University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series (Jun 2016)
“The Maze Factor” Vs. “The Solar Eye”: Identities of Walkers and Watchers
Abstract
This paper will aim to investigate Joyce’s Ulysses, the paradigmatic urban novel, in juxtaposition with Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World and Alasdair Gray’s ambiguous Lanark on the theoretical basis of modern urban planning, environmental psychology, and De Certeau’s analyses of modern urban living. It will compare the contrasting perspectives of the city as a fragmenting labyrinth and integrative panorama. The analysis telescopes on the denizens’ roles of walkers and spectators, with particular attention on cognitive mapping as vital for spatiotemporal orientation. Therefore, as the wanderings of Stephen, Bloom, and Duncan Thaw demonstrate, the practice of everyday walking in the city and the trajectory walked are inextricably linked to the character’s inner quest for self-identity. The city maze is as confounding as the puzzles of one’s subjective existence. Conversely, Huxley’s characters’ panoptic vision of post-Fordian London fits an urban planner’s dream of objectivity, linearity, and totalitarian order where walking, I would argue, amounts to a productive anarchy against the imprisonment of individuality. Ultimately, the optimism of Joyce and Gray testifies that the peripatetic city view, although disordered, allows a dynamic inscription of subjective meanings on the material reality, thus prevailing over any attempt to curtail its heterodoxy into a static onedimensionality.
