“[T]he tremendous claustrophobia of the city is designed to hide what the city really does, which is to divorce us from a sense of reality and to divorce us from each other.”(James Baldwin) Both Paul Auster’s City of Glass and James Leo Herlihy’s Midnight Cowboy consider the impact that

New York City can have upon its inhabitants. However, neither text supports the idea that claustrophobia is a design tool that has been carefully incorporated by town planners to hide what the city really does, as if it is a conspiracy. It may be that claustrophobic conditions are a factor in the effects of city life that

Baldwin put forwards in his argument; but neither text goes as far as to say it is a deliberate cloaking device. Both texts do however dwell on the living conditions and environment of the

New York City dweller: apartments, X-flats, alleys and streets, which by their nature may be claustrophobic for some. The texts, in different ways, support the idea that “cities divorce us from a sense of reality and…each other.” (

Baldwin) These ideas: loss of identity, isolation, environment and the perception of reality will be critically considered in the two texts under consideration. Auster has as his main character a private investigator who experiences a metamorphosis as a consequence of a misdialled telephone number, the action in the novel begins and ends in

New York. Herlihy on the other hand uses the cliché of a young character leaving home to find a better life in the city, Gelfant (1970) describes this as a “portrait study” (Gelfant 1970 11). Herlihy subtly distorts the cliché by making Joe Buck leave Houston, which is of course a city, to journey across America to exercise his sexual prowess in

New York and make money from doing so. In this way the naiveté, that is part of the clichéd country boy being tricked and conned in the city, is exchanged for the naiveté of a cowboy, which is of course symbolic of the masculinity and power of American men. He uses the iconography of the Wild West cowboy to reveal the power of New York to change the identity of Joe Buck and so transform him from a naïve sexual predator to a male prostitute and eventually to a caring individual who leaves

New York City. Auster uses another icon to achieve a similar impact, that of the private investigator. City of Glass charts the gradual loss of identity that Daniel Quinn experiences in a postmodern city, which Auster represents

New York City as being.

Part one of Midnight Cowboy introduces Joe Buck and provides details, by way of flashback, of his early life and his maturity into a libidinous cowboy. He is brought up by three women: ‘He had been raised by various blondes, one of whom was his real Mother. The first three, who brought him up to the age of seven, were young and pretty’ (Herlihy 1965 12) Joe did not distinguish between the three women “never certain which of them was which.” (Herlihy 1965 12). Joe does not have much in the way of male influence in his early life, and then without warning he is given into the care of Sally Buck, his grandmother, who worked long hours and left him in the care of “various cleaning women.” (Herlihy 1965 14). Sally had many “beaus” who “were ranchers who wore Western hats.” (Herlihy 14 1965). Most of them ignored Joe but one, Woodsy Niles, “taught him how to ride and a little of what Joe came to believe being a man was all about. However, like Sally’s other beaus he left “and Joe was left to pine for him as for a gone away father.” (Herlihy 1965 15). The text is making the point that a boy needs a male role model and if there is not a Father around then a boy will mimic whatever male gains his affection or respect and mimic that person: ‘But surely it was in this time of Woodsy Niles that Joe had begun to see himself as some sort of cowboy’ (Herlihy 1965 15) In contrast we learn nothing of Daniel Quinn’s early life. On the first page the text erroneously dismisses its relevance: ‘As for Quinn, there is little that need detain us. Who he was, where he came from, and what he did are of no great importance.’ (Auster 1985 1). Quinn did have a wife and son who are now both dead. The main protagonists of each text have experienced the loss of family, as has Rico Rizzo. Auster by avoiding any back story concerning Quinn focuses on the effect

New York City has upon his identity. In doing so he examines, with the use of many literary references, the fragility of identity within a postmodern environment and so supports

Baldwin’s thesis. However to do so is in itself a divorce from reality: As Herlihy rightly observes, in the metaphor of the cowboy, childhood experience shapes the person. Joe Buck’s arrival in New York, from

Houston Texas, dressed as a cowboy demonstrates his naivety. He wanders about the city looking for a woman who will pay him to have sex with her. The first lady he encounters turns him down. The second then demands and receives payment from Joe in return for having sex with him. It is at this point in the text that Joe realizes he needs help:

