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Wrapping up Washington Square

November 28, 2011 in Books, Film, Writing New York by Bryan

Three endings to the same story. First, the ending to William Wyler’s film The Heiress, adapted by Ruth and Augustus Goetz from their own 1947 stage adaptation of James’s 1880 novel. Olivia de Havilland won an Oscar for her portrayal of Catherine Sloper, the homely daughter of an overprotective father, played by Ralph Richardson. (As in several other categories, The Heiress‘s supporting actor nomination for Richardson lost out to All the King’s Men. Montgomery Clift, for what it’s worth, wasn’t nominated for Best Actor.)

Here’s another take, from the 1997 adaptation of Washington Square directed by Agnieszka Holland and starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Ben Chaplin. Just as Clift was, Chaplin seems too handsome in the final scene: I want to see Morris fat and bald. I don’t remember much else about this adaptation — it’s been years since I’ve seen it — except for my impression that it seemed to get the provincialism of 1850s Washington Square North dead on. The parties seemed so small town. In any case, its final scene:

And here’s how the novel ends:

“You treated me badly,” said Catherine.

“Not if you think of it rightly. You had your quiet life with your father–which was just what I could not make up my mind to rob you of.”

“Yes; I had that.”

Morris felt it to be a considerable damage to his cause that he could not add that she had had something more besides; for it is needless to say that he had learnt the contents of Dr. Sloper’s will. He was nevertheless not at a loss. “There are worse fates than that!” he exclaimed, with expression; and he might have been supposed to refer to his own unprotected situation. Then he added, with a deeper tenderness, “Catherine, have you never forgiven me?”

“I forgave you years ago, but it is useless for us to attempt to be friends.”

“Not if we forget the past. We have still a future, thank God!”

“I can’t forget–I don’t forget,” said Catherine. “You treated me too badly. I felt it very much; I felt it for years.” And then she went on, with her wish to show him that he must not come to her this way, “I can’t begin again–I can’t take it up. Everything is dead and buried. It was too serious; it made a great change in my life. I never expected to see you here.”

“Ah, you are angry!” cried Morris, who wished immensely that he could extort some flash of passion from her mildness. In that case he might hope.

“No, I am not angry. Anger does not last, that way, for years. But there are other things. Impressions last, when they have been strong. But I can’t talk.”

Morris stood stroking his beard, with a clouded eye. “Why have you never married?” he asked abruptly. “You have had opportunities.”

“I didn’t wish to marry.”

“Yes, you are rich, you are free; you had nothing to gain.”

“I had nothing to gain,” said Catherine.

Morris looked vaguely round him, and gave a deep sigh. “Well, I was in hopes that we might still have been friends.”

“I meant to tell you, by my aunt, in answer to your message–if you had waited for an answer–that it was unnecessary for you to come in that hope.”

“Good-bye, then,” said Morris. “Excuse my indiscretion.”

He bowed, and she turned away–standing there, averted, with her eyes on the ground, for some moments after she had heard him close the door of the room.

In the hall he found Mrs. Penniman, fluttered and eager; she appeared to have been hovering there under the irreconcilable promptings of her curiosity and her dignity.

“That was a precious plan of yours!” said Morris, clapping on his hat.

“Is she so hard?” asked Mrs. Penniman.

“She doesn’t care a button for me–with her confounded little dry manner.”

“Was it very dry?” pursued Mrs. Penniman, with solicitude.

Morris took no notice of her question; he stood musing an instant, with his hat on. “But why the deuce, then, would she never marry?”

“Yes–why indeed?” sighed Mrs. Penniman. And then, as if from a sense of the inadequacy of this explanation, “But you will not despair–you will come back?”

“Come back? Damnation!” And Morris Townsend strode out of the house, leaving Mrs. Penniman staring.

Catherine, meanwhile, in the parlour, picking up her morsel of fancy work, had seated herself with it again–for life, as it were.

I plan to write a little bit about that last line for Wednesday. In the meantime, what do you make of the contrasts between these wrap-ups? Which one do you prefer?

Previously on PWHNY.

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Ragged Dick probably wouldn’t have occupied Wall Street

November 14, 2011 in Books, Writing New York by Bryan | 1 comment

Our students are currently registering for spring semester courses and I’m feeling a little out of sorts about the fact that Cyrus and I aren’t offering Writing New York this year. It’s only the second time since 2003 that we will take the year off from WNY, this time due to the fact that Cyrus is teaching in Abu Dhabi. What will happen in spring 2013 and beyond is still a little up in the air, but for now we soldier on with #vWNY, our virtual version of the course, spread over two semesters here on the blog.

Our model, for those who may just be joining us, is to post something that approximates what we might have posted as a follow-up or complement to our lecture for a given today. Today’s reading assignment is Horatio Alger’s 1868 novel Ragged Dick, which over the years I’ve taken to reading as the antithesis of Melville’s “Bartleby.” If that story has been taken up by Occupy Wall Street as either a prototype for the sit-in or as an illustration of the crushing effects of the one percent’s blindness to the social conditions of actual workers, Ragged Dick is a book about a humble, initially homeless bootblack’s aspirations to join the 1% through a combination of pluck and luck. He does make it, of course, if not to excessive wealth then at least to business-class respectability, and in doing so lays the cornerstone of American Dream ideology that continues to support people who somehow think that the 1% are “job creators” who will somehow allow the worthy hard workers of the world into their elitist circles and so should be exempt from paying their fair share of taxes. Um, okay.

Actually, the way I’ve always taught Ragged Dick has to do with what I see as its inadvertent revelation of exactly how corporate capitalism works. In this I’ve been heavily influenced by two important readings of the novel, one by Michael Moon (Emory University) and the other by Glenn Hendler (Fordham University). Both essays are included in the recent Norton Critical Edition of the novel, edited by Hildegard Hoeller (College of Staten Island), which we will adopt as our official edition once we resume teaching this course in the flesh. In the meantime, we recommend it to you.

