Ihab Hassan

[In the following excerpt, originally written in 1981, Hassan discusses depictions of urban life from Plato to Samuel Delany.]

The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind. . . . With language itself, [the city] remains man's greatest work of art.

—Lewis Mumford

With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desire and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

—Italo Calvino

Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

I

The city: grime, glamour, geometries of glass, steel, and concrete. Intractable, it rises from nature, like proud Babel, only to lie athwart our will, astride our being, or so it often seems. Yet immanent in that gritty structure is another: invisible, imaginary, made of dream and desire, agent of all our transformations. I want here to invoke that other city, less city perhaps than inscape of mind, rendered in that supreme fiction we call language. Immaterial, that city in-formed history from the start, molding human space and time ever since time and space molded themselves to the wagging tongue.

And so to commence, I shall tersely review the founding of that ideal city, which even the naturalist tradition in American fiction—from Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, through James Farrell, Henry Roth, Nelson Algren, to Willard Motley, Hubert Selby, and John Rechy—failed to make into mortar and stone. I shall regard it as concept, project, field, a magic lantern through which the human condition may be viewed. Next, I shall consider some examples of fiction, largely postwar, uniquely American, omitting, alas, both international trends and historical antecedents. Last, from this special perspective, I shall assay some in-conclusion, which my brief scope must make even briefer.

II

In its earliest representations, the city—Ur, Nineveh, Thebes, or that heaven-defying heap turned into verbal rubble that we call Babel—symbolized the place where divine powers entered human space. The sky gods came, and where they touched the earth, kings and heroes rose to overwhelm old village superstitions and build a city. As Lewis Mumford says: "All eyes now turned skywards. . . . Those who made the most of the city were not chagrined by the animal limitations of human existence: they sought deliberately, by a concentrated act of will, to transcend them." And so they did, with language, "with glyphs, ideograms, and script, with the first abstractions of number and verbal signs." All cities, it seems, are sacred, symbolic, heavenly at their origin, made of unconscious promptings as they grow into mind, made of mind that grows into purer mind through the power of language.

Thus the dematerializing metropolis coincides with the first temple or palace stone and dimly evokes, farther back, the burial mound, around which village life fearfully gathered. The "twin cities," biopolis and necropolis, stand for the visible and invisible demesnes that all human endeavor, however profane, assumes. Arnold Toynbee, we recall, thought that cities helped to "etherialize" history. But etherialization, as Mumford knows, carries also its counterpoint—"The rhythm of life in cities seems to be an alternation between materialization and etherialization: the concrete structure, detaching itself through a human response, takes on a symbolic meaning, uniting the knower and the known; while subjective images, ideals, intuitions . . . likewise take on material attributes... . City design is thus the culminating point of a socially adequate process of materialization."

Yet as the universe became conscious of itself in Homo sapiens, so do we now reflect upon the city through abstractions the city itself generates. To see a city whole is also to apprehend its theoretical nature, its hidden functions and ideal forms. For the city acts as mediator between the human and natural orders, as a changing network of social relations, as a flux of production and consumption, as a labyrinth of solitudes, as a system of covert controls, semiotic exchanges, perpetual barter, and, withal, as an incipient force of planetization. In short, at once fluid and formal, the city apprehends us in its vital grid.

Modern theoreticians of the city variously recognize this aspect of its character. Max Weber, for instance, conceives the city not as a large aggregate of dwellings but as a complex "autocephalic" system of self-maintaining forces, while Robert E. Park, founder of urban "ecological" sociology in America, describes it as "a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of organized attitudes and sentiments." Practical and streetwise, Jane Jacobs still insists that the "ubiquitous principle" of cities is their need "for a most intricate and close-grained diversity of uses that give each other a constant mutual support," a need that dishonest city planning invariably conceals. Raymond Williams, though historically alert to the forces of production and consumption in the city, also perceives it as a "form of shared consciousness rather than merely a set of techniques," about which everything "from the magnificent to the apocalyptic—can be believed at once."

