670
PARTISAN REVIEW
other (e.g., Victor Hugo, Dickens), or, alternatively, as a setting in which
the isolated
jlaneur
can feel himself walled off from society (e.g., Poe,
Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky) . Phenomenologically-oriented critics such as
Georg Sin1illel and Walter Benjamin have adopted this latter perspective of
seeing the city in terms of public space as it impinges on the senses of an
individual. Other critics, such as Franco Moretti and Richard Sennett,
define urban life not as public in this way but as private. For them, the
essence of urban life lies in individual lives within the home, the room, not
in the social life of the street. This is why, Moretti argues in
Signs Taken for
Wonders,
the city appears in novels only as background: "bourgeois culture
is fundamentally a culture of private life, which is reluctant to identify and
resolve itself entirely in great collective institutions" such as the city and
the state. Novelists and poets are not so categorical in either of these direc–
tions, happily weaving public and private spaces into a fictional web that, in
Balzac and
T.
S. Eliot, for example, incorporates something of the com–
plexi ty of urban life as a phenomenon rather than an idea.
The problem inherent in this book's title is one that besets every
writer on the topic. Can "the city in literature" be made the subject of "an
intellectual and cultural history"?
BURTON PIKE
Go West
N ATHANAEL W EST: N OVELS AND O THER W RlTINGS.
Edited
by
Sacvan
Bercovitch . Library of America. $35.00.
A
couple of years ago, a panel including Harold Bloom, Gary Indiana,Jay
Martin, and Sacvan Bercovitch convened at the Union Square Barnes and
Noble to pay homage to Nathanael West, a writer who received little
respect in his own lifetime, but whose importance in American fiction has
been acknowledged with increasing force since the 1950s. The occasion
for this rather unlikely combination of literati in an incongruously com–
mercial setting was the Library of America's publication of
Nathanael West:
Novels and Other Writings,
edited by Bercovitch, which, in all its glossy
splendor, is meant to solidify West's canonical status once and for all.
Sitting behind a mass-produced
Mohy Dick
tapestry , the four men were
united in the common cause that West, like Melville before him, was an
unsung American bard, a prophet of incipient American apocalypse well
before the coming millennium made it fashionable.
