SOURCE: "Sin and the City: The Uses of Disorder in the Urban Novel," in the Centennial Review, Vol. XVI, No. 3, Summer, 1972, pp. 203-20.

[In the following excerpt, Rose examines the use of urban settings in novels from various periods of American literature, beginning with Charles Brockden Brown's novel Arthur Mervyn, and ending with J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.]

Since the beginning of the American novel its young hero has been drawn inexorably to the city. Financial success is rarely his goal, and amidst the continuous charges of evil and corruption one is hard pressed to find other motivation commensurate with the lure of the place. Yet the urban obsession dominates novels taken from widely different periods of our culture; in Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1800), Bayard Taylor's John Godfrey's Fortunes (1864), Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), and J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951), the protagonist repeats the same journey toward crime and degradation. If we shift our traditional rurally oriented point of view, if we approach the common denominator of the urban experience, the city's devious complexity, its amorality, positively, as an essential if unspoken component of the young hero's development, we can account for the city's recurrent role in the American novel. For in a culture committed to rural innocence, dominated by a variant of the initiation pattern defined by the first and finalized letter of our earliest primer, "In Adam's Fall, We sinned all," the young hero has no alternative but the city in which to find the raw experience, the complexity and disorder which traditionally in the ancient metaphor of initiation, the Fortunate Fall, comprise the crucial step to maturity.

The deviations in the American version of the Fall extend further than its unusually intimate association with sin and crime. In the general pattern, as R. W. B. Lewis suggests, "the human personality fulfilled itself only through a classic drama of a fall and a regeneration . . . [yet Puritan] orthodoxy insisted [so] heavily on the Fall that it held the creature wholly passive in the process of redemption. Redemption, for the orthodox, was effected by a single shattering blast from heaven."¹ The Fortunate Fall in American fiction involves this unique paradox: to become reborn "as a social being," in Henry James, Sr.'s words, to mature, the protagonist has not merely to have "an encounter with 'Evil,'" he must share it, become criminal, usually commit a crime. But once he has himself experienced corruption within our pattern he is powerless to save himself; he must await an inexplicable act of external intervention. If, as Lewis and Herbert Weisinger maintain, we are dealing with a "metaphor in the area of human psychology [with] immense potential,"² an unconscious pattern of action whose power is defined by its component of irrationality, this is indeed a central archetype of our culture. For the city novel through its first century can be recognized, astonishingly, by its mystical overtones, its hidden areas of fantasy and abandon, and the unique failure of reason in its plot action. While remaining, as Leslie Fiedler puts it, "unexamined," the archetype assuming the different forms of a changing culture retains its efficacy; it continues to offer the possibility of regeneration. But as the novel becomes "psychological," as it turns to subjective analysis, the Fall as a source of resolution weakens, and fragments.³ In the twentieth century American novel the city is a place offering not fruitful maturity but confusion, frustration, and barrenness.

The Philadelphia of Arthur Mervyn is an emerging city; accordingly its role in the novel, its influence upon the young protagonist is sketchy and blurred. Mervyn journeys toward it with doubts; he wonders, for example, "whether the city would afford me employment."⁴ He is the first of our heroes to feel the lure of its power; still outside its limits, before sensing the painful trials it is to impose upon him, Mervyn prematurely sets up the equation of mature resolution with success which we shall see will only become a reality later, after the experience of urban disorder: "Now, said I, I am mounted into man. I must build a name and a fortune for myself." (22) As Mervyn nears the city, however, the corruption which characterizes it in the archetype begins to influence his behavior and expression. The city symbolizes sin in the Fall; it is surrounded in secular terms by crime. At the moment he enters the city, Mervyn's naivité fades; he cheats the toll collector at the Schuylkill River Bridge, and rationalizes his crime: "All that honor enjoins," he concludes, "is to pay when I am able." (25)

Once in Philadelphia the full effects of its complexity begin to be felt. In the eastern city trade with Europe and the Far East was increasing, and the waves of European immigration were beginning. The city already seemed exotic. Its foreignness, reflecting the source of much of the wealth and culture, gave form to the complexity, and to the corruption, which the city offered. Immediately upon entering Philadelphia, Mervyn is made "the victim of malicious artifice" (33); forced to witness a convoluted, morally ambiguous scene which poses a distinctly foreign quality for him. If he were to "tell the tale [he would be ranked] with the story tellers of Shirauz and Bagdad." (32) Before his first full day in the city is over, Mervyn's descent into urban degradation has begun. He has met with Welbeck, a morally corrupt foreigner, and been made to shed his simple country garments and clothe himself in French livery. Losing his early, hollow maturity, Mervyn begins his experience of the city an apprentice, subjected to the lessons of a complex, urbane, and criminal master.