‘He had to have some advice, that was all there was to it. The thought became an obsession: He wouldn’t do another thing in town until he’d found someone who knew the ropes and could give him some advice.’ (Herlihy 1965 119) As Oliver Twist had the Artful Dodger so Joe eventually meets Rico Rizzo. However, like Quinn, at this point Joe is living in

New York amongst millions of people, who are crowded into high rise flats and offices, but he is completely isolated. The chance meeting that Joe has with Rizzo is a turning point in Joe’s life. The same device is used by Auster in the very first sentence of the text, but the chance meeting is replaced by a chance telephone call: ‘It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and a voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.’(Auster 1985 1)

Quinn writes detective fiction as Max Work, he has no friends and only works for six months of the year. The blurring of identity, that is so fundamental to postmodern literature, begins with the use of a pseudonym to publish his books. This is highlighted when Daniel Quinn pretends to be Paul Auster and believes he is accepting an assignment from the wife of Peter Stillman. This split personality that develops, echoing works like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, is almost the sine qua non of what is now a clichéd postmodern device. This idea is again explored when Quinn goes to Grand Central Station. Quinn arrives early in order “to study the geography of the place,” (Auster 1985 50). The station is crowded and Quinn observes that Stillman could disappear “without much trouble” (Auster 1985 50). It is in this scene at the railway station, in a confined space amongst “the press of oncoming bodies” (Auster 1985 50) that the text explores the claustrophobic effect of crowds upon identity but not the idea that it is concealing a deeper, more malevolent purpose as

Baldwin argues. As the scene continues Quinn recognizes Stillman from an old photograph. However this recognition is then blurred as he spots another man who has a face that “was the exact twin of Stillman’s.” (Auster 1985 56) He cannot be sure he is following the correct person but makes a choice and follows the less affluent appearing Stillman.

He follows him around New York, making a map of his walks and seeks to divine meaning from them; there is a possible reference to The Tower of Babel and the text here is considering the idea of De Carteau (1988) that walking is itself like language and that the way a person walks and where that person walks has meaning, that the city is defined by the places that people go. Auster appears to discard this idea when it transpires that the person in question has a fascination with eggs and is possibly insane. After three meetings with Stillman, at which Quinn is disguised, he discovers that Stillman has disappeared. The power of the city to engulf identity and, as

Baldwin argues, “divorce us from a sense of reality and to divorce us from each other”, is confirmed by Quinn’s symbolic use of disguise to change identities and by the text when Stillman vanishes:

‘Stillman had gone now. The old man had become part of the city. He was a speck, a punctuation mark, a brick in an endless wall of bricks. Quinn could walk through the streets every day for the rest of his life, and still he would not find him. Everything had been reduced to chance, a nightmare of numbers and probabilities. There were no clues, no leads, no moves to be made.’

(Auster 1985 91)

The contrast between the indoor life of Daniel Quinn, as Max Work, and the real life of a detective as Paul Auster is shown here. Detectives solve mysteries; they follow leads, examine clues and interpret events and the actions of people to provide meaning. The failure of Quinn to find any real meaning in the case undermines his sense of identity and reality. From this point in the text his identity begins to unravel. Quinn believed that he “could return to being Quinn whenever he wished” (Auster 1985 62). He stakes out Stillman Junior’s apartment, hiding and sleeping up an alley. He is completely isolated; upon leaving the alley one day, to obtain money, he sees himself in a mirror and does not recognize the reflection:

‘He did not recognize the person he saw there as himself…He tried to remember himself as he had been before, but he found it difficult.’ (Auster 1985 142)

The text is overtly saying that the claustrophobic conditions within which Quinn was living in the alley divorced him from all sense of reality. He has become like the homeless people he had observed in the city:

‘The transformation in his appearance had been so drastic that he could not help but be fascinated by it. He had turned into a bum.’ (Auster 1985 121)

The city and its claustrophobic environment removes all sense of reality and so identity and leads to isolation for Quinn. This is confirmed when upon returning to his apartment he finds it is no longer his home: he has nowhere to return to:

‘He had come to the end of himself. He could feel it now, as though a great truth had finally dawned in him. There was nothing left.’ (Auster 1985 126).

