ABSTRACT
The simultaneity of past, present, and future in the life of the city tests the limits of novelistic narrative. Whereas Alfred Doblin renders the city in terms of a modernist epic, Virginia Woolf offers a modernist impressionism. Like Doblin, Woolf was self-consciously trying to write about the experience of the modern city after James Joyce. Doblin's solution is epistemological montage; Woolf's the passage of ontological perception. This tangled temporality also suggests why the experience of the modern city has so produced hallucination, new types of mental illness, and, in the case of Septimus Warren Smith, suicide. The imagination necessary to rebuild a living city is equally a product of the Enlightenment tradition, but it works with a different temporality. Edwardian narration is not only a record of images, but a projection of multiple selves – past, future, imaginable selves – onto the cityscape being recorded.