Here’s the upshot of the argument I make in lecture, drawing on Moon’s gendered analysis of the nature of corporate capitalism and Hendler’s understanding of how the genre of the “boy book” worked in the nineteenth century, when Alger’s novels, like Twain’s, caused some amount of controversy for their celebration of rough-and-tumble boy culture. In Alger’s novel, of course, Dick cleans up. He stops wasting his money on childish things or working-class leisure activities. He puts aside money and buys a home. He charms older men and takes on younger boys as wards (and housemates). He has a keen eye for opportunity — “an eye for business” we’re told over and over from the moment we meet him. He knew how to “look sharp” in both senses of the word. Consider Alger’s initial description of Dick, who’s awakened from his sleeping place in a packing crate on Nassau Street:

Washing the face and hands is usually considered proper in commencing the day, but Dick was above such refinement. He had no particular dislike to dirt, and did not think it necessary to remove several dark streaks on his face and hands. But in spite of his dirt and rags there was something about Dick that was attractive. It was easy to see that if he had been clean and well dressed he would have been decidedly good-looking. Some of his companions were sly, and their faces inspired distrust; but Dick had a frank, straight-forward manner that made him a favorite.

Dick’s business hours had commenced. He had no office to open. His little blacking-box was ready for use, and he looked sharply in the faces of all who passed, addressing each with, “Shine yer boots, sir?”

“How much?” asked a gentleman on his way to his office.

“Ten cents,” said Dick, dropping his box, and sinking upon his knees on the sidewalk, flourishing his brush with the air of one skilled in his profession.

“Ten cents! Isn’t that a little steep?”

“Well, you know ‘taint all clear profit,” said Dick, who had already set to work. “There’s the blacking costs something, and I have to get a new brush pretty often.”

“And you have a large rent too,” said the gentleman quizzically, with a glance at a large hole in Dick’s coat.

“Yes, sir,” said Dick, always ready to joke; “I have to pay such a big rent for my manshun up on Fifth Avenoo, that I can’t afford to take less than ten cents a shine. I’ll give you a bully shine, sir.”

“Be quick about it, for I am in a hurry. So your house is on Fifth Avenue, is it?”

“It isn’t anywhere else, said Dick, and Dick spoke the truth there.

The narrator and the businessman alike seem to gravitate toward Dick, find him attractive in a way Moon deems pederastic. This attraction is key to Dick’s shoe-shine business and to his upward mobility over the course of the novel. Recognizing the role played by his good looks and his eagerness to charm older men leaves us with a picture of how corporate capitalism works that is much more accurate than the rags-to-riches ideology Alger doesn’t really represent after all. Dick plays of the businessman’s nostalgia for the wildness of youth, for life on the street, for the outdoors, away from daily bathing and polite society. That desire, in corporate capitalism, translates into older men’s eagerness to recruit and promote good-looking successors who remind them of their own youth. And through this desire the corporation perpetuates itself. Where Bartleby would prefer not to, obsequious Dick is more than willing to do whatever it takes.

Previously on PWHNY.

Did you know that Metropolitan Playhouse’s big winter festival centers on Alger this year? Check it.

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Exhuming Cecil Dreeme

November 7, 2011 in Books, Writing New York by Bryan

I’m blogging this morning from the jury selection room at a courthouse down at Thomas and West Broadway. Not sure how long I’ll be sitting here — I was under the impression that the trial to which I’ve been assigned as an alternate juror was supposed to start an hour ago. In the meantime, though, I’ll offer a very quick post by way of introduction to this week’s reading on our Virtual Writing New York course. (You’re participating in it just by reading this; feel free to comment as well.)

We don’t teach Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme in our regular Writing New York course, though we’ve always wanted to. It’s not in print, but you’ll find it in full on Google Books. It’s a quirky urban Gothic novel set in a thinly veiled version of NYU’s old University Building — pictured above — which occupied the east side of Washington Square before the current Silver Building went up in the 1890s. The dilapidated building was rumored to be filled with hidden passageways, mysteries, and secret histories. The novel plays up such legends in its own twists and turns of plot and character.

NYU’s Bobst Library has a nice page devoted to the novel and to its author, a former post-graduate resident of the old NYU building who died during the Civil War. (He also was a descendant of the Puritan leader Jon Winthrop.) His novels, poems, and travel writing were published posthumously, but Winthrop seemed to have a taste for popular genres. Another novel, John Brent, picks up on the mid-century craze for anti-Mormon, anti-polygamy fiction. Here’s how the Fales pages describes Cecil Dreeme:

Cecil Dreeme (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862) is one of the queerest American novels of the 19th century. Basically a gothic tale in the style of The Castle of Otranto, which is cited in the text, the partially autobiographical story is a combination of plots take from Shakespeare and Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, and Winthrop’s experiences living on Washington Square. In the story Robert Byng, a former New Yorker who has just returned from ten years abroad, takes up lodgings in “Chrysalis College” (NYU) on “Ailanthus Square” (Washington Square) in rooms unused by the fledgling school. Caught up in the strange world of artists, “bohemians,” and dandies on the one hand and the stolid, respectable society of Knickerbocker New York on the other, Robert befriends a young man who has locked himself away from the world, painting by day and moving about the City at night. Their friendship deepens into love as Robert describes them as “Damon and Pythias,” the famous Greek lovers. The disappearance, and presumed suicide, of a young woman Robert knew when he was a child haunts Churm, one of his other friends, who is convinced that the evil dandy, Densdeth, was in someway responsible for the girl’s disappearance Densdeth was engaged to marry the girl by her father’s arrangement but against her will. Densdeth, whose influence is considerable, has ruined many young men and his next conquest is to be Robert himself. Robert’s attentions to Cecil, however, keep him from falling totally under Densdeth’s power. As the plot unravels, scenes of life in Chrysalis College, the Square, and the Village during the period provide a backdrop for a complicated philosophical discussion about the nature of male/female, manly/unmanly, womanly/unwomanly, and effeminate and langourous behavior. Cecil Dreeme, the young artist of Robert’s affection, turns out to be Clara Denman, the young woman, thought dead, who has been hiding in Chrysalis College dressed as a man. This revelation is startling to Robert who now has an explanation for his sexual attraction to the young man, but now has to confront the gender differences society places on their relations.

