New York dans The Hazard of New Fortunes, de William Dean Howells : le sceau du silence

In The Hazard of New Fortunes, William Dean Howells seems to reinvent urban realism. It is by revealing the uncertainty of his words at the onset of the shapeless, nameless modernity of New York that he endows the structure and the substance of his writing with a susceptibility that ultimately proves necessary to the recreation of the silent marks of suffering or endurance that rule the city. The movement of the characters through Manhattan illustrates the author’s renunciation of an understanding of the urban transformations and the engagement of his words in the concreteness and the complexity of the world. Like Basil March, who progressively relinquishes the remoteness of elevated trains and the aesthetic screens of the “picturesque” in order to roam the streets of the city, Howells’s writing abandons all forms of total domination or artistic reconstruction in order to harmonize its words with the violent variations and the infinite promises that animate the city. In this respect, the first chapters of the novel, dedicated to the vain “hunt” for a furnished flat in Manhattan, reveal the inadequacy of realistic discourses or metaphoric screens. Indeed, the author ceaselessly unveils his distrust of realistic frames and inventories and focuses on the uncertain, intermediary zones where the familiar is endowed with a strange, unspeakable quality. He also resorts to theatrical images in order to disclose the limits of aesthetic projections. Quite significantly, the metaphors soon give way to an influx of synaesthetic notations, thus underlining the way in which the appraisal of the endless renewal of the city is necessarily linked to an immediate, sensory experience of its most ordinary components. In this sense, the creation of a new magazine functions as a prism in the novel and simultaneously refracts the artificiality of social conventions and the audacities of literary constructions. However, overriding all forms of satiric denunciation or artistic reflection, the magazine also announces the way in which the novel succeeds in recreating those moments of disruption when machines suddenly acquire the beauty of works of art or those protracted moments when the inhabitants of the metropolis discover their common humanity.