Introduction: Beginnings in Endings

Abstract

Doreen Massey describes cities as ‘the intersections of multiple narratives’, a nexus of distinctive and coexisting stories (1999: 171). I am interested in what follows in certain kinds of urban stories, those comprising some of the texts of modernist and postmodernist literature and film, and in how they interpret the changing physical forms, subjective and social experience of the city. I read these texts, so to speak, to understand how they have read the city, but also to discern how urban forms and processes have enabled or limited those readings. As this suggests, I see the ‘imaginary’ and the ‘actual’ as existing in a constitutive dialogue and therefore depart from recent post-structuralist accounts of the entirely discursive or written city (Wolfreys, 1998, Donald, 1999). lain Sinclair speaks of the ‘city as a darker self: a theatre of possibilities in which I can audition lives that never happened’ (1999c: 7), and this captures my sense of the exploratory role of fiction and the symbolic imaginary as it uncovers alternatives within present realities. Above all I am interested in how single and collective urban identities are in this way made, undermined or re-imagined. My primary examples are of London and New York, commonly recognized as the leading ‘modern’ cities at the turn of and into the first half of the twentieth century, and described as exemplary ‘global’, ‘postmodern’ or ‘postcolonial’ cities at the century’s end. For some commentators this millennial moment is the time too of the ‘post-metropolis’, as urban life, even in established Western cities, moves decidedly beyond its earlier classic forms. I turn most directly to this theme at the volume’s close.