City in Modern Literature Professor

¶ … City in Modern Literature

Professor and author Richard Sennett is frequently depicted in biographies and scholarly journals as a left-leaning social science thinker whose writing, though sometimes brilliant and always original, is also on occasion confusing and esoteric, sometimes psychologically baffling. His work, when explored carefully, is controversial, albeit stimulating and thought-provoking. His views and his book, along with the writings of scholars, authors and critics connected with urban-themed literature, will be reviewed at length in this paper.

On page 152 of The Fall of Public Man, when speaking about personalities in public (e.g., people in urban settings) Sennett seems simplistic in his narrative: "Personality varies because the appearances of emotion and the inner nature of the person feeling are the same. One is what one appears; therefore, people with different appearances are different persons." And yet, he goes on to put appearances into historical context, and thus, ties his point in a fairly neat box with a red ribbon.

Personalities are "not only composed of variations in rage, compassion, or trust between people," he writes (Sennett, 152), urban personality also possesses "the capacity to 'recover' one's emotions. Longing, regret, and nostalgia acquire an importance in 19th Century psychology of a peculiar sort." he continues; "the 19th Century bourgeois recalled what he was like as a young person, and so his personal "self-consciousness is not so much an attempt to contrast his feelings with those of others as to take known and finished feelings, whatever they once were, as a definition of who he is."

His observations of people in the 18th Century - which he considers the Gold Age of urban life - are that people reflective of all economic levels of society lived their lives in almost continuous performance, and paraded themselves about publicly in wildly expressive costumes. Those 18th Century city people, Sennett explains, wanted to make the city a kind of live theater of frivolity and joy.

And gradually things changed in the urban world; people who were "involuntarily expressive" in the 19th Century, psychologists - who believed them to be "insane people" - carried out the illogical fear that the "spontaneous feeling" is "abnormal." But when the modern personality shows expressiveness involuntarily, it is thought of as charming, and unique.

Sennett's book - The Fall of Public Man - which, in brief summary, is an attempt to create and justify a theory that has to do with how people, social relations, and the drama of intimacy are going through - and have gone through - dramatic changes in American urban society. His theory, Sennett explains, is one that attempts to explain the "confusion" that has "arisen between public and intimate life." Masses of people are concerned with "their single life histories and particular emotions as never before," he writes; but in the process of people being concerned they are falling into a "trap" rather than being "liberated."

Much of what Sennett describes, critiques, and investigates has to do with the public vs. The private self; and he uses the props and characters of theater frequently as metaphors to embellish his narrative on people and change over the past three centuries. A political candidate, he writes (p. 4), is seen by the public in terms of "credibility" and "legitimacy" based on what kind of person he is, not what programs he advocates. The stage on which politicians act out their themes and recite their predicable lines is not that different from the stage on which the public side of average citizens is judged, as well.

Our understanding of society has meaning only in terms of our personal responses to others, and in terms of our own personalities, Sennett explains. An example of his view of society and individuals' changing intimacies is on page 7, when he discusses how physical love has been "redefined, from terms of eroticism to terms of sexuality." In Victorian times, "eroticism involved social relationships," Sennett writes, but today, "sexuality involves personal identity."

Moreover, the term "affair" has repressed the idea "that physical love is a social act" (Sennett 8) whereas "seduction" used to mean "the arousal of such feeling by one person...in another that social codes were violated." And that very violation "caused all the other social relations of the person to be temporarily called into question..."

NARCISSISM: Sennett takes great pains to develop his view of narcissism, which is quite different than the traditional definition of "self-love," and embraces instead what "this person, that event means to me" (Sennett, 8); or, this is or isn't "what I wanted..." Psychologists aren't seeing the "hysterical symptoms which were the dominate complaints of Freud's erotic and repressive society," he writes, because narcissism in the 21st Century more often takes the form of, "If only I could feel more, or if only I could really feel, then I could relate to others or have 'real' relations with them" (Sennett, 9). Narcissism is more along the lines of "the world is failing me" than self-absorption and self-admiration, which it once was almost exclusively.

Sennett is fond of explaining narcissism in terms that suggest that what we want and think we want, yet we can't actually have: "There is a never-ending search for gratification [in urban society today]; and at the same time the self cannot permit gratification to occur" (Sennett, 10). Narcissistic feelings, the author explains (Sennett 11), "often focus themselves on obsessive questions of whether I am good enough, whether I am adequate, and the like."

Later in his book, on page 333, Sennett claims that the "denial of gratification for purposes of validating the self" is actually "worldly asceticism"; and so, "denying oneself pleasure in concrete experiences (such as the sexual experience) shows one is a real person." Denying oneself "pleasure in the world makes a statement to oneself, and to others, about what kind of person one is," Sennett explains. And so, "worldly asceticism and narcissism have much in common" (Sennett, 334): In both, 'What am I feeling' becomes an obsession." And in both world asceticism and narcissism "there is a projection of the self onto the world, rather than an engagement in worldly experience beyond one's control."