What’s not to like here? We’ve included the novel on our vWNY list as a first step toward eventually finding a publisher who’ll let us reissue it. I hope, by Wednesday, to offer a few more questions and observations to help locate Cecil in the trajectories we’ve been tracing in the course so far.

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The under-ground story

October 5, 2011 in Books, Writing New York by Bryan

On Monday Cyrus quoted a bit from the opening paragraph of Foster’s New York by Gas-Light, our text this week in vWNY. Here’s a little more:

NEW YORK BY GAS-LIGHT! What a task have we undertaken! To penetrate beneath the thick veil of night and lay bare the fearful mysteries of darkness in the metropolis — the festivities of prostitution, the orgies of pauperism, the haunts of theft and murder, the scenes of drunkenness and beastly debauch, and all the sad realities that go to make up the lower stratum — the under-ground story — of life in New York! What may have been our motive for invading these dismal realms and thus wrenching from them their terrible secrets? Go on with us, and see.

Here Foster offers us a useful example of a recurring figure in city writing: the narrator as tour guide, escorting the reader into the city’s lower depths, recesses and dark corners that would likely be off limits in real life. Part of the attraction for arm-chair tourists and virtual slummers, of course, was the titillation provided by descriptions of such festivities and orgies, which could confirm one’s middle-class sensibilities and provide soft-porn satisfactions all at once. On these points Foster delivers. But he also comes off as a bit of a prude and less than sympathetic to the lives of the “wicked and wretched classes” on whom the gas-light falls. On this point he exemplifies a specific model of the urban tour guide, one traced by our friend Eric Homberger to the “stern-faced Virgil” of Dante’s Inferno, a text popularized for nineteenth-century Americans in a new translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Here’s a taste of that text:

“Through me the way is to the city dolent;
Through me the way is to eternal dole;
Through me the way among the people lost.

Justice incited my sublime Creator;
Created me divine Omnipotence,
The highest Wisdom and the primal Love.

Before me there were no created things,
Only eterne, and I eternal last.
All hope abandon, ye who enter in!”

These words in sombre colour I beheld
Written upon the summit of a gate;
Whence I: “Their sense is, Master, hard to me!”

And he to me, as one experienced:
“Here all suspicion needs must be abandoned,
All cowardice must needs be here extinct.

We to the place have come, where I have told thee
Thou shalt behold the people dolorous
Who have foregone the good of intellect.”

And after he had laid his hand on mine
With joyful mien, whence I was comforted,
He led me in among the secret things.

There sighs, complaints, and ululations loud
Resounded through the air without a star,
Whence I, at the beginning, wept thereat.

Languages diverse, horrible dialects,
Accents of anger, words of agony,
And voices high and hoarse, with sound of hands,

Made up a tumult that goes whirling on
For ever in that air for ever black,
Even as the sand doth, when the whirlwind breathes.

And I, who had my head with horror bound,
Said: “Master, what is this which now I hear?
What folk is this, which seems by pain so vanquished?”

And he to me: “This miserable mode
Maintain the melancholy souls of those
Who lived withouten infamy or praise.

Commingled are they with that caitiff choir
Of Angels, who have not rebellious been,
Nor faithful were to God, but were for self.

The heavens expelled them, not to be less fair;
Nor them the nethermore abyss receives,
For glory none the damned would have from them.”

And I: “O Master, what so grievous is
To these, that maketh them lament so sore?”
He answered: “I will tell thee very briefly.

These have no longer any hope of death;
And this blind life of theirs is so debased,
They envious are of every other fate.

No fame of them the world permits to be;
Misericord and Justice both disdain them.
Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass.”

Longfellow’s translation wasn’t published until the late 1860s, but he worked on it for decades. In 1840 he had delivered lectures on Dante to the New York Mercantile Library Association. “All Hope Abandon, Ye Who Enter In”: Homberger tells us that this line in particular was repeated over and over in sermons and city literature. It was even posted above one of the entrances to the Tombs, the infamous New York City prison where Melville’s Bartleby (and countless real-life counterparts) died.

Foster doesn’t take his readers into the Tombs. He mentions the prison a few times, and in his final chapter notes the “morning roll,” one of the rituals of daybreak in the nineteenth-century city:

At the Tombs the morning roll is about commencing, and by the dim light of his dark lantern, policeman after policeman brings in the report of his watch, and deposits the culprits along the sticky and oozy benches. The magistrate, with spectacle on nose, deciphers by instinct the mis-spelled returns, and consigns the miserable wretches one after another to the welcome cells, to be thence despatched to the Penitentiary, the Hospital, or Potter’s Field — either fate a glorious relief from all they have been able to accomplish for themselves unaided in the world. (195)

Virgilian, alright. Foster opened his book by saying that these peeks into dark corners would allow “Philanthropy and Justice” to “plant their blows aright,” but he seems to be set in his conviction that the social divisions he witnesses are natural and not susceptible to reform. Along the way his narrator may have begrudgingly disclosed the appeal of the Five Points entertainment culture, the Bowery B’hoy and G’hal, and other pleasures of the social “under-ground,” but here he seems content to consign that under-ground to the Potter’s Field. It’s a moralizing strain that will appear in much reform writing of the later nineteenth-century, though it will eventually be contested by the underclass itself.

By way of postscript: The introduction of the tour guide figure provides us with occasion to mention our favorite New York City tour guide, Speed Levitch. In The Cruise, Levitch makes a nod to the Virgilian tradition in New York tour guide literature, dividing him and other famous historical and literary figures between rival tour companies Apple and Gray Line: “Spartacus, Brutus and his conspirators, they were Apple tour guides. Willie Wonka, he was Gray Line. Attila the Hun would have been a great Apple dispatcher, whereas Virgil would have worked for Gray Line.” Virgil’s placement must have something to do with his unflinchingness, his dour pronouncement of justice: the miserable deserve their misery.

Levitch’s philosophy of Cruise and Anti-Cruise — the freedom afforded by urban life and the forces marshaled against it — would suggest that Virgil and Foster would both likely fall on the Anti-Cruise side of things, which reminds me that when Levitch offers a discourse on the Anti-Cruise in the film, one of the chief examples he serves up is the Tombs. Embedding is disabled, but this will take you to the relevant clip.

