by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
IV
Let us abruptly turn from what literature may tell about the city to what the city does in and to literature.
The city as presence brings major changes in narrative patterns. Abandoning the inclusive tourism of the picaresque, the 19th-century novel often employs a spiral-like pattern; first a pull toward the city, then a disheartened retreat to some point of origin (the blacksmith shop in Great Expectations, the chestnut tree in The Charterhouse of Parma). Elements of pastoral seem still attached to this narrative configuration, for one of its tacit ends is to retain in the novel clusters of feeling that flourished best in earlier genres. Lionel Trilling describes this kind of narrative:
. . . equipped with poverty, pride and intelligence, the Young Man from the Provinces stands outside life and seeks to enter. . . . It is his fate to move from an obscure position into one of considerable eminence in Paris or London or St. Petersburg, to touch the life of the rulers of the earth. He understands everything to be “a test.”
And then? Always the same denouement: the Young Man’s defeat or disillusion, and his retreat to the countryside where he can bind his wounds, cauterize his pride, struggle for moral renewal. Even more striking than its presence in novels as explicitly hostile to the city as Great Expectations and Sentimental Education is the way this pattern dominates novels in which the author seems consciously to intend a celebration of the city. For Balzac Paris is a place of “gold and pleasure,” and the central portion of Lost Illusions evokes a stormy metropolis of excitement and sheer animatedness. Yet even this most cosmopolitan of novels follows the pattern of attraction and withdrawal, bringing its hero Lucien back to the countryside in bewilderment and thereby offering a distant nod to pastoral. At the end, to be sure, Balzac’s cynicism triumphs (one almost adds, thank God) and Lucien is seen in the tow of the devil, who will take him to the city where life, naturally, is more interesting: the city, as Balzac said, that “is corrupt because it is eminently civilized.”
If the pattern of 19th-century fiction forms a spiral to and away from the city, it is in the sharpest contrast to later novels in which the city becomes a maze beyond escape. In Ulysses and The Trial the traditional journeys of the hero are replaced by a compulsive backtracking: there is no place else to go, and the protagonist’s motions within the city stand for his need, also through backtracking, to find a center within the self.
The city allows for a more complex system of social relationships than any other locale. Sociologists keep repeating that the city impels men into relationships lacking in warmth, often purely functional and abstract; and from this once-revolutionary perception they slide into nostalgia for an “organic community” located at notoriously imprecise points in the past. For the novelist, however, the city’s proliferation of casual and secondary relationships offers new possibilities: the drama of the group and the comedy of the impersonal. The experiences of Ulysses for which Homer had to arrange complicated journeys, Joyce can pack into a day’s wandering through a single city. There follows the possibility of fictions constructed along the lines that the Soviet critic M. M. Bakhtin calls a “polyphonic” structure, in which social loss may yield literary advance. Dostoevsky’s novels, writes Bakhtin, “caught intact a variety of social worlds and groups which had not [yet] . . . begun to lose their distinctive apartness” and thereby “the objective preconditions were created for the essential multilevel and multivoice structure of the polyphonic novel.”
To which I would add two observations: 1) The rise of the city is a blessing for minor characters who might otherwise never see the light of day; and 2) The inclination of some novelists to employ a multiplicity of narrative points of view has much to do with the rise of the city.
As the city becomes a major locale in literature, there occur major changes in regard to permissible subjects, settings, and characters. The idea of literary decorum is radically transformed, perhaps destroyed. Literature gains a new freedom; everything, which may be too much, is now possible. Out of the dogmas of anti-convention, new conventions arise. The city enables the birth of new genres: who could imagine surrealism without Paris?
In the novel of the city, a visit to a slum can serve as a shorthand equivalent to a descent into hell, as in Bleak House or Redburn. An address, a neighborhood, an accent—these identify the condition of a man, or the nature of an act, quite as much as social rank or notations of manners once did. So powerful, at first liberating and then constricting, do these new conventions become that in The Waste Land their rapid evocation permits a summary vision of an entire culture. The typist’s life as a familiar barrenness, the dialogue in the bar as a characteristic plebeian mindlessness, the conversation between upper-class husband and wife as a recognizable sterility—these serve as the terms of an overarching spiritual assessment.
As the city breaks down traditional rankings, there emerges the plebeian writer or the writer of fallen circumstances. The city erases family boundaries, in one direction toward those rootless wanderers of the streets first imagined by Edgar Allan Poe, and in the other direction toward the extended families pictured by Dostoevsky. The city yields stunning and rapid juxtapositions: “In Paris,” gloats Balzac, “vice is perpetually joining the rich man to the poor, and the great to the humble.”
The city thereby offers endless possibilities of symbolic extension. In Gissing’s New Grub Street it becomes a place of paralyzing fatigue, a grayness of spirit that finds its extension in the grayness of a London winter. To Flaubert in Sentimental Education, as if to anticipate Max Weber’s fear that we are entering “a long polar night of icy darkness and hardness,” Paris comes to represent a collective yielding to acedia and nihilism, and as we read we have the sensation of watching men turn slowly into stone, a whole civilization in the process of quiet petrifaction.
