From City to Style

October 14, 2007

The argument to grasp in Imagined Cities is that literary style is not necessarily the result of a strictly literary evolution. That is the way we like to think about it: writer A in the 19th century led to writer B in the next generation.. and then writer C took that style a step further.. and on we go to writer D. In this model the style of a work is a matter of artistic evolution and sealed off from material considerations. Robert Alter makes the case that the rise of what we think of as the modern novel comes not as a development from literary antecedents, but rather as a response to immense changes in the city. The new urban environment called for a new way of portraying the experience of life.. and this gave rise to the formal experimentation that we associate with modernist literature.

Here is Alter writing about the tactics used by Flaubert and Dickens in portraying the new and chaotic city:

Both writers have a sense that the very dimensions of the modern city dwarf the individual, threaten to subvert the exercise of human agency. Flaubert, faithful to the representational bias of the experiential realism that he perfected, registers this predicament as a perceptual problem... Dickens, deploying with great virtuosity a series of panoramic views of the city, is drawn by the terrific energy of his own metaphoric inventiveness to weave images of the new urban world... [54]

According to Alter's argument (although this is not explicitly stated) if there had been no dramatic shift in urban patterns in the 19th and 20th centuries, then there would have been no push for the representational strategies present in the great modern novelists (running in his account from Flaubert to Dickens to Woolf to Joyce to Kafka).

I am willing to mostly buy this idea. It is attractive to me since it allows for the modern novel to stand as a genuine witness to the historical experience of new urban settings. I also think this central idea about the interrelationship between style and place could be a useful way to think about medieval Arabic writing about cities. It would thus be possible to not simply appreciate the dense weave of sites that al-Maqrizi captures in his Khitat, but also to see in that weave an indication of the way the city—in this case Cairo—was experienced day to day. Alter provides the beginning of a theoretical framework that brings together literary style and the experience of a place.. and this is where his argument allows us to move beyond the European 19th and 20th century authors that he works with in this book.