Previously on PWHNY:

New York Nocturne
Darkness and Daylight
Slumming
Sunday in the Park with Speed

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Foster’s Praeteritio

October 3, 2011 in Books, Writing New York by Cyrus

At the end of my first post on Irving for vWNY, I cited the author’s description of New York as a “great crowded metropolis, so full of life[,] bustle, noise, shew and splendour,” so changed from the “quiet little City” of his youth. “It is really now,” Irving wrote to his sister, “one of the most rucketing cities in the world and reminds me of one of the great European cities (Frankfort for instance) in the time of an annual fair – Here it is a Fair almost all year round.”

George G. Foster’s New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches (1850) is a portrait of that city — or at least, the city that emerges when the sun goes down and the gas-lights come on. As William Chapman Sharpe points out in New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850-1950 (2008):

The installation of gaslight in London’s West End in 1807 ignited a series of innovations that permanently rearranged the rhythms of everyday life, transforming traditional patterns of industry, commerce, leisure, and consumption. The concept of ‘nightlife’ was born, along with the twenty-four -hour workday. With reliable lighting came safer streets, late shopping, and vastly expanded entertainments. The illumination of the city changed the very way people thought about — and thus lived in — the night. Darkness, so long a barrier to human activity, quickly became a stimulant. (p. 2)

Foster’s Gas-Light describes, in vivid detail, the effects of that stimulant on mid-century New York. The text itself is designed to serve as something like a gas-light trained on the city: his avowed purpose, stated at the outset, is to penetrate beneath the thick veil of night and lay bare the fearful mysteries of darkness in the metropolis.” Right away, the enquiring mind who glances at the first page of  Foster’s book  will find the promise of all the things that the would one day become the stock-in-trade of tabloids like the National Enquirer:

festivities of prostitution, orgies of pauperism, the haunts of theft and murder, the scenes of drunkennes and beastly debauch, and all the sad realities that go to make up the lower stratum — the under-ground story — of life in New York!

Exclamation point! Foster, a journalist and litreary aspirant, was a pioneer of what Stuart Blumin describes, in his introduction to our edition of Gas-Light, as “the new literary genre of nonfictional urban sensationalism.”

As we mentioned on the first day of the course, Foster begins begins by invoking the motif of the “walk down Broadway,” invoked with tongue-in-cheek humor as a safe haven from the promised depravities soon to be seen: “Fashionable, aristocratic Broadway! Certainly we shall find nothing here to shock our senses and make our very nerves thrill with horror.” Nudge, nudge.

Foster’s first chapter takes us on a nocturnal jaunt through the shadows of the city, and it ends with the dawn. Already we’ve seen brief depictions of “the sisterhood,” and Foster shines his light on “the public prostitute” at the end of his second chapter. She is the woman who “sinks willingly to the lowest type of human degradation” and thus “goes, in utter recklessness of herself and the world, to add one more to that frightful phalanx of female depravity which is the terror and the curse of an enfeebled and depraved civilization.” With that, our tour is over for the night, and Foster tucks us safely into bed — alone, presumably: “Let us forget, in sleep, these dreadful sights and gloomy reflections.” The night-time walk is the governing metaphor of Foster’s narrative: each of his chapters takes us on a “tramp” through an area of the city, and many of them explicitly deposit us safely back in bed at the end.

Foster’s narrative as a whole makes use of something like the rhetorical device known as praeteritio (also called apophasis or paralipsis) in which the speaker reveals something by promising not to talk about it. Here’s an example from Melville’s Moby-Dick: “We will not speak of all Queequeg’s peculiarities here; how he eschewed coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks, done rare.” Gas-Light operates through a kind of reversal of praeteritio: Foster’s ostensible goal is to promote the  virtues of “civilization” at its best, but he does so by showing us exactly the kinds of things that the virtuous shouldn’t be looking at. Of course that means that the book functions in a way that is opposite to its avowed intentions: it can be read as a kind of guidebook that will show those who are looking for trouble precisely where to find it.

We’ll take another tramp through Foster’s text on Wednesday. Good night!

Changing Horizons

September 12, 2011 in Books, Writing New York by Cyrus | 1 comment

It was an interesting experience, rereading E. B. White’s Here is New York on 9/11. It reminded me how valuable a tool the concept of the horizon of expectations is for literary critics. Coined by the literary historian and reader-response theorist Hans Robert Jauss, the term refers to the set of expectations against which a literary text — indeed any work of art — positions itself when it is conceived and then brought before the public. This horizon is created both by social practice—what Jauss describes as “the milieu, views and ideology of [the] audience”—and by literary tradition. Jauss argues that

A literary work, even when it appears to be new, does not present itself as something absolutely new in an informational vacuum, but predisposes its audience to a very specific kind of reception by announcements, overt and covert signals, familiar characteristics, or implicit allusions. It awakens memories of that which was already read, brings the reader to a specific emotional attitude, and with its beginning arouses expectations for the “middle and end,” which can then be maintained intact or altered, reoriented, or even fulfilled ironically in the course of the reading according to specific rules of the genre or type of text. … The new text evokes for the reader (listener) the horizon of expectations and rules familiar from earlier texts, which are then varied, corrected, altered, or even just reproduced.  (“Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory”)

This model suggests that the meaning of a literary text is a function not only of its author’s intention in writing it but also of the milieu into which it is received, which includes its reader’s social, cultural, historical, aesthetic, and personal contexts. Meaning, in other words, is a negotiation between writer and reader through the medium of the text.

As a result, the “meaning” of text can shift when the historical milieu of its readers shifts. (It can also shift when later works force us to reread it in a different light, or when critical opinion or literary scholarship forces a change in expectations.) For example, White’s Here is New York is often taken to present an abiding portrait of New York and its inhabitants. That’s what Hillary Clinton believed when she cited it during a debate with her challenger Rick Lazio during her campaign the fall of 2000 to become one of New York’s U.S. senators. (See our earlier post on this subject.)