As for Marshall McLuhan, we know his theme: the old metropolitan space must eventually dissolve into electric information, a "total field of inclusive awareness." Similarly, Charles Jencks considers the urban environment as a communicating system, a cybernetic or semiotic mesh; hence the efforts of such architects as Nicholas Negroponte to use computers (URBAN 5) in designing cities. Finally, stretching the cybernetic metaphor to its limit, Paolo Soleri speculates that in "the urban organism, the mind remains in independent but correlated parcels divided spatially and coincidental with the parceled brains, the whole forming the mental or thinking skin of the city." His "arcology" presages no less than the passage from matter to spirit.

Such visions may seem intolerably angelic to citizens inured to the diabolic occulusions and exigencies of the modern metropolis. Yet the city remains an alembic of human time, perhaps of human nature—an alembic, to be sure, employed less often by master alchemists than by sorcerer's apprentices. Still, as a frame of choices and possibilities, the city enacts our sense of the future; not merely abstract, not mutable only, it fulfills time in utopic or dystopic images. This expectation strikes some thinkers as peculiarly American. Nearly half a century ago, Jean-Paul Sartre remarked, "For [Europeans], a city is, above all, a past; for [Americans], it is mainly a future; what they like in the city is everything it has not yet become and everything it can be." But Sartre was never the most reliable observer of America, and what he perceives as an American impatience merely avows the city's own high-handedness with history.

Utopia, dystopia, futuropolis: these cities of mind have occupied a space in the Western imagination since Plato's republic. In Christian times, the city of God, the heavenly city, even the medieval church triumphant, became structures of a pervasive spiritual energy whose absence in nether regions suffered the infernal city to rise. (Pieter Brueghel's paintings of Babel attest to this doubleness in their equivocation between heaven and hell.) But the great architects of the Italian Renaissance (Filippo Brunelleschi, Rafael Alberti, Bramante, and Leonardo da Vinci), its painters (notably Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Piero della Francesca, and Francesco di Giorgio), and its authors (especially Tommaso Campanella in City of the Sun) turned to the dream of reason; circular or square, radial or polygonal, their urban visions revealed logic, will, clarity, purest tyranny of the eye.

English Utopian writers, like Sir Thomas More and Francis Bacon, also implicated their utopic concepts into urban space. So did, later, the pictorial architects of the eighteenth century, Etienne-Louis Boullée and Claude Nicholas Ledoux, the nineteenth-century planners of Garden City, inspired by Ebenezer Howard, and those eccentric designers of the early twentieth century, Tony Garnier and Antonio Sant' Elia, who ushered in the austere shapes of futurism and constructivism, of the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier. Closer to our time still, "plug-in cities" of Archigram illustrate the immanent structuralist principle; Buckminster Fuller's geodesic forms enclose us all in nearly invisible technology; and Constantinos Doxiadis's "entopias" offer blueprints of "the city of dreams that can come true." Abstract urbs all, bright geometries of desire, they share with Disneyland and Disney World—indubitably our two most solvent cities—a commitment to effective fantasy.

Yet as Jane Jacobs warns: "Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination." Since our cities seem still to beggar the imagination of planners, our urban afflictions persistently defy our sense of a feasible future. Thus, dystopia becomes a synonym of megalopolis. Disneyland will not rescind Harlem, and against the visions of Soleri, Doxiadis, or Fuller, those of Fritz Lang in Metropolis or of Jean-Luc Godard in Alphaville may yet prevail. Writers and illustrators of speculative fiction certainly continue to envisage island cities in space—mobile, radiant, noetic, all Ariel and no Caliban, communicating with each other and the universe by means of unique mental powers. Yet these mind-cities yield, in darker speculations, to vast conurbations of discorporate brains, floating in innumerable cubicles, ruled all by a sublime computer or despot brain. Here time and space, transcended by mind, betray the ultimate terror of dematerialization—complete control.

