Urban Legends by Peter L'Official

Author:Peter L'Official
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Knowledge and expertise can function as a kind of protective bulwark against doubt and disorientation; Wolfe’s chapter uses the uniqueness of its setting to dismantle those bulwarks and expose its characters to an environment that is, despite being part of their same city, unfamiliar to them. Here, the Bronx built environment is productive of a kind of bewilderment that is, counterintuitively, quite legible: unfamiliarity, at a speed and within a space whose lines of transport are hopelessly convoluted, is completely understandable. What readers, imagining themselves in the same situation, adrift in an area unknown to them, could not share Sherman’s frustration and growing unease?

Where Wolfe often loses his reader’s sympathies, where the familiarities of a universal situation like getting lost in a strange setting are made narrower, is also where race emerges, often closely. After a few more minutes of aimless, anxious driving, Wolfe’s characters find themselves in a more densely populated area where they encounter people “out in the street … dark, but they look Latin … Puerto Ricans?” for the first time.56 Wolfe’s casual references to possible ethnicities take a different tone when these nameless, faceless characters fulfill all the beastly connotations that the chapter’s title implies as some of them scream at each other, crawl about “on the street on all fours,” or grapple “like Sumo wrestlers … staggering, weaving … worn out.” Gothic horror is played first for terror and then for laughter, yet when the figure of Wolfe’s hyperbole is human rather than environmental, its effect broaches the irredeemable. A woman “[leans] over with her hands on her knees, laughing and swinging her head around in a big circle” with two men “laughing at her,” all while Wolfe orchestrates a characteristically onomatopoetic bass line for them to dance to: “thung thung thung thung thung.” A more stereotypical urban “jungle” than this would be hard to imagine.57

Wolfe is more effective as an author when he maintains sharp focus on illustrating the built environment and its effect upon his characters. Again, his narration sings when called upon to render an environment devoid of familiar landmarks and any sense of cardinal direction. “Over this way a subway entrance … Over there low buildings, shops … Great Chinese Takeout … He couldn’t tell which street went due west … That one—the likeliest—he turned that way …”58 The ellipses, used almost to excess throughout the chapter, here and elsewhere function effectively as the space between images—linguistic gestures for Sherman’s turning of his head from left to right—and the thoughts that they engender, and they are one of Wolfe’s most effective formal tools. What becomes most terrifying for Wolfe’s characters is not just the total loss of their bearings while in the Bronx but a seeming eradication of the city’s governing logics, which should not be overlooked as crucial—and comforting—concepts that underlie any city dweller’s sense of assurance: “There was a street sign, but the names of the streets were no longer parallel to the streets themselves. East Something seemed to

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