Eviction Notice

These buildings house man. He inhabits them and yet does not dwell in them, when to dwell means merely that we take shelter in them. In today's housing shortage even this much is reassuring and to the good; residential buildings do indeed provide shelter; today's houses may even be well planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, open to air, light, and sun, but-do the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them?

…there rages round the earth an unbridled yet clever talking, writing, and broadcasting of spoken words. Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. Perhaps it is before all else man's subversion of this relation of dominance that drives his nature into alienation.

-          Heidegger, From Building, Dwelling, Thinking

Language is the house of Being and in it man dwells.

-          From Letter on Humanism

INTRODUCTION

Heidegger's Hut in the Black Forest

In reading Babbitt I could not help but notice its preoccupation with buildings and language. The later Heidegger also makes these concepts – viz. of building, dwelling, thinking (ie language) – central to his thought. Now I don’t want this post to rely on a deep understanding of later Heidegger (which I at any rate do not possess), but I would like to put Babbitt’s concerns on the same plane of seriousness as the existentialist thinker. For Heidegger, a language and a building serve a similar function: they are open spaces in which, when filled with the light of Being, man can allow things to be what they are. This is no simple undertaking, and our words and buildings are not always filled with light. Man spends most of his time in oblivion of Being. With pacified day-to-day self-assurance, man thinks he dwells upon the earth; but in moments of angst or boredom man’s not-being-at-home – man’s “uncanniness” reveals itself. Language (which includes silence) calls out to man in his homelessness:  Man has not yet learned to dwell.

Along with building and language, homelessness too is a central theme in Babbitt. It goes beyond the fact that the “one thing wrong with the Babbitt house” is that “It was not a home” (14), although this statement has resounding thematic significance for the story (especially since Babbitt is a dealer in houses). Homelessness, uncanniness, permeates the very stylistic form of the novel as well; in particular, the pervasive use of irony ideally functions to alienate, or, if I may, evict, the reader from his feeling at home in the world. My post today will be about how this irony works, how exactly we should read this irony to achieve the maximum alienation, and how this all relates to the themes of building and language.

SATIRE

Dutch Colonial Frame House for Sale - Nine Rooms and a Porch!, Sears, 1928

I want to claim that there are two ways of reading irony in Babbitt – one which I will call the satirical, the other which I will call the grotesque. In making this distinction, I may depart from the literary-technical uses of the terms, but I believe it will be in keeping with their spirit, as well as a fruitful distinction to have at hand in our reading and discussing of the text.  I will now attempt to define what I mean by these terms, and then go on to argue which reading I find preferable.

The easiest way to do this will be to do a satirical analysis of an example in Babbitt. The opening passage proves a great place to start:  

“The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches but beautifully office buildings” (3)

Thus Babbitt opens. To a first-time reader, the ironic tone of the book becomes clear with the last noun-phrase of the first paragraph: “office buildings”. If irony means that there is an implicit meaning that runs contrary to what is explicitly said, then the dissonance between the implicit and the explicit here – what I will call ironic distance – plays on the implied reader’s beliefs about the categories of buildings as well as the kinds of descriptions that are applicable to these categories. Upon envisaging buildings which “aspire” and are “austere”, the reader’s presuppositions already rule out certain kinds of buildings. So within the first sentence, not only has the reader already been cued to employ a distinction between the sacred and the profane (or, at least between the high and the low), he has also been cued to bring into play his distinction between high/sacred buildings and low/profane buildings. This distinction involves assumptions about what makes a building the kind of building it is – namely, what purpose it serves or what it is for – and this in turn draws on assumptions about what kinds of purposes are high/sacred and which are low/profane.

