Fiction With an Urban Theme
GIVENS, SEON
Fiction With an Urban Theme The American City Novel. By Blanche Housman Gelfant. Oklahoma. 289 pp. $4.00. Reviewed by Seon Givens Editor, "James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism" The American...
...Gelfant finds that American writers have used the material which the city offered them in different ways...
...Gelfant also explores the synoptic city novel...
...It was possible to project upon the heartless, bloodless steel and concrete all the confusion and bewilderment which beset mankind...
...Gelfant, a novelist of manners...
...Instead, she has tried to evaluate in each instance why an author chose to write the way he did...
...The portrait novel is concerned with one principal character, and it is through his eyes that the city is revealed to us...
...Mrs...
...a city block, an apartment house, or, as in the case of its greatest exemplifier...
...The different mores of country and city, the anguished absorption of mechanization into our cultural pattern, the recognition (so pronounced in city living) of the individual's aloneness which can so easily pass into alienation...
...I can scarcely find it in my own soul now...
...He wrote in Dawn: "The city of which I sing was not of land or sea, or any time or place...
...As a man of 60, Dreiser realized this...
...One might call this approach, James Joyce permitting, "a portrait of the city as a young man...
...through the work of John Dos Passos...
...Neither New York nor Chicago has acquired those multiple associations of time and history which once made London and Paris literary capitals, but in the very anonymity, confusion and hustle of American urban life there germinated a new and very personal relationship of the writer to the city, and the city, in turn, to the novel...
...His characters are the most real of the human beings in city fiction, "precisely because they have absorbed the outer world into their consciousness and are making constant responses to what's immediately outside them...
...The colors, sounds, the entire mosaic of the city must be presented as an organic whole...
...Gelfant's book is refreshing in its critical approach...
...all these made the idea of the city a worthy theme...
...Gelfant, in her admirable study of the city novel as a literary genre, explores these relationships with remarkable insight and critical judgment...
...a "novel without a hero, which reveals the total city immediately as a personality in itself...
...Look for it in vain...
...However, it would appear that none of the contemporary novels speak successfully for all of us...
...being best for him, best for the work of art which he produced...
...Two new ingredients have been added...
...Fifty years after the publication of Dreiser's Sister Carrie, the city novel is still in existence...
...Urban themes were not new to American writers when Theodore Dreiser, a hopeful, romantic and ambitious young man, stormed Chicago, subscribing to the great American dream (as did so many of his generation) that the city symbolized success...
...Reviewed by Seon Givens Editor, "James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism" The American city has exercised a power, a significance, a thematic challenge which has had a marked influence upon American literature from Theodore Dreiser to our present-day literary aspirants typing away in the summer night, heard if not known...
...Technique becomes more important than plot, and, in Dos Passos's hands, a vehicle of social commentary...
...The cultural phenomenon of the city has become absorbed into our way of life, the conflicts reconciled, the theme less inviting for the deep expression of universal emotions...
...The hope, the disillusionment and the inevitable rejection which Dreiser experienced made him almost a spokesman for a period of American history, as well as a figure in American literature...
...Mrs...
...The "ecological" novel concerns itself with a spatial unit...
...Gelfant finds sentiment, summarized by Betty Smith's title Tomorrow Will Be Better, and violence, as found in Willard Motley's Knock on Any Door, the new elements in an old tradition...
...The first she defines as the "portrait" approach, used to the full by Dreiser, but employed also by Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe and, in her own way, Edith Wharton...
...James T. Farrell, a neighborhood...
...Mrs...
...why it was best for his purposes and...
...Farrell's complete immersion in a particularized locale, the South Side of Chicago, makes him, says Mrs...
...She has not tried to belabor the authors she is discussing, nor does she dwell upon the limitations of their various approaches to the novel...
Vol. 37 • June 1954 • No. 26