At the end of the novel the narrator states that “It is impossible for me to say where he is now.” (Auster 1985 133)

The self conscious cleverness of Auster’s style in City of

Glass, analyzed in depth by William Lavendar (1993) and exemplified by the many literary references, changing points of view, character, plot and resolution create the atmosphere of a gradual drift away from reality and the blurring of boundaries between reality and fiction. The text is a critique of

New York City as an environment and what is, for Auster, the destructive power a postmodern city has on the psyche. The text is a strong supporting argument for

Baldwin’s hypothesis. But the failure to engage with the fundamentals of childhood experience to shape identity, first advanced by Freud, undermines its power.

In contrast Midnight Cowboy is an examination of both childhood influence and environment. Joe Buck’s identity as a cowboy is derived from Woodsy Niles, not the women who brought him up or the city of

Houston. It is this cowboy identity that unravels when he arrives in

New York City. However it is not Joe Buck who so much loses an identity as develops one. He eventually sheds his cowboy image after he befriends the crippled Rico Rizzo.

Baldwin’s argument is not supported here; Joe Buck and Rico Rizzo know who they are and what they want. They are not divorced from each other but friends and this is a direct result of them both being in

New York City.

The text emphasizes Rizzo’s childhood experiences; he, like Joe Buck, has also lost his Father and family but it is the deterioration in his health that is caused by

New York City. Joe Buck’s identity develops from “Never having had a friendship of his own,” (Herlihy 1965 20) to having a caring friendship with Rizzo. He learns from Rizzo the ways of

New York City, regarding Rizzo as “someone who new the ropes” (Herlihy 1965 119). But as Joe Buck is shown the ropes he recognizes the destructive power of

New York City, and here there is a parallel with City of Glass, if one equates the plight of the homeless with the desperation of the sex trade. After his only success as a gigolo:

‘He saw himself being drained and robbed and swindled in a thousand impossible ways: Every smile cost him some ungodly sum, and every time he nodded in assent to a stranger, a vital substance was extracted from him. If a clock ticked or a breeze blew or a wheel turned in his presence, within range of his senses, it seemed somehow to have stolen his energy to fuel itself.’ (Herlihy, 1965, 203)

Joe realizes, when referring to the clock and wheel, that the city is draining him of life. Rizzo’s health deteriorates to the point at which he may be unable to walk. The unforgiving nature of

New York City and the seeming indifference of the population to his plight are shown by the text when Rizzo tells Joe he is scared and asks him:

‘I mean what do they uh, you know – do with you – if you can’t, uh..Agh, shit!’ (Herlihy, 1965, 209)

The answer is implied as nothing. So Rizzo changes from confident street-smart trickster to being unable to walk at all and scared. On the bus to Florida Joe realizes he cannot live like Rizzo, he must get a job. He confirms his rejection of the cowboy, saying he wants:

‘…a change of shoes!’ Cause I am so sick o’ lookin’ at these goddam boots. I am! I’m gonna throw ‘em in the ocean! Watch me. I want ever’thing new.’ (Herlihy, 1965, 246)

Rizzo’s death, symbolizes the death of

New York City life for Joe and his continued search for meaning.

Baldwin’s argument that the city divorces us from reality and each other is not supported by Midnight Cowboy. Joe learns from Rizzo, who symbolizes New York City, the value of companionship, trust and loyalty; that

New York City can be a hostile environment in which identity and self-belief are “drained”. By contrast Auster in City of

Glass is overtly making the postmodern point that reality and fiction become blurred in a city and it is this that divorced Daniel Quinn/Max Work/Paul Auster from reality and everyone else.

2000

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New York Trilogy. Contemporary Literature Vol. 36, No. 4. (Winter, 1995): 613-32.

Auster, P. (1985). City of Glass,

London: Faber & Faber Ltd.