It is because, by the end of the first sentence, that the reader already has certain rather sophisticatedly arrived at yet dimly conscious expectations about what kinds of buildings these are that the second sentence immediately disabuses the reader of those assumptions: I know what you are thinking, but no, these buildings are not citadels or churches. The surprise that comes from the revelation of the function of these buildings (office buildings) is the ironic distance travelled, and we are propelled upwards into the good company of the “aspiring”, “austere” and “beautiful”, of “citadels” and “churches” – not just the ironic distance between citadels/churches and office buildings , but the ironic distance between the functions of protection of a people/worshipping and commerce. The satirical humor here then is our reaction to the preposterous, to a farcical imposter: the imposing Towers which dominate the landscape are just office buildings. We are asked to consider: a world in which the role played by office buildings (commerce) has replaced the roles played by citadels/churches (retreat, protection: solidarity).

On what I am calling a satirical reading, the effect is comic: office buildings rising to the heights of churches? Ridiculous! Again the humor - the resistance - is to the idea of something that has gone above its station. And like any good observer of the social order, we are permitted – encouraged – to scoff at this attempt and in the same gesture we place things back in their proper place: office buildings are profane; and anyone who thought otherwise would be missing a deep important point about the world! The ultimate effect is that we identify ourselves as the upholders of the moral order who “get the joke” precisely because we know that things are exactly the opposite as they are stated. So to sum up the satirical reading: the ironic distance is perceived as small things appearing very big (or trivial things appearing serious, or low things appearing very high) and this is reacted to with indignant humor, a mental lowering/returning of things to their proper sphere of value, and consequently the reinforcement of one’s own self-conception as possessing the right values.

Let’s look at a second example of irony that pertains now to language.  In almost a continuous pan inwards from our skyline of towering office buildings (which is interrupted only by a passage concerned with transportation, a third Babbittian theme beyond building and language which would prove too much for this post to include) our attention is drawn to “one of the skyscrapers [in which] the wires of the Associated Press were closing down” (3). From the state of building, we zoom in to the state of language: the Press; the media; Mass Communication.

The ironic distance that will be created around the media is not, as with building, presented immediately, but is developed over the course of the next couple of chapters. The first newspaper enters the scene thumping against the front door, interrupting Babbitt’s sinking back into morning, dozing bliss, rousing him, filling him with “alarm” (4). Its next appearance is as “clippings” that Babbitt retains in his pocket notebook, “editorials from which Babbitt got his opinions and polysyllables” (10). From there it bears an implicit contrast with the “standard bedside book” (13) which “no one had ever opened.” The implication is that the Word as literature is soporific, neglected, and effectively for show, while we learn that his daily reading of the Advocate-Times is a daily ritual comparable to an “exhilarating drug” (16). Already this involves us in an ironic distance – between the derelict literature and the daily use and even retention on his person of fragmented clippings of the newspaper. But the passage I mean to examine is the one where Babbitt actually sits down to read – in particular, Babbitt’s reactions to the various articles in the paper.  

            As we have seen from its initial thumping entrance on his front door, the newspaper represents a kind of intrusion - an important intrusion from the outside world into the inside, domestic world. The paper is how, each morning, Babbitt reconnects with the wider world. And this reconnection is exhibited to us by his (one-sided) discussion of the daily events with his wife. The perusal of the newspaper moves from the headline to the society page. The very layout of the newspaper seeming to reflect our priorities: going through three distinct phases – the mortal (the “terrible big tornado”), the socio-political (bills banning socialism, workers’ strike, elections, international affairs and rumors) and finally, the societal (the Dance at Royal Ridge). The ironic distance is produced by a reversal of this order. Babbitt dismisses the death and destruction of the tornado with an indifferent, “Hard luck, all right”, and moves on without a pause to the socio-political. Here he dwells longer – enough to express not just indifferent clichés, but his own (clichéd) political opinions. But it is not until the Society page that he actually reads aloud, and so presents to us, what the paper says: the only page worth reprinting is the Society page. His reaction to this “news” – the spacious lawns, the notable guests, the baronial fireplace! – occupies his thoughts until the next textual break, viz., until the end of the chapter.

