This keynote lecture was delivered at the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies, University of Limerick in December 2019. It examined the relationship between the urban and the utopian – specifically, the question of the knowability and unknowability of city spaces within literary texts (primarily London, but also other smaller British cities). It focussed on an emerging caucus of twenty-first-century British fictions that use urban settings, as well as real and imagined escapes from the city (in pastoral or temporal terms) to blend mimetic topographical detail and the locatedness of an identifiable city space with a more formally dislocating sense of ambiguity.

1. “The other city, the city of dreams”
literary utopias and literary utopianism
Dr Caroline Edwards
Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature
Birkbeck, University of London
image by Mathanki Kodavasal under a CC BY-SA license

2. London: an unrepresentable whole
Claude Monet, “Houses of Parliament, Sunlight Effect” (1903)

3. • London becomes seen as an impossible
profusion of competing vantage points
which cannot be unified (at level of individual
subject/protagonist or at level of narrator)
• Modern London is inherently “unknowable”
and presents to writers/artists the
impossibility of any realist
representation (London-as-totality)
• Technological innovations fundamentally
change the way in which people view the city:
(1) bomber planes in WWI; (2) the
underground (“tube”) – new perspectives of
the aerial and the subterranean
New perspectives:
aerial and subterranean

4. City spaces in contemporary
British fiction

5. Writers of the not yet
David Mitchell
Hari Kunzru
Megan Hunter
Jon McGregor
Maggie Gee
Joanna Kavenna
Claire Fuller
Jim Crace
Grace McCleen
Bernardine
Evaristo
Ali Smith
Sam Taylor

6. Ours is a time of profound unevenness
How should we approach the question of (un)fair cities, of the imbrication between
the urban and the utopian?
• the relationship between utopian disruptions that reconfigure the city along
oppositional temporal and spatial axes and the ideological cartography that
such disruptions seek to unsettle, disturb, and refunction (umfunktionieren)
• of the layering of memory and anticipatory illuminations of redeemed future times
(Vorschein) that the archaeological complexity of the urban landscape
makes visible, with its palimpsest traces of previous architectural styles and the
social worlds that contained and produced them, and that they in turn reimagined
• of the fraught spaces and times of utopian possibilities within literary
texts – which gesture towards new, as well as old, pre-capitalist kinds of
sociality, glinting between the habitualised patterns of everyday life

9. From The Economist, 6 April 2019

12. Non-contemporaneityLiterary utopias and literary utopianism

14. Gulliver’s
problem
of scale
• We need to refine our critical lens in
order to excavate the utopian content
expressed by contemporary novels,
which often functions in a quiet, latent
way
• The declension of the utopian ideal over
the 20th century returns us to utopia’s
Renaissance beginnings in small-scale
visions of ideal city-states
• Ernst Bloch’s utopian philosophy gives
us a model for identifying “the tick-tock
of small scale happiness”

15. Beyond non-
communicating
utopias
• How can we mediate between different
utopian representational levels? What
literary hermeneutic would be capable of
forming a “commonly rooted” alliance
between “autonomous voices”?
• We need (1) to identify/excavate utopian
moments of possibility; and (2) establish
the correspondence between them – both
within and between texts
• Utopia’s shifting expressions of scale
require a flexible reading strategy– like
Gulliver, we are in this world “sometimes
too big, sometimes too small, never at
the right scale”

17. “…what if life is feared more than dying? If
death itself appears only as part of a restless
and unloved life?”
(The Principle of Hope, Vol. 3, p. 1136)

18. “…the contradiction between our brief time and
the historical time we cannot live”
(The Spirit of Utopia, pp. 262-3)

19. Wouldn’t it be really absurd to maintain that the vast
moving universe and its motion, wholly unmediated
with us in the multitude of its stars, has its
‘continuation’ pure and simple in the existing history of
mankind…? So that […] the time of the previous history
of Nature would appear empty, and – in contrast to the
time of human history – without any noteworthy future
mode of its own?”
(The Philosophy of the Future, p. 136)