The city affects literature in still another way: it provides a new range of vocabularies, from the street argot of a Céline to the ironic urbanities of the early Auden, from the coarse eloquence of Balzac’s Parisians to the mixture of racy street-Jewishness and intellectual extravaganza of Bellow. The city also encourages that flavorless language, the language of sawdust, we associate with naturalism, as if the denial of will must be reflected in the death of words; yet the city also yields writers like Dickens and Gogol new resources for grotesquerie and mockery. Language can be reduced to bureaucratic posture, as in Guppy’s proposal to Esther Summerson in Bleak House, employing the terms of a brief for a small-claims court. Or it can be used by Gogol in a style the Russians call skaz, described by Yevgeny Zamyatin as “The free, spontaneous language of speech, digressions . . . coinages of the street variety, which cannot be found in any dictionary . . . [and in which] the author’s comments are given in a language close to that of the milieu depicted.”
One of the great temptations for the writer dealing with city life is to think of it as a “creature” or “being” independent from and looming over the people who live in it. Apostrophes to London and Paris are frequent in Dickens and Balzac, but these are only feeble rhetorical intimations of what they are struggling to apprehend. The sense that somehow a city has “a life of its own” is so common, it must have some basis in reality; but precisely what we mean by such statements is very hard to say. For Dickens and Gogol, as for Melville, such metaphors become ways of expressing the sense of littleness among people forming the anonymous masses. For other writers, such as Zola, Andrey Biely, and Dos Passos, these metaphors prepare the way for an effort to embody the life of the group in its own right, to see the collective as an autonomous and imperious organization.
The city as presence in modern literature gives rise to a whole series of new character types, and these come to be formidable conventions in subsequent writing. A few of them:
The clerk, soon taken to represent the passivity, smallness, and pathos of life in the city: Gogol, Melville, Dickens, Kafka.
The Jew, bearer of the sour fruits of self-definition: Joyce, Proust, Mann.
The cultivated woman, one of the triumphs of modern writing, inconceivable anywhere but in the city, a woman of femininity and intelligence, seductiveness and awareness, traditional refinement and modern possibilities: Tolstoy’s Anna, James’s Madame Vionnet, Colette’s Julie.
The underground man, a creature of the city, without fixed rank or place, burrowing beneath the visible structure of society, hater of all that flourishes aboveground, meek and arrogant, buried in a chaos of subterranean passions yet gratified by the stigmata of his plight: Dostoevsky and Céline.
“The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individual,” writes Georg Simmel in his essay, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” “consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli. . . . Lasting impressions . . . use up, so to speak, less consciousness than does the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single phrase, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions.” Dostoevsky and Joyce best capture this experience in the novel, Baudelaire and Hart Crane in verse.
In Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov is assaulted by repeated impressions during his dazed wanderings through Petersburg. He walks along the street and sees a coachman beating his horse with gratuitous brutality. He watches a street entertainer grinding out a tune on a barrel organ, tries to strike up a nervous conversation with a stranger and frightens the man away. Another man approaches him and without warning mutters. “You are a murderer.” At still another moment he notices a woman in front of him, “at first reluctantly and, as it were, with annoyance, and then more and more intently”; he supposes her a victim of a seduction; the terribleness of the city seems flaringly vivid to him. Each of these apparently stray incidents becomes a tonal equivalent to Raskolnikov’s condition, and the seemingly chaotic business of the city is transformed into a map of the protagonist’s turmoil.
V
Together with what I have called the myth of the modern city—enemy of man: pesthole, madhouse, prison—there appear in modern literature at least two other significant visions of urban life. The first is benign, fairly frequent among American writers who have grown up in a culture devoted to the virtues of the country side. For Henry James the city serves as a token of the possibilities of a high civilization. The Paris of The Ambassadors is a mixture of Balzac’s Paris (without Balzac’s greasepaint, vulgarity, and financial delirium) and an American dream of a European City of Beauty. Paris becomes the shining gloss of man’s history, the greatness of the past realized in monuments and manners. Paris stands for the Jamesian vision of a culture far gone in sophistication yet strangely pure, as if no dollar were exchanged there or loyalty betrayed. James was not a naif, he knew he was summoning a city of his desire; and in an earlier novel, The American, he had shown himself capable of presenting a Paris sinister and shabby. But now Paris has become the home of civilization, with the splendor of its history yielding the materials for his myth of idealization.
Quite as benign is Whitman’s vision of New York. His poems do not capture the terrible newness of the industrial city, for that he does not really know. Whitman’s city flourishes in harmony with surrounding forests and green; it figures modestly in the drama of democracy; there is still psychic and social roominess, so that this bohemian singing of the masses can easily knock about in the streets, a New World flâneur, without feeling crowded or oppressed. Between the noisy groping city and Whitman’s persona as the Fraternal Stranger there are still large spaces, and this very spaciousness allows him to celebrate the good nature and easy style of his “camerados” in New York. Not many 19th-century writers can share that comfort.
