Constructing the apocalyptic city in Paul Auster's "In the country of last things"

Abstract

Our research began through Blake’s poetry, by seeing how the people he portrayed were engulfed by the city, how this new modern construct affected their daily living. As Heather Glen has very accurately stated in her Blake’s London: “The eighteenth-century London street was […] a place where that sense of the other as object –often as feeble and wretched object- […] was the dominant mode of relationship (148).” This new type of urban mode of living is extreme to the 18th century Englishman, a place where the rule becomes to survive, if you can, in this distant society. “This world simply is. Reciprocal human relationships in which otherness is acknowledged and the needs of all harmonized do not exist: the only relationships […] are instrumental ones. People have become objects (155).” As is very well shown through Glen and Blake in this case, this is a very bleak prospect. Cities become in a way, object-enemies, by this I mean that the city is distant and unfamiliar, in much the same way people are according to Glen, and each citizen has to do what he can to survive in this hostile world. Glen specifically focuses her analysis on Blake’s London, a portrayal of this growing metropolis that pushes the common Londoners further into ‘their’ corner; they watch it with fear because it is becoming distant. They belong in the city, for without them the city would not function, yet they are mere objects, they are not part of its creation or development. They are not free in the city.