A Voice Still Heard

by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)

  The fetid backwaters of the past seep back; the proletariat sinks into indolence and cynicism. And even in its triumphant moments, it exhibits a want of consciousness in its choice of leaders. The “instinctive sense of reality” attributed to it by Auguste Comte, which it so readily reflects in many a circumstance, abandons it at such moments. Its courage and self-sacrifice are not enough to give it what, precisely, is needed in order to act out the role assigned to it by Marx: political capacity.

  The question Vannier is raising here is not merely whether the working class can take power—that is an old and well-rehearsed question. He is asking something more troublesome: can a triumphant working class, once in power, display the political “capacity” to rule over a modern society or will it, in effect, cede power to an alliance of bureaucrats, intellectuals, and technocrats?

  3* A few points about the significance of the new youth styles:

  1. It is hard to suppose that the feelings of disaffection or dismay one encounters among young people are confined to those who come from a single class, though it may well be that such feelings are most strongly articulated by them. Even among plebeian segments of our population there are visible strong feelings of rage and resentment, sometimes turned against “the students,” but in origin and character often sharing with “the students” sentiments of powerlessness and dismay.

  2. Today’s middle-class style can become tomorrow’s working-class style. In this country, the lines of social and cultural demarcation between the classes are not nearly so firm as in other capitalist societies. Youth mobility is high; working-class children go to college in increasing, if not sufficient, numbers; they are likely to share at least some of the responses of other students; and they do not bring with them a strong sense of class allegiance or definition to which they feel obliged to cling and which might create psychic barriers between them and their middle-class peers.

  3. Mass culture quickly provides lower-class equivalents to middle-class styles, and often succeeds in spilling across class barriers. There are overwhelming cultural or pseudo-cultural experiences shared by the young of all classes, certainly more so than in any previous society. Movies, rock music, drugs—these may not figure with equal force in the lives of both working- and middle-class youth, but they do create a generational consciousness that, to an undetermined extent, disintegrates class lines.

  There have recently appeared reports of widespread and serious drug usage among young workers, both white and black, in major American industries. Whatever this may signify, and I don’t pretend to know, it ought to be sufficient evidence to dismiss the claim that somehow the less attractive features of the “counter culture” are unique to disoriented or spoiled middle-class youth. For good or bad, illumination or contamination, young workers in a mass society increasingly share the surrounding general culture.

  The City in Literature

  {1971}

  SIMPLICITY, AT LEAST IN LITERATURE, is a complex idea. Pastoral poetry, which has been written for more than two thousand years and may therefore be supposed to have some permanent appeal, takes as its aim to make simplicity complex. With this aim goes a convention: universal truths can be uttered by plebeian figures located in a stylized countryside often suggestive of the Golden Age. In traditional or sophisticated pastoral these plebeian figures are shepherds. In naive pastoral they can be dropouts huddling in a commune. Traditional pastoral is composed by self-conscious artists in a high culture, and its premise, as also its charm, lies in the very “artificiality” untrained readers dislike, forgetting or not knowing that in literature the natural is a category of artifice. As urban men who can no more retreat to the country than could shepherds read the poems celebrating their virtues, we are invited by pastoral to a game of the imagination in which every move is serious.

  With time there occurs a decline from sophisticated to romantic pastoral, in which the conventions of the genre are begun to be taken literally, and then to naive pastoral, in which they are taken literally. Yet in all these versions of pastoral there resides some structure of feeling that seems to satisfy deep psychic needs. Through its artifice of convention, the pastoral toys with, yet speaks to, a nagging doubt concerning the artifice called society. It asks a question men need not hurry to answer: Could we not have knowledge without expulsion, civilization without conditions?

