Arts and Urban Life in London - Essay Example

Arts and Urban Life Introduction Fog in the London skyline and environs has been the and literature and art. In paintings, essays, novels, at one point in time, fog has been an object to note. In literature, fog was a potent symbol of what James called his 'incurable cockneyship', and, as Beerbohm's drawing implies, his almost impenetrable late manner (James, 480). In his discussion on city environments of London, Freeman has analysed "He was fascinated by 'London particulars', noting how the city seemed to have 'its own system of weather and its own optical laws' amid an atmosphere that 'magnifies distances and minimises details', and 'makes everything brown, rich, dim, vague'. Dickens invested fog with symbolic properties; later 'realist' writers had used it for practical demonstrations of the difficulties of urban life or else, in a version of the antipathetic fallacy, to suggest the environment's malign incompatibility with human wishes. Punch's versifier detailed 'The muck and mud that still our movements clog', while Conrad made the same point more sonorously in describing 'the enormity of cold, black, wet, muddy, inhospitable accumulation of bricks, slates, and stones, things in themselves unlovely and unfriendly to man." (Freeman, 89). The city of London is perhaps one of the oldest yet also one of the most powerful cities in the world. This account speaks about the atmosphere, weather, but not the people. All urban histories states about the city in terms of physical structures and ultrastructural layouts. When the reality is that the people of the city and their lives day in and day out constitute the core of urban life, which embodies their struggle, aspirations, and moments of heightened awareness, then art in the urban life in any form will also express those. In the detective fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle or Richard Harding Davis, fog underlay or encouraged the city's criminal associations, with Sherlock Holmes speculating as to how the 'thief or murderer could roam London' 'as the tiger does the jungle', since figures are but 'dimly seen, then blend once more into the cloud bank' (Doyle, CA, 913). The question arises, what is a city, is it the demonstrable difficulties of urban life, its malign incompatibility with human wishes, or entirely something else arising out of it. In some cases, the metropolis itself has been assigned a character in itself, which responds enthusiastically to the process of transformation in the city space and the ways it is perceived by the individual. Radical artists such as Whistler and Monet were exploring similar possibilities during the 1870s. Such figures moved away from the particularization of realist art and conventional topographic painting, concerning themselves with atmospheric evocation. James's immersion, in all senses, in London's fog was therefore something he shared with its most famous visual chroniclers, impressionist painters, even though he initially had little obvious sympathy for their art (James, 219). Accounts of London by Dickens, and, even more so, by Gissing, repeatedly emphasized the city's aromas and the tidal roar of its 'flaring and clamorous' streets where 'the odors of burning naphtha and fried fish were pungent on the wind'. To judge from The Princess Casamassima, the Thames is equally noisy and smelly, with Hyacinth (Gissing, 111), Robinson observing the 'grinding, puffing, smoking, splashing activity of the turbid flood', but in his own trip down river, James concentrates on the tonal limitations of the scene, its blacks and sables, silvers and grays (Jackson, 277). Baldwin's "Another Country" is a novel, but more of an essay on love. Love on the backdrop of a city, where life at least takes the form of impressionist art. Love is a theme that the author had explored both on homosexual and heterosexual perspectives. On closer examination, there is another theme in this novel, racialism. While love is a necessity and is utterly constructive, hate is terribly destructive, and this theme is core concept which the author explores on the hatred that the Black Americans face in a city life. There is also a component of this concept, which is homosexual love that according to the author Baldwin is more stable. This love-hate-race theme had been dealt with through the central character Rufus, who is a paranoid Black musician from Harlem. He is in love with Leona, white woman and he hates Whites, and perhaps the fact that he is love with a White woman. The contrast has been brought out well where he is angry and outraged about his hate towards her; Rufus shows a physical outrage leading to a physical assault leading to Leona's hospitalization. The transition from love to hate and gradual transformation of the effects of this racial emotion ultimately leads to a situation when Rufus starts hating himself. Although this tale is on the backdrop of some other city, since our topic is London as a city, the culture of the community is very important in this novel. They re-engage with anxieties concerning urban degeneration, immorality, imperial decline, miscegenation and the increased political and sexual freedom of women. This tale from that point of view is brutally realistic and sexually explicit. However, if one goes through Another Country, they can also argue that this work is also poetically charged, and it featured wonderful descriptive passages that appealed to all the senses. This tale also features characters with recurring themes of racism, violence, brutality, broken