Walking or Reading the City: Spatiotemporal narrative forms in contemporary urban Chinese fiction

In his influential essay ‘Walking in the City’, Michel de Certeau contrasts the practice of walking in the city, which produces or ‘enounces’ space; “[t]he act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language,” with the practice of viewing the city from above, which in turn “transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes.” This paper takes de Certeau’s distinction as the point of departure for an analysis of two very different narrative strategies for dealing with complex urban realities in contemporary Chinese fiction, namely 朱天心 Chu Tien-hsin’s 古都 Old Capital (1996) set in Taipei and Hong Kong writer 董启章 Dung Kai-cheung’s 地图集 Atlas (1997).