But on closer investigation, we that White’s book is truly a product of its historical moment, and not just because it is full references to once-recognizable names that now beg for footnotes. here are darker ways in which White’s essay is marked by the historical moment in which it was written:

The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

White’s prose suggests that the dropping of the bomb changed everything, that New York would never be the same now that it “must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation.” White’s contemplation of “the destroying planes” seems uncanny in the wake of 9/11, which White did not live to see: in some fundamental ways, the “meaning” of his text has changed.

Perhaps it always was a prophetic text, but it strikes me that the nature of its prophetic vision has subtly  shifted. Where once it was a jeremiad, crying out against the evils of its present moment, now it seems like something of a Delphic oracle, whose prophecies have come true — not, perhaps, in the way we (or it) expected, but in a way that is even more terrifying and continues to haunt us still.

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Life during wartime: Chronic City book club, day 5

September 2, 2011 in Books by Bryan | 2 comments

Rounding out the week’s posts on Lethem’s Chronic City is long-time friend-of-the-blog Sunny Stalter, an assistant professor in the English Department at Auburn University. Her research examines technology in American literature and culture. She’s currently writing a book about NYC subway literature. Follow her on Twitter: @slstalter.

In a 2004 review, Lev Grossman celebrates the current crop of novelists for whom “the tough, fibrous membrane that used to separate literary fiction from popular fiction is rupturing.” For Jonathan Lethem, that membrane has always been a porous one. As Martha Nadell pointed out on Wednesday, Lethem’s earlier novels have covered a wide range of genres, from the detective novel to the superhero story to the urban sketch. Today I’d like to point out some of the issues in Chronic City that come to the fore when we think about Jonathan Lethem as a writer of science fiction. His first four novels were sci fi tales with occasional tropes borrowed from the mystery story and the western. His indebtedness to Philip K. Dick is much-discussed, especially by Lethem himself (see his 2005 essay, “You Don’t Know Dick” in The Disappointment Artist); Chronic City inhabits a similar realm, with its stoner protagonists and conspiracy theories.

Lethem is not the only contemporary novelist working with the dystopian instrument of speculative fiction. Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad flashes forward to a technology-addled and authenticity-starved future Manhattan in the novel’s final chapter, and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story inhabits a similar space. Colson Whitehead, no stranger to genre-hopping, has a zombie novel called Zone One coming out this fall, in which protagonist Mark Spitz reconstructs and defends lower Manhattan. What is it about life in present-day New York that’s making all of these authors imagine its near-future?

Like all good genre fiction, Chronic City uses its sci fi tropes to actualize what it feels like to live in the present day and what might be possible in the future, bringing the inexpressible and uncanny parts of urban life to bear on the central characters. The giant, marauding tiger that moves below the city streets destroys critic Perkus Tooth’s favorite restaurant (possibly killing a waitress for whom he pines); the tiger’s action renders his apartment uninhabitable as well. Chase Insteadman attempts to visit Tooth and is turned away by the police. He finds out that

it was the weight of the snowfall and the erosion of the street salt on the century-old foundation accessible within the Jackson Hole crater [made by the tiger] that brought about the wider damage which made Perkus’s building, among the others, unsafe. The word infrastructure came to mind. The city was always on the brink, hardly needing an excavating tiger’s help to fail. (311)

Here, Chronic City uses the monstrous force of the tiger as a vehicle for articulating the anxiety about infrastructural decay and the root instability of apartment living. The city “hardly need[s]” the tiger, but as a supernatural force he does articulate the seemingly inhuman and unstoppable force of urban development, what Max Page has called the “creative destruction of Manhattan.” As we see with the heavy snowfall in the passage above, the weather becomes a malevolent force in Chronic City as well. I finished the book as Hurricane Irene raged, truly creeped out by Lethem’s descriptions of the thick fog covering downtown and the snow that continues through April.

Real estate plays a central role in the dystopian New York City of Egan’s and Shteyngart’s novels as well. (In Super Sad True Love Story, hipsters live on Staten Island!) More importantly perhaps, these novels share with Chronic City a deep suspicion of the new technologies that have changed city dwellers more deeply than even gentrification could. Lethem’s Guardian interview suggests that Chase is “almost like a character in a reality television show” and identifies a central concern of the novel as “how confusing it is to live in this muddle of virtual and real.”

Have the distractions of the smartphone changed or reduced the pleasures of city life? Egan’s novel concludes with Alex, a late arrival to New York, fretting about losing his credibility by advertising a concert through his social networks and paying his friends to do the same. Super Sad True Love Story finds people tethered to their apparats, personal communication devices that broadcast their net worth and rank their desirability relative to other people in the room. In his New York Times essay “Only Disconnect,” Shteyngart discusses how his view of the city changed once he bought an iPhone:

The first thing that happened was that New York fell away around me. It disappeared. Poof. The city I had tried to set to the page in three novels and counting, the hideously outmoded boulevardier aspect of noticing societal change in the gray asphalt prism of Manhattan’s eye, noticing how the clothes are draping the leg this season, how backsides are getting smaller above 59th Street and larger east of the Bowery, how the singsong of the city is turning slightly less Albanian on this corner and slightly more Fujianese on this one — all of it, finished. Now, an arrow threads its way up my colorful screen.

In Shteyngart’s view, the iPhone distracts the novelist’s attentive eye, and the physical details of clothing, body type, and accent fail to make an impression. But Lethem’s characters are technological anachronists, trying to win eBay auctions on dial-up modems and ignoring their cell phones when they even have them. Even though Chronic City writes about New York City in (and even as) a speculative fiction, these characters remind us that the future may already be here, as William Gibson is often quoted as saying, but that it is unevenly distributed even in a city like New York.

Although they offer a mode of critique, the dystopian elements of Chronic City provide a way of imagining community and authenticity as well. Our moderator has already introduced the issue of music in the novel, especially the importance of The Rolling Stones’ “Shattered” after Perkus Tooth flees to the Friendreth Canine Apartments. The “giddy nihilism” of the song seems to offer one possible affective response to seeing a New York City in disrepair (353). The more resonant reference to me was to that epitome of punk rock dystopianism, Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime,” name-checked in subtle ways in the book’s second half. That song, whose title could in fact be a subtitle for Chronic City, evokes both the fear and the bracing excitement, indeed the palpable life of the resistance in any war. After the Jackson Hole burger joint has collapsed, Chase and Perkus take their friends to another restaurant called Grace Mews. Chase feels the power in banding together after such an event:

I’d widened the circle of conspirators — mine, and Oona’s — to include Richard and Georgina. This felt natural, in a life-during-wartime sort of way.