III

I have not strayed altogether from my subject, the city in fiction; I have tried rather to perceive it from a certain angle that reveals the city as a fiction composing many fictions. Baudelaire, perhaps first among moderns, knew this well enough, though some might claim for Restii de la Bretonne or Eugène Sue earlier knowledge of nocturnal streets. Baudelaire, at any rate, allegorized Paris in various poems; one in particular, "Les Sept Vieillards," found an echo in T. S. Eliot's poem about another "unreal city":

Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,
Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant!
Les mystères partout coulent comme des sèves.

This spectral note pervades, in diverse timbres, all modern as well as postmodern literature—fiction, poetry, or drama, naturalist, symbolist, or absurd. Certainly, the city as a formal dream or internal shape of consciousness emerges in fiction before the postwar period. Marcel Proust's Paris, James Joyce's Dublin, Alfred Döblin's Berlin, Robert Musil's Vienna, the London of Virginia Woolf, the Manhattan of John Dos Passos, Henry Miller's Brooklyn, and Nathanael West's Los Angeles attest to a longer historical view. Perhaps I can make the point by adverting to the last two.

In Black Spring (1963), Miller declares himself a patriot of the fourteenth ward, where he was raised, to which he continually returns "as a paranoiac returns to his obsessions":

We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets—we remember only.... Here there is buried legend after legend of youth and melancholy, of savage nights and mysterious bosoms dancing on the wet mirror of the pavement, of women chuckling softly as they scratch themselves, of wild sailors' shouts, of long queues standing in the lobby, of boats brushing each other in the fog and tugs snorting furiously against the rush of tide. . . .

The plasm of the dream is the pain of separation. The dream lives on after the body is buried.

After the city vanishes too, one might add. For Miller really dissolves the city into his emotions, into remembrances more vivid than the city ever was, splashing his words on the page as Jackson Pollock threw colors on a canvas, exorcising his death in images drenched in nostalgia. Sensations, perceptions, observances of the city thus obey, in the fourteenth ward, the imperative of his soft need.

The absorption or ingestion of the object—a whole borough here—typifies the romantic sensibility. But Miller could suddenly exchange the romantic egoist for the selfless cosmologist, perhaps no less romantic. Thus, in the surrealist section of Black Spring entitled "Megalopolitan Maniac," he collapses the city not into the self but into the universe: 'The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, her electricity, her frigidaires, her soundproof walls. Box within box she rears her dry walls, the glint of lacquered nails, the plumes that wave across the corrugated sky. Here in the coffin depths grow the everlasting flowers sent by telegraph. . . . This is the city, and this the music. Out of the little black boxes an unending river of romance in which the crocodiles weep. All walking toward the mountain top. All in step. From the power house above God floods the street with music. It is God who turns the music on every evening just as we quit work."

The city as self, the city as cosmos: thus Miller draws the far limits of urban conceptualization. Nathanael West, however, conceptualizes the city with cooler art: in The Day of the Locusts (1939), Los Angeles finds its consummation in a painting that Tod Hackett wants to create. West—employing throughout various devices of style and impersonal narration to distance himself from the lunatic scene—ends his novel with a vision of chaos within another vision of chaos, rendered in the very act of experiencing that chaos amid the crowds assaulting Kahn's Persian Palace Theatre. Here is the passage depicting Andrews's apocalypse within apocalypse:

Despite the agony in his leg, he was able to think clearly about his picture, "The Burning of Los Angeles." After his quarrel with Faye, he had worked on it continually to escape tormenting himself, and the way to it in his mind had become almost automatic.

As he stood on his good leg, clinging desperately to the iron rail, he could see all the rough charcoal strokes with which he had blocked it out on the big canvas.