Baudrillard, J.(1994) Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor:

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Bernstein,S. (1990). “‘The Question is the Story itself’: Postmodernism and Intertextuality in Auster’s New York Trilogy. Merivale and Sweeney, 134-153.De Certeau, M. (1988) The Practice of Everyday Life. (Trans. Steven Rendall.) Berkely:

University of

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American

City Novel.

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Oaklahoma Press: Oaklahoma

Herlihy, J. L. (1965). Midnight Cowboy,

London: Scribner

Lavender,W. The Novel of Critical Engagement: Paul Auster’s “City of

Glass”

Contemporary Literature, Vol. 34, No. 2. (Summer, 1993), pp. 219-239. Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholsan-Smith. Oxford and

Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Little, G. Nothing to Go on: Paul Auster’s “City of

Glass” Contemporary Literature, Vol. 38, No. 1. (Spring, 1997), pp. 133-163. McCaffery, L. & Gregory, S. An Interview with Paul Auster Contemporary Literature, Vol. 33, No. 1. (Spring, 1992), pp. 1-23.

Solnit, R. (2000) Wanderlust: A History of Walking.

New York: Penguin.

http://reconstruction.eserver.org/023/swope.htm accessed 28.08.07

This essay will critically examine the ways in which the urban environment
in The Jungle represents the collapse of traditional values and its
effect on the individual. In so doing it will be demonstrated that the novel
contains a political message that advocates a socialist solution to the social
problems highlighted and exposed by the text, in the first decade of twentieth
century Chicago. The disintegration of the central characters, Jurgis and his
family symbolise the destructive power of capitalism. The novel concludes with
Jurgis discovering socialism and emerging from a corrupt and criminal lifestyle
that the city, and its representatives, in the form of police, politicians,
employers and criminals, has driven him to. There are many tragic deaths in
the text but it is not a tragedy in the strict literary sense, as Jurgis, the
hero, does not die. The text explores the injustices endured by immigrants
to America, they were routinely exploited: in terms of pay and housing, which
are described in detail by Jon Yoder (Yoder, 1975).
An urban environment, for the purposes of this essay, is a man made environment,
in which people live in pre-built housing, sharing utilities such as water,
roads, police, courts and electrical power. Typically, the inhabitants will
eat processed, pre-packaged or precooked food. Upton Sinclair used the Packingtown
Meat Factory as a metaphor for urban society and the pig as the inhabitants.
He shows how the pig descends through the plant all of it had been rendered,
even bad meat being used and sold. In chapter fourteen we are told of “…..that
old Packingtown jest–that they use everything of the pig except the squeal.” (Sinclair,
1906, p.42). The pigs, like the immigrant workers of Chicago, are cruelly treated
and exploited by the owners, who are capitalists. Food is fundamental to the
human condition; Sinclair was astute in his choice of metaphor, the book caused
such an outcry from the public that the Department of Food and Drugs Administration resulted,
and laws passed, regulating the food industry as a direct result. President
Roosvelt described Sinclair as a ‘muckraker’, a term he used to
describe journalists that exposed malpractice. There are many examples
of similes and metaphorical references throughout the text, notably the foundry
described in such a way as to portray it as akin to Dante’s Inferno,
a hot unnatural, hostile and dangerous environment for men and women. Ironically,
men compete with each other for an opportunity to work in bad conditions for
very low pay: the owners and capitalism are at fault for exploiting the workers.
The novel’s title reflects the negative representation of the urban setting
as a jungle; the metaphor is reinforced constantly throughout the text and
Chicago is further described as:
a city in which justice and honor, women’s bodies and men’s souls, were for
sale in the marketplace, and human beings writhed and fought and fell upon
each other like wolves in a pit, in which lusts were raging fires, and men
were fuel, and humanity was festering and stewing and wallowing in its own
corruption….a wild beast tangle. (p. 198)
The text implies that greed, envy and a ruthless competitiveness are the conditions
in which unfettered capitalism thrives and a place in which money is all-powerful.
Chicago is a jungle the guiding Darwinian rule: it is the survival of the fittest.
The meatpacking plant is “a seething cauldron of jealousies and hatreds;
there was no loyalty or decency anywhere about it, there was no place in it
where a man counted for anything against a dollar.” (p. 74) In chapter
