SOURCE: "The City Novel as Literary Genre," in The American City Novel, University of Oklahoma Press, 1954, pp. 3-24.

[In the following essay, Gelfant traces the development of the modern American urban novel as a distinct literary form.]

In Ben Hecht's A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago, a newspaperman dreams of writing a great novel about the American city. He wants to discover the inmost and essential meaning of city life so that his novel can say definitively: "The city is so and so. Everyone feels this and this. No matter who they are or where they live, or what their jobs are they can't escape the mark of the city that is on them."¹ While the newspaperman is a thin, sentimentalized character, the literary impulse he is expressing is a real and urgent one: for out of the desire to define the city and reveal its essential "mark" upon its people the twentieth-century American novel has developed as a generic literary form. Behind the rise of the modern city novel has been the awareness—always growing stronger and more clearly articulated—that city life is distinctive and that it offers the writer peculiarly modern material and demands of him literary expression in a modern idiom. As a shaping influence upon the modern American literary mind, the city has made its impression not only as a physical place but more important as a characteristic and unique way of life. In order to give literary expression to this way of life—to re-create its tensions and tempos, its institutional patterns, its economic structure, its system of tenuous and yet complex social relationships, its manners and moral temper, its breathless, sometimes stultifying, atmosphere, its immediate daily routines and mechanized monotony, and its total impact upon the mind, imagination, and spirit—the American novelist has drawn upon the methods of European and English writers. But his social vision and emotional complex, which are the intrinsic material of his art, derive from an experience of American life. This experience has developed an awareness of the distinctive qualities of the American city as a modern creation of industrialism, a melting pot, still inchoate and lacking in the rich historical and emotional associations that the centuries have built up about a London or Paris. Central to the city writer's interest in the distinctiveness, the American-ness, and urgent modernity of a Chicago or New York is his concern over the personal impact of urban life. His fundamental intention, phrased by Hecht's character, is to show what the American city is by revealing how it creates and definitively marks the people living in it.

This intention is realized within the novel as the city becomes a key actor in a human drama. It participates in the action as a physical place, which makes a distinctive impression upon the mind and senses; as an atmosphere, which affects the emotions; and as a total way of life—a set of values and manners and a frame of mind—which molds character and destiny. In Robert Herrick's A Life for a Life, there is an explicit, if rather dramatic, statement of the shaping influence of the city: "The City was man! And already it was sowing its seed in the heart of the youth, this night. It was moulding him as it moulds the millions, after its fashion, warming his blood with desire,—the vast, resounding, gleaming City. . . . "²

Usually the city plays the role of antagonist. It exists as the obstacle to the fulfillment of the hero's desires, while, ironically, it may promote and encourage them. Sometimes it may itself be protagonist, emerging in such novels as John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer and Elmer Rice's Imperial City as a vital personality with an identity and life of its own, distinct from that of its people.

This active participation of the city in shaping character and plot distinguishes the city novel from what might be called urban local color fiction. In a local color city novel, the characters act against a static urban setting that is not the vital and necessary condition for their acts. The substitution of another backdrop might alter details within the novel but not the essential patterns of plot, characterization, theme, and language. An O. Henry short story, "The Defeat of the City," amusingly dramatizes the difference between the intrinsic and the spurious urban product.³ (O. Henry, incidentally, for all the unwarranted praise that the social historian Henry Steele Commager⁴ has given him as the authentic American city writer, is an excellent example of the writer exploiting urban material primarily for local color.) The hero of this story has come to New York from an upstate farm and has been transformed by the city: New York has "remodelled, cut, trimmed and stamped him to the pattern it approves."⁵ When he visits the farm, however, he is overcome by a "rural atavism": he tears off his stylish clothes, wrestles buffoonishly, strums an old banjo, dances the buckand-wing, and becomes so completely the "yokel" that no trace is left of "the immaculate Robert Walmsley, courted clubman and ornament of select circles." He stands unmasked as a "peasant gambolling indecorously in the valley"—this is his real self. Now, just as Walmsley seemed to be a real urbanite because he displayed the clothes and manners of the city man, so local color city fiction seems to be authentic urban literature because it uses urban settings and dialects; but this urban paraphernalia does not create city fiction, just as Walmsley's clothes did not create a New Yorker. The ruling theme of O. Henry's work, for example, is the irony of coincidences, which do not depend for their occurrence upon a particular locale; in The Four Million and The Voice of the City, the coincidences only happen to occur in New York.