The general abandon of the city tends to focus in a disordered center. As the city crystallized, its nucleus took the form of an established area of intense social depravity. In the less defined terms of Arthur Mervyn, the city is momentarily overcome by its moral and social malaise during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793. At the center of the plague lies the Hospital, normally ordered, but now a place of "mortal stenches . . . debauchery and riot . . . malignancy and drunkenness" (165), in which subterranean corruption dominates, and the dissipated attendants enact their criminal debauchery below the prostrate bodies of the helpless patients. In this inverted milieu Mervyn, stripped of conventional social attitudes, experiences as evil the coalescent disorder offered by the city: "Now the calamity had entered my own doors, imaginary evils were supplanted by real, and my heart was the seat of commiseration and horror." (127)

The importance of this experience can be gauged by Mervyn's compulsion to be in Philadelphia during the plague, and his inexorable movement toward the Hospital: "I harboured not a momentary doubt that the course which I had taken [into the plague] was prescribed by duty." (132) But once sharing the corruption Mervyn, tellingly, is powerless to save himself: "I closed my eyes, and dismissed all fear, and all fore-sight of futurity . . . and should probably have expired on this spot." (206) But he is saved by the chance appearance of one Dr. Stevens who, reflecting the irrational nature of the pattern, is unaccountably drawn to Mervyn: "I scarcely ever beheld an object which laid so powerful and sudden a claim to my affection and succour." (5) It is this same Stevens who, besides performing the providential act of external intervention which saves Mervyn, also provides the reward which follows the protagonist's immersion in disorder and defines his success. He introduces Mervyn to Achsa Fielding, who is not only rich and socially prominent, she is mature, a widow, and foreign, a Jew. In her, resolution and maturity are translated into economic and social rewards. Because of the relative tentativeness of this early expression, Mervyn's success, and the efficacy of our archetype, can best be measured not by the linguistic and imagistic development which will come to characterize the initiation process, but by the distance the protagonist has come from his status at the beginning of the novel. There, at his arrival in the city, Mervyn is apprenticed to the foreign and experienced Welbeck. After his journey through urban disorder, at the end of the cycle, he is about to become husband and master of this foreign, experienced, and mature woman.

Between the formative years sketched in Arthur Mervyn, and the mid-nineteenth century of John Godfrey's Fortunes, the American city had crystallized. It sees the culmination of the division of labor, a place where "man responds to the industrial process with only part of his personality: segmentalization .. . characterizes his work;"⁵ where the old myth that industriousness leads to personal fulfillment and economic advancement is exploded. In fact, "in the novels one can hardly find a single instance where industriousness, frugality and piety are the operative factors in the hero's rise in society."⁶ But if the emergent city gives the lie to an old, hollow myth of success, it provides an abundance of materials to support a psychologically far more valid one. For it is when the protagonist is not working that he is free to share the complexity that the new city, the focal point for "all the new economic forces .. . the generating center for social and intellectual progress,"⁷ has to offer. And the nucleus of its complexity, tentatively disordered in Arthur Mervyn, is now emphatically defined by foreignness; for example "four out of every five residents of Greater New York were foreigners or of foreign parentage,"⁸ and by the squalor of the new slums which by 1888 comprised "over thirty-two thousand tenements with a population exceeding a million."⁹ By the mid-nineteenth century the city offers a place where in reality "community organization breaks down and there is an especially good opportunity for personal disorganization to occur, [where] vagrant and normally inhibited impulses are permitted free reign."¹⁰ No wonder for authors like William Dean Howells it seems based on a savage and primal disorder: "Ravening beasts and poisonous reptiles lurk in those abodes of riches and poverty . . . [among] sewers that rolled their loathsome tides under the streets, amidst a tangle of gas pipes, steam pipes, .. . all without a plan."¹¹ All without a plan—the American city has indeed emerged as a metaphor for chaos, a place where the dangerous but potentially life-giving descent into the irrational underworld can occur.