The ironic distance is of course Babbitt’s elevating the importance of notable guests and spacious lawns to the level of (or rather far, far above!) social justice and the “weather”, that is, contingencies of the cosmos: life and death. We might minimize this distance by pointing out that Babbitt knows these people personally, and so is much more emotionally involved in their doings than in strangers grappling with nobler battles; but this just begs the question: for WHY on earth should we be more concerned about a trivial aspect of a person with whom we are acquainted (and, as in this case, don’t much like) than we are concerned with the most serious aspect of a stranger (his mortality and his mortal needs) which moreover is common to everyone, everywhere, ever?

So given my schema, this satirical reading can be summarized thus:  the ironic distance between the triviality/lowness of Babbitt’s animated, personal reaction to the Dance, on the one hand, and his thoughtless, emotionless, perfunctory (non) reaction to the Tornado (which, we should note, cause homelessness!) show Babbitt’s priorities and these are reacted to with indignant humor; the reader returns things to their proper sphere – tornados are more newsworthy than spacious lawns! – and the reader, who confirms the authors values and is confirmed by them in turn, is reinforced in his self-conception as possessing the right values.

THE GROTESQUE

Notre Dame Grotesque

Next, by contrast with what we’ve just characterized as a satirical reading, I want to consider a reading style which I will call grotesque. My choice of this term is not arbitrary and I would like to go into its accepted meaning a bit to start off. Although having many valences in literary theory, all grotesque, like satire, involves incongruity. Grotesque characters are supposed to inspire both sympathy and disgust; perhaps the most famous example of this is Shelley’s doubly-grotesque monster in Frankenstein – whose grotesque physical form inspires disgust, as do eventually his actions, but, when the perspective reverses and he is allowed to tell his story, he elicits sympathy, and so is a grotesque character. The grotesque is generally associated with the monstrous, and indeed is the name for the monstrous statues or Chimera that adorn Gothic cathedrals (a grotesque is just a gargoyle without a water spout). Moreover, a chimera is a particular kind of monster: one composed of the parts of several animals. As such, the grotesque, like the satirical, transverses a certain distance in our expectations: where we expect the body of a lion there is that of a goat; where we expect to maintain a disgusted stance toward an individual, we find we also feel sympathy toward them.

But how does this translate into a reading style? Let’s consider the effect a grotesque has on a Gothic Cathedral. There is of course a dissonance between the hideous/monstrous appearance of the statue and the exalted beauty of the building. But the effect does not work on the observer like satire – that is, the onlooker does not see the gulf between hideous twisted little monsters and the glory of God and think how inappropriate that such ungodly things should pretend to the sacred nature of this building; and in turn reverse the transgression, placing the low and high back in their proper places; that is, the grotesque statuary does not merely exalt god through negative contrast in the same way the satirical reaffirms the proper values through a negative contrast with their temporary, ridiculous reversal; rather, the grotesque serves to enhance and expand one’s former conception of what the sacred is, and in particular, to call into question one’s presuppositions about the strict dichotomy between small/ugly/monster on one hand and grand/beautiful/God on the other: perhaps the Holy both rejects/excludes and contains the horrific; that it is both threatened by and defined by the horrific.  

            To bring these considerations into the light of our earlier discussion, while the satirical reading involves an (1) immediate rejection of the inverted value-scheme, and in turn an immediate lowering of the illegitimate, usurper values, which serves (2) to return things to their former, obvious, taken-for-granted order and (3) affirm the reader in his own values (which is to say, it makes the reader feel at home), the grotesque reading, on the other hand, involves (1’) temporarily inhabiting the inverted value-scheme and attempting to sustain the perspective in which the high is on a leveled with the low; this occasions the reader to (2’) sympathetically imagine the world in which this value-inversion is the obvious, taken-for-granted order  and (3’) this in turn alienates the reader, as he experiences the contingency of what he presumed was high/low.  This contingency is not supposed to leave the reader rejecting his earlier values; it is rather supposed to show that they are not eternal, necessary feature of our world: that the frightening possibility exists that the we might live in such a way, in such a world, where what we now take as most important and sacred, is diluted and leveled off with what we take as trivial and profane. The grotesque reading reveals that the meaningfulness of our world - which is oriented by, stabilized by, our sorting things into the sacred/profane, the high/low etc. – is fragile, vulnerable, and threatened.