Unlike a local color writer, the city novelist sees urban life as an organic whole, and he expresses a coherent, organized, and total vision of the city. As he is not concerned simply with details of local color, he is also not concerned only with the anecdotal value of city incidents (as O. Henry is in his stories). In creating a unified impression, he uses particularized incidents as a means of arriving at underlying truths about city life. He offers an interpretation and a judgment of the city—a way of seeing and evaluating it as an ordered pattern of experiences consistent with the inner principles of its being. While the interpretation inheres in the total formal structure of the novel, the experiences that develop and comment upon the meaning of city life are contained in the episode.

The death of little Arty in Farrell's No Star is Lost is a case in point. When little Arty becomes ill, the O'Neills call Dr. Geraghty, but even though the doctor realizes that the child has diphtheria, he refuses to care for him. Arty dies; but the children at the O'Flahertys', given careful medical attention, quickly recover. The episodes dealing with Arty's illness and death have suspense and human interest. But while each episode is a link in the narrative structure, it serves also as an instrument of social commentary. Because of the circumstances surrounding this death, one begins to understand the structure and meaning of a social system. As Jim O'Neill realizes, his son is victimized by poverty. Dr. Geraghty will not come to a poor man's home,⁶ but he arrives quickly enough at the O'Flahertys', not because Al O'Flaherty is his special friend, but because he knows he will collect his fee. Money is the arbiter of life and death in the South Side—this is what the unnecessary waste of Arty's life clearly reveals.

Almost invariably the city novel contains social implications. Yet its intention is not exhortatory. As a form of creative expression rather than propaganda, it is distinguishable from what may be called city problem fiction, fiction which presents a particular social evil in order to show the need for immediate reform. The purpose of a problem novel is rhetorical; its end is a call for social action. The standard for judging the problem novel is its exactness in reproducing the social facts and its influence upon public opinion. It is a good problem novel if, like good journalism, it presents facts clearly and correctly and if it leads to social reform. Perhaps the best example of problem literature is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. It presents an accurate, if heightened, picture of social conditions that demand to be reformed. The exposé of the scandalously unsanitary conditions in the Chicago stockyards led to a government investigation and a federal pure foods act. The novel proposes a specific remedy for social evils, that is, a socialistic system. The affinity between problem literature and journalism is strong: in spirit, purpose, and material, The Jungle is a fictional counterpart of the muckraking journalism of Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, and Lincoln Steffens.

Sometimes a fictional account of actual situations has been so close to journalism that it has almost defied classification. For example, The Long Day by Dorothy Richardson, a social worker, is a fictional statement of the author's experiences as a working-girl in New York.⁷ As its conclusion it summarizes the young girl's problems and temptations in the city and outlines a program of social reforms. The difference between such problem fiction (and journalism) and the city novel can be seen by a comparison between The Long Day and Dreiser's Sister Carrie. Both depict the working-girl's struggles to find work, to maintain economic independence, and to protect herself against temptation. But Sister Carrie does not present a solution to the isolated problems of the young girl in the city because the novel is not limited to these specific problems. Rather it is concerned with a total way of life. It explores the values and manners of the modern city and reveals its total impact upon human character and destiny. It has also an intrinsic interest in the city as a unique place and atmosphere. In other words, the intention of the novel is to explore the city, to show what it is, what values it lives by, and what effect it has upon the individual's character and destiny. Consequently, it is broader in scope than the problem novel; it interprets city life as a social structure, while the problem novel records, in a more photographic manner, only the symptoms of a particular urban disorder.

