The Contemporary Novel and the City: Re-Conceiving National and Narrative Form by Stuti Khanna (review)

The title of this monograph is slightly misleading, as it consists primarily of a comparative study of James Joyce and Salman Rushdie. The comparison is instructive, however, insofar as the works of these two writers represent fictional interpretations of the city in its modern and postmodern forms, respectively. According to Stuti Khanna, “[m]odernist” cities like “Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and London” were the cosmopolitan “metropolises” at the beginning of the twentieth century that favored the development of modernist art (3). Dublin figures among them at least marginally, because of the modern elements of its infrastructure and the presence of the Irish Revival. “Postmodern” cities include those beyond Europe and North America, like Bombay, Shanghai, and São Paulo, which are marked by the effects of late capitalism, globalization, migration, and postmodern culture (3).

Khanna’s contention is that the radical literary forms adopted by Joyce and Rushdie are the direct effects of urban experience in the cities about which they write. Her study also has the implicit purpose of evaluating both writers according to the degree in which they accurately represent the “multiple, many-layered” aspects of the city, its variety of classes and ethnicities, its “crowded realities,” and its status as a place for “the articulation of untotalizable differences that open up new ways of thinking and being” (69, 144, 66).

With respect to Joyce, this argument is hardly new, but in support of it Khanna offers some interesting readings of certain episodes in Ulysses. What takes places in “Cyclops,” for example, is not the simple confrontation of tolerance and intolerance or of reason and passion conventionally seen there. If we take into account everything said by all those present in Barney Kiernan’s pub, there is, in fact, a spirited debate about the categories of nation and race that is more than two-sided. Not everything the Citizen says is unreasonable, such as his environmentalist plea against deforestation: “Save the trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of Eire, O” (U 12.1263–64). The episode explores a variety of ways of being Irish, making it difficult to reach definite conclusions about the nature of Irish nationalism.

As a further example of the “heterogeneities and contradictions” found in a “postcolonial metropolis” (83), Khanna points to ways in which the official status of such civic institutions as the museum and public library is transformed in Joyce’s narrative. Bloom’s curiosity concerning the nether parts of the Venus Callipyge at the National Museum is offered as an alternate but legitimate form of aesthetic appreciation resulting from Joyce’s refusal to “hierarchize different kinds of knowledges” (108). In the library, the traditional “injunction to silence” is “flouted with impunity as even the librarians [themselves] participate with gusto” in the literary discussion (110). Since this is presented as an example of lively disregard for institutional decorum, it should perhaps be pointed out that the discussion in question takes place in Thomas Lyster’s office, sealed by closed doors from the reading room and adjacent hallway.

Khanna’s most interesting chapter explores the way both Joyce and Rushdie put forward figures of the artist as a means of exploring the city. This is a key question insofar as both modernism and postmodernism are commonly held to be artistic movements for which the urban environment has been essential both as a space of collaboration and as a source of new material for artists. In these two writers, however, the figure of the artist is far from being a triumphant product of the city. Khanna points out that, for Stephen Dedalus, the city is not “confronted head on but sublimated and epiphanized into timeless essences” (125). Stephen, in other words, will not serve as a reliable interpreter of the city. That task falls, rather, on Leopold Bloom, whose “mind works by association, opening up unending series of observations” and reflections on...