At a time often described as the death of the storyteller, the passing of David Malouf on 22 April offers an occasion to return to an old yet still pressing question: can cities be understood solely through official documents and urban plans?
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The experience of reading literature by way of problematising what we call narrative, suggests that something still remains in between. Many things, in fact, that have gradually and systematically been pushed to the margins, or altogether omitted.
In this sense, when we speak of the novel, we seek to bring into writing those elements that are absent from, or deemed insignificant within, dominant discourses. In an age of planetary urbanisation, for whom do stories, memories, emotions, longings, dreams and friendships truly matter?
The issue here is not merely one of form, but also of methodology. When we invoke narrative, we are in fact referring to a particular mode of articulation, a way of understanding the world that does not treat time as a homogeneous, neutral, and linear sequence, but rather as a layered and at times contradictory field.
In this sense, as Foucault suggests in The Order of Discourse, literature – by revealing the limits of language – can recover within time those elements that have been erased or suppressed in official discourses.
Literature thus becomes a site where language distances itself from pre-established orders and approaches its own limits. It is precisely at these intersections, as Foucault argues, that discursive openings may emerge. It is therefore no coincidence that he consistently emphasised a certain form of storytelling in his work.
In this sense, it can be argued that the official history of cities is often little more than the archive of states and their apparatuses. Narratives-particularly in the novel, however–- recount the histories of inhabitants, the marginalised, and lived experiences that have not necessarily taken on a discursive form.
As Jean-Paul Sartre argues in What Is literature? narrative is not merely a representation of reality; it is itself a form of action-an act that organizes time and confers meaning upon human experience. In this sense, narrative is always endowed with a certain kind of agency: the agency that making the invisible visible.
If we accept that every city has its own story, then we must ask where these stories are written and who gets to tell them. From this perspective, literature emerges as one of the most significant sources for understanding the cities:
In Russia, Nikolai Gogol in Nevsky Prospect transforms the city into a psycho-social space in which poverty, alienation, and modern anxiety take shape. The street here is not merely a route of passage, but a stage of spectacle, deception, and perceptual rupture; a site where appearance and reality continually diverge. It is through these very slippages that the city reveals itself as an unstable, multilayered experience. one that unsettles rather than stabilises the subject.
Morteza Moshfegh Kazemi, in Tehran-e Makhuf, Tehran is portrayed as a scene of corruption, inequality, and social transformation, a city in which modernisation and moral crisis are deeply intertwined.
By entering the hidden spaces of the city – from aristocratic homes to lower-income neighbourhoods, and even marginal sites such as coffeehouses and brothels – this narrative draws an alternative map of Tehran: one that is less official than it is lived and contradictory. Here, the city appears not as a coherent totality, but as a field of forces in which class, gender, and power are entangled in stark and often violent ways.
Ethel Lilian Voynich, in The Gadfly depicts the Italian cities as a terrain of tension among ecclesiastical authority, authoritarian states, and revolutionary forces. In this context, urban relations emerge less through physical form or everyday experience than through a network of conspiracies, resistances, and repressions.
Charles Dickens offers a portrayal of Hard Times of London during the process of industrialisation – one whose realism is rarely matched elsewhere. In his works, the city is not merely a site of accumulated poverty and labour, but a scene of structural inequality and institutional injustice sedimented into everyday life. Through characters and urban spaces-from workshops to impoverished neighbourhoods, London emerges as a network of power relations and deprivation, a narrative that vividly exposes the gap between industrial progress and human suffering.
Victor Hugo reconstructs Paris not simply as a place, but as a field of social and historical forces in which various forms of inequality are produced and reproduced. In Les Misérables, the city becomes a complex network of contrasting spaces-from streets and barricades to subterranean sewers-each revealing a layer of social and historical life. In this account, Paris is not a mere backdrop to the narrative but becomes an active agent in its own right: a force that both suppresses and enables resistance and transformation.
Günter Grass presents the city (Danzig/Gda?sk) not simply as a location, but as a narrative space in which history has sedimented-where national, linguistic, and ideological layers accumulate upon one another.
In The Tin Drum, the city is never reduced to a single narrative; rather, it manifests through conflicting voices, fractured memories, and transformed bodies (such as Oskar). In Grass’s work, the city increasingly appears as a terrain of trauma and dark humour.
The Problematic of Dualities
Literary narrative can be understood as a form of urban knowledge-one that is produced not from above, but from within the textures of everyday experience.
Unlike the knowledge generated by formal dispositive it does not necessarily seek coherence, order, or systemic organisation; rather, it foregrounds rupture, contradiction, and ambiguity. Yet it is precisely these qualities that render it indispensable for understanding the city. The city is not a unified, pre-given whole, but a constellation of heterogeneous forces; and narrative remains one of the few means capable of representing such heterogeneity.