Seeing the company assembled here for the first time — four of us with our burgers, and now came Oona’s too — I believed I was seeing my present life complete for what it was, or what I wished it to be. Like a foreign correspondent in a zone of peril, a Graham Greene protagonist, I was secretly thrilled that chaos had rearranged a few things. I had my people around me. (241)

Pushing back against the terror of the moment, Chase feels an increased sense of solidarity. There’s a “we” in the Talking Heads song — “we dress like students/we dress like housewives” — and a sense of community and incipient power. By the end of Chronic City, Chase has translated that community into agency. The transgressions of wheatpasting posters on city streets or fighting in the virtual world may be minor ones, but they give the participants a shared sense of purpose instead of the atomizing distraction that Lethem finds to be the most poisonous element of contemporary culture. Chase’s renunciation of taxis in favor of the shared anonymity of the subway is an everyday version of this gesture (465); his attempt, along with Biller, to liberate Claire Carter’s hidden cache of chaldrons so that they might be shared with the entirety of Yet Another World is the more heroic one.

So I’d like to end with some questions, in the hopes that we might open up discussion to include not only Chronic City but all of these contemporary visions of New York. What does it mean to imagine New York City from the perspective of a science fiction writer, even when you’re writing for a literary audience? Is this, as Fiona Anderson suggested yesterday, a traumatic response to recent history, one where New York writers cannot look at the present straight on? Is this interest in examining New York from the standpoint of genre fiction a response to Michael Chabon’s call for a return to the “thrilling tale” instead of the bland New Yorker-style epiphany? Or is it merely fiction writers figuring out what filmmakers like George Romero and John Carpenter already know, that telling a B-movie story is the easiest way to engage with the politics of the day? This is by no means a conclusive survey, so I’d love to hear about other novels treading the same paths and other connections that I may have missed. Most importantly, I’d love to other theories about why writers might be so interested in using this mode to explore the city right now.

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Mnemonic City: Chronic City book club, day 4

September 1, 2011 in Books by Bryan | 1 comment

Today we’re pleased to welcome Fiona Anderson, a doctoral candidate in American Studies at King’s College London, as a guest contributor to our summer book club discussion of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City. Fiona’s dissertation deals with space and sexuality in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, with special attention to the work of David Wojnarowicz. Follow her on Twitter: @fiona_rachel.

As Lethem’s Chronic City draws to a close, Chase Insteadman attempts to come to terms with the unexpected passing of his friend Perkus Tooth. Claire Carter, an associate of the novel’s Bloomberg-esque Mayor Arnheim, who “debunked” the holograms of Yet Another World, is “astounded at [the] naiveté” of Chase’s concern that Perkus may have been ‘right,’ that “Manhattan had become a fake. A simulation of itself” (525; page numbers refer to British edition). “How could a place like Manhattan exist for just one purpose, instead of a million?” Carter replies, as Chase begins to conceive of a “simulation riddled through with the real”:

The world was ersatz and actual, forged and faked, by ourselves and unseen others. Daring to attempt to absolutely sort fake from real was a folly that would call down tigers or hiccups to cure us of our recklessness. The effort was doomed, for it too much pointed past the intimate boundaries of our necessary fictions, the West Side Highway of the self, to shattering encounters with the wider real: bears on floes, the indifference and silence of the climate or of outer space. (527)

Like the multiple Manhattans that make up the landscape and subject of Chronic City, mention of the West Side Highway evokes two city structures simultaneously, both known by official (or municipally applied) and non-official titles: the city’s waterfront-adjacent West Side expressway, also known as the Joe DiMaggio Highway, and the disappeared Miller Highway, the now-demolished West Side Elevated Highway, known more informally as ‘Death Avenue.’ In an ironic turn that would not seem out of place in Lethem’s novel, the dump truck that served as the catalyst for the Highway’s final collapse in December 1973 was carrying asphalt to be used in the roadway’s ongoing repairs. The removal of the collapsed structure was not completed until 1989. The defunct road seemed to remain to serve as a reminder of the city’s own decay: functionless, inaccessible to the majority of the city’s public. It closed Manhattan off from its perimeter and with a possible confrontation with its edges, its “unhemmed” quality, as a 1987 New York Times article put it. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Highway was both present and invisible, strangely obstinate, like the fictitious novel Obstinate Dust, which passes between Perkus, Biller and Chase throughout Chronic City.

What does the image of a “West Side Highway of the self” tell us about Chronic City’s fixation with might we might call Manhattan’s architectural memory, of a building or a landscape’s mnemonic properties? Do these properties persist after its buildings decay or are demolished? “New York,” wrote Henry James, “is nothing more than a provisional city,” an always temporary construction. How does Lethem’s semi-fictitious landscape engage with James’s condemnation of Manhattan’s relentless modernity? Memory is, of course, a central tenet of the novel on a more abstract level. Chase, remembered publicly for childhood achievements, cannot remember the fiancé who exists, it seems, only in ‘outer’ space, where landmarks like planets are distinct, but few and far between, paralleling Chase’s own battle with spatial mnemonics in a declining Manhattan, or, indeed, numerous declining Manhattans, each eaten away at, decaying like Janice’s cancerous foot.

In the passage that Bryan explored on Day 2, Chase is moved by the vision of a local church’s “actuality” from his apartment window: “buildings do persist, Manhattan does exist. [...] When I look, however, language dies” (147). In Chronic City, Laird (/Layered) Noteless’s gaping holes step in where language seems to fail or “dies.” Noteless is a latter-day proponent of the ideals of the land artist Robert Smithson, as Oona’s research for her autobiography of the famed artist tells us: “I practically memorized The Writings of Robert Smithson, for god’s sake,” she cries. The ‘non-site,’ Smithson wrote in his ‘Provisional Theory of the Non-Site’ in 1967, is “a three dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site,” and stands in contrast to an architectural drawing which is a “two-dimensional analogy.”