fifteen, Ona has the “eye of a hunted animal,” (p. 170) and Jurgis
pants “like a wounded bull.” (p. 182) finds Connor, his wife’s
rapist, “this great beast.” (p. 182). He fights “like a tiger,”(p.
182), and like a jungle cat sinks “his teeth into the man’s cheek.”(p.
182). Having obtained satisfaction Jurgis is himself caged and in prison at
Christmas: further underlying the uncaring assault on traditional family values
by capitalism. To compound the injustices Jurgis’ wife dies during childbirth.
Real estate agents, manufacturers of roach powder, trolley car companies and
saloonkeepers, all swindle Jurgis. He, and the reader, experience Chicago’s
underworld in which “nothing counted but brutal might, an order devised
by those who possessed it for the subjugation of those who did not” (
p. 278) and maintains that in Chicago “it is a case of
us or the other fellow” (p. 302)
All of these metaphors, symbols and similes create images of destruction and
violence, showing traditional values and family life as under severe threat
from capitalism. Traditional values as an ideal, and a phrase, has many meanings,
to many people. In the historical context of the text, as a concept, those
values that support heterosexual, Christian family life, in which the main
provider for the family is the husband (for the parents will be married). The
text in the first sentence begins at a wedding to underline the importance
of family as a foundation of traditional values and to suggest a paradise lost.
The husband will work hard, be honest, support the police and be patriotic.
Self-sufficiency, hard work and family life are at the core of this definition.
Sinclair utilises a pastoral device: Jurgis and his family have left a utopian,
communal and agrarian life in Lithuania suggesting to his contemporary readers
that the characters adhere to a set of traditional values consistent with those
of most Americans, creating empathy between the intended audience and the characters.
Although not a Naturalist Sinclair adopts several of Emile Zola’s techniques
of characterisation. Removing Jurgis and his family from this utopian pastoral
environment, and placing them in an urban jungle, is akin to a laboratory experiment.
The narrative invites the reader to see events depicted in the text from Jurgis’ perspective;
in effect, the reader becomes Jurgis. He sees his Father die from hard oppressive
work, as well as exploited and having to pay to actually do the job. His only
real respite is when he leaves Chicago and lives as a hobo.
Like Zola
Sinclair is a Realist and gives vivid, often harrowing, accounts of the oppressive
and unforgiving nature of the capitalist urban environment. He describes in
incredible detail working life in a brothel, eating frozen rubbish, criminal,
political and judicial corruption, blacklists, working life in a foundry and
a slaughterhouse; utilising all of the senses, the reader can almost experience
the life that Jurgis and others endured. Using powerful imagery the reader
is effectively taken on a tour of urban life in early twentieth century Chicago.
Jurgis survives, although his wife, child and father do not providing Sinclair
with a literary device to demonstrate the alternative of socialism, which he
duly provides in the last part of the book. He does not develop the characters
fully and consequently they are shallow; the narrative is a medium by which
Sinclair wished to promote the socialist alternative to capitalism and so pays
far more attention to the detail of working conditions and environment than
the emotions and depth of the characters. Sinclair quickly establishes the
character of Jurgis as simple, guileless and artless; like a child, with a
naive charm, unsuspecting and credulous. At the beginning of chapter two Jurgis
dismisses stories “about the breaking down of men,” because “he
was young, and a giant besides… he could not even imagine how it would feel
to be beaten.” (p.47) this confirms his status within the text as a naïve
country boy who does not know his way around the urban jungle. When he is described
as having “… come from the country, and from very far in the country,” (p.28)
this adds to the image of Jurgis as naïve, but also as a decent family
man with a positive self image and a respect for traditional values. The fact
that he is naïve is not a negative trait, this reinforces the representation
of the urban environment of the city as oppressive and hostile to ordinary
decent people; in juxtaposition to the utopian alternative of traditional country
life, that implicitly incorporates traditional values. (Ferraro T., 1993)
The remainder of the text deals with the readers’, and Jurgis’,
tutelage in the reality of life in an unfettered and unregulated, almost anarchic,
violent urban capitalist environment. Swindled, “used up” and exploited
as employees, swindled by real estate agents, manufacturers of cockroach powder,