City novelists have themselves pointed out that their intention is to give a personal impression of the city and not a solution to its problems. Dreiser, for example, recalls how his brother Paul had once shown him about New York and suggested that he write a novel to expose corruption and inequality in the city.⁸ Because he was then "youthful, inexperienced, unlettered," Dreiser had thought that he could "show up some of these things" and perhaps help to prevent them; but his mature reflection was that "picturing or indicating life" was no guarantee of changing it. He understood the purpose of the novel to be the expression of a personal vision of life, and not exhortation. In a preface to a bibliography of his work, Dreiser pointed out that his purpose was that of the creative artist—to re-create his "vision of life": "This is what living in my time has seemed like. . . . You may not like my vision . . . but it is the only one I have seen and felt . . . therefore it is the only one I can give."⁹

Later writers have become more aware of a complexity of motives behind the city novelist's act of creation. Farrell, for example, believed like Dreiser that the writer's purpose is to communicate a personal discovery about his world and that the primary function of the novel, as "a branch of the fine arts," is to provide "aesthetic pleasure."¹⁰ Although the city novel deals with social disorder and personal failure, it produces aesthetic pleasure by virtue of the form it imposes upon the disorganized experiences of life. But Farrell also pointed out that as the writer reveals the confusions and disorder of modern life, his art becomes "an instrument of social influence."¹¹ The subject matter of the novel makes its claim upon the social conscience of the reader; he may be aroused to action as he is troubled by the vision of life contained within the novel. If the city novel exerts social influence, then, it is because of its social implications rather than because of a direct attack upon an urban problem.

A study of the literary methods of city novelists brings into sharp focus the integral relationship between their social vision and aesthetic technique. In the past some critics (Granville Hicks, for example)¹² have taken the novelists' social ideas out of their novelistic context and judged them as social philosophy, while others (Mark Schorer in his comments on Farrell)¹³ have taken a single formal element out of context and judged it as technique. But the city novel is an organic whole in which material and form have become one aesthetic integer. The material is the writers' particular social vision of city life; their techniques are the instruments through which they have crystallized and expressed this vision. The formal elements in their work—style, plot, tone, theme, and structure—give literary expression to their specific attitudes towards the city as a place, an atmosphere, and a way of life. To judge Dreiser's structure, for example, without relating it to his view of the city's economic structure, or Dos Passos' complex aesthetic design without relating that to his comprehensive view of a complex urban society, or Farrell's style without evaluating it as an instrument that reveals his characters' sensibility is to ignore the fundamental unity of the city novel as a work of art. It is only as we examine the relationship between material and form, between the vision of city life and technique, that we can evaluate city fiction as literary art; and then we also can see that its artistic achievement has been a considerable one. For not only has the city novel shown a keen insight into the social meaning of the city's complex and turbulent life: it has also developed a form for recreating that life in imaginative terms that reveal its essential meanings.

Through literary practice, if not through theory, three forms of the city novel have emerged: the "portrait" study, which reveals the city through a single character, usually a country youth first discovering the city as a place and manner of life; the "synoptic" study, a novel without a hero, which reveals the total city immediately as a personality in itself; and the "ecological" study, which focuses upon one small spatial unit such as a neighborhood or city block and explores in detail the manner of life identified with this place.

The portrait novel belongs in the literary tradition of the novel of initiation—that is, a novel tracing a young hero's discovery of life and growth to maturity. In the portrait novel, the hero is typically a naïve and sensitive newcomer to the city, usually a country youth, as in the fiction of Dreiser, Herrick, and Wolfe, although in Howell's A Hazard of New Fortunes, he is an older man. Structurally, the novel is built upon a series of educating incidents in which the city impresses upon the hero its meanings, values, and manners. As the hero responds to the insistent pressures of city life, his character undergoes a change: he learns what the city is, and this is his achievement of sophistication and maturity. He may adjust himself to an urban way of life and conform to its standards and seek its goals, or once he becomes aware of its social implications, he may repudiate it. The change in character, as a younger person either suffers inner defeat, achieves material success, or arrives at social wisdom, reflects the personal impact of urbanism. Dreiser's protagonists submit to the city: they learn to want that which it obviously values—money, fashion, and ease. The heroes of portrait novels of the thirties and forties usually repudiate city life for its injustices and materialism and dedicate themselves to the cause of social change.