20. “…what if life is feared more than dying? If
death itself appears only as part of a restless
and unloved life?”
(The Principle of Hope, Vol. 3, p. 1136)

21. Arresting the time of deathArresting the time of death
Everything has stopped.
And silence drops down from out of the
night, into this city, the briefest of silences,
like a falter between heartbeats, like a
darkness between blinks. Secretly, there is
always this moment, an unexpected pause, a
hesitation as one day is left behind and a new
one begins…
These moments are there, always, but
they are rarely noticed and they rarely last
longer than a flicker of thought.
We are in that moment now, there is
silence and the whole city is still. (pp. 3-4)

22. Arresting the time of deathArresting the time of death
I don’t remember seeing it, not the
moment itself, I remember strange
details, peripheral images, small
things that happened away from the
blinded centre. […]
I can see all these moments as though
they were cast in stone, small
moments captured and enlarged by
the context, like figures in a Pompeii
exhibition. (pp. 7-8)

23. Arresting the time of deathArresting the time of death
He imagines what would happen if the whole
street called [Shahid’s] name, joining with the
mother’s small voice, the whole street lifting
the words and the words spreading through
this city, taking flight like a flock of birds at
dusk, clouding the sky, the voices all-present,
across fields and forests and oceans, sent out,
transmitted […] the name, pouring down from
the sky like electronic rain … across all our
misconnected world, a chorus of name-saying,
a brief redemptive span of attention. (pp. 272)

24. Arresting the time of deathArresting the time of death
And there is an interruption in the way of
things, a pause, something faint like the
quivering flutter of a moth’s rain-sodden
wings, something unexpected. Something
remarkable […] in the time it takes for a
hand to be clasped and unclasped, Shahid
Mohammed Nawaz wakes gently, lifted
through a gap in the way of things. (pp.
273-5)

25. Arresting the time of deathArresting the time of death
• McGregor’s use of the subjunctive, a tense associated with
utopian acts of imagination – Characters continually
speculate and imagine alternative possible scenarios: ‘I imagined
… I wondered … I wondered’; ‘she wonders if…’; ‘he wonders …
what they would say if…’; ‘if she had stayed… if she had managed’;
‘I’m finding out what I might have been called, if things had been
different’
• McGregor’s cinematic narrative omniscience – discrepancy
between a totalising ability to make visible and the limited
perspectives of characters
• Treatment of novelistic time constructs a politics of
connection, yet the miraculous realism of McGregor’s formal
experimentation juxtaposes the real-world urban setting with a
notably anti-mimetic, even surreal articulation of lived time
• British city, British residential street – McGregor’s experiment
with form hinges on the evocation, and subsequent
disavowal, of the material real-world co-ordinates through
which the reader might locate themselves

26. “…the contradiction between our brief time and
the historical time we cannot live”
(The Spirit of Utopia, pp. 262-3)

27. Birth as a wormhole in time
1. Mid-nineteenth-century Vienna, Robert von Lucius is
writing a letter to a colleague about an inmate he has
visited at the city’s gruesome Lazarettgasse asylum
(the real historical figure of Hungarian doctor Ignaz
Semmelweis)
2. The scene of 42-year-old Brigid Hayes going into
labour with her second child at her London home
3. The writer Michael Stone is enduring a birth of a
different kind with the belated publication of his first
novel
4. In a future dystopian narrative set in 2153 we read the
transcripts of a state interrogation with a female
Prisoner known only by her number, 730004, who
stands accused of ‘crimes against the species’

28. Birth as a wormhole in time
“I found birthing my own children such a
moment of gory apotheosis, as if
everything comes together at the point at
which a new life begins: family history,
the lives of ancestors, the coincidences
that cause two people to meet and birth a
child, reality, fantasy, dream and
everyday life. […] To me it was as if
everything was happening at the same
time. As if a wormhole has opened up,
past, present, future, fantasy and reality
have merged.”
(Joanna Kavenna in interview)

