Chapter 33 - Urbanity

Summary

The evolution of the representational goals and techniques that we call ‘the realist novel’ is inseparable from the history of cities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In some cases, critical views of the relationship between writers and cities are totalizing: ‘London created Dickens, just as Dickens created London’ affirms Peter Ackroyd, in the secure knowledge that Dickens’s melodramas required the vision of the city as a place of ‘imprisonment and suffocation’. A similar case could be made for the other great architect of realist fiction, Honoré de Balzac: from banking systems to the mœurs of domestic servants, from the rituals of social climbing to the assortments of shoes, no aspect of Paris under the Second Empire is empty of suggestion. In the great age of realism – roughly 1840 to 1880 – the city is neither an object of mere description nor a backdrop for the drama of good and evil. Rather, it permeates every aspect of character: its institutions shape aspiration and temptation; its customs shape the trajectory of success or abjection; it is everywhere and always permeated by money – wanting it, getting it, having it, losing it. The city’s designs for living – interior and exterior, public and private – determined in advance the kinds of character interaction that novelists could dramatize, as well as the climax or ‘upshot’ of these interactions. The rendering of streets, buildings, slums, bourgeois quartiers was often so exact that the novel came to function as a map, or as a simulacrum, of the city at a certain point in its development. To put this another way, the realist novel became less a representation of urban architecture than a kind of architecture, one that shaped reading practices in ways similar to our traversing of urban spaces themselves. In the hands of the realists, reading quickly demanded not merely a visual imagination but also a keen spatial sense, so that we all but unconsciously negotiate certain chapters like drawing rooms, others like a warren of oppressive, winding streets and alleys.