So when the hero of John Godfrey's Fortunes comes to the city in 1864 to find fame and success, the New York in which he arrives impresses him with a complexity which he sees in terms of foreignness: "I knew not which was most remarkable—the never-ending crowd that filled the chief thoroughfare, the irregular splendor of the shops, or the filthiness of the pavement. .. . I could with difficulty comprehend that I had not passed into some foreign country."¹² The city's role in the novel, offering an opening into an initiatory descent into disorder for the inexperienced, is now clearly defined by the ominous contrasts within Godfrey's first residential neighborhood: "The rooming house was two or three blocks removed from the noise of the bowery, and its neighborhood wore an aspect both of quiet and decay. . . . Not far off, on the opposite side of the street, there was a blind alley, leading to some hidden cluster of tenements, whence issued swarms of dirty, ragged, and savage children." (195)

Although Godfrey comes to the city to seek success, it is the psychological nature of his poverty which counts: "I had never experienced any marked unkindness or injustice . . . and I did not imagine the human race to be otherwise than honest, virtuous, and reciprocally helpful." (8) As long as he remains in the city and works industriously, without gaining experience from it, success remains elusive. He has a menial job on the Daily Wonder which ironically prevents him from experiencing the wonders which daily occur around him: "For months I strictly performed my appointed duties . . . acquiring no experience which seems worthy of being recorded." (221) Without moving toward the initiatory center of the city Godfrey's early immature equation of maturity with wealth, his goal of "Love, Manhood, and Money" (225), tellingly similar to Mervyn's, remains unchanged and ineffectual. Although he has met a rich heiress, Isabel Haworth, she continues inaccessible.

Godfrey's descent into degradation begins when he moves from Mrs. Very's plain American boarding house to Mrs. De Peyster's foreign one. The back room of the nearby bar "Ichneumon" acts as a symbol of the foreign, complex, disordered center of the city. It is run by a foreigner, its den is smoky, like the "salon des nuages," it is called "the Cave." To enter this potentially regenerative place Godfrey's "initiation fee is beer through the evening." (326) In fact his initiation begins when "a Delphic voice exclaimed, The offering is accepted . . . welcome and acceptance from the mystic brotherhood.'" Godfrey soon begins to share "the lawless recklessness of the utterance to which it was dedicated." (331)

The language which the Cave offers, its "utterance," embraces the primacy of raw experience. Significantly, its terminology is not abstract and theoretical as are the later attempts to analyze the pattern, but consists of a powerful imagistic language of regeneration which reflects the unconscious vitality contained in the archetype. As Godfrey is immersed deeper into the lawlessness of the Cave he comes to reject the apparent relationship of work with reward, his immature equation of money and manhood: "economy . . . practical talent. . . industry . . . work, and the worry that comes with it are . . . relics." (329) As Godfrey draws near to the underlying center of the archetype, toward experiential abandon, the meaning attached to cash, one of the society's most cherished beliefs, begins to shift. Money becomes significant only as a means of realizing psychological fulfillment: "Money is an empty form—a means of transfer, being nothing in itself—like the red flame, which is no substance, only representing the change of one substance into another. . . . They only who turn it to the enrichment of their lives—who use it as a gardener does manure, for the sake of flowers—have the abstract right to possess it." (328) Money to manure. There is a ring of Freud for us that lends a special impact to the protagonist's epiphany, deep within the city's disorder, that success is based upon an organic process of psychological development.

