Making the Modern City: Architecture and the Literary Imagination in Steven Millhauser's Martin Dressler

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• Making the Modern City:Architecture and the Literary Imagination in Steven Millhauser's Martin Dressler
• Dale Pattison (bio)

In Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas's beloved architectural history of turn-of-thecentury Manhattan, the architect-theorist argues that fantasy and eroticism reside at the heart of the twentieth-century American metropolis. For Koolhaas, the emerging technologies and architectures of modernity enabled new forms of social life that would define our relationship to cities throughout the twentieth century. Part of the appeal of Koolhaas's book is its playful framing of modernist traditions of architecture and urban planning as grounded in the erotic imagination. Cities, Koolhaas argues, are intrinsically sites of imaginative possibility, and no city embodies this quality more completely than the modern American metropolis. Published in 1978, Delirious New York emerged at a particular historical moment when architectural theory began to account for the erotic potential of built environments. In essays published between 1975 and 1983, for instance, the Swiss-French architect Bernard Tschumi writes extensively on transgression as a principle fundamentally embedded in built space; the pleasure of architecture, according to Tschumi, resides in the individual's ability to subvert an architectural program—the set of behaviors ascribed to a built space—by creatively inhabiting that space and transgressing the architect's "rules" of space.¹ The intensely regimented and programmatic spaces that make possible these erotic transgressions are, not coincidentally, the architectures of modernity; indeed, the utopian belief that architecture could discipline individuals into "radiant life," to use Le Corbusier's term, was foundational to architecture of the period.

Largely unaccounted for in these conceptions of modern architecture, however, are the social dimensions of built space. Even as these architectures of modernity—the skyscraper, the avenue, and the elevator shaft, for instance—thrust city dwellers into new [End Page 79] erotic and transgressive postures, they also served to connect people in ways that would contribute to an emergent modern public. Kate Marshall's recent work on the medial networks of modernity, embodied most visibly in modernist literature through the spatial locus of the corridor, describes how the architectures of modernity—built on a logic of communication—helped to produce new forms of social life. While Marshall focuses explicitly on American literature written during the modern period, in this essay I am interested in exploring how contemporary literary imaginaries of the modern city frame the emergence of the modern public. Perhaps more than any other time in urban history, the post-1973 neoliberal era represents a critical temporal locus for imagining city life and for capturing its energies, potentialities, and promises. Indeed, a number of novels published around the turn of the twenty-first century—during which the modernist valorization of social life was being challenged by neoliberal logics of privatization—looked to the modern city as a vital symbol of social reinvention. From Toni Morrison's Jazz (1992) to Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1999) to Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), and finally to Steven Millhauser's Martin Dressler: Tale of an American Dreamer (1996), the subject of this essay, a significant body of contemporary fiction imagines the modern city as a vital space of social production.

In its focus on the public dimensions of the built urban environment, this essay embraces and builds upon the recent infrastructural turn in literary studies, which sees public infrastructure as the transparent, yet essential, form that organizes social life.² Insofar as infrastructure is only visible when it is dysfunctional, failing infrastructure—a condition of neoliberal public life—serves as a visible reminder of the dissolution of society and of the public commitments that underwrite it.³ For Lauren Berlant, the erosion of the social must be met by a new articulation of "the commons," which requires forms and infrastructures capable of "sustaining the mutations that emerge from the chains that are already snapping against those exposed to regimes of austerity."⁴ In imagining the modern city, then, contemporary novelists like Millhauser and Morrison locate in the architectures of modernity forms capable of responding to neoliberal policies and ontologies aimed at dismantling the social. These texts' overt attention to the built environment of the...