Immaterial City to a New City-Dweller

I apologize to those of you who didn’t read Donald’s “The Immaterial City: Representation, Imagination and Media Technologies.” I realize that I should probably respond to a text we are all reading, but I found myself drawn to this chapter not only because of my interest in the multifaceted role of narrator and narration in the texts we have read so far, but also because of personal experience. Donaldson draws insight from J.K. Huysman’s Á Rebours to explore the ways that cities are created not only by the physical experience of them, but by our expectations and insights that precede that experience. Donaldson states, “the way we experience cities is profoundly shaped by the immaterial city of word, image, and myth. It is through them that we learn not only to see cities, but also how to live in them” (47). The city, the idea of the city, is an amalgamation of our anticipations of the city, previous representations of the city, and actual experiences. While this idea becomes more complicated as Donaldson continues, the idea of cities as a combination of actual experience and of expectation created through myth, art, and literature spoke to me as a fairly new city-dweller. I moved to LA about 2 ½ years ago and I honestly feel that my conceptualization of Los Angeles as a city has almost as much to do with my previous expectations and interactions with the city through “mediated pedagogies of urban life” as it does with my actual experience living in the city; I find myself making sense of my life here in accordance with those myths that preceded my move here. The city of Los Angeles is loaded with narrative representations and expectations and as someone moving in from the outside, I find myself constantly trying to make sense of those representations in accordance with my actual experience. I also find that at times when those two (or three, or more) “representational spaces” do not align, and I cannot reconcile the gaps between representation and experience, I either feel a great sense of liberation and excitement, or utter confusion and existential crisis.

While I can’t articulate specifically how this idea has influenced my reading of Dickens’ Bleak House, I can say that it has given me a new perspective for dealing with the narrators within the text and how the novel is dealing with perspective. I’ve mentioned previously that I’m interested in the vacillation between Esther’s narrative and the omniscient narrator that appears sporadically. I have been reading these different narrations as different ways of entering the city and of knowing characters (I may never get un-stuck from thinking about the narrative interjections in Mary Barton because I’m still trying to make sense of them), but after reading Donald, I find that I have begun reading Esther in a more critical way; her omission of the “gentlemen of a dark complexion” that she decided was “very sensible and agreeable” suddenly became heavy with implication. Thinking of how narrators are responsible for conveying narratives to the outsider, and considering how Donald describes the reality and significance of representations, I cannot help but feel slightly betrayed by Esther’s denial to relay information; I feel that her narrative, her imagining and representation of characters, of events, of the city, carry more weight than I initially wanted to believe and I need her to be more responsible with her representations (I think I feel this way more-so because her narration is far more present than the omniscient narration, but still). Anyway, I’m still dealing with the perspective of the narrator and how that influences the experience and imagining of the city; I’m opening “city” up to broader definitions of narratives in general that are multi-faceted and sites of constant movement, networks, interactions, exchange etc. I can’t quite detail an argument for a paper yet, but this essay at least allowed me to see this particular facet of the text in another way.