A description of the fiery and phantasmic picture ensues, as Andrews imagines himself at work on his painting. Thus, West gives us in his novel the work of art that Andrews fails to complete. Can this mean that Hollywood, city of dreams, lends itself to our apprehension only as another kind of dream (the painting) within still another form of art or dream (West's fiction)? The question offends our sense of the real. Yet how different, finally, does Hollywood seem from all those modern cities that drive us to fictions of survival amidst their desperate confusions?

IV

The modern city compels certain idealizations of its orders or disorders. Moreover, all art selects, abstracts, and so must further conceptualize its objects, dense or ethereal. The great naturalists, I suspect, knew this subliminally, as did symbolists and modernists to a fuller degree. In the postwar period, however, fabulism, irrealism, absurdism abet the conceptual tendency further. I have no leisure here to survey the entire fictional landscape; nor should I endeavor to do so, since the urban element in many novels seems sometimes extraneous. In certain works, though, urban setting and fictive form are inseverable. I cite—all too cursorily, I fear—two early examples: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) and Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March (1953).

Ellison's novel transmutes Harlem into a dance of characters, a music of ideas and illusions; realism and surrealism here are seamless. Thus, the protagonist always moves between an act and its shadow: "I leaped aside, into the street, and there was a sudden and brilliant suspension of time, like the last ax stroke and the felling of a tall tree." All New York becomes the image, the sound, the very texture of a dramatic theme, and the coal cellar, in which Invisible Man at last confronts his invisibility, burns with an ironic intelligence more luminous than the 1369 light bulbs improbably affixed to its ceiling. Similarly, Bellow's Chicago shapes Augie's high call to freedom, his quest for the fabled "axial lines." Deadly, fluent like money, omnific like love, the city becomes the very form of American experience in midcentury. And when Augie wonders in a dejected moment if cities, once cradles of civilization, can ever become wholly barren of it, he thus refutes himself: "An inhuman thing, if possible, to have so many people together who beget nothing on one another. No, but it is not possible, and the dreary begets its own fire, and so this never happens."

To the classic fictions of Ellison and Bellow one may add others that variously render or vivify the American city. But I should turn now to another kind of novel, more shadowy in its urban inscapes, more cunning. I allude to William Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959), Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Donald Barthelme's City Life (1970).

In Burroughs's entropic world, whether earthly or galactic, the city becomes a machine for dying. Fueled on sex, junk, and money, this infernal machine invariably regulates, violates, exterminates; in short, it both controls and negates, relying on the calculus of absolute human need. The need, beyond eroticism, is for forgetfulness, a final lubricity. This lubricity, in the metabolism of the addict, aspires to "Absolute ZERO." But if Burroughs's spectral city finds its center in the human body, locus of desire and decay, it meets its circumference in language. Death enters the erotic body and spreads through the body politic carried by the virus Word. Hence the cure: Rub Out the Word! Or if it proves impractical, then let the word, testifying against the world, testify also against itself. Cut up, desiccated, phantasmagoric, Burroughs's language reaches heights of savage poetry, grisly humor, metaphysical outrage, grotesque conceit, yet must finally expend itself, as the city must, in prophetic waste. Thus Naked Lunch attempts to become itself the feculent city, an expanse of shameful words, deeds, deaths, dreams. The shame of cities? It is of existence itself.

Pynchon, another wizard of words and waste, offers, in The Crying of Lot 49, a city ruled by the expectation of WASTE (We Await Silent Tristero's Empire) and DEATH ("Don't Ever Antagonize The Horn"). His Los Angeles, indeed the whole of urban California if not of the United States, seems a lunatic semiotic system, both immanent and indeterminate, the breath of some universal paranoia. The mystery that Oedipa Maas pursues through the labyrinths of signs remains a mystery; for self and society in America have dissolved into these same esoteric signs—hieroglyphs of concealed meaning or meaninglessness (we never know which).

