Chapter 19 - Walking the City

Summary

This chapter examines the representation of walking within the modern novels of New York. In American literature, walking the city seems to incarnate some coincidence between the uncertainties of discourse and the fluctuations of a place that is both circumscribed and open to the unknown. Walking the city cannot simply be considered as the pretext of a realist description nor simply associated with an abstract means of enunciation either. The act of walking reveals the manner in which writers sense and recite what may be no more than an emotion: an experience of the influx of fragments, of the grating notes and inflexions that nonetheless constitute the city. Walking the streets of New York, in American fiction, therefore simultaneously emblematizes the metatextual questioning of a discourse that is now conscious of its own limitations and the involvement of this discourse in the sensitive diversity of the world. Indeed, far from estranging the text from the world, far from alienating words into some reflexive abstraction, far from secluding discourse into some intransitive, self–sufficient construct, the consideration of the limits of language makes the very substance of the novel vibrate with endless possibilities.