With this definition of the grotesque reading, we can see important differences from the satirical. First, while the satirical reading involves the (illegitimate) upward movement of the low, the grotesque reading sees the opposite: the (tragic) downward movement of the high. Second, while the satirical involves the immediate return of the low to its proper place, the grotesque is receptive to the possibility of the widespread lowering of the sacred as a real, imminent, or even actualized, possibility. Next, while the satirical leaves the reader in his place throughout this motion, and indeed stabilizes him in his belief that he is on the side of the good guys, the grotesque destabilizes him by showing the contingency that threatens the reign of the sacred. While the satirical ultimately, at best, involves the reader in a futile preaching to the choir, (teaching the Good that their conception of good is good), at worst it serves merely to reinforce the readers sense of superiority: the problems of the world come from these fools who miss the point, and so much the worse to them. The grotesque, on the other hand, asks the reader to sympathetically identify, to take dead seriously, the soul and world of a person whose values are so inverted. It makes the grotesque character both an object of disgust and pity: disgust because of their error; pity because, by earnestly attempting to inhabit this morally-inverted experience, the reader experiences the sense of loss involved in the grotesque character’s mistaking the low for the high: what a small, low, sad little world that forms the horizon of this character.  The reader in turn dreads the possibility that this horizon become the horizon of the actual world. Instead of being confirmed in his moral superiority, the reader is moved to pity, and also is called into question: how committed are you, really, to maintaining the sacred? To preventing the darkening of the earth? To guiding those lost? How horrific is this possibility, when taken dead seriously? Is it too late? Has human existence become a farce?

To summarize what I think is effectively the principle difference between the satirical reading and grotesque reading: To approach the text as something of a light joke, an exaggerated caricature on those who miss the point regarding what matters in life means that the irony encountered will serve to elicit derisive laughter: and this concept already involves all that we’ve discussed under the heading of satirical:  putting the other back in their place; a wholesale rejection of their experience as ridiculous, unthinkable, impossible; and the self-satisfaction of perceived superiority of those who have enough insight to see the other’s folly. To approach the text grotesquely – as an illustration of an actual course the world may take (or has taken) – neither as an exaggeration nor a caricature but as a serious threat to meaning – will serve to elicit pity, as well as a desire to protect the sacred, that is, will elict pathos. To put it even more simply:  the reaction to the dissonance glimpsed through the satirical perspective is comic exclusion; the reaction to that glimpses through the grotesque is pathetic inclusion.

A Grotesque Reading of Babbitt

The city was full of such grotesqueries… (3)

Kertesz, 1972

Is there any reason to approach the text grotesquely rather than satirically (supposing I’ve made a strong enough case for what’s at stake in the difference)? I think there is, both within the text and without.  First, I want to claim that in general, readers will tend by default to take the satirical approach to ironic dissonance. I know that I for one began reading the book like this, inwardly smirking at the exalted office buildings, at the barrage of noise of the modern world that wakes Babbitt, rendering his alarm clock – so proudly possessed! – redundant, at his preoccupation with the Society page and at his worry over appropriate way to refer to a tuxedo jacket, etc. The experience was one of drifting through a petty world that had been made quite grand.  But I also found myself tempted to identify with these characters with respect to their values: imagine if my thoughts could only orbit the spacious lawns of the elite, or if the heights my soul reached was pride in my alarm clock, in the new water cooler, or if an office building inspired as much awe in me as Notre Dame. If we don’t laugh this off we can see that these attitudes aren’t as preposterous as they seem – or more precisely, they perhaps aren’t so far off –f rom society’s own attitude as a whole, and, if I’m honest, from my own (To pretend I’ve never thought, right along with Babbitt, not ironically but dead seriously, “There is character in spectacles”!(9)). Materialism, which the satirical reader indignantly laughs at, is a language – a system of symbols – with which we all interact with each other, and which provides us with a self-understanding; everyone is defined by the material objects surrounding them, and few in the history of the world have truly rebelled from this condition (though many an ascetic has defined themselves by the absence of such objects, this move is still based on the assumption that identity depends on one’s material arrangement. Now admittedly we are not wholly defined thus – there is lofty side to us too– when we truly engage with others, with ideas, with God; but Babbitt, when read grotesquely, enjoins us: imagine, not that the petty has risen to the heights of the grand, but that the grand has diminished until it became the petty; not that the profane metamorphosed into the sacred but that nothing is sacred anymore – it has been forgotten, like all forgetting, it has been forgotten that it has been forgotten, doubly buried. We cannot laugh away that this is where the world is headed; we cannot laugh away that possibility that this pigmy-world is the world we live in, and the only world we’ve ever known or will ever know.