Still, though entropy affects the physical, the social, the linguistic universes—pace Maxwell s demon—the mind insists on weaving and unweaving patterns, creating and decreating fictions, including Pynchon's own. Consider these communicative devices the author devises to guide or misguide his heroine through the book: a cryptic will, stamp collections, the mails, telephone, television, radio, graffiti and drawings, plays, movies, lapel buttons, wrecked cars, hallucinogens, maps, transistor circuits, motel signs, rock music, inaudible voice frequencies, striptease shows, impressions on a dirty mattress, footnotes, forged editions, doodles, puns, typographic errors, sign languages, children's games, tapes, armbands, bullet shots, epileptic fits, sex, silence, and so forth. Semiosis unending: can we wonder that the city, that all existence, turns for Oedipa into a cryptogram? Here she muses the nature of language: "Behind the initials was a metaphor, a delirium tremens, a trembling unfurrowing of the mind's plowshare. The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost. Oedipa did not know where she was."

The world, the city, the book: all promise some hierophany, always deferred. But is a malignant Logos or the encapsulated human self here at fault? Locked in an imaginary tower, Oedipa once dreams of letting her hair down to serve as ladder for another, only to discover that her hair is a wig. Narcissism, then, defines our city's limit, as in San Narciso. And the opposite of narcissism, which we call love, breaks through these limits and in so doing releases "the unnamable act, the recognition, the Word." In short, Pynchon's city of treacherous signs may stand in the void or hold some occult meaning that only love can yield. Or perhaps only the "unimaginable Pacific," the "hole left by the moon's tearing-free and monument to her exile," can redeem it. But which?

Burroughs's and Pynchon's are cities of entropy and mystery; Barthelme's, no less entropic or mysterious, is one of parody. City Life, of course, tells us nothing overtly about New York City. A collage of stories, a catena of fragments, it provides rather an experience of urban being, under the aspects of parody, pastiche, parataxis, under the aspect of the most delicate irony. The experience resists interpretation, battens on absurdity and irrelevance; and so we fasten on such words as dreck, detritus, trash, waste, and sludge, which Barthelme slyly supplies. "It's that we want to be on the leading edge of this trash phenomenon," he writes, "the everted sphere of the future, and that's why we pay particular attention, too, to those aspects of language that may be seen as a model of the trash phenomenon." And again: "We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of 'sense' of what is going on. This 'sense' is not be to obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines themselves." The dreck, sludge, or trash, may strike us as the unassimilable detritus of an urban mass civilization; yet they become available to us as epistemic units of city life, parodies of parodies—and parodies of parodies of parodies—that finally inhabit the mind as a unique mode of urban consciousness.

The transformation of dreck into mind is style in action. Barthelme's consummately ironic style employs catalogues, drawings, photographs, puns, vignettes, aphorisms, clichés, neologisms, jokes, innuendos, stutters, fragments, metafictions, non sequiturs, recondite allusions, odd juxtapositions, asides, absurd humor, and typographic horseplay, not only to defamiliarize his art but also to dematerialize his city. (Defamiliarization and dematerialization have been for nearly a century concomitants in various arts—cubist, surrealist, and abstract.) Above all, Barthelme's rhetoric of irony deconstructs, displaces, defers urban reality—to use three voguish terms—precisely because it declines to make it whole. The city, radically discontinuous, becomes a mental construct, reconstructed from verbal shards, sad, zany, or wise. As Barthelme remarked in an interview: "New York City is or can be regarded as a collage, as opposed to, say, a tribal village in which all the huts (or yurts, or whatever) are the same hut, duplicated. The point of collage is that unlike things are stuck together to make, in the best case, a new reality." This is more urbane than Ramona's urban statement near the end of City Life: "Ramona thought about the city.—I have to admit we are locked in the most exquisite mysterious muck. This muck heaves and palpitates. It is multidirectional and has a mayor. To describe it takes many hundreds of thousands of words. Our muck is only a part of a much greater muck—the nation-state—which is itself the creation of that muck of mucks, human consciousness. Of course all these things also have a touch of sublimity." And so the city, "dreck," "collage," or "palpitating muck," leads directly to the problem of the nation-state in the twentieth century and to "that muck of mucks, human consciousness"—touched with sublimity, of course.