What does all of Sennett's attention to narcissism and self-image really mean? To conservative editor and critic Roger Kimball, Sennett's writing "displays considerably more urgency than clarity." When Sennett writes that the social world lacks "intimacy," "warmth, trust, and an open expression of feeling," and that the "world outside seems to fail us, seems to be stale and empty," Kimball replies that "there is no reason to expect the social world to be full of intimacy - that intimacy is best reserved for our private lives and gets along perfectly well there, thank you..."

But Kimball perhaps misses Sennett's point; perhaps Kimball digests the word "intimacy" in personal sexual terms, and perhaps Kimball didn't read Sennett's explanation of intimacy on pages 311-312. "Urban planners have yet to learn a profound truth which conservative writers [like Kimball, one presumes] have perceived but have put to the wrong uses. It is that people can be sociable only when they have some protection from each other; without barriers, boundaries, without the mutual distance which is the essence of impersonality, people are destructive."

Conservatives, Sennett continues, believe that people are destructive because "the nature of man" is "malevolent." But on the contrary, he asserts, people are destructive because "the sum effect of the culture spawned by modern capitalism and secularism makes fratricide logical when people use intimate relations as a basis for social relations" (Sennett, 311). The problem that Kimball has is he seems far more interested in plucking Sennett's phrases out of context and attacking them with sophomoric spears than carefully critiquing what Sennett is attempting to convey, both philosophically and psychologically. For example, Kimball takes Sennett's line - "The fear of exposure is in one way a militarized conception of everyday experience" - and asks, "How did militarism get dragged in here?"

What Sennett was saying was simply that too often many of us just go through our days in patterns that repeat the steps we took yesterday and the day before; "militarized" simply meant that we're marching to the same drummer every day. But Kimball saw it perhaps as a left wing assault on the Pentagon, or the right wing passion for fat defense budgets. In any event, it caused Kimball to say: "Such problems make reviewing this book like trying to review a swamp: anywhere you step you sink into a wet, oozy morass of pieties and cliches." That is a lively critique, and it entertains the senses, but it doesn't really relate to Sennett's book.

A less cynical and more straight-forward description of Sennett's work is offered by author Gunther Barth of the University of California, albeit Barth isn't entirely enthralled with the veracity of Sennett's assertions and comparisons. "[Sennett] argues that changing perceptions of self in society now produce a cult of personality which inhibits the blunt exchange of diverse political views," Barth writes (1214). And moreover, Barth summarizes Sennett's book as a discussion of how "eighteenth and nineteenth-century Paris and London" reflected an "erosion of public life through an analysis of middle-class behavior in the theater and on the street."

And Barth adds that Sennett's work "...lacks the terse logic of comparative history," and "makes many excursions into fleeting aspects of culture, yet in its discussion of the theater misses the rise of vaudeville house and music hall as the nursery of a new urban audience." Yes, Barth concludes, Sennett is correct that "public and private behavior changed between the three decades," but instead of documenting those public and private changes, Barth continues, Sennett calls upon (in Sennett's words) "...the expectations of a sophisticated, intelligent general reader."

And if that reader discovers (continuing with Sennett's words as quoted in Barth's essay) "a reasonable analysis of how a malady of modern society has come about, the book has succeeded; if after finishing the book, he thinks of an alternative logic for explaining this distress, so much the better," Sennett offers on page 43. Still, Barth says "the prose is bad" and is "burdened with jargon" while sentences "stagger under the weight of subordinate clauses laden with abstractions."

The legacy of Western values over the past two centuries - as portrayed by Sennett - is that they have evolved "in a wholly disastrous way, from a public to a private center, from impersonality to intimacy, from performance to self-revelation, and from engagement into withdrawal from urban life," according to Marshall Berman writing in The Nation (Berman 118). When people began to "get serious about their inner lives" and "devalue the art of public performance," Berman writes, they began to pursue "emotional 'authenticity'" and apparently "lost all interest in public life."

The passion of urbanites, Berman believes Sennett to be saying - though Sennett doesn't say precisely when this occurred - became one of "hermetic self-absorption (alias 'narcissism'); they withdrew from the urban forum into a walled intimacy of ghettos and suburbs."

And yet, Berman is convinced that while Sennett champions the "emotional satisfaction" and "balance between private and public life" that urban people in the 18th Century supposedly enjoyed, Sennett lacks knowledge of "the content of 18th Century drama." Indeed, though Sennett apparently is educated about the "forms" of city society, how does Sennett know that the "forms" of city life in the 18th Century "didn't make people unbalanced and miserable?" Berman asks in The Nation (Berman 119). Samuel Richardson and Rousseau, who were cultural giants of the 1750s (Sennett's golden decade), had as a common theme in their writings "...the frightful disparity between current social conventions and the depths of the human heart."