Godfrey does come to share an abandoned thirst for experience: "My life naturally took on, more and more, a reckless, vagabondizing character. . . . My stomach, like my brain, craved variety, piquancy, excitement." (418) His crucial experience of disorder occurs while drunk in the Cave. He "had never [before] lost the control of brain or body." After one and a half bottles of Sauterne "a partial paralysis crept over my body. . . . My mental vision turned inwards and was fixed upon myself with wonderful sharpness and power. .. . I was in a condition resembling catalepsy rather than intoxication .. . in a luminous revelation of my own nature that I was forced to read." (434) In the midst of disorder, this is Godfrey's moment of self-insight. It carries the seeds of resolution; normally it would bring about a rebirth. Yet the shadow of Puritan predestination in the Fall in America precludes an effective individual act of will. In spite of his descent into regenerating experience Godfrey, like Mervyn, is incapable of emerging mature from his moment of insight without an external intervention: "I struggled to find the trace of some path which might lead me out of the evil labyrinth,—but I could not think or reason: it was blind, agonizing groping in the dark." (437)

The irrationality basic to the archetype is reflected in the absence of a reasonable account for the external intervention which does save Godfrey and brings about his resolution. Deep in his stupor, Godfrey mystically hears a footstep, which is outside of the bar and must be close to a mile away. Somehow it seems that "its cessation were the beginning of deeper disgrace, and its approach that of a regenerated life!" (437) He staggers out of the bar and finds that he had been hearing "Bob Simmons! Dear old [boyhood] friend, God has sent you to save me!" (439) Simmons seems to symbolize the regenerative qualities of the city. He has come from the country to settle there, as has Godfrey, and he is a bricklayer, apparently enjoying his creative role in adding to the physical complexity of the place.

Godfrey's progress seems measured by his ability to see his rebirth clearly, as a psychological experience. At first he interprets Simmons' appearance religiously: "In the Providence which led him to me at that hour and in that crisis of my fortunes, my fears of a blind chance or a baleful pursuing Fate were struck down forever." (433) But soon the idea grows that his regeneration was part of a more secular, psychological pattern. He makes a rather casual attempt to reject the heresy: "I prefer not to think that my restoration to health was already assured by the previous struggle through which my mind had passed, that from the clearer comprehension of myself, I should have worked up again by some other path. [Rather,] it is pleasant to remember that the hand of a brother-man lent its strength to mine, and to believe that it was the chosen instrument of my redemption from evil ways." (439, italics mine) Finally, he discards the religious interpretation and views his descent and regeneration entirely in terms of secular experience: "Those months of vagabondage seemed like a dark uneasy dream, in the steady light of resolution which now filled my life; it was as if a sultry haze in which the forms of Good and Evil were blended, and the paths of order and of license become an inextricable labyrinth, had been blown away, leaving the landscape clearer than ever before." (465)

The "struggle through which [his] mind had passed," and the consequent "steady light of resolution which now filled [his] life," suggest that Godfrey has attained the insight which marks maturity. He can now see through appearances: "I was able to recognize them under whatever mask they approach." (465) When he finally win his heiress, Isabel Haworth and her $80,000, she is seen as something more than just a cash reward: "Thank God! I whispered to myself, money is her slave, not her deity." (371) Godfrey ends by living the lesson learned in the Cave: his urban experience has taught him to interpret the abstract economic language of his era's success myth in a manner which allows him to realize its underlying psychological content.

John Godfrey's Fortunes is a unique example of the "success novel"; it begins to explore the meanings of success in the city while retaining the simple form and the irrational content of the dozens of less sensitive works from its genre. Its rudimentary probings make it an unusually rich subject, yet they also carry the seeds of dissolution. A half-century later, at the time Sister Carrie was written, the impulse toward fictional analysis of cultural forces had strengthened. Dreiser's book is an exercise in myth-breaking; it separates out the major components of the success myth, the Fall and resolution, balances Hurstwood's decline against Carrie's rise, and subjects them each to theoretical discussion. In the process the unconscious integrity of the myth is undercut; it is deprived of the irrational components responsible for its regenerative qualities, and the pattern begins to produce only destruction and sterility. Hurstwood's story, expressing only the fragment of the fall, demonstrates the disaster which results when the protagonist is denied the irrational luck, the external act of intervention which traditionally occurred to save the hero from disintegration. His lack of resolution to raise himself from the descent into the hideous poverty of the Bowery reflects the individual's inability to effect his own salvation by an act of will within the context of the archetype. Hurstwood's decline into poverty, his loss of mental control, and his final suicide reveal the destruction which accompanies the violation of the traditional pattern.