  Now, between such questions and pastoral as a genre, there is often a considerable distance. We can have the genre without the questions, the questions without the genre. We can also assume that pastoral at its best represents a special, indeed a highly sophisticated version of a tradition of feeling in Western society that goes very far back and very deep down. The suspicion of artifice and cultivation, the belief in the superior moral and therapeutic uses of the “natural,” the fear that corruption must follow upon a high civilization—such motifs appear to be strongly ingrained in Western Christianity and the civilization carrying it. There are Sodom and Gomorrah. There is the whore of Babylon. There is the story of Joseph and his brothers, charmingly anticipating a central motif within modern fiction: Joseph, who must leave the pastoral setting of his family because he is too smart to spend his life with sheep, prepares for a series of tests, ventures into the court of Egypt, and then, beyond temptation, returns to his fathers. And there is the story of Jesus, shepherd of his flock.

  Western culture bears, then, a deeply grounded tradition that sees the city as a place both inimical and threatening. It bears, also, another tradition, both linked and opposed, sacred and secular: we need only remember St. Augustine’s City of God or Aristotle’s view that “Men come together in the city in order to live, they remain there in order to live the good life.” For my present purpose, however, the stress must fall on the tradition, all but coextensive with culture itself, which looks upon the city as inherently suspect.

  It is a way of looking at the city for which, God and men surely know, there is plenty of warrant. No one can fail to be haunted by terrible stories about the collapse of ancient cities; no one does not at some point recognize the strength of refreshment to be gained from rural life; no one can look at our civilization without at moments wishing it could be wiped out with the sweep of a phrase.

  II

  Our modern disgust with the city is foreshadowed in the 18th-century novelists. Smollett, connoisseur of sewage, has his Matthew Bramble cry out upon the suppurations of Bath—“Imagine to yourself a high exalted essence of mingled odors, arising from putrid gums, imposthumated lungs, sour flatulencies, rank arm-pits, sweating feet, running sores.” In London Bramble feels himself lost in “an immense wilderness . . . the grand source of luxury and corruption.” Foreshadowing the late Dickens, Smollett is also a literary grand-uncle of Louis Ferdinand Céline, impresario of Parisian pissoirs and New York subway toilets.

  Smollett helps create the tradition of disgust, but Fielding, a greater writer, helps set in motion the dominant literary pattern of discovery and withdrawal in regard to the city. It is the pattern of Tom Jones and later, in more complicated ways, of those 19th-century novels recording the travels of the Young Man from the Provinces: the youth leaving the wholesomeness of the country and then, on the road and in the city, experiencing pleasures, adventures, and lessons to last a lifetime. Fielding has little interest in blunt oppositions between mountain air and pestilent streets such as Smollett indulges. Smollett’s city is more vivid than Fielding’s, but Smollett rarely moves from obsessed image to controlled idea: the city, for him, is an item in that accumulation of annoyance which is about as close as he comes to a vision of evil. And thereby, oddly, Smollett is closer to many 20th-century writers than is Fielding. A man of coherence, Fielding knows that the city cannot be merely excoriated, it must be imaginatively transformed. Just as Tom Jones’s journey is a shaping into circular or spiral pattern of the picaro’s linear journey, so the city of the picaresque novel—that setting of prat-falls, horrors, and what the Elizabethan writer Robert Greene had called “pl
easant tales of foist”—becomes in Fielding an emblem of moral vision. The picaro learns the rules of the city, Fielding’s hero the rules of civilized existence. In Fielding the city is a necessary stopping-point for the education of the emotions, to be encountered, overcome, and left behind.

  It is customary to say that the third foreshadower of the 18th century, Daniel Defoe, was a writer sharing the later, 19th-century vision of the city, but only in limited ways is this true. For Defoe’s London is bodiless and featureless. Populated with usable foils, it provides less the substance than the schema of a city; finally, it is a place where you can safely get lost. The rationality of calculation Max Weber assigns to capitalism becomes in Moll Flanders an expert acquaintance with geographic maze. Moll acts out her escapade in a city functional and abstract, mapped out for venture and escape—somewhat like a ballet where scenery has been replaced by chalk-marks of choreography. Defoe anticipates the design of the city, insofar as it is cause and token of his heroine’s spiritual destitution, just as Kafka will later dismiss from his fiction all but the design of the city, an equivalent to his dismissal of character psychology in behalf of metaphysical estrangement.