Since the portrait study traces a process of social conditioning—the hero is gradually illuminated and conditioned to the city's way of life—the narrative pace may be slow and the effect documentary. Whatever the form and results of the conditioning, the forces acting upon the hero must be commensurate with the changes in his character. In Dreiser's novels, the city impresses itself upon the hero's mind and sensibility in a few climactic experiences, which are moments of recognition when the protagonist realizes what the city has to offer. But the preparation for these moments has been carefully laid, for example, in the studied account of Carrie's job-hunting or in the descriptions of Clyde's home environment. The potential weakness of the portrait novel is that the portrayal of environmental forces may be made at the expense of the interior drama, so that the hero seems an automaton, too much acted upon and not enough an actor. But at its best, the form allows for a revelation of a way of life in its greatest personal significance, that is, in its effect upon human character and destiny. It permits the reader to see and feel the environmental pressures that help mold, if they do not entirely determine, the moral identity of modern city man.

The ecological novel differs from the portrait study by having as its protagonist not a single person but a spatial unit—a city neighborhood, block, or even an apartment house. Interest thus focuses upon the social relationships and manners within a close group, although one figure may come to prominence, as Danny O'Neill does in Farrell's novels of the South Side. The title of the ecological novel often specifies the spatial unit: for example, there is Waldo Frank's City Block, Albert Halper's Union Square, Ann Petry's The Street, Sholem Asch's East River, and John Kafka's Sicilian Street. Sometimes the locale is implied in the title; Willard Motley's Knock on Any Door refers (as the epigraph states) to any door in the city's back alley and slum; and Nelson Algren's The Neon Wilderness (a collection of stories) refers to Chicago's Skid Row. Sometimes the title designates the social group, as in Meyer Levin's The Old Bunch.

While the ecological form limits the range of the novel, it permits an intensive study of urban manners and of idiosyncratic urban types. The breakdown of the city into small, self-contained, and distinctive social worlds gives a sociological justification to the ecological approach. The fact that most recent writers have been born into a particular neighborhood and know its way of life intimately explains the increasing popularity of the form. This inmost kind of knowledge of a society within the city is the writer's equipment: it can make him, as it has made Farrell, a city novelist of manners. The ecological novel can reveal city life as it exists for the native city-dweller—perhaps devoid of its surface glamour, perhaps merely monotonous as in Farrell's South Side Chicago, or bitter and cruel as in the slums of Michael Gold's, Joseph Gollomb's and Isidor Schneider's East Side New York, or superficial and conventionalized as in Edith Wharton's "fashionable New York." Perhaps no city fiction gives the reader so immediate a sense of the familiar world of everyday experiences as the novels of Farrell. His ecological approach permits a detailed exploration of the manners and morals of a cohesive group of city people. Time moves slowly in his works—four novels are required to show Danny O'Neill's emergence from childhood and adolescence—and this slowing down of time in combination with the strict circumscription of space allows for a minute and comprehensive portrayal of how urban people think, act, and feel. The reader comes to understand the inner life of a community in terms of the perceptions of its people. In Farrell's works the reader can see the forces of environment slowly and inexorably shaping the youth, giving them the content of their experiences and determining their attitudes, actions, and destinies.

The synoptic novel makes the city itself protagonist. It is an inclusive form that presents the complex pattern of city life—its contrasting and contiguous social worlds (the ironic union of gold coast and slum, of gangland and bohemia, of Harlem and Chinatown), its multifarious scenes, its rapid tempos and changing seasons, its tenuous system of social relationships, meetings, and separations, and its total impact as a place and atmosphere upon the modern sensibility. Because it intends to be all-inclusive, the synoptic novel requires special techniques of condensation, integration, and characterization. The massive material of city life must be ordered and condensed to fit within a formal framework. Urban symbolism, used so prominently in Manhattan Transfer, is one method of condensing statement, atmosphere, and judgment. The awkwardness of Elmer Rice's Imperial City can be explained in part by his failure to develop successful methods of condensation. Unless the separate scenes and incidents of the synoptic novel are also integrated within a clearly defined formal frame, the novel will collapse into a loose series of incidents. Mood unifies Manhattan Transfer, but more important, an underlying interpretation of modern city life relates the varied incidents and characters to a unifying theme. Since the protagonist in the synoptic novel is the city itself, the technique of individual characterization raises a crucial artistic problem, for if the people do not emerge with sufficient importance and vitality, the novel loses the appeal of human drama. In Imperial City, Elmer Rice inserts biographical sketches within the narrative structure when the focus is upon the action of a particular character. But this is a crude device that results in awkward pauses within the novel and an undramatic exposition of character. Manhattan Transfer also does not successfully solve the problem of characterization, although it is the outstanding example of the synoptic city novel and of experimental technique. In its elaborate symbolism, its dissociated urban images, its dramatization of color in the cityscape, its experimentation with syncopated rhythms, and its impressionistic method, it reveals an artist's conscious effort to re-create the modern city through innovations in language and form.