relations, troubled relationships, and anxieties surrounding inter-racial sexual activity. This depicts the pain of a city life, which is almost an urban disease in which human beings battle to survive. In the Jungle, the lives if Jurgis and his friends were those of unbearable suffering, of inhuman demands for survival, of severe depression which appears almost natural and usual in an urban life. It had another thing, it has a socialist view to examine the urban life, and from that angle, it can be considered to be a persuasive piece of political literature. This means in any urban life, disparate groups of people with their own distinguishing features. Although Another Country has been set in the city of New York, we can try to find out similar themes in the City of London as evident in the art of literature. If one turns to a city, there is always a deeper level of reciprocity which results from the subtle and ever-shifting interplay between society, community, and culture. Since both racialism and socialism point towards the effects of urbanity on the social structure, an appropriate art form on urbanity can examine the ways in which the social structures affect individual human interactions. Another Country fits well to this concept since it examines the contemporary human culture in an urban context and how it evolves, consolidates, or fragments in different social contexts. In some literature and art, the models of personality addressed the conflict between the individual and his environment in ways that anticipate, in certain respects, later sociological formulations. However, there were crucial differences between a philosophically inclined aesthete and a sociologist, albeit one who was himself a philosopher. Georg Simmel's 'The Metropolis and Mental Life' (1900) perceived city life rather than existence in general as being founded upon 'the rapid telescoping of changing images, pronounced differences within what is grasped at a single glance, and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli'. Simmel argued that the figure he designated as 'the metropolitan type' adapted to its environment in particular ways, creating (Simmel, 121) 'a protective organ for itself against the profound disruption with which the fluctuations and the discontinuities of the external milieu threaten it' 'Instead of reacting emotionally, the metropolitan type reacts primarily in a rational manner,' ------ 'thus creating a mental predominance through the intensification of consciousness, which is in turn caused by it.' It has been seen in 'Another Country' that there has been intensification of consciousness, which acted as a safety device, allowing what he termed the 'metropolitan type' to cope with the diverse imaginative stimuli, with 'flood of external objects', to which it was subjected. One scene from Another Country is noteworthy since it speaks regarding changes in city life by focusing on specific cultural spaces and social relations found in contemporary urban life. This speaks of highlights about the temporal, social, spatial, and semiotic distinctions of the city's current scene, particularly as a manifestation of the overlapping contexts of work and play in an economy that is culturalized. Therefore there are complex set of relationships that reveal the different constructs of individual, group, and urban identities. Two friends of Rufus, Vivaldo and Cass talks about growing in a bad neighbourhood like Rufus and talk about the racial discrimination, but at one level these identities fuse, and thinks happen in the same manners to both. This is the character of urbanity. In case of London, similar things can be noted. Most research of different cities implies implicitly that there is a common urban frame that associates centrality to a local integration potential of societies that are plural in these urban contexts. However, while distinguishing between empirical categories; there appears a normative model of space that is public which combines with the political agency in order to overcome the structural conception of an urban culture. Here the concept of socialism takes its entry which has been depicted well in the novel "The Jungle." If we look at acrtichetures in urban London, the architecture is also an art form. Whilst it is universally accepted that the makers and users of architecture have historically and culturally been positioned as white, scant attention has been paid to the racial identity of either maker or user and to the impact on the discipline of the mythical identity of the white, male and 'universal' architect. It has been argued in relation to racialism that 'race' is, in fact, not 'real'. Racial appearance-skin colour, hair and facial features, to put it squarely-relies on a tiny proportion of the many genes that make up 'man'. 