V

The city conceived as a machine for dying (Burroughs), as a paranoiac semiotic system (Pynchon), and as mental dreck or palpitating muck (Barthelme), presumes on the novelist's freedom from verisimilitude. Such freedom becomes constitutive in a number of works that we may unabashedly call fantasy or science fiction.

Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) stands at the edge of this genre. Poised between three worlds—the desolate present, a utopic future, a dystopic alternative—the book refracts reality in the lens of several mental institutions; the madhouse becomes both metaphor and microcosm of the modern city, which ruthlessly exploits the poor, the powerless, and the deviant. At its core, Piercy's book seethes with poetic outrage, in the honored naturalist mode, threatening to explode its fantastic frame. Yet the frame holds because the present does contain all versions of its future; the modern city does enact the convulsions of its fate. Thus, the incarceration of Connie Ramos in Rockover Mental Hospital not only betrays the violence of our civilization; it further tests its potential for survival.

Connie communes mentally with two futures. One seems ideal, arcadian, impeccable in its advanced views of sex, race, ecology, technology, education, political life, yet earthy withal. The other looms like an urban nightmare of windowless skyscrapers, gray suns, fetid air, cyborg police, and unspeakable vulgarity. But the crucial insight of the novel identifies the war between these two possible futures with the actual war between Connie and her captors—that is, the struggle between two cities, one of human fulfillment, the other of inhuman deprivation. Here is Connie's cry of pain: "Whoever owned this place, these cities, whoever owned those glittering glass office buildings in midtown filled with the purr of money turning over, those refineries over the river in Jersey with their flames licking the air, they gave nothing back. They took and took and left their garbage choking the air, the river, the sea itself. Choking her. A life of garbage. Human garbage."

Garbage (or dreck) this city really is not, but rather something more sinister: electroencephalic control through brain implants. Thus, the good doctor explains: "You see, we can electrically trigger almost every mood and emotion—the fight-or-flight reaction, euphoria, calm, pleasure, pain, terror! We can monitor and induce reactions through the microminiaturized radio under the skull."

The novel, as I have said, tells a tale of two cities. To their struggle—a struggle also between unborn futures, virtual worlds clashing in a crux of time—the novel can offer no denouement except the rage of Connie, her poisoned will to survive. Relentlessly ideological in parts—all the men, for instance, seem nasty or brutish—Woman on the Edge of Time still projects a powerful image of human courage and city madness. Barely removed from the present, it reveals us to ourselves all the more savagely in the urban mirror of our distortions.

Set only half a century hence, once more in New York, Thomas Disch's 334 (1976) also stands at the threshold of fantasy, revealing us to ourselves implacably. Again, life there seems so close to our own that we scarcely recognize it as alien. Yet violence and hebetude, garishness and despair, mingle easily in this crammed city of the imminent future; everything there seems a grotesque parody of our best hopes. Still, many characters—whether engaged in the cryonics black market or the no less deadening market of sex—strike us as vibrantly human, and their will to endure miraculously endures. As Lottie in Bellevue Hospital broods: "And anyhow the world doesn't end. Even though it may try to, even though you wish to hell it would—it can't. There's always some poorjerk who thinks he needs something he hasn't got, and there goes five years, ten years getting it." The same Lottie, however, in the same year, 2026, says: "The end of the world. Let me tell you about the end of the world. It happened fifty years ago. Maybe a hundred. And since then it's been lovely."

