Village Voices

...As the architectural critic Steen Eiler Rasmussen has noted, London is unique because it has always been a collectivity of discrete neighborhoods, each with distinctive architecture and culture, partly reinforced by continuing political autonomy...

...Obviously, this dilemma extends far beyond the boundaries of any one city to a good part of Europe and the U.S...

...All of them, he contends, had to invent ways of conveying the intensity and fragmentation of European city life brought on by tremendous population expansion, the rise of industrialization, the mix of occupations and classes, and the adoption of technologies-like railroads and trolleys-that compressed space and time...

...Could Flaubert convince us of the new mentalities of Parisians if he wrote in Dickens' style...

...Even in Flaubert's era, Paris was far more salubrious than London...

...But I would question his implication that planners and architects are always engaged in losing battles...

...On the other hand, in London, Mayor Ken Livingstone's imposition of a tax on cars that drive into the city's center has smoothed the traffic flow and improved air quality...

...I found myself wondering, though, how much the particular physical features of each city setting influenced the methods used to portray the experience of living in it...

...Some planned interventions have worked, and we have been able to control the rapidly advancing technologies that devastate the human qualities of the modern metropolis...

...Petersburg...

...His rich figurative language was stocked with metaphors that evoked the transformation of the city's landscape and population through images of nature, children's random and disorderly play, and visionary fantasies of destruction and decay...

...To depict the anxiety, confusion and uncertainty that he reports often resulted from those fleeting relationships, Alter says, the novelist had to "conduct the narrative through the moment-by-moment experience" of his characters...

...Reviewed by Robert Gutman Lecturer in Architecture, Princeton University Robert Alter is a literary historian and critic with many books about Hebrew and European literature to his credit...

...It resides, I believe, as much if not more, in his choosing to focus on the horrors of 19th-cenrury cities: hideous common crimes, the foul waters of the Thames, the endlessly polluted atmosphere, the terrible privations and distress suffered by the lower classes...

...Consider the difficulties Paris faces attempting to integrate its expanding Muslim immigrant population...

...Alter is interested in the methods shared by these writers as well as their differences...

...Indeed, London's air is cleanertoday than it was in Dickens' day, or when Mrs...

...Dalloway was keeping track of her friends and acquaintances...

...Dalloway (1925), James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), and Franz Kafka's The Trial (1925...

...I am not as convinced as Alter that Dickens' language is the center of his genius at portraying the evolving urban experience...

...For Flaubert the symbol of the new Paris was the masked ball, with its momentary, casual contacts...

...Dickens, whose authorial voice remains dominant and whose characters are less likely to ruminate or speak for themselves, is more of a puzzle...

...And could either author tell their stories using Woolf 's consciousness...

...Here his subject is the emergence of a modern urban sensibility in fiction, as reflected in six classic novels: Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education (1869), Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend (1865), Andrei Bely'sPetersburg(\9l6), Virginia Woolf's Mrs...

...This technique-Alter calls it "narrated monologue"-allows an actor's consciousness, rather than an author's inclination toward the discursive, to carry the flow of the story...

...Dalloway...

...Alter's illumination of the techniques employed in the novels he surveys makes for fascinating reading...

...Dickens relies on these features in his novels, as does Mrs...

...But what of the difference between Paris and London-two very distinct cities in terms of history, layout, transportation networks, and the quality of their physical environment...

...Alter is correct to point out that freeways and superhighways have not reduced the problems generated by the automobile...

...Woolf 's highly original style telegraphs the selfabsorbed, often confused consciousness we recognize as the way urban people think, act and feel...

...This applies not only to London in the 1920s, but throughout the world to this day...

...Yet there he even emphasizes those features of Dublin's development that begin to match the 19th-century history of other metropolises...

...Could Dickens have used the techniques of Flaubert to give his account of London life...

...The question is not one that interests him greatly, except in his discussion of Ulysses, where he notes that Dublin is much smaller than Paris, London or St...

...Dalloway when arranging her party...

...Many of the troubles we associate with cities are not urban problems as such, but are traceable to globalization and transformations occurring worldwide...

...The most compelling example of Alter's argument is Mrs...

...It was also more unified administratively, so a writer could conceive it as an intact totality...

...In Alter's view, he relied on other literary modes to express his feeling that London was, in the critic's words, "human purpose tumbling out of control...

...Anyone who compares Flaubert to Balzac or Emile Zola will recognize what is a departure in the style of Sentimental Education...

...Alter does not regard the planning mentality favorably, because he rightly assumes its ambition is to impose order on urban life...

...Ultimately, of course, such vicissitudes are overcome by Dickens' enduring faith in the power of the human community...

...Admittedly, this is a greater challenge now than it was in the years covered by these novels...

...Alter knows the trends of the 19th and early 20th centuries that generated the literary innovations he examines have become still more intense...

...Perhaps we can take comfort that Paris has not had a major political uprising in 37 years...