Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (review)

In his preface to Imagined Cities, Robert Alter gives the reader fair warning about what his book will and will not deliver. Alter is not interested in the "material realities" of the city, or "how the novel 'represents' or 'reflects' the reality of the city," thus sweeping aside Marxist and New Historicist approaches. Instead, he wants to explore how the "experimental realism" practiced by writers such as Dickens, Flaubert, and Kafka registers a new form of urban experience that focuses on the sensory perception of the individual. His choice of texts, which begins with Flaubert's Sentimental Education, and ends with Kafka's The Trial, is intended to be "suggestive rather than comprehensive"; thus he deftly avoids any claims to a "grand narrative about the history of the novel."What Alter does offer is a series of stylistic analyses and detailed close readings that demonstrate how these various novels operate in conversation with each other as their authors invent the literary language of modernism.

Like many critics who study literature and the city, Alter begins by invoking Walter Benjamin's brilliant essays on the flâneur, Baudelaire, and the "shock" experience of urban life. Following Benjamin's lead, Alter cites Georg Simmel's celebrated essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life," in which he claims that the attention of the city dweller is continually distracted by "the rapid crowd of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions." It is the challenge of this chaotic urban scene that leads authors to develop and/or elaborate upon innovative literary techniques, from le style indirect libre as practiced by Flaubert (which, admittedly, first appears in the provincial setting of Madame Bovary) to stream-of-consciousness narration in the works of Joyce. For each author, Alter isolates a particular literary technique that he believes encapsulates that author's response to the urban environment. Although Dickens employs fantastic and apocalyptic figurative language to describe the corrosive influence of pollution and exploitation upon the city and its inhabitants, Woolf and Joyce celebrate the heterogeneity of the city as an enjoyable spectacle rather than as a fearsome creature. When Alter discusses how Woolf 's "lyric interior monologue" and the fragmentary, staccato rhythm of the "Aeolus" chapter of Ulysses bring an element of delight and surprise to modernist depictions of the city, his own enthusiasm for the subject is palpable.

Despite the author's engaging style, scholars who study the subject of literature and the city are not likely to find any new factual information in Imagined Cities. Some of the connections that Alter raises in his book are more thoroughly developed in other works; for example, the intersections between trains, time, and literary representation that Alter mentions have been discussed in greater detail by Stephen Kern in The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (1983). Similarly, although the choice of Andrei Bely's Petersburg is unusual (at least, for an American audience), it is not unprecedented for studies of this kind; Marshall Berman's section on Bely in All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1981) comes to mind. For those who are interested in a more comprehensive survey of the subject, there is The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (1998), by Richard Lehan, and Imagining the Modern City (1999), an interdisciplinary study that includes film and architecture, by James Donald. Nonetheless, scholars who are seeking new inspiration for discussions of familiar texts will find much to appreciate in Alter's insightful juxtapositions and interpretations.