The form of the city novel has important implications for the language as well as the setting. Since the ecological form limits the setting to a circumscribed and usually peculiar area, it may use this area's characteristic speech as a means of creating character and scene. The synoptic form, on the other hand, may rely heavily upon metaphor and symbol as a language that condenses description and social judgment. If in the portrait novel the hero makes a sweeping exploration of the city, a panoramic approach to setting may lead to symbolism as a technique of implicit social commentary and to the use of vulgar speech patterns as a technique for realizing atmosphere and character.

The urban setting may be created through three distinguishable elements: the physical facts of the scene (actual streets, structures, topography), the aesthetic impression that the scene makes upon a sensitive mind, and the urban atmosphere. Early writers felt called upon to give a detailed account of the physical facts—partly because they could not assume the reader's familiarity with them, partly because they themselves had only recently discovered these facts and found them exciting, partly because they felt that a literary theory of realism demanded close description, and partly because they believed it important to preserve the facts as a matter of historical record. Their difficulty layin incorporating information about the setting into the narrative structure. Usually, they relied upon exposition, which was awkwardly set apart from the narrative. Dreiser, for example, sometimes halts his story and addresses the reader directly in order to inform him about the facts of the scene. But while this intrusion of exposition is awkward, the facts are significant, for the physical scene affects the characters and produces in them attitudes and emotions that help explain their actions. Later writers have been able to incorporate facts into the structure more successfully not only because they have felt themselves less under the necessity of describing physical details but also because innovations in novelistic technique make it possible for them to project external facts through the minds of the character.

The facts themselves have changed with the historical development of the city. And the writer's response to them has also changed as he sees them from the perspective of his own time and his own personal relationship to them. The physical city of Dreiser's novels, described in expository passages, is a growing and vigorous world in which is heard constantly the noise of construction. There are grand mansions that thrill the newly arrived country youth, streaming crowds of well-dressed people who arouse their admiration and envy, tall and impressive office buildings that inspire wonder and awe. And in its very immensity the city also brings youth to a recognition of their smallness and essential helplessness in the modern world. In the beginning of Manhattan Transfer, New York is like Dreiser's Chicago a young and vigorous city with promises of a great destiny, but at the end of the novel its promise is left unfulfilled. The vision of the architects in the novel of a magnificent city of steel, concrete, and glass, beautiful in a modern way, never comes to life. New York has become a place of incessant movement, clamorous noise, stench, oppressive heat or biting wind, of dirt and garbage and grit. The physical city of Farrell's novels is a narrow and confining neighborhood far different from Dreiser's immense city of glittering contrasts. The boys play in small alleys or narrow streets, and the women live out their days in cluttered apartments. The only spot of beauty in this dismal world is a small artificial park.

When the objective scene is presented as subjective experience, it usually becomes not a statement of fact but an aesthetic impression. The setting is no longer described: it is dramatized as an inner experience. The emphasis is therefore not upon the facts of perception: it is upon the fact of perception—upon the way one sees the scene, the way it seems to be. The aesthetic impression reflects the quality of mind of the observer, whether it be the novelist or one of his characters. Because it gives a personal reaction, in which the selective element is significant, it also contains an implicit judgment. Whether one finds the city a place of beauty or ugliness, of harmony or discord, may be expressed through the selective process that determines the details of the aesthetic impression.