David Malouf and the city
In this sense, the significance of David Malouf may well be distilled into this very point. Writing from below, he demonstrates how storytelling can yield a deeper understanding of spatial relations that are not merely geographical, but also historical, social, and affective. Literature, then, is not a substitute for urban planning, but its necessary complement – a means of apprehending that which would otherwise remain unseen.
Malouf was a master of borders, a writer whose world took shape not at fixed points, but in distances and transitions.
Much like Theo Angelopoulos, who held his camera at the mist-laden frontiers of the Balkans, where history, geography, and memory slip into one another, David Malouf persistently wrote at the edge of Australia, not as a geographical line, but as an existential condition.
When he spoke of “here”, he simultaneously invoked a “there”, as if every place in his work were marked by an absence, by something not there, yet constitutive of it.
Within this framework, war and memory emerge as two forces that unsettle these boundaries. War, as an experience of rupture, and memory, as the return of what has passed yet remains unresolved, both blur the lines between present and past, between here and there.
Consequently, Malouf’s world is one in which no boundary remains stable; every line is susceptible to slippage.
This condition can be clearly observed across his works. In An Imaginary Life, the narrative of Ovid’s exile to the margins of the empire becomes an occasion to reflect on the boundary between civilisation and nature, language and silence.
Ovid, as a representative of Rome’s linguistic and cultural order, gradually distances himself from language in his encounter with the unnamed child, moving toward a form of pre-linguistic perception. Here, the boundary is not merely geographical, but epistemological: the boundary between what can be spoken and what can only be lived.
In Remembering Babylon, this boundary emerges as the divide between self and other. The character of Gemmy Fairley, who has lived between Indigenous communities and European settlers, becomes a border in himself, a body that connects two worlds and is, at the same time, excluded by both.
Set within the colonial context of Australia, the novel demonstrates that the “other” does not exist outside the order, but at its very core – a presence that continually unsettles and threatens it.
In Fly Away Peter, the boundary takes on a more classical form as the boundary between war and peace. Yet even this binary does not remain fixed in Malouf’s work –the war front and the tranquil wetlands of Australia become intertwined, and the experience of war appears not as an external rupture, but as an extension of a world already lived.
Here, too, the boundary collapses: peace already carries within it the possibility of war, and war reflects the very order that has made it possible.
In Johnno, the boundary shifts to a more internal scale, situated between structure and subject. Brisbane in this novel is not merely a city, but a space in which social, class, and cultural orders are entangled with dualism such as obedience or defiance, individualism or collectivism, agency or structure, and yes or no.
The relationship between the narrator and Johnno itself constitutes a kind of boundary, a boundary between conformity and deviation, between accepting the prevailing order and escaping it. The city thus becomes the terrain of this tension.
Malouf’s Brisbane is not necessarily the Brisbane recorded in planning documents or official statistics; rather, it is a city formed through memory, intermittent friendships, class fractures, and everyday life. It is precisely here that narrative, as a kind of methodology, enables the perception of what remains absent from maps and plans.
In Johnno, Brisbane appears as a lived structure. something produced and reproduced not outside subjects, but within their relationships.
Streets, neighbourhoods, and public spaces are not merely the backdrop to the characters’ movements; they operate as forces that shape the possibilities and constraints of action. In this sense, urban relations in Brisbane become intelligible through unplanned experiences – friendships, distances, senses of belonging or alienation – rather than through official data or grand narratives.
Narrative here functions as a form of gradual discovery of space, not as something pre-existing, but as something constituted in the course of narration. The city, therefore, is not a fixed container, but a process. one in which individual memory and social orders continuously redefine one another, and where the boundary between personal experience and urban structure is in constant flux.
Malouf, in this sense, may be understood as a writer of repetition. Yet not a repetition of stasis, but a repetition of passage, a movement that, each time it occurs, does not stabilise the boundary but renders it porous.
This is a repetition of the experience of the boundary. A continual return to the moment in which meaning has not yet been fixed and identity remains in the process of becoming. In his work, the boundary is a site of suspension, where one can belong fully neither to this side nor to that.
For this reason, Malouf’s characters inhabit a condition of in-betweenness, a state in which arrival is perpetually deferred and origin is no longer recoverable. They achieve neither stability nor certainty; instead, they dwell within distance itself. It is precisely this distance that becomes the site where narrative takes shape-a narrative not oriented toward resolving contradiction, but toward sustaining it.
In Malouf’s work, the boundary is not a geographical line, but a temporal-existential moment, a moment in which language, memory, and the body resist the order that seeks to fix them.
This resistance does not appear as direct confrontation, but rather as slippage, suspension, and incompletion. And it is precisely here that his literature becomes a possibility of thinking the spatial relations.