It is, however, Carrie's book; her role in the city myth comes under closest scrutiny, and consequently moves toward the most telling incompleteness. Carrie begins as the previous protagonists had; she comes from the country to the city and "submits to a solemn round of industry and [is told to] see the need of hard work without longing for play."¹³ Carrie soon rejects the Hansons' hard working home, her $4.50 per week job, and this joyless theory. But a hint to the meaning of the novel lies in the fact that it is a theory. The "industry" that Carrie turns from is for the first time extensively analyzed, and while it is unlikely that she "would get in one of the great shops and do well enough until—well, until something happened . . . and Carrie would be rewarded for coming and toiling in the city" (16), the new awareness that "something" must precede the reward undermines the unconscious resolving force of the act of luck, the irrational intervention when it does occur.

Enacting a fragmentalized pattern, Carrie is denied its central component, the experience of evil and corruption. While the New York Carrie and Hurstwood journey to, the city which Dreiser considered the center of experience in America, is again entered after a crime, it is Hurstwood who steals the $10,000. And, as has been discussed, it is around Hurstwood that accrues all the crime, degradation, and corruption that the myth had required the quester to experience. Carrie is untouched by degradation; consequently she does not learn the psychological lesson of the Cave that John Godfrey comes to understand: "only the long strain of starvation would have taught her that in some cases [money] could have no value." (57) It is not so much that Carrie is not capable of learning the nature of experience, but that the lesson is unavailable to her. Carrie's view of experience is as immature at the end of Sister Carrie, when she has wealth, as it was at the beginning: "And now Carrie had attained that which in the beginning seemed life's object... yet she was lonely. In her rocking-chair she sat . . . singing and dreaming. . . . She was still waiting for that halcyon day when she should be led forth among dreams become real." (418) Inviolate in spite of her liaisons, still inexperienced, her name in fire-letters hovering above the city but never part of it, Carrie may as well sit in a convent as in her tower over New York. Missing her fall she indeed remains a secular American nun, a Sister Carrie.

The structure of The Great Gatsby, our document of illusions shattered, of myths seen with ruthless clarity, is even more emphatically fragmented; Gatsby's fall is balanced against Nick Carraway's development. The sense of loss, the longing which reflects weakness in our pattern in Sister Carrie is intensified in the later book. Gatsby does not sit "singing and dreaming." He stands, in a posture of exquisitely frustrated yearning: "He stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way . . . I could have sworn he was trembling."¹⁴ The dimensions of the myth's components in The Great Gatsby are "colossal," appropriately enough on the eve of the American success myth's explosion. Gatsby is not merely apprenticed to a Welbeck on his arrival in the city, he is formed by the titanic criminality of Meyer Wolfsheim: "'He's the man who fixed the World's Series back in 1919'. . . . [He] play [ed] with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe." (74) In the absence of the archetype's saving stroke of luck, Gatsby's experience of degradation grows uncontrollably: even his guests could not have "guessed at [the extent] of his corruption." (154) His "drug-store business was just small change . . . [compared to] something on now." (135) Without the old irrational intervention Gatsby's world can only go downhill, decay, "turn septic on the air now." (107) After rejecting his immature work "SCHEDULE," his development is irreversibly "down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers" (111), where rebirth has been conclusively thwarted.

The gauge of Gatsby's failure, in terms of experience, is of course the inaccessibility of Daisy Fay. Earlier, in John Godfrey's Fortunes, salvation had been accompanied by a rich heiress, and she had been valuable because she translated money into experience. Daisy too offers such an equation: her voice, which is "a promise that she had done gay, exciting things . . . and that there were gay, exciting things hovering" (9-10), is also "'full of money.'" (120) Daisy is not the goal of Gatsby's quest; like Miss Haworth she would mark its success: "Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything." (97) But Daisy, after a false hope, drifts further from Gatsby and the resolution that she symbolizes remains unrealized, a "hope, a romantic readiness . . . some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life." (2)

Nick Carraway comes closer to enacting the traditional pattern of initiation in the city, and by his failure reveals more clearly its dissolution. Nick has not come to New York for economic success, the "dozen volumes on banking . . . [remained] on my shelf." (4) Rather, Nick is "restless" for the experience that the eastern city offers. His journey is toward its vital complexity: "I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye." (57) The "satisfaction" that the city offers for Nick is based upon its intense experiential quality: its "wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world." (69)