Between the two sites, Smithson argues, resides “physical metaphorical material devoid of natural meanings and realistic assumptions. [...] Let us say that one goes on a fictitious trip if one decides to go to the site of the Non-Site.” Smithson’s ‘non-site’ is, like the chaldrons, “real and fake, as Marlon Brando was dead and alive” (396). Might Lethem’s novel suggest Manhattan itself, or at least Perkus’s vision of it, as a kind of Smithsonian ‘non-site’? The gap in Noteless’s ‘Urban Fjord’ is, however, literal. In a city where skyscrapers assume a monumental quality, his works go down, digging into Manhattan’s subterranean spaces, the domain of the subway, the kingdom of the gentrifying tiger, which, for Chase, is also a space of trauma. “The New York subway,” he declares to the reader, “is a vast disordered mind, obsessing in ruts carved by trauma a century earlier.”

Noteless’s works name presence and encourage spatial memory in a city where streets and avenues are distinguished by numbers. His next project, the ‘Memorial to Daylight,’ marked the enveloping of the Financial District in a “grey fog.” The absence of the numerical mnemonic ‘9/11’ from Lethem’s novel leads the reader not to imagine a Manhattan without this trauma, this disappearance, but to read its presence in each unfamiliar space in Lethem’s unreal New York, producing a confrontation with how we acknowledge trauma and host memories in a city that seems to exist by rewriting itself.

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Interior maps: Chronic City book club, day 3

August 31, 2011 in Books by Bryan

Today’s discussion of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City comes from guest blogger Martha Nadell, who teaches at Brooklyn College and is at work on a literary history of Brooklyn. She is also the author of the chapter “Writing Brooklyn” in our Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York.

In the past decade or so, Jonathan Lethem, more than any other novelist of recent years, has come to be considered Brooklyn’s quintessential writer. He is the go-to Brooklyn writer, a familiar presence at the Brooklyn Book Fair, at Brooklyn bookstores, classrooms, and other venues. Lethem, by virtue of two of his novels’ settings and subject matters as well as his own personal history (he grew up in Brooklyn in what is now known as Boerum Hill), has come to stand for Brooklyn’s most recent literary renaissance.

When, in 2010, Lethem accepted the Roy Edward Disney Professorship in Creative Writing at Pomona College, the Brooklyn Paper indicted the “bard of Boerum Hill” on charges of abandoning Brooklyn, while the New York Post reported that one fan tweeted “Hard to imagine Lethemless Brooklyn” and accused him of pulling a Walter O’Malley Think about that for a second. Lethem was so closely aligned with Brooklyn that he was charged with replicating what some see as the greatest betrayal Brooklyn experienced in the twentieth century, O’Malley’s uprooting of the Dodgers to Los Angeles. Lethem, in uprooting himself, was cast simultaneously as the nefarious owner and the team itself.

Lethem’s fictional move to the Upper East Side in Chronic City did not occasion such a strong reaction, but it did cause some local handwringing. The Brooklyn Paper was quite relieved that the novel was a satire, rather than a tribute of that “god-forsaken borough.” And even his publisher got in on the act. According to an article in the Guardian, Lethem’s publisher took out an ad for the novel proclaiming, “Lethem does Manhattan.”

While Lethem may have left the borough for California, Chronic City, however, is not a radical shift away from Brooklyn to the foreign land of the Upper East Side. Indeed, Lethem himself has stated that “It’s deeply grounded in a Brooklynite’s view of Manhattan.” But what does that mean? Is Lethem writing from an outsider’s perspective in Chronic City, fashioning Chase Insteadman (who hails from Indiana) or any of the other characters as aspirational social climbers intent on piercing the Upper East Side’s closed and easily satirized wealthy society? That’s not what’s at stake in the novel, clearly, despite Lethem’s comments. Rather, Lethem is transposing the obsessive concentration on small nodes of Southern Brooklyn evident in Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude to a new locale. Bryan’s Day 1 comments are helpful here. If Chronic City is the “novel in the age of Google,” then Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude are novels in the age of Google-maps. Rather than encourage us to follow in the epistemological journeys of Chronic City’s characters through the catalogues that preoccupy so much of the book, Lethem’s Brooklyn novels encourage us to follow the epistemological journeys of their characters though their movements through those places that, by virtue of the local and idiosyncratic meaning concentrated in them, don’t appear on what James Agee calls “official maps.”

Both Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude take as their subjects the peculiarities and nuances of the local, as well as the manner in which these places figure language and identity for their characters. Motherless Brooklyn is a soft-boiled detective novel, which follows the Tourette-suffering, orphaned Lionel Essrog, car service driver cum detective, over the course of a four-day investigation into the death of Frank Minna, his boss and father figure. This investigation provides the novel with the occasion for pages and pages of flashbacks that reflect on the centrality of Brooklyn’s streets, well Cobble Hill’s streets, and mores and on the coming-of-age in language of this young orphan. The novel both maps and makes meanings and structures, for its characters, out of its cartography:

And Court Street, where it passed through Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill, was the only Brooklyn, really – north was Brooklyn Heights, secretly a part of Manhattan, south was the harbor, and the rest, everything east of the Gowanus Canal (the only body of water in the world, Minna would crack each and every time we drove over it, that was 90 percent guns), apart from small outposts of civilization in Park Slope and Windsor Terrace, was an unspeakable barbarian tumult.

Lethem writes: “But it was Minna who brought me language, Minna and Court Street that let me speak.” And again: “Like Court Street, I seethed behind the scenes with language and conspiracies, inversions of logic, sudden jerks and jabs of insult.” The novel makes meaning visible in space — the streets, stores, and brownstones — out of what often remains invisible to outsiders.

