Postmodern Spatiality and the Impossible City in Tim Powers’s Last Call
Keywords:
Tim Powers, Last Call, Postmodernism, impossible city, chaos theory, fractalsAbstract
This essay explores the status of urban spatiality in Tim Powers’s Last Call (1992) within the framework of postmodernism. Drawing on Edward Soja’s Thirdspace concept, this paper argues for an impossible posturban space that defies representation. Neither imaginary nor real, it remains unattainable and meaningless, drawing the characters into a relentless quest. Focus will be placed on the way Powers reimagines Las Vegas not as a center of power but as a fluid, liminal zone where mental, physical, real, and unreal dimensions overlap; hence, the enactment of the impossible space. This reconceptualization aligns with fractal and chaos theories, presenting the city as a fragmented, ever-shifting landscape never giving a sense of stability or conclusiveness. The ambition of this paper is to focus on the postmodernist suspension of a sense of locality and geography and the foregrounding of the impervious nature of urban spatiality. The paradoxical creative-destructive aspect of the city, in Powers’s hands, becomes a mirror reflecting the characters’ shifting identities, or better, confused subjectivities in a posturban world where boundaries are arbitrarily and constantly blurred.
References
Ackroyd, Peter. “The Life of the City.” The Tate Modern, February-April 1. 2001, pp. 4-5.
Barthes, Roland. “Semiology and Urbanism.” The Semiotic Challenge. Translated by Richard Howard, U of California P, 1994, pp. 191-201.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. Semiotext(e), 1983. Clark, James M. Death and the Visual Arts. Arno Press, 1977.
Clute, John. “Urban Fantasy.” The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, edited by John Clute and John Grant, Orbit, 1997, pp. 975-76.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. U of Minnesota P, 1987.
Eagleton, Terry. Holy Terror. Oxford UP, 2005.
Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality: Essays. Harcourt Publishing, 1986.
Eggum, Arne. “The Theme of Death.” Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images, edited by Robert Rosenblum, National Gallery of Art, 1978, pp. 143-84.
Evans, Gareth, Tara McPherson, and Edward Soja. “Watch this Space: An Interview with Edward Soja.” Discourse, vol. 14, no. 1, 1991-92, pp. 41-57.
Gelfant, Blanche. The American City Novel. U of Oklahoma P, 1954.
Greenwood, Dan, and Sen Kuo. “Implementation of the Fractal-Based Random-Iterated Function System Decoding on the AT&T DSP32C.” Progress in Computer Graphics, edited by George Winston Zobrist and Chaman Sabharwal, vol. 1, Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1992, pp. 127-63.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Blackwell, 1997.
Hassan, Ihab. “Cities of Minds, Urban Words: The Dematerialization of Metropolis in Contemporary American Fiction.” Literature & the American Urban Experience: Essays on the City and Literature, edited by Michael C. Jaye and Ann Chalmers Watts, Manchester UP, 1981, pp. 93-112.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso, 1991.
Jencks, Charles. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. Rizzoli, 1977.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Blackwell, 1991.
---. Writings on Cities. Translated and edited by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Blackwell, 1996. Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. MIT Press, 1960.
Mandelbrot, Benoit. Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension. W.H. Freeman, 1977.
---. “Foreword: Fractals and the Rebirth of Experimental Mathematics.” Fractals for the Classroom, Part One: Introduction to Fractals and Chaos, edited by Heinz-Otto Peitgen et al., pp. 1-16. Springer, 1992.
Mitchell, Peta. Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity: The Figure of the Map in Contemporary Theory and Fiction. Routledge, 2013.
Powers, Tim. Last Call. Avon Books, 1992.
Skeates, Richard. “‘Those Vast New Wilderness of Glass and Brick:’ Representing the Contemporary Urban Condition.” Cities on the Margin, on the Margin of Cities: Representations of Urban Space in Contemporary Irish and British Fiction, edited by Philippe Laplace and Eric Tabuteau, Presses Universitaires Franc- Comtoises, 2003, pp. 25-42.
Soja, Edward W. “Inside Exopolis: Scenes from Orange County.” Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, edited by Michael Sorkin, The Noonday Press, 1992, pp. 94-122.
---. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Blackwell, 2000. ---. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Blackwell, 1996.
Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. MIT Press, 1988.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford UP, 1973.
Wilson, Elizabeth. The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women. U of California P, 1991