  III

  The modern city first appears full-face—as physical concreteness, emblem of excitement, social specter, and locus of myth—in Dickens and Gogol. Nostalgic archaism clashes with the shock of urban horror, and from this clash follows the myth of the modern city. Contributing to, though not quite the main component of this myth, is the distaste of Romanticism for the machine, the calculation, the city.

  “The images of the Just City,” writes W. H. Auden in his brilliant study of Romantic iconography, “which look at us from so many Italian paintings . . . are lacking in Romantic literature because the Romantic writers no longer believe in their existence. What exists is the Trivial Unhappy Unjust City, the desert of the average from which the only escape is to the wild, lonely, but still vital sea.”

  Not all Romantics go to sea, almost all bemoan the desert. Wordsworth complains about London in The Prelude:

  The slaves unrespited of low pursuits,

  Living amid the same perpetual flow

  Of trivial objects, melted and reduced

  To one identity, by differences

  That have no law, no meaning, and no end.

  This Romantic assault upon the city continues far into our century. Melville’s Pierre says, “Never yet have I entered the city by night, but, somehow, it made me feel both bitter and sad.” “I always feel doomed when the train is running into London,” adds Rupert Birkin in Women in Love. Such sentences recur endlessly in modern writing, after a time becoming its very stock in trade. And the assault they direct against the modern city consists of more than sentimentalism, or archaism, or Gemeinschaft-nostalgia. The Romantic attack upon the city derives from a fear that the very growth of civilization must lead to a violation of traditional balances between man and his cosmos, a Faustian presumption by a sorcerer who has forgotten that on all but his own scales he remains an apprentice. Nothing that has happened during this past century allows us easily to dismiss this indictment.

  Darkened and fragmented, it is an indictment that comes to the fore in Dickens’s later novels. In the earlier ones there is still a marvelous responsiveness to the youthfulness of the world, an eager pleasure in the discoveries of streets. Almost every idea about the city tempts us to forget what the young Dickens never forgot: the city is a place of virtuosity, where men can perform with freedom and abandonment. And it is Dickens’s greatness, even in those of his books which are anything but great, that he displays London as theater, circus, vaudeville: the glass enlarging upon Micawber, Sarry Gamp, Sam Weller. If the city is indeed pesthole and madhouse, it is also the greatest show on earth, continuous performances and endlessly changing cast. George Gissing notes that Dickens seemed “to make more allusions throughout his work to the Arabian Nights than to any other book,” a “circumstance illustrative of that habit of mind which led him to discover infinite romance in the obscurer life of London.” Continues Gissing: “London as a place of squalid mystery and terror, of the grimly grotesque, of labyrinthine obscurity and lurid fascination, is Dickens’s own; he taught people a certain way of regarding the huge city.”

  In Dickens’s early novels there are already ominous chords and frightening overtones. The London of Oliver Twist is a place of terror from which its young hero must be rescued through a country convalescence, and the London of The Old Curiosity Shop, as Donald Fanger1* remarks, “impels its victims . . . to flee to the quasi-divine purity of the country . . . repeatedly identified with the remote springs of childhood, innocence and peace.” Yet throughout Dickens’s novels London remains a place of fascination: he is simply too great a writer to allow theory to block perception.

  In his earlier novels sentimental pastoral jostles simple pleasure in color and sound; and the pattern toward and away from the city, as classically set forth by Fielding, is used in a somewhat casual way until it receives a definitive rendering in Great Expectations. But it is in his three great novels—Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend, with their commanding images of fog, prison, dust-heap—that Dickens works out that vision of our existence which has so brilliantly and oppressively influenced later writing. Here the by-now worn notions of our culture—alienation, depersonalization, forlornness—are dramatized with an innocence of genius. That in cities men become functions of their function; go crazy with the dullness of their work; transform eccentricities into psychic paralysis; soon come to look as if they themselves were bureaucracies; and die without a ripple of sound—all this Dickens represents with a zest he had not yet learned to regard as ill-becoming. He enlarges his earlier comic gifts into the ferocious splendor of the Smallweeds, the Guppys, the Snagsbys, so that even as the city remains a theater, the play is now of a hardening into death.