Like the aesthetic impression, the atmosphere realizes the setting as a physical place and comments on it. The difference in atmosphere between an early and later city novel is partly a historical one; but also it reflects a change in attitude towards the city and a change in the writer's knowledge. Dreiser saw the city as it was going through an exhilarating period of growth, and he saw it as a newcomer. In his novels the atmosphere plays an important part in a pattern of defeat: it arouses in youth hopes that are to be unrealized. His characters move in an atmosphere of vigor, strength, and excitement, and only gradually are they made aware of undercurrents of struggle and tensions in the atmosphere. When they begin to appreciate these currents, their hopes have already been doomed to defeat. Dos Passos' characters also move in an atmosphere of excitement and tension, but it is one that has lost its power to inspire dreams. The contrast between the atmosphere of Dreiser's city and that of Farrell's is a sharp and significant one. Farrell's young men do not step out into a city whose vigorous mood stimulates and excites them; they live in an atmosphere of stagnation in which are hidden currents of brutality. The city that inspired in characters like Carrie, Eugene Witla, or Cowperwood enthusiasm and a vast eagerness to live has now become a place that makes the young people weary with the emptiness of time.

In giving expression to the city as a place and a way of life, city novelists have been concerned with the development of an idiom appropriate to their material. Because the world they deal with is a mechanized world of manmade structures, a language that draws heavily upon metaphors and symbols taken from nature seems incongruous and outmoded. Rather, the city itself has provided a vocabulary for the urban novel. While early novels like Sister Carrie, A Life for a Life, and The Voice of the Street employed urban symbols, the need for an appropriate idiom was not explicitly discussed. But a more recent novelist like Farrell, who has become fully aware of his role as city novelist, has pointed out in critical writings the need for a metaphorical and symbolic language derived from the facts of modern urban life. In a review of Edward Dahlberg's novel Those Who Perish, he wrote:

.. . an author does not pick his images out of a grab bag, but rather they grow out of his own background and changing experiences. .. . it is apparent that romantic literary conventions have already passed their efflorescence and that they reflect an ideology of dualism completely dead and antiquated for many of us.

Contemporary American writers, in many cases, I believe, have . . . perceived this fact about the use of romantic symbolisms. Many of them are the products of urban life. In their immediate sensory experiences they have been most affected by the sights, sounds, odors, and objects of an industrial city. In their first stages of reading particularly, they have absorbed much of the romantic poets, and in their early writing there has been some imitation of the romantics. Generally speaking, the charms and attractions of nature have been peripheral if not non-existent in their lives. Hence they often have sensed a dichotomy between the objects and sensations they have sought to describe and the language and symbolism they have inherited.¹⁴

Perhaps one of the most conscious experimenters with urban imagery is Dos Passos in Manhattan Transfer. His use of the dissociated or fragmentalized image is particularly effective in creating the sense of rapid movement within the city, while it suggests also a peculiarly modern kind of perception. In very recent fiction, the most evocative and stirring use of urban imagery has been made by Nelson Algren.

Urban symbolism equates physical elements in the setting with social or psychological characteristics of city life. The symbol not only suggests an interpretation of urban society but it usually contains an implicit moral judgment. Thus, symbolism is one of the city novelist's means of introducing his evaluation of modern life without, however, intruding himself as direct commentator. Early novels which use urban characters as symbols are H. B. Fuller's The Cliff-Dwellers and Ernest Poole's The Voice of the Street. In the former, the elusive figure of a beautiful pampered wife of a Chicago titan symbolizes the materialistic impulse within competitive Chicago, as well as the injustices and social inanities that result from this materialism. In The Voice of the Street, the hero, who might be taken for a kind of urban "Everyman," vacillates between two characters, who together personify the dual forces of good and evil in the city. Herrick's A Life for a Life makes a simple linear equation between a huge glittering sign that says "Success" and the materialistic and competitive drives within urban society. Beneath the sign there takes place an accident which indicates the high human cost of success. As in Manhattan Transfer, fire is symbolic of the destructive element in modern life. Dreiser made most effective symbolic use of fashion: in a society where people were anonymities, the outward signs of dress became a kind of symbolic language that communicated one's social and economic position. Perhaps no writer translated the facts of city life into symbolic gestures as much as Thomas Wolfe, although his symbolism was not always conscious and controlled; and perhaps no writer has so consciously controlled his urban symbols as John Dos Passos in Manhattan Transfer. In Meyer Levin's The Old Bunch, the Chicago World's Fair becomes an interesting symbolic counterpart to the city itself: its flimsy façades and glittering spectacles are destroyed in a final collapse, just as, Levin implies, the false values and deceptive foundations of urban society are also doomed to destruction. These are only a few examples of how the city novelist has assimilated the physical facts of the urban setting into his language.

