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...how far literary cities are imaginative constructions and how far, the contrary, they reflect the material realities of the city at particular stages of historical development. Johnson's view is that the latter possibility is routinely neglected in favor of the former, which she claims is the usual starting point of literary criticism. Another routine starting point, however, is that this issue first becomes acute with respect to literary modernism, given its unprecedented attention to urban consciousness. Franco Moretti is influential, for example, in arguing that what distinguishes the city ... is that its spatial structure ... is functional to the intensification of mobility; spatial mobility naturally enough, but mainly social mobility. The dazzling rapidity of success and ruin is the great theme of the nineteenth-century novel from Balzac to Maupassant: with it the city enters modern literature and becomes ... its obligatory context. (qtd. in Bridge and Watson 7) Spatial and social mobility afforded by the city is not exclusively, however, a post-Romantic preserve. I contend in this article that Alexander Pope's The Dunciad (1728-43) has a fair claim to being the first literary work to raise the question of the production of space in recognizably modern form. The Dunciad compels its readers to ask both questions posed by Jeri Johnson: how closely is Pope's London based on the material actuality of the Stuart and Georgian city? What is the nature of the poet's imaginative transformation of it? That these are not new questions and that contemporary readers of Pope's poem were also compelled to ask them, is attested in John Dennis's exasperated reaction to Book 2 in his Remarks upon Mr. Pope's Dunciad (1729), where he is incensed by the affront upon verisimilitude committed by Pope's setting the heroic games near the church of St. Mary-le-Strand. Only with a crudely reductive notion of probability can Dennis combat Pope's mythologized space:
What Probability in the Games which take up a third Part of the
Piece? Is it not monstrous to imagine any Thing like that in the
Master Street of a populous City; a Street eternally crowded with
Carriages, Carts, Coaches, Chairs, and Men passing in the greatest
Hurry about Private and Publick Affairs? (Dennis 2: 362) What Dennis responds to here is The Dunciad's provoking way of overlaying upon one another different kinds and conceptions of space--a peculiar layering effect. Pope utilizes the reader's personal knowledge of a particular material space, but superimposes on that space events that could not possibly take place within it--events that the reader's very knowledge of the nature of the space renders impracticable and impossible. What we might term Pope's use of "hyperspacing" perhaps suggests that Johnson's dichotomy is a false one. One novel aspect of Pope's use of space is its rendering inseparable material reality and imaginative transformation. This essay's exploration of The Dunciad's cultural geography will focus upon the conditions that produce novel conceptions of imaginative spatialization in the poem.
I
Much of the best recent work on The Dunciad has shown that, rather than Pope's London representing something other than itself, encoding a set of ethical, political, or metaphysical meanings, it represents at least itself. Biographical work on the main personae and charting, for example, of the routes taken by and the rituals attendant on the Lord Mayor's procession and the coronation have exposed the material vertebrae of the poem, its rich inspissation in contemporary material culture. (1) Yet it is at once obvious to readers who work their way through the voluminous prefatory matter that Pope intends the urban geography of The Dunciad to signify in a densely allusory and symbolic way. Based around a set of adjudications on inclusion and exclusion, The Dunciad's very structure, the principles that govern it as a physical object and a piece of bookmaking, is determined by the question of material space. How much space is there in the poem, and who should fill it? In the section of the prefatory material devoted to "Testimonies of Authors," Pope quotes a letter from James Moore Smythe that indirectly claims Pope's Memoirs of a Parish Clerk to be a satire on Gilbert Burnet. In response, Pope cites the Earl of Peterborough as a witness that Smythe himself was the real enemy of Burnet, but he at once faces the question of the juxtaposition of such individuals, Peterborough and Smythe, on the same physical page, and hence in the same imaginative universe: Here in truth should we crave pardon of all the foresaid right honourable and worthy personages, for having mentioned them in the same page with such weekly rift-raft railers and rhymers; but that we had their ever-honoured commands for the same; and that they are introduced not as witnesses in the controversy, but as witnesses that cannot be controverted;...
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