  Not only, as Edmund Wilson remarks, does Dickens develop the novel of the social group; he becomes the first to write the novel of the city as some enormous, spreading creature that has gotten out of control, an Other apart from the men living within it. By the time he writes his last complete novel, the savage and underrated Our Mutual Friend, Dickens sees London as “a hopeless city, with no rent in the leaden canopy of its sky . . . a heap of vapour charged with muffled sound of wheels, and enfolding a gigantic catarrh.”

  We have learned to speak lightly of “society” as something pressing and enclosing us, but imagine the terror men must have felt upon first encountering this sensation! Reading these late novels of Dickens we seem to be watching a process like that of the earth being buried beneath layers of ice: a process we now can name as the triumph of the Collective. And to this process Dickens’s most intimate response is a bewilderment he projects onto an alienated space, in that multiplying chaos where Mr. Krook, double of the Lord High Chancellor, reigns and the dust-heap becomes a symbol of the derangements of exchange value. The indeterminacy of urban life, for Dostoevsky a frightening idea, is for Dickens a frightening experience.

  As if in echo, one of Gogol’s clerks cries out, “There is no place for me.” Not in Petersburg there isn’t nor in the grotesque emblem of Petersburg Gogol created. Meek spiritual cripples, his clerks lure us for a moment into sympathy with the smallness of their desires. But perhaps out of that awe at the endlessness of suffering which leads Faulkner and Leskov into harshness, Gogol treats pathos not as pathetic but as the material for comedies of irreducible disorder. The grander the city, the more wormlike its creatures. Socially fixed, the clerks are personally erased. Reduced to clerkness, one of them takes home documents to copy for pleasure—this zero reveling in his zero-ness recalls another zero, Peretz’s Bontche Shveig, who when asked in heaven to name his ultimate desire, requests a hot roll with butter each morning.

  How can one bear such a world, this Gogol-city of innumerable petty humiliations? By a gesture signifying the retribution of arbitrariness. In “The Overcoat” Akaky Akakievich (in
Russian a name with cloacal associations) affirms himself only after death, when Petersburg is haunted by an Akakyish specter: an excremental cloud hanging over this excremental city. In “The Nose” a character finds that his nose has simply quit his face, with a sauciness he would not himself dare. But how can a nose quit a face? (As like ask Kafka how a man can turn into a cockroach.) When the weight of the determined becomes intolerable, the arbitrary gesture that changes nothing yet says everything may come to seem a token of freedom. The nose leaves the face because Gogol tells it to.

  The figures and atmospheres of Dickens and Gogol are appropriated by Dostoevsky, but in his novels men appear as conscious beings, their alienated grotesqueness elevated to psychological plenitude. The life of man in the city becomes a metaphysical question, so that in those airless boarding houses into which Dostoevsky crams his characters there is enacted the fate of civilization. Raskolnikov’s ordeal relates to Petersburg and Christianity: Can man live in this world, is there a reason why he should? Crime and Punishment offers a wide repertoire of city sensations, not as a catalogue of display but as a vibrant correlative to Raskolnikov’s spiritual dilemmas. God and the Devil still live in this city, the former as idiot or buffoon, the latter as sleazy good-natured petit-bourgeois. That is why in Dostoevsky the city of filth retains a potential for becoming the city of purity. The city brings out Raskolnikov’s delusions: it is the locale of the modern fever for mounting sensations, for the modern enchantment with the sordid as a back-alley to beatitude. The city is also the emblem of Raskolnikov’s possible redemption: it is the locale of men who share a community of suffering and may yet gain the ear of Christ. Never does Dostoevsky allow the attractions of nihilism to deprive him of the vision of transcendence. In “Notes from Underground” the city bears a similar relation, what might be called a dialectical intimacy, with the narrator: each of his intellectual disasters is publicly reenacted as a burlesque in the streets. More than social microcosm or animated backdrop, the city provides Dostoevsky with the contours and substance of his metaphysical theme.