"Oy, a good men!": Urban voices and democracy in Henry Roth's Call It Sleep.(Critical essay)

Even before the start of World War I, Walter Lippmann had already announced that "the world has been altered radically" (9). Lippmann's assertion rested on the tremendous changes he observed everywhere in his American context. In his book Drift and Mastery (1914), he repeatedly emphasized both the scope and the irreversible character of what he called "the obvious drift of our time":

 
  We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. There isn't a human 
  relation ... that doesn't move in a strange direction. We are not used 
  to a complicated civilization, we don't know how to behave when 
  personal contact and eternal authority have disappeared. (xxiv, 
  152-53) 

The dislocation and the discontinuity that Lippmann perceived at the core of his altered world constitute what we have come to identify as the experience of modernity. For Lippmann, writing in early-twentieth-century America, this experience had everything to do with the country's fast urbanization as a result of its industrialization and of the single largest wave of immigrants in its history.

Opening in "May of the year 1907, the year that was destined to bring the greatest number of immigrants to the shores of the United States," Henry Roth's novel Call It Sleep (1934) locates its characters within the changes that Lippmann discerned at the center of the new, complicated reality. The multiple transitions detailed by the narrator-from "almost every land in the world," where the immigrants were natives, to the American shores, where they will be "foreigners"; from Ellis Island to Manhattan; from "the stench and throb of the steerage to the stench and throb of New York tenements"-reveal mobility and displacement as definitive of those caught up in them. The sense of drift and uncertainty plagues the Schearls, the immigrant Jewish family on whose reunion the prologue eventually focuses and whose American lives the rest of the book follows. That Genya and Albert Schearl suffer modernity's disintegrating forces becomes clear in the silence of Albert's anger at Genya's failure to recognize him. Her explanation--"You've changed"--suggests that both of them live in a world in which people feel unanchored and lost (12). (1) Or, as Albert explains, "I think when you come out of a house and step on the bare earth among the fields you're the same man you were when you were inside the house. But when you step out on pavements, you're someone else. You can feel your face change" (31-32). Albert's feeling of dissolution in the city characterizes the experience of the Schearls throughout most of the novel: for them New York is a frightening, inhospitable, and even dangerous place.

Roth's portrayal of the city thus seems to fit neatly within the urban vision traditionally ascribed to the literary modernists. After all, in the year following the publication of his own mythical The Waste Land and of James Joyce's Ulysses, T. S. Eliot announced that Joyce had used myth in Ulysses as "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history" (Ulysses, 177). For Eliot this futility was most evident in the modern city. It is not surprising, then, that critical readings of Roth's portrayal of the broader historical reality in his urban novel have tended to conclude that Call It Sleep reveals "contemporary sterility and debasement in general," which Roth artistically transcends through the use of myth (Lyons, Henry Roth, 99).(2) Similarly, interpretations of the novelist's engagement with his modernist predecessors have followed closely Eliot's reading of Ulysses. For example, in his essay "The Many Myths of Henry Roth," Leslie Fiedler claims that the novel's penultimate chapter, "(reminiscent of the Nighttown episode in Ulysses and the second canto of The Waste Land) dissolves into a cacophony of disembodied voices, clearly symbolizing the 'futility and anarchy' of modern life which only myth can order and control."(3) This now conventional understanding of Roth's response to the modernist moment has even prompted some of his readers to revisit standard definitions of literary modernism.(4)