Accordingly, it is into this clearly-defined experiential city that Nick must descend if he is to share its initiatory center of degradation. Only one of Nick's commutations to New York is described with specific detail: his ride in with Gatsby to meet Meyer Wolfsheim. Again the entrance to the city is prefaced by a crime, the encounter with a "frantic policeman" (68) for speeding. At the bridge into Manhattan the foreignness and racial complexity of New York become apparent in "the tragic eyes and short upper lips of southeastern Europe," and the "haughty rivalry . . . [of] three modish negroes." (69) This journey to New York is pregnant with meaning: "Anything can happen now . . . anything at all." (69)

What does happen is Nick's meeting with Meyer Wolfsheim, who symbolizes the corruption which underlies the urban experience. Wolfsheim is found under the center of the city, in a "Forty-second Street cellar" (69), in "half-darkness." (70) The dark cave-like environment beneath the city is apparently Wolfsheim's milieu; accordingly his visual apparatus has shrunken: "After a moment [Nick] discovered his tiny eyes." (70) Wolfsheim is the priest of this subterranean world; "'a denizen of Broadway'" (74), he makes over it "a sort of benediction." (73) It is in his power to offer the momentary contact with corruption central to the protagonist's initiation: "I understand you're looking for a business gonnegtion." (71) But the offer is "startling" to Nick. He draws back, Gatsby confirms the reluctance, and when the crucial moment passes "Mr. Wolfsheim seemed disappointed." (71) In fact he and the resolving if painful experience he makes possible have been rejected; he cannot "impose" himself upon Nick, and he leaves. As he goes he seems a grotesque parody of evil, "his tragic nose . . . trembling" (73). But the tenacity of his hold, once established, and the strength remaining in our archetype are apparent in the most dramatic of his images, the "human molars" he wears on his sleeves.

The result of the encounter with the archetype, without the possibilities for regeneration offered by the intact pattern have already been suggested in the case of Gatsby. Without a saving intervention Gatsby's "gonnegtion" with corruption is not momentary; rather it is broken only with his death: "'Mr. Gatsby's dead.' There was a long silence on the other end of the wire, followed by an exclamation [from one of Gatsby's criminal contacts] . . . then a quick squawk as the connection was broken." (167) Without the contact Nick's search for maturity and fulfillment remains ambiguous. He is thirty when he leaves New York, past the age of initiation. As he leaves, Jordan Baker concludes he is a "bad driver." Significantly Nick's urban encounter has changed her opinion of him for the worst. Originally, she "'thought [him] rather an honest, straightforward person.'" (179) While Nick casts some doubt over Jordan's reliability, it must be remembered that her first word, and apparently her dominant characteristic as the only observer in the novel, is '"Absolutely!"' (11) Although his experience in New York appears to age Nick, meeting Tom Buchanan he "felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child" (181), it is not a fruitful maturity. Nick's withdrawal from "the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men" (2) is quite unlike the psychological resolution that the intact myth offered the protagonist. Nick's barrenness upon leaving the city reflects the collapse of the archetypal pattern of the Fall into urban experience as an effective initiation myth in America.

The objectification and dissolution of the archetype appears conclusive by the early fifties, in novels such as J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Salinger's book goes beyond the pessimistic sense of loss with which The Great Gatsby ends. In the fruitless search for the resolution that an aged myth can no longer offer, Holden Caulfield is himself an image of enervation. Nick Carraway ends concerned with his own aging: a major characteristic of Holden Caulfield is his abundance of "gray hair."¹⁵ Furthermore, the form of success the protagonist travels to the city to find, in flux in Sister Carrie, experiential in The Great Gatsby, has itself dissolved, become hopelessly inaccessible. Holden's question, suggesting the lost soul of the city, the missing ducks in Central Park, results not in fulfillment and resolution, but in frustration. The Jew he asks it of, "Old Horwitz," in contrast to Meyer Wolfsheim, is already remote and hostile, empty of any resolving knowledge. When he drives off "like a bat out of hell" (83), Holden is in effect abandoned in the city, already symbolically deprived of the knowledge that could make resolution possible. At that point, rather than beginning the regenerative period in the city that would result in his going home "all rested and feeling swell" (51), he embarks upon his fated quest leading only toward physical and mental collapse.