Another development has been the use of vulgar city speech as a medium for creating character and scene. This development can be explained in part as the result of a shift in narrative point of view. When the early novelist like Dreiser or Herrick put himself in the position of omniscient author, he spoke in his own language. Dreiser characteristically shifted from a most extravagant romantic idiom to journalese and to scientific jargon. This was his own vocabulary. But once the writer projected the scene from within the consciousness of his characters, he began to employ their speech patterns, intonations, and rhythms. Particularly in the ecological novel, an idiosyncratic language—whether that of the Chicago Irish or the New York East Side Jews—has been an aesthetic medium. The effectiveness of this language depends upon the novelist's ability to make it a revelation of a state of mind and a way of life; and contrary to common critical opinion, this is the achievement of Farrell's language—it creates and comments upon the South Side and its people.

Twentieth-century life has thrust upon the modern artist certain obsessive concerns—to name some, a concern over man's aloneness and alienation, over the collapse of his community and the breakdown of tradition, the ineffectuality of love and religion, the impact of mechanization, the materialism of modern life, and the conflict between artist and society. These are the themes of modern art; they are also the themes of city fiction. Because the modern American city abstracts and concentrates the social forces that have given the artist his themes, the city novel can develop and project these themes against the background that most clearly illuminates their social origins and implications. The modern experience of alienation and aloneness is thus related to a breakdown of tradition and community nowhere so striking and definitive as in the city. The materialistic temper of the age, as well as the mechanistic basis of our modern way of life, is also most intensely expressed in the city. And the tempo and tensions of the twentieth-century world of speed and hectic amusement are revealed in the rhythms and pace of big city life. In the same way that the city epitomizes the twentieth century, city fiction focalizes the main themes of twentieth-century literature.

The comprehensive theme of city fiction is personal dissociation: the prototype for the hero is the self-divided man. Dissociation is a pathological symptom which results from, and reflects, a larger social disorder. The dissociated person has not found a way to integrate motive and act and so to organize his life's activities towards a continuous and progressive fulfillment of his desires. In contrast to inhibition, which implies coercive pressures from an organized society, dissociation arises mainly because of a lack of social unanimity: the community has failed to provide a cohesive tradition that can guide the individual in his choice of goals and moral alternatives. Dissociation is also distinguishable from frustration. One experiences frustration when he is prevented from attaining his goal; but one is dissociated when he cannot even clearly define what his goal is.

In Manhattan Transfer, Jimmy Herf articulates most clearly the confused and indecisive feelings of personal dissociation. He is discussing his failure to achieve fulfillment with his friend Stan Emery (who expresses his own inner dissociation by seeking escape from reality in alcohol):

"The trouble with me [Jimmy says] is I cant decide what I want most, so my motion is circular, helpless and confoundedly discouraging."

"Oh but God decided that for you. You know all the time but you wont admit it to yourself."

"I imagine what I want most is to get out of this town [New York] preferably first setting off a bomb under the Times Building."

"Well why don't you do it? It's just one foot after another."

"But you have to know which direction to step. "¹⁵

In Dreiser's characters, desire is urgent and intense, but dissociation manifests itself because the character does not really understand the nature of his desire—and consequently, he seldom makes the right decision for his own happiness. With Carrie, for example, desire and action remain essentially unintegrated: while she really wants beauty, she acts to attain only its false appearances in fashion and fame. And her dream of personal happiness and fulfillment remains as elusive at the end of the novel as it was at the beginning.

