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COPYRIGHT 2006 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
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)
In contrast, in this essay I analyze Roth's turn to the European modernists in order to pursue a specifically American inquiry: the future of democracy in a society increasingly marked by the discontinuities of modern life. Roth's treatment of this problem in his 1934 novel follows a long-standing tradition in American thought. In the introduction to his Drift and Mastery, Lippmann, too, identified democracy as the fundamental problem driving his social analysis. He described his book as "an attempt to diagnose the current unrest and to arrive at some sense of what democracy implies" (xxiv). For Lippmann the question of democracy repeatedly centered on the issue of interpersonal relationships in the city. The problem, as he saw it, was that "We live in great cities without knowing our neighbors, the loyalties of place have broken down, and our associations are stretched over large territories, cemented by very little direct contact" (153-54). Even though in his book Lippmann does not evoke the American tradition of democratic thought, his writing echoes the connections Walt Whitman claimed as essential to the mechanism of democracy. In Democratic Vistas (1871), his longest sustained prose exploration of democracy, Whitman recognized "individuality, the pride and centripetal isolation of a human being in himself--identity--personalism" and "the mass, or lump character," the "unyielding principle of the average," as the two great principles of democracy (38,16). Whitman argued that only "intense and loving comradeship, the personal and passionate attachment of man to man" could transform the contradiction between these forces into "the most substantial hope and safety of the future of these States" (67). What Whitman variously called "adhesive love" or "fervid comradeship" was to assure that democracy's inclination towards unification would not erase the singularity of its individual members (67). But if, as Lippmann suggested, modern life obliterated personal contact, what was to guarantee the individual's recognition in early-twentieth-century America?
Although it did not provide definitive answers, John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems (1927) reiterated the importance of this question. Like Whitman, Dewey recognized the connection between an individual and a sustaining community. Dewey argued:
Liberty is that secure release and fulfillment of personal potentialities which take place only in rich and manifold association with others: the power to be an individualized self making a distinctive contribution and enjoying in its own way the fruits of association. (150)
Like Lippmann, Dewey saw communal life disappear in modernity, and yet continued to assert that democracy must be based on local, face-to-face relationships. But, as Lippmann had already pointed out more than a decade earlier, "I might possibly treat my neighbor as myself, but in this vast modern world the greatest problem that confronts me is to find my neighbor and treat him at all" (36-37). Even in Dewey's thoughtful analysis, the future of American democracy in modernity remained uncertain.
Roth raises the central question of democracy in the opening pages of Call It Sleep. The prologue begins with a detailed description of all the immigrants who have taken the Schearls' route from Ellis Island to Manhattan on the day with which the narrative starts. Given the ominous prediction of their future status as "foreigners," the portrayal of the newcomers reveals a surprisingly joyful, Whitmanesque affirmation of individual difference (9). The narrator echoes Whitman's celebratory catalogs in three consecutive sentences, each of which begins with "All that day" or "All day," as if to emphasize the breadth of the ensuing picture. The first sentence describes bemusedly the nationalities of the new arrivals, the second their varied attire, while the third catalogs their awed utterances on approaching their new home. And even if this motley crowd does not constitute a community, its "reiterations of gladness" entail the possibility of forging attachment through common expectations and goals (9-10). As soon as the narrator focuses on a single family, however, the spirit of shared gladness disappears. For Genya, Albert, and their son David, life in America means unpredictable and threatening change. Albert copes with modernity's fearful forces by trying to hide "behind a cripple or a drunkard or any other kind of freakish person.... He wants people on the street to look at someone else" (42).
This essay argues that Roth resolves the conflict between the leveling forces of modern life and the individualistic impulse of American democracy in the novel's ending. I show that in order to portray the conditions for the kind of "local community" Dewey discerned as the basis of democracy (213), Roth needed a model other than Whitman's all-encompassing vision. To that end, in the last chapters of Call It Sleep Roth employs some of Joyce's modernist techniques of narration and style. This borrowing enables Roth to privilege hearing as capable of compensating for vision's inevitable shortcomings in modernity. The vocal crowd of strangers that emerges at the end of the book reveals the possibility for union through recognition of individual difference, what Dewey called democratic equality: "It denotes effective regard for whatever is distinctive and unique in each, irrespective of physical and psychological inequalities" (Public, 151). In their shared sympathy for David Schearl, the urbanites in Roth's Lower East Side become a life-giving community of strangers, thereby affirming the modern city's democratic potential.
Although after the prologue the Schearls' narrative unfolds entirely within the urban context of New York City, it is not until the novel's end that Roth uses the formal...
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