These doubts are the call of conscience: we question which side, matter or spirit, we really stand on, and how firmly and squarely we stand there. Am I Babbitt? Do I live in zenith? We ask in a moment of lucidity. We are tempted to say, of course not. I’m not perfect, but I have spiritual aspirations. But it is not that easy – for Babbitt too believes he lives a life of the spirit – his involvement in fraternities, his fondness for his city, his metaphysical belief in the progress of the times and his being a direct, even integral, part of that. For Babbitt too has his moments of doubt, his pangs of conscience, which he too, we can presume, manages and minimizes, much in the same way we would minimize our own suspected Babbitry. So when we’re brutally honest with ourselves, when we sympathetically identify with Babbitt and Zenith, we cannot so easily return things back to their previous order nor can we make the equation me/nonmaterialistic/good, Babbit/materialistic/bad.  Moreover, these glimpses of the vacuity of his values – in the form of the dream fairy child, in the abruptly returning doubts at breakfast, in his lecherous peering at his secretary – also lend to a grotesque reading – because it is easier for us to sympathetically identify with a lost character who is not hopelessly lost, but can admit the error of his ways. Indeed, what a relief it is when, after all the tedious brochure-like descriptions of the material composition of objects, or the advertisement-like pitches detailing the features of things, at last we find Babbitt a doubting and serious man, beginning to form the beginnings of a Real Question in his mind.  This also lends itself to pathetic inclusion – Zenith is not a yet completely dark, just as it contains a trace of moral guidance, so too our pangs, upon our grotesque reading, that we too fall far short reveal that we too are not completely lost. We end up by taking a grotesque approach to ourselves.

Thomas Mann called the grotesque the “Genuine anti-bourgeois style”. And this vision of the uprootedness of the bourgeoisie, the homelessness of the 20th century middle-class, has been a pervasive theme for the entire century since Babbitt’s publication. Heidegger (who you can just take as my mouthpiece for the 20^th century zeitgeist!) talks about the oppressiveness of lacking a genuine struggle. A people who have become altogether pragmatic and utilitarian will, once their material prosperity has been secured, have nothing left to do but struggle with their own ennui and angst – which are sort of meta-struggles in a way that a tornado or a fight for social justice is not. This homelessness, which is explicitly and symbolically stated 11 pages into the narrative (14), is not just a threat to a fictional character in a fictional world, but is meant to call out to us in our homelessness: We have not yet learned how to dwell.

Returning briefly to our opening readings of the building/language imagery in Babbitt, we can enhance this a bit with what has been discussed since.  For instance, the opening image is not one of “aspiring” “austere” office buildings – or rather, what these terms can now mean has changed – for without the touchstone of the sacred and communal housed by the church and the citadel, these terms themselves lose their ability to elevate the office buildings, and instead, are lowered to the level of the office buildings. So too with the churches and citadels themselves. So while, on a satirical reading, everything, and above all the spireless office buildings, is “aspiring” in an upward motion, this is only apparent; the real motion is downward, and it is of cathedral and citadels being razed to the ground, where they will be covered in an all-forgetting mist. The symbolism, which the grotesque reader shares with the satirical reader, is that what these buildings stand for – the worshipping of a transcendent being, the haven to which a united people retreats to defend itself – has been reduced to this lowest common denominator: commercialism.

