SOURCE: Edwards, Justin D. “Strange Fugitive, Strange City: Reading Urban Space in Morley Callaghan's Toronto.” Studies in Canadian Literature 23, no. 1 (1998): 213-27.

In the following essay, Edwards considers Callaghan's portrayal of Toronto in his novel Strange Fugitive.

The City is of Night; perchance of Death, But certainly of Night

(Thomson 34)

I am … a citizen of no mean city

(Acts 21:39)

If, as Steven Marcus claims, “the city continues to be a text,” it is a text fraught with ambiguities, paradoxes, and contradictions (234). Marcus goes on to articulate the contradictory tensions inherent in reading the city-as-text by noting that “the city is at once sordid, corrupt, ruinous, terrible, contaminating, and still a place of wonders, magic, marvels, and ‘reality’” (233). The illegibility of the city, moreover, is partially explained by Louis Wirth's comment that “instability and insecurity” are at the very heart of the modern metropolis (497). Although these comments refer specifically to...