The irony, pathos, and tragedy of city fiction lie in the fact of dissociation. Ironically, the city novel shows that the chaotic conditions of urban society create man's intense need for conscious self-integration while they also constitute the obstacles to personal fulfillment. Thus, from Sister Carrie, the first city novel of the century, to such recent works as Nelson Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm, city fiction has portrayed man searching for a complete self in an urban world where personal integration or completeness seems to have become impossible. The pathos and tragedy of urban fiction lie in the inner defeat that man suffers as he becomes self-divided and perhaps even self-destructive. The "stranger motif is another expression of the pathetic and tragic implications of dissociation. The characters in urban fiction typically feel that they are strangers moving in an alien world. Their subjective experience is one of loss and confusion: they feel as though they have lost hold of their identity, that they have failed to define and objectify themselves, and that any course of action may involve them in serious self-contradictions, if not indeed in selfdestruction. The failure of personal love is both cause and consequence of an inner dissociation. As Sherwood Anderson tried to show, an incomplete man cannot love; and a man who cannot objectify himself through relationships of love cannot be sure of the reality of his identity. If the failure to conciliate motive, perceptions, and acts is final, defeat is inevitable. But if a character recognizes the cause of his floundering, he may decide upon some course of action. Like Jimmy Herf in Manhattan Transfer, he may leave the city for an unknown destination, or, like Farrell's Danny O'Neill, he may dedicate himself to the task of changing society.

In Tess Slesinger's The Unpossessed, another aspect of dissociation is very specifically revealed, and that is its relationship to a new kind of personal freedom, the freedom that results from the collapse of binding social conventions. It is partly because the individual is free—free, it seems, from coercive moral restraints, from clearly defined social responsibilities, from the forces of convention and the ties to family and community—that he suffers inner confusions and feels himself somehow lost in a social void. The heroine of The Unpossessed, the modern liberated woman, articulates her feelings of isolation, impotence, and sterility in an interior monologue, and significantly, she ties these together with her sense of personal freedom. She recalls that when she separated from her lover, "We wept because we could not weep, we wept because we could not love, we wept because . . . we care about nothing, believe in nothing, live for nothing, because we are free, free, free, like empty sailboats lost at sea."¹⁶

Although dissociation takes form as a personal failure, it has been related in both literary and sociological pictures of the city to the social context of urbanism as a way of life. This relationship between personal and social systems of disorder is expressed in the formal terms of the novel as an interaction between character and setting or milieu. It is expressed in other terms in a sociological theory of urbanism that defines the collective characteristics of the city as a way of life and describes their personal consequences for the individual. While the sociology of city life cannot validate the art of the city novel, it can illuminate the social backgrounds with which the novel is concerned and out of which it has emerged. Because the actualities of city life have shaped the city novelist's vision of life and given him the material, themes, symbols, setting, and language of his art, an understanding of the modern city's essential characteristics can further our understanding of the city novel. The following chapter gives a selective summary of these characteristics as they have been formulated and systematized in the sociological theory of urbanism.

¹ Ben Hecht, A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago (New York, Covici-Friede, 1922), 286.

² Robert Herrick, A Life for a Life (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1910), 44.

³ O. Henry, "The Defeat of the City," The Voice of the City (Garden City, New York, Doubleday, Page and Company, 1919), 85-94.

⁴ Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880's (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1950), 62.

⁵ O. Henry, "The Defeat of the City," The Voice of the City, 85.

⁶ James T. Farrell, No Star Is Lost (Cleveland, World Publishing Company, 1947 reprint), 602, 627.

⁷ Dorothy Richardson, The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl as Told By Herself (New York, The Century Company, 1905).

⁸ Theodore Dreiser, A Book About Myself (New York, Boni and Liveright, 1922), 449.

⁹ Theodore Dreiser, Preface to Edward McDonald, A Bibliography of the Writings of Theodore Dreiser (Philadelphia, Centaur Book Shop, 1928), 12.

¹⁰ James T. Farrell, A Note on Literary Criticism (New York, Vanguard Press, 1936), 11.

¹¹Ibid., 177.

¹² See Granville Hicks, The Great Tradition (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1935).

¹³ See Mark Schorer, "Technique as Discovery," Forms of Modern Fiction (ed. by William Van O'Connor, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1948), 283-300.

¹⁴ James T. Farrell, "In Search of an Image," The League of Frightened Philistines (New York, Vanguard Press, 1945), 156f.

¹⁵ John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (New York and London, Harper and Brothers, 1925), 176. Italics mine.

¹⁶ Tess Slesinger, The Unpossessed (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1934), 136.