            So too the vision of Babbitt perusing his newspaper at the breakfast table is made more frightening and threatening by a grotesque reading. Imagine if our ability to emphasize with each other’s common, mortal and weak humanity – our exposure to the tornadic elements, so to speak – was seen as no more important, or seen as less important, than our ability to feel covetous envy of our neighbor’s baronial fireplace. It is worth noting that although the writing style of the main narrative is riddled with irony, the direct quotation of the Society page article is actually meant to read as a real such page would read. That is to say, the grotesque irony of the main narrative flows seamlessly into the earnest tone of the article: the reader cannot help but read this article ironically (because of the momentum of the narrative hitherto) when it is in fact is a representation of a non-ironic output of the mass media. This continuity producing re-contextualization allows the reader to ask: Is it not a bit strange, even perverse, that a single daily publication contains within it people faced with horrific untimely death and loss, and just marginally margins away, the “deep comfy armchairs” of Royal Ridge? Do we already invite this leveling, when a single sheet of paper contains within it fragments of the gravest and most trivial events, and we consume them all together over our muffin and coffee? How have we not seen all along the deeply ironically dissonant nature of the mass media, with its leveling juxtapositions? How could anybody read this non-ironically? Perhaps Zenith is not laughable for its difference from us. Perhaps it is pitiable precisely because of its similarities.  

Afterthought: on Bab—

Before Babbitt, I never had any trouble finding an abbreviation for our subjects – Reading Partner, Midnight’s Children, Bruno’s Dream: RP, MC, BD. But how to abbreviate Babbitt? Obviously “B” won’t do. So it would be Bb or Bt – but which, I thought, that depends on which consonant, the second b or the t, was more integral to the word. To me it was an easy decision: Bb – two voiced, explosive consonants to represent this loudly vocal, explosive man, this town, this time. But also for all the words for which it is a seed, like baby, and bib (don’t these seem somehow descriptive of Georgie?), but also bubble (diaphanous, unstable, about to pop, likea stock market bubble), bobble (clumsily oscillating, not at rest) and babble (as idle, chattering speech, language without communication), and last but not least: Babel – the city in which that aspiring, towering structure goes unfinished because God confounds the common language of the builders and scatters them across the world.

Reading on, I wonder: So how much of Zenith is Babel? And how much will history repeat itself? The word ‘tower’ is conspicuously used twice within the first sentence. Moreover, as we pan in, the scene reveals:

In one of the skyscrapers the wires of the Associated Press were closing down. The telegraph operators wearily raised their celluloid eye-shades after a night of talking with Paris and Peking. (3)

The imagery is rich with deeper meaning: we begin with our symbol of language – the Press – closing down. The first seen occupants of our towers are the decoders of messages, the telegraph operators – and we find them weary, and raising their eyeshades which are historically associated with both journalists and accountants and indeed are even a symbol common symbol of over-preoccupation with commerce. Finally, and most tellingly, is the alliterative expanse of Peking to Paris – a dizzying pan back out that has the effect of decentering Zenith, of bringing us out into the wide world, of which this weary communication is just one instance of many, and moreover just one of the many ‘confounded’ languages of the scattered peoples of the world.

Their intent of course was to build a tower from the earth to the heavens. Not only do the Zeniths’ towers “aspire”, but the very word “zenith” itself means highest point that something reaches before it makes its descent. A point of seeming stability and balance on a constantly moving arc. But so too, is the zenith the point in the sky directly over one’s head: the city itself points upward, and declares its intention to reach from earth to the heavens: “A city built – it seemed – for giants (3)”. This interjection –“it seemed”— is not a little foreshadowing of a biblical fate to our city and its denizens. If Book I part one opens on the image of aspiring towers, it closes on the image of toppling giants – not toppling over, but losing their stature as we approach and look closer and see that their seeming height was an illusion: Babel halted by a new perspective leaving us once again, as ever, homeless. Man has not yet learned to dwell.

Thanks for once again meeting me here. Thanks for not giving up on me. 

-Your Reading Partner, Justin

Pieter T the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563