Taking Rousseau's writing a bit further (since Sennett admires the French philosopher so much and made much of him in the book), Berman points out that when Rousseau actually "attacked the Parisian theatre (which Sennett equates with the Athenian one), what he [Rousseau] was really attacking was Play." What Rousseau "really wanted," Berman continues, was a "regime of work and strict duty and nothing else, in which men would privately search for personal authenticity, while publicly submitting to totalitarian tyranny." So Berman, in short, clearly believes that Sennett has taken editorial liberties with 18th Century city / social history, in order to build a case for his view that society was very playful and energetic on the public stage then, juxtaposed with what he sees as today's irreverence, indifference, and privacy-obsesses urban culture.

Rousseau's "public man" doesn't match up well with the picture that Sennett attempts to paint of the 18th Century dynamic, according to Berman. Rousseau, in fact, did not view the French theatre as public; "These exclusive spectacles that close up a small number of people in a gloomy cave, that keep them fearful and immobile, in silence and inaction, that show them only prisons, lances, soldiers, and images of servitude and inequality."

Moreover, Berman wonders why Sennett, who taught at NYU during the time the book was published - and hence worked on Washington Square - can't see the "overflowing life all around him," but rather sees the city as a wasteland where modern men "are wrapped up in themselves, oblivious to the "hundreds or thousands of people of every race and age, acting and interacting; making music, harmonizing and improvising...making love, or looking for some; agitating arguing, distributing leaflets in every known cause...performing magic tricks for love or money." It is a pity Sennett doesn't see the playful vitality on the streets of the most vibrant city in America, Berman continues, "...because this public life...can rescue us from our personal sorrows and anxieties, nourish us and renew our strength, help us make it through the day and night" (Berman 121).

Meanwhile, the city (and its teeming humanity) in modern literature is presented very colorfully and graphically by author Claude Levi-Strauss in his book Tristes Tropiques (Part Four, "The Earth and its Inhabitants," Chapter 15). Levi-Strauss writes of the "conglomeration of millions of individuals for the simple sake of conglomeration, regardless of physical conditions." The urban realities for those millions in Calcutta include "filth, promiscuity, disorder, physical contact; ruins, shacks, excrement, mud; body moistures, animal droppings, urine, purulence, secretions, suppuration - everything that urban life is organized to defend us against, everything we loathe, everything we protect ourselves against at great cost...constitute the natural setting which the town must have if it is to thrive."

There are powerful similarities between Sennett's themes of real time play-acting drama and Levi-Strauss's anthropological narrative. Indeed, while Sennett viewed 18th Century Parisians as characters in an ongoing interactive theatrical environment, Levi-Strauss, upon leaving the Calcutta Hotel - "beleaguered by cattle and with vultures perched on the window-sills" - becomes "the centre of a ballet, which I would find comic, were it not so pitiful" (Levi-Strauss, 134).

And each of the following characters in Levi-Strauss's ballet has "a leading part": the shoe-shine boy "dashing to my feet"; the "small adenoidal child"; the "cripple, practically naked so that you can see in detail the knobs of his limbs"; the pimp ("British girls, very nice..."); the clarinet dealer and "New Market" porter.

And finally," the author continues, with the theater theme intact, "the whole troupe of minor characters, touting rickshaws, taxis and gharries." Levi-Strauss sees the citizens of the city of Calcutta (in 1955) as "...the clinical symptoms of a death-agony. All these despairing mimes have one origin - the haunting nightmare of hunger; that same hunger which drives the crowds in from the countryside...the hunger which heaps the fugitives up in railway cul-de-sacs...asleep on the platforms, huddled in the white cotton print which is today their dress and tomorrow their shroud."

Levi-Strauss's grim description of city life in a third world country takes a dramatic detour from Sennett's 20th Century city where citizens are sulking behind closed doors but apparently well-fed and clothed and not desperate for attention. "Everyday life [in Calcutta] appears to be a permanent repudiation of the very notion of human relationship," Levi-Strauss continues. And as to the rickshaw boys, who "are more ignorant of the route than you yourself," how is a person of Western extraction "...to keep one's temper and to refrain from treating them like animals, when they force one to look on them as if they were, by their own unreason?" (Levi-Strauss, 136).

And while in Sennett's view the public men in New York City are still quite human (albeit they have gone underground), the public men in Calcutta, according to Levi-Strauss, are like "...the grey-necked crows incessantly cawing in the trees..." Beware, Levi-Strauss, of actually meeting the gaze of a Calcutta beggar; "the slightest pause will be interpreted as weakness, as purchase for importunity." And while a person may wish to recognize the beggar as a human being in need, and even give him "alms," all the initial situations "which define relationships between persons are falsified...for if you tried to treat the destitute as equals, they would protest against your injustice." Those destitute souls in the streets "implore you to annihilate them with your eminence," Levi-Strauss asserts, "because it is the extent of the gulf which separates you from them which determines their expectation of your charity."