trolley car companies and bar owners. A vivid portrayal of the actual fabric
of the city turning on its more vulnerable occupants occurs when Jurgis’ son
dies, by drowning, in the mud of the unsanitary streets. The text suggests
direct responsibility laid with the corrupt city officials and elected representatives,
who have effectively killed him by neglecting to perform their civic duty because
of corruption caused by the capitalist system. They are supposed to serve the
people but simply maintain the status quo; even the electoral system is shown
as fixed, so there is no real democracy. Jurgis’ wife being raped and
yet Jurgis being sent to prison by an uncaring Judge is another example of
corruption of the judicial institutions by the capitalists. Even Judges are
repressing the working person. Sinclair thus expands upon and develops his
central themes concerning his representation of urban capitalism, through Jurgis’ eyes,
as having a reckless disregard for the health and well-being of workers, the
exploitation of children, and the suppression of workers by blacklisting, the
corruption of the judicial and political systems and so on. By using Jurgis
as an example, the text is telling the reader that it could happen to anyone
in any city in America. This allows Sinclair to expound upon his political
ideal and suggest that a socialist model of living will overcome all of the
social problems highlighted. In so doing, he also suggests that the American
Dream is illusory in the tradition of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,
which highlighted the plight of immigrants, in a juxtaposition of characterisation,
by focusing on how an apparent example of the American Dream fulfilled is also
illusory, and tragic.
Families are at the core of any Western definition of traditional values and
Jurgis’ immediate and extended family are symbolic of the concept that
traditional values cannot survive in any capitalist urban environment any more
than individuals can. Capitalism is responsible for the deaths of two adults
and three children as well as Jonas, another family member, disappearing. Marija
becomes a prostitute, Elzbieta a sick woman whose children pick up “wild
and unruly” ways on the streets. These characters are symbolic of the
oppression and exploitation of women and children in this capitalist society:
no more than commodities and no better off than the pigs in Packingtown. Incompatible
with the demands of a competitive urban capitalist system, traditional family
life also becomes impossible. Ultimately destroyed by the environment in which
Sinclair places it. In chapter ten, after Antanas is born, Jurgis declares
himself “irrevocably a family man.”(p. 129) However, the hours he
is required to work do not allow him to spend much time with his son, only
when he is out of work with an injury can he do so. Similarly, husbands and
wives cannot enjoy a fulfilling marriage or any meaningful traditional family
life. Ona and Jurgis had “only their worries to talk of- truly it was
hard, in such a life, to keep any sentiment alive” (p. 148). Ona becomes
a boss’s mistress and ironically, for the sake of the family, she gives in
to his demands. This symbolises the utter power of capitalism to invade the
intimate privacy of the relationship at the core of traditional values: that
of man and wife. This is a powerful argument to make to a male workforce that
one desires to empower. It is an astute use of symbolism.
The narrative voice is a powerful warning, to the point of preaching, against
the unfettered power of capitalism and the inevitability of its destructive
power. The purpose of the text is to show that old world traditional communal
values cannot survive in the jungle that is capitalist Chicago and that every
facet of urban life is corrupt or tainted: the food, the housing, the workplace.
The streets are dangerous and destructive. The text concludes with the suggestion
that socialism is the only alternative to the system of capitalism as portrayed.
At the time the novel was published the idea and promise of socialism was real,
an alternative political system in which traditional values are respected and
work is not an oppressive form of slavery; corruption in the civic administration
and judicial system would both be removed.

Bibliography
Primary Source
Sinclair U. (1906) The Jungle, Reprinted 1986, New York: Penguin Classics
Secondary Sources
Ferraro, T. J. (1993) Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century
America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Smith, Carl S. (1984), Chicago and the American Literary Imagination, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press
Bloodworth, William A. (1977) “The Jungle” Upton Sinclair. Boston:
Twayne Publishers
Yoder, Jon A. (1975) “The Muckraker” Upton Sinclair. New
York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company