Likewise, The Fortress of Solitude is a coming-of-age novel that is predicated on the protagonist’s interaction with Brooklyn’s streets, or at least primarily with one Brooklyn Street — Dean Street in what was Gowanus and has come to be known as Boerum Hill. In this tale of gentrification, race, and desire, Lethem’s cartography is on the smallest of scales, beginning when Dylan is young the “arrangement of zones in slate” that is Dean Street and getting progressively larger. Consider this:

Nevins and Bond Streets, which bracket the block at either end, were vents into the unknown, routes to the housing projects down on Wyckoff Street. Anyway, the Puerto Rican men in front of the bodega on Nevins owned the corner. Another group, black men mostly, lingered in the doorway of a rooming houses between the Ebduses’ and Isabel Vendle’s, and they would shoo way the ball-playing boys, yelling at them to watch out for the windshield of a car forever parked in front of the rooming house, a Stingray, which one Puerto Rican man with a waxed mustache frequently polished and rarely drove. Finally, a mean black man who glared but never spoke broomed the slate and scissored weeds in front of two houses close to Bond Street. So the children of Dean Street instinctively bunched in the middle of the block.

Both Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude encourage us to walk with an eye to the local and the idiosyncratic. And some react with very specific questions about the relation between Lethem’s Brooklyn and our own: Does Zeod’s (the fictionalized Ziad’s) really make such good sandwiches? Is that Isabel Vendle’s (the fictionalized Helen Buckler’s) house? The novels focus our attention on not on large-scale landmarks of New York but on the particulars that preoccupy everyday lives.

And so does Chronic City. The WSJ map and guidebook of the Upper East Side is evidence of this impulse. As Bryan writes, we want to know where our world and the world of Chronic City overlap. But there is more than that desire that connects Chronic City and Lethem’s Brooklyn novels. As in Lethem’s earlier works, Chronic City links its characters and readers experiences of space with their transformations. Chase Insteadman’s meanderings from his apartment to Perkus Tooth’s apartment to Jackson Hole points to the problem of opacity and visibility that preoccupy the novel:

To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, the chaotic intricacy with which realms interleave, like those lines of television cable and fresh water and steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire and whatever else which cohabit in the same intestinal holes that pavement-demolishing workmen periodically wrench open to the daylight and to our passing, disturbed glances. We only pretend to live on something as orderly as a grid. Waiting for Perkus Tooth’s buzzer to sound and finding my way inside, I felt my interior map expand to allow for the reality of this place, the corridor floors lumpy checkerboard mosaic, the cloying citrus of the superintendent’s disinfectant oil, the bank of dented brass mailboxes, and the keening of a dog from behind an upstairs door, alerted to the buzzer and my scuffling boot heels. I have trouble believing anything exists until I know it bodily.

The novel distrusts and resists the legibility of the city implied by the grid, like Speed Levitch, and uncovers for its readers a different kind of legibility.

Likewise, when Perkus begins to walk the dog flaneur Ava, his experience of space too transforms his “interior map”:

Yet far more important than any human map, Perkus learned to which patches of snow-scraped earth Ava craved return, a neighborhood circuit of invisible importances not so different, he decided, from his old paces uptown, the magazine stand where he preferred to snag the times, or East Side Bagel, or the crater formerly known as Jackson Hole . . . If Ava could thrive with one forelimb gone, the seam of its removal neatly erased in her elastic hide, he could negotiate minus one apartment, as well as with the phantom limbs of conspiracy and epiphany and ellipsis that had always pulled him in so many directions at once.

As in Lethem’s Brooklyn novels, Chronic City points to the contingent and conditional nature of our own “interior maps,” maps that emerge from encounters with and in space. Chronic City deploys the Upper East Side in the same way that Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude deploy Red Hook, Cobble Hill, Gowanus, and Boerum Hill. The intricacy of the spaces and the meaning with which they emerge as places, subject to and determined by interpretation are, in Motherless Brooklyn, “wheels within wheels,” and, in Chronic City, worlds within worlds.

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This city’s reigning fictions: Chronic City book club, day 2

August 30, 2011 in Books by Bryan | 2 comments

I’ll keep things shorter today, in hopes that someone might dare to get a word in.

Two moments early on in the novel were game changers for me — points at which I became less sure I knew what kind of book I was reading. One came in chapter 5, when I realized that suddenly I’d been let inside Perkus’s head, was listening to him think. In narratological terms, Lethem uses free indirect discourse to give us access to Perkus’s voice when he’s not speaking aloud. What seems jarring about this formal choice is that up to this point we’d been experiencing Chase as a first-person narrator, limited in his perspective. So how do you take this shift? Does the novel have multiple narrators, or is Chase somehow taking on the role, in moments like this, of a third-person omniscient narrator? If so, why?

The other moment came a little later, in chapter 7, when Chase gives us a beautiful, brief monologue on the view from his window. It begins this way:

I find I want to get this description right, or at least a little righter. With the possible exception of my own face in the bathroom mirror, the church spire outside my window is the sole thing I look at deliberately, consciously, every single day. Yet I glance in its direction as if in doubt, as though the spire’s memory is only a rumor between me and myself, and one of the two of us doesn’t completely trust the other. When my eyes do confirm the church’s actuality (buildings do persist, Manhattan does exist, things are relentlessly what they seem even if they serve as hosts, as homes, for other phenomena), the sight acts on my mind like an eraser rubbing away the words that might describe it, into crumbs easily swept from the page. If I’m elsewhere, I have an easy name for the thing: a church spire, a few blocks away, and, sporadically, a flock of wheeling birds. When I look, however, language dies. (124)

The paragraph that follows is, on the one hand, quite tentative about the ability of language to convey what he sees from that window. And yet this chapter is often cited as — and the view from the window serves as a recurring reminder of — Lethem’s lyricism, the vitality of his prose style. He foregrounds and even showcases clarity and descriptive power here, in spite of Chase’s insecurities about words. “Manhattan does exist”: that phrase in the middle of the paragraph anticipates and seems to refute the discussion of virtual realities that will come to dominate the novel’s closing sections. It also seems to resist the view Perkus had put forward in one of his internal rants back in chapter 5: “for who hasn’t found themselves enlisted in this city’s reigning fictions from time to time?” (74).

The issues here are the same ones I asked about yesterday: What are the relationships between personal fictions, the city’s fictions, and prose fiction (the novel as a genre, the New York novel)? What do any of these things have to do with the novel’s satirical take on virtual reality?

Let me know what you think.

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