Life in the Big Cities. Moltitudine e invisibilità metropolitana nella narrativa statunitense contemporanea

After Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, contemporary fiction often imagines the distance between present and past as a dislocation in space: our predecessors have lived not only Then, but also There, so Elsewhere is just another state of Here. The traces of Then are all and only Here/Elsewhere, container of time in solid state. What is left of time is a spatial concretion: an agglomeration of environments, smells, objects, bodies, events, atmospheres; a network of simulacra. Therefore, contemporary narrators not only tell their stories following and/or manipulating the trajectory of time, but also explore their story-worlds making digressions within or around time, which ends up being massively spatialized, built as an architecture. Like Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s Le città invisibili, who tries to “put together piece by piece the perfect city, made of mixed fragments, of moments separated by intervals, of signals sent by someone and collected by who knows who”, a city appearing “discontinuous in space and time”, more like the postmodern Sprawl by William Gibson than the modernist Paris by Proust. A diffused, decentralized, asymmetrical, entropic, spurious city, which in contemporary USA fiction often assumes the town planning, the skyline and the architectural appearance of the metropolis. This essay consists in a crossed close reading of some representations of the metropolitan cityscape in the last thirty years fiction, trying to draw a map that can reproduce its invariance and variations in a plausible stereography.