Indeed, the dominant structures and metaphors of the work suggest both perplexity and decadence. Composed of interrelated fragments, vignettes, tableaus, the book is a labyrinth of miseries—smog, lupus, television, eugenics, overcrowding, sadomasochism, artificial foods—each preternaturally vivid, all absurd. Centered on a dismal building at 344 East Eleventh Street, the various families accept historical decline within their spatial frame. Thus the titular number 334 evokes an address as well as the imaginary "birthdate" of Alexa, a character in the section called "Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire"; her imaginary "death" in 410, the year Alaric sacked Rome, terminates her "alternate historical existence" under the influence of a drug, Morbihanine. And so Alexa dreams of bloody ritual sacrifices at the Metropolitan Museum and wakes to wonder, in Spenglerian gloom, if civilization still warrants the human effort. Clearly, the city of Disch, Pynchonesque, emanates a subtle insanity: ourselves.

This theme is brilliantly prefigured in Samuel Delany's trilogy, The Fall of the Towers (1977), which includes Captives of the Flame (1963), The Towers of Toron (1964), and City of a Thousand Suns (1965). The city here, at last, realizes its fabulous potential; it emerges as a cosmic frame of mind, an extension of intelligences both terrestrial and extraterrestrial. In fact, the trilogy contains not one but many cities. There is, first, silent Telphar, deserted, with spires and high looping roadways, ruled by a "psychotic" computer, symbolizing mind turned against itself, symbolizing death. There is, next, the island capital, Toron, like "a black gloved hand, ringed with myriad diamonds, amethysts by the score, turquoises, rubies," rising with its towers "above the midnight horizon, each jewel with its internal flame," yet all too human, with kings, ministers, tycoons, circuses, rabble, a city conspiring against itself in a wholly imaginary war that projects its own civic corruptions until all its towers come tumbling down.

There is also that rough, utopic City of a Thousand Suns, salvaged by malcontents from death and rubble, rooted in earth, reaching beyond its forest clearing for the stars. Then, halfway across the universe, there is a nameless city, provisional home of the Triple Being, built twelve million years ago by a vanished civilization yet so made as to continue recreating itself into time. As the Triple Being, supernal spirit, explains: "The city responds to the psychic pressures of those near, building itself according to the plans, methods, and techniques of whatever minds press it into activity. "

In that city, beneath a double sun immeasurably distant from our own, a conference of sentient beings convenes. Delany depicts the scene marvelously. He begins, "What is a city?" and the conferees begin thus to answer, each according to its nature: "To one group at the meeting, immense thirty-foot worms, the city seemed a web of muddy tunnels and the words came as vibrations through their hides. . . . A metallic cyst received the words telepathically; for him the city was an airless, pitted siding of rock. . . . To the fifty-foot eyestalks of one listener the atmosphere of the city was tinged methane green. . . . To one living crystal in the city the words of the Triple Being came as a significant progression of musical chords. . . . A sentient cactus shifted its tentacles and beheld the city almost as it was in reality, a stretch of pastel sand; but, then, who can say what was the reality of the city." And so it continues, while the Triple Being unfolds the cosmic conflict centered now on cities of the Earth, a conflict of men engaged in phantasmic wars against themselves, which hence attract the Lord of the Flames: a roaming, curious, amoral force in the universe, negative by human reckoning, strange by the reckoning of all.

But I risk to make trite the exuberant inventions of Delany's work, which raises the question of the city radically—that is, at an imaginative limit. What is upolis? The good city eschews inversions of the (human) will and turns randomness not into uniformity but choice. "It is a place where the time passes as something other than time"; and the one and the many attain to a harmony that only time can yield. More empathic than telepathic—for Delany's characters know that communicating minds can jar and clash and still remain isolated—the good city grants its citizens time to touch, "experience and perception weighed against experience and perception, the music their minds made free in the double sound of their names." No wonder then that even the Lord of the Flames finds something to learn on bungling Earth. Though collective in his consciousness, dispersive in his influence, reversed in his polarities of love and death, matter and antimatter, this everted intergalactic creature realizes at last his kinship with creation.

Again, what is Delany's upolis? Both arcadian and Utopian, in time and also out of it, at once cosmic, social, and personal, material as well as immaterial, founded on work and boundless in mind, concrete no less than universal, this city, unfinished, absorbs cosmic randomness into the ever-widening circles of its awareness, which may also be called—however shyly—love.