The hopelessness of making the necessary encounter in the city becomes apparent upon Holden's arrival in New York. Like previous protagonists, he has journeyed from the country, Agerstown, Pennsylvania, and has prefaced his entrance to the city with a moral offense, in this case the compulsive lie to Mrs. Morrow. But in New York his first impulse implies the thwarted nature of his relation with the city. In language even more explicit than that in The Great Gatsby, Holden immediately tries to establish a "connection" with the city: "The first thing I did when I got off at Penn Station, I went into this phone booth. I felt like giving somebody a buzz." (59) But the collapse of the myth, the emptiness of the city's role in it, renders the essential impulse futile: "But as soon as I was inside, I couldn't think of anybody to call up. . . . So I ended up not calling anybody. I came out of the booth, after twenty minutes or so." (59)

As has been suggested, the archetype comes under increasingly explicit analysis in its decline. The first person narrative technique of Catcher in the Rye precludes the sort of analytic discussion found in Dreiser's novel. Similarly, Holden's youth makes highly articulate insight such as Nick Carraway offers difficult. However, an image occurs in Catcher in the Rye which, in its explicit analytic intent and totally objective language, appears to encapsulate the subjectively shrunken state of the urban archetype. Near the end of Holden's unproductive journey through the city waits a figure unusually equipped to analyze the archetype of the city in literature, Mr. Antolini, a member of the English Department at an urban university. Antolini offers Holden an objective vision of his pattern of action: "I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall." (186) Significantly, his fall is irreversible because the culture no longer offers the integral contact with disorder and the consequent irrational act of salvation: "This fall I think you're riding for—it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with." (187) Antolini's analytic expression is true; its accuracy acts as a gauge of the degree to which the myth has weakened. The archetypal pattern, previously so powerful as to be "unspeakable," is easily expressed here in its totality. Offered in explicit form to Holden as a substitute for the intimate psychological experience, its efficacy is suggested by Holden's reaction: "All of a sudden, I yawned. What a rude bastard, but I couldn't help it!" (190)

The results of Holden's quest, more than Nick Carraway's aging and withdrawal, reveal the enervated state of the archetype. Holden, too, finally comes face to face with a subterranean image of the city. Meyer Wolfsheim, below the center of New York, still offered some possibility of a contact with living corruption. The vision Holden encounters, and the prelude to his final collapse, is characterized by a totally unproductive abstraction and atrophication. Holden descends not into a hot, teeming restaurant, but into the Egyptian tombs, where the mummies are displayed, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And there, in the totally static environment, surrounded by figures of immeasurable agedness, Holden confronts the abstraction which symbolizes the decadence of a once fruitful pattern of initiation, an obscene distortion of the act of sexual maturity. In response the protagonist experiences not a sense of salvation and rebirth, but a vision of his own death, conclusively buried under a tombstone which associates his name with the obscenity symbolizing the failure of the initiation myth. It is this long delayed moment which finally realizes the full implications of the agedness which surrounds Holden. It is the death knell of a century and a half old, uniquely American, urban archetype.

¹The American Adam (Chicago, 1955), p. 58.

² Pp. 59-60. See also Weisinger, Tragedy and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall (East Lansing, 1953).

³ Fiedler's discussion of the archetype is found in "Come Back to the Raft Ag'n, Huck Honey!" from An End to Innocence (Boston, 1955).

⁴ Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn (New York, 1962), p. 20. Subsequent references from this, and the other easily available paperback editions used are included in the text.

⁵ Blanche H. Gelfant, The American City Novel (Norman, Oklahoma, 1954), p. 32.

⁶ John C. Cawelti, The Apostles of the Self-Made Man (Chicago, 1965), p. 62.

⁷ Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Rise of the City (New York, 1938), p. 79.

⁸ P. 72.

⁹ P. 110.

¹⁰ Gelfant, p. 40.

¹¹ The passage from A Traveler from Altruria is quoted in George Dunlap, The City in the American Novel 1789-1900 (Philadelphia, 1934), p. 112.

¹² Bayard Taylor, John Godfrey's Fortunes (New York, 1889), p. 179.

¹³ Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (Boston, 1959), p. 31.

¹⁴ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York, 1953), p. 21.

¹⁵ J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (New York, 1969), p. 57.