The second and by far more influential vision of the city proceeds in a cultural line from Baudelaire through Eliot and then through Eliot’s many followers. In the smudge of our time, this vision of the city has come to seem indistinguishable from the one I have attributed to the 19th-century masters; but it is distinguishable. There is in Baudelaire little of that recoil from the city about which I have spoken and little, if any, pastoral indulgence. He accepts the city as the proper stage for his being; he apprehends, better than anyone, the nervous currents that make cosmopolitan life exciting and destructive; he writes in the Tableaux Parisiens not only of ugliness and debauchery but also, in Proust’s words, of “suffering, death, and humble fraternity.” A famous passage celebrates the public concerts, “rich in brass,” that “pour some heroism into the hearts of town dwellers.”
Walter Benjamin notes that “Baudelaire placed the shock experience at the very center of his artistic work,” and he remarks also on the relation between that “shock experience” and Baudelaire’s “contact with the metropolitan masses . . . the amorphous crowd of passers-by” with whom he “becomes an accomplice even as he dissociates himself from them.” In Baudelaire’s poems shock serves more than a social end; it has to do with his struggle for a scheme of moral order, a struggle conducted, in extremis, through images of disorder. Baudelaire’s fear is not, as others had already said before him, that the city is hell: his fear is that it is not hell, not even hell. His strategy of shock comes to seem a modernist terror-raid in behalf of classical resolution—not always so, of course, since poets can become secret sharers of the devils they grapple with. It hardly matters whether Baudelaire is seen as a figure of urban satanism or inverted Christianity; he moves in the orbits of both, emanating, in Mallarmé’s wonderful line, “a protective poison that we must go on breathing even if we die of it.” For Baudelaire, Paris embodies the fear of a life reduced from evil to the merely sordid, a life sinking into the triviality of nihilism.
This is the side of Baudelaire that Eliot appropriates in The Waste Land: “Unreal City . . . I had not thought death had undone so many.” Eliot lacks Baudelaire’s capacity for surrendering himself to the quotidian pleasures of a great city, but he narrows the Baudelairean vision into something of enormous power, perhaps the single most powerful idea of our culture. Eliot’s idea of the city has become assimilated to that of the great 19th-century writers, though it is imperative to insist on the difference between madhouse and wasteland, even prison and wasteland. Eliot’s vision is then taken up, more and more slackly, by the writers of the last half-century, charting, mourning, and then—it is unavoidable—delectating in the wasteland. Life in the city is shackled to images of sickness and sterility, with a repugnance authentic or adorned; and what seems finally at the base of this tradition is a world view we might designate as remorse over civilization. “When one has a sense of guilt after having committed a misdeed,” says Freud gloomily, “the feeling should . . . be called remorse.” Our guilt, almost casual in its collective sedimentation, proceeds from the feeling that the whole work of civilization—and where is that to be found but in cities?—is a gigantic mistake. This remorse appears first as a powerful release of sensibility, in imaginative works of supreme value, and then as the clichés of kitsch, Madison Avenue modernism. The strength of the masters remains overwhelming, from Baudelaire to Eliot to Auden, as they fill their poems with forebodings of the collapse of cities, the crumbling of all man’s works. Auden writes in “The Fall of Rome”:
Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]
Caesar’s double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.
And the Greek poet Cavafy writes about a city waiting, with impatient weariness, for the barbarians to take over:
What does this sudden uneasiness mean,
And this confusion? (How grave the faces have become!)
Why are the streets and squares rapidly emptying,
and why is everyone going back
home lost in thought?
Because it is ni
ght and the barbarians have not come,
and some men have arrived from the frontiers
and they say there are no barbarians any more
and now, what will become of us without barbarians?
These people were a kind of solution.
VI
The suspicion of the city and all it represents seems to run so deep in our culture that it would be impossible to eradicate it, even if anyone were naive enough to wish to. In its sophisticated variants it is a suspicion necessary for sanity. And perhaps, for all we know, it is a suspicion emblematic of some ineradicable tragedy in the human condition: the knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.
In traditional pastoral, suspicion of the city is frequently contained through a discipline of irony proceeding through a sequence something like this: game of the shepherds, seriousness of the game, recognition of how limited are the uses of that seriousness. In modern literature, which can have but little interest in shepherds, there is a violence of response to the city which breaks past the discipline of irony—our experience demands that. But then, just as traditional pastoral suffers the corruptions of literalism, so must the modernist assault upon the city. How, we ask ourselves, can we bring together, in some complex balance of attitude, our commitment to the imaginative truth in what the modern writers show us about the city and our awareness that it may no longer be quite sufficient for us?
We are the children, or step-children, of modernism. We learned our abc’s lisping “alienation, bourgeoisie, catastrophe.” As against those who brushed aside the 20th century, we were right in believing our age to be especially terrible, especially cursed, on the rim of apocalypse. But today loyalty to the tradition of modernism may require a rejection of its academic and marketplace heirs, and far more important, a questioning of its premises and values.