VI

Given the human propensity for endings, what may we conclude about the city, fiction, or the city in fiction? Nothing conclusive, I fear.

Fiction and the city have been complicit, if not from the rise of Babel, then since Picaresque and bildungsroman. In these early genres, the novel often portrayed the innocent young man from the country come to experience urban sins and pleasures. In so doing, the novel recovered an ancient debate between nature and civilization, arcadia and polis, earth and fire, two mythic modes of human being in the world that still strain the sensibilities of our ironic age. It is as if the original sin of race were not only disobedient knowledge (Adam and Eve in the garden) but also disobedient artifice (Prometheus and his fire, Daedalus and his maze, the babbling builders of Babel).

I insist on this old complicity of language, knowledge, and artifice because I believe that it constitutes the central archetype of the city, its ambiguous gnosis. For the city has always been a crime against nature, against the pleromatic condition of some fabled disalienation, and it remains the crime that consciousness itself perpetrates, perpetuates, against creation. Mythically, then, and prophetically too, the city is less city than a moment in that human project realized by mind, a mind, as Friedrich Nietzsche knew, that can think only in fictions, a mind, as so many modern gnostics think, seeking ever-wider—and more problematic—expression of itself in the universe. Hence, the dematerialization of metropolis, often associated with the emergence of extraordinary human powers, finally depends on psychic even more than technic resources.

Such dematerialization, though, can prove horrendous, as the examples of Rotterdam, Coventry, Dresden, Hiroshima—of Auschwitz and Gulag and all those other cities of night in our land, including Watts—have shown. Can we wonder that the city has become another name for bedlam, slum, prison camp, asphalt jungle, every kind of dystopia we know? Certainly, the contemporary novel provides no reassurance on this score; with rare exceptions, the city in fiction embodies an imagination of disaster, which, as Susan Sontag remarked of science fiction films, responds to "seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror." Far richer in response to these threats than celluloid, the novel still admits no bright and exacting vision, no luminous trope.

Perhaps our dreams themselves have lost the edge of hope. For the city is itself desire, as I have persistently argued, as well as trope. But perhaps, also, history has begun to veer from the city, swerve. Oswald Spengler, we recall, thought that although world history was the history of cities, a time came at the end of a civilization when, "empty receptacles of an extinguished soul," these doomed world-cities would move on "to final self-destruction." Yet our destiny need not hinge on such dubious exercises in cyclicism and gloom. The city may simply cede the initiative to another organization of human energies, another definition or disposition of what we have hitherto called civilization, and so open new vistas for our earth. Here is Kenneth Boulding's roseate vision: "We may very well ask ourselves, therefore, whether we visualize a period in the not very distant future when in postcivilized societies, the city will really have disappeared altogether as an entity. We can even visualize a society in which the population is spread very evenly over the world in almost self-sufficient households . . . each basking in the security of an invisible and cybernetic world state in which each man shall live under his vine and his own fig tree and none shall make him afraid."

Yet the time is neither dusk nor dawn in the West but the present. We stand as ever between history and hope. And standing there I perceive the postmodern city as a place of ecumenism, open to the universe. Nervous, mindful, turbulent, it intensifies alienation as well as planetization. The process derives from no mystic doctrine or Teilhardian intuition but rather from human interactions that Ralph Waldo Emerson presaged more than a century ago: "Our civilization and these ideas," he observed, "are reducing the earth to a brain. See how by telegraph and steam the earth is anthropolized." Such reductions of the earth seem, at times, to threaten us with homogeneity if not baleful constraints. But the city is variousness itself inscribed in steel and stone. Terrorism and totalitarianism in it are but extreme revisions of the one and the many, neither of which we can ignore. Thus, we distrust utopic uniformity precisely because each of us needs to quicken the city with some image of his or her dream. Happy Babel: immaterial in its languages, diverse in its desires, projected to some end still obscure to us that yet menaces the gods.