29. Birth as a wormhole in time
“Time, in this non-narrative conception, is
not an unfolding towards a proper end that
we grasp in the present, where the past
might be used: time is an “open whole”
where the past can always produce new
potentials for new futures, which in turn
open up new pasts. Each moment of time
bears the potential for a sense of the whole
of time; and this is a sense and a whole that
is not our own. This mode of time might
also be thought of as “quasi-messianic” in
that the burden of the past compels us to
read what the past must have wanted to
say.”
Claire Colebrook, ‘Stratigraphic Time, Women’s Time’,
Australian Feminist Studies, 24. 59 (2009): 11-16 (11).

30. Birth as a wormhole in time
• Brigid’s pregnancy and labour connects her to an ancient
phylogenetic temporality that stretches beyond
industrial modernity and outside of the ordinal time of
contemporary London
• Michael cannot connect with other Londoners, family or friends;
Kavenna echoes T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” “Preludes” and The
Waste Land, suggesting the flow of crowds and commuters
streaming through the city and recalling Eliot’s formal
devastation of poetic style
• Kavenna invokes two poles of modernist time consciousness –
clock time and the Husserlian stream of experience.
However there is no revelatory temporal arrest or Bergsonian
durée for Michael
• Post-apocalyptic time of ruined futurity imaged through
present conditional tense, then literalised in narrative form
through the dystopian future section of the novel

31. Birth as a wormhole in time
“Everything was strange. It all seemed like a
dream. The crate, sweaty and vile. The
passage or tunnel and my confusion about
whether it was day or night. The incessant
beating of the waves and the vision of a
landscape I had never seen before but
somehow recognised, and all the suspense
of our crossing and the shock of our arrival.
[…] I was transfixed by the mountains and
the vastness of the sky.”
(The Birth of Love, p. 137; my italics)
“…there arises in the world something which
shines into the childhood of all and in which no
one has yet been: homeland [Heimat].”
(Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. 3, p. 1376)

33. Wouldn’t it be really absurd to maintain that the vast
moving universe and its motion, wholly unmediated
with us in the multitude of its stars, has its
‘continuation’ pure and simple in the existing history of
mankind…? So that […] the time of the previous history
of Nature would appear empty, and – in contrast to the
time of human history – without any noteworthy future
mode of its own?”
(The Philosophy of the Future, p. 136)

34. The problem of temporal exteriority

35. The problem of temporal exteriority
“… as they were rowed through the drowned
kingdom, they saw the beauty and the havoc.
The river stretched out like a golden flood-
plain. Only a scattering of birds traced lines
on its surface. […] While they stared at
nothingness, two magnificent swans came
powering across and led them on. […]
“Timeless, isn’t it?” asked the man with
glasses.”
(The Flood, pp. 113-14)

36. The problem of temporal exteriority
“I am going to tell you how it happened. How I
came to be here, with so many others, in this
strange place I often dreamed of, or glimpsed in
the distance, across the river – the lit meadows,
the warm roof-tops, caught in those narrow
shafts of sunlight, in this moment that lasts for
ever. A city hovering over the darkness. Above
the waters that have covered the earth, stained
waters, rusty waters, pulling down papers,
pictures, peoples; a patch of red satin, a
starving crow, the last flash of a fox’s brush. A
place which holds all times and places. And we
are here. We are all still here.”
(The Flood, p. 7)

37. The problem of temporal exteriority
“Perhaps the dead can move through time. If
time is an endless unspooling ribbon, the
living see only the short bright section to
which they cling, panting, struggling, peering
out, blinded, from the spot-lit moment.
Perhaps the dead see the whole of the road,
stretching out for ever, before, behind, three
thousand human generations. Under the city,
the dead travel onwards. Searching for
something. Homing, homing.”
(The Flood, pp. 8-9)

38. The problem of temporal exteriority