(with
reference to Blake, Dickens, Poe, and Joyce)
Jeremy Tambling
The attempt
to ‘read’ the city and so to master it has been the subject of so much writing:
Wordsworth, Blake, De Quincey, Dickens, Gissing, and Joyce being some examples
from the ‘English’ tradition. But the modern city, unlike the village, or the
country-setting, cannot be read, because it knows no inside or outside; its
exterior harbours secrets as much as its interiors; put another way, the city
allows no separation between the person who tries to understand it, and what is
beheld: it allows no single-subject position to exist as the observer. This
increasing failure, despite the attention given to conceptualising cities in
such figures as Engels, or Georg Simmel, or Walter Benjamin (whom we hope to
discuss), produces writing which may be considered as marked by a schizoid
tendency, defining schizophrenia in terms of a loss of ego-boundaries, an
inability to distinguish inside from outside, which may in turn be
paranoia-inducing. This paper will move through several Romantic and
nineteenth-century examples of such writing, focusing at last on James Joyce
and Ulysses as texts which were in
their own time thought of as schizophrenic, tending to the destruction of
language as that which can distinguish inside and outside. What then is the
relation of the city to schizophrenia? It is a question this paper wishes to
provoke.