'Race', in other words, as a trope of difference, is an invention of sorts, a convenient construct through which economic and material practices such as slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism, etc. have sought to justify their actions. No case exists, in any of the 'scientific' categories through which we understand the world around us-biology, physiology, genealogy-for the attribution of certain physical, moral or intellectual capabilities based on skin colour (Marcuse, 78). A new generation of urbanites is growing up-urbane, metro- and cosmopolitan. At home in a number of locales and languages, this group represents a new land of immigrant labour. Education and opportunity have combined to afford a greater sense of 'belonging' or at least an acceptance of a dual or split sense of identity. Bound by a different set of constraints than the preceding generation, the inclusion of these traditionally 'othered' voices in countless aspects of public and creative life has significantly shifted the balance of power. Drawing analogies between disciplines is inevitable. Literature, in particular, has been an important precedent for a number of the writers here. For some, the way in which so many post-colonial writers have identified the literary text as the site of cultural control and used it to reveal the way in which Eurocentric notions about 'race', identity and difference lie at the heart of the literary and therefore cultural imagination, has been crucial. From that point of view, Baldwin is right on the point, that which happen to the urban population, underprivileged, may happen to both the whites and the blacks. In Another Country the answer of Cass defines the concept of race clearly. "But they didn't happen to you because you were white. They just happened. But what happens up here (Harlem) happens because they are colored. And that makes a difference." (Baldwin, 103) While studying people of a city, their socioeconomic conditions are important and they reflect well in urban art and literature as in the Jungle or in Another Country. The characters flourish in the back drop of their living conditions, among their worries and woes, and the conflict in the living and thinking are explicit in the interactions. With this, what is revealed is the darker side of the urban life and the city as a whole. This is supported by works of other famous authors who dwelt on urbanity as their medium of expression. Taking from Dickens and the City "Significant too is that favourite phrase of Dickens, "the attraction of repulsion." His imagination and verbal skills were manifestly stimulated by repulsive, objectionable, ludicrous, and grotesque, not by God's handiwork in the woods and fields, which evoked at best his inertly pious aesthetic approval. God had of course got it all right, but rightness was not Dickens' literary territory. As a middle class boy, albeit precariously middle class, he had felt shocked by superior to, though also thrilled by, those Covent garden destitutes and the "dirty men, filthy women, squalid children" whom he had noticed in his "Seven Dials" essay written before he became a novelist, living in the streets "of dirty, straggling houses, with now and then an unexpected court composed of buildings as ill-proportioned and deformed as the half-naked children that wallow in the kennels." (Collins, 103). Urbanity has an inherent rat race for fame, power, position, and name in it. This is clearly depicted in Another Country where all the characters, Vivaldo, Eric, Rufus, Yves, Cass, and Richard were preventing each other from reaching their potential heights. This bitter rivalry led to isolation and obscurity to all, yet they did not stop. This is entirely urban behaviour. When compared to the Jungle, the same theme comes out in the struggle and thematic representation of capitalism, where opportunities are taken away by the capitalist system, and people's battle becomes their own, and nobody stands by. Although it can be argued that the political ideas presented by Sinclair is somewhat utopian where everything related to capitalism is bad, and the only solution is socialism since perhaps Sinclair wanted to promote socialism. This has close relation to urban sociology since the science of the society states that the rise of modern industrial city took place with emergence and modification of urban society and sociocultural relations. Conclusion All these indicate that there is a human dimension to all urbanity. Although most cities are described in terms of economic prosperity and population densities, urbanity essentially is expression of human spirit, and the personality of a city lies in the conglomerated ever-evolving personalities of its people. What is real, then, about cities is as much emotional as physical, as much visible as invisible, as much slow moving as ever speeding up, as much coincidence as connection. Metropolitans respond to the possibility of being overwhelmed by all the new things they encountered by developing a particular set of attitudes - an urban mentality. This psychological structure is characterised by the attempt to dampen down the emotional intensity of urban stimuli. The metropolitan personality is founded on an intellectualism, as individuals seek to reduce their emotional responses to the volume and variety of stimuli that cities offer. Thus, it has been argued that the growth of cities has a direct impact both on social interactions between people and also on their personal attitudes and behaviours. The characteristic rationalism and intellectualism of the urban dweller has far-reaching implications. In some ways, these predispositions allow urban dwellers to shake off older customs and traditions of social interaction. The modern city creates opportunities for people to develop a new sense of their individuality and uniqueness. This is not simply a psychological process, it is also related to changes in the economy since the economy now values personal creativity and capacities. It is, however, not sufficient only to look at the ways individuals are liberated in cities, for it has also been identified how these new freedoms create new kinds of problems for people. In the city, people are bound up in all kinds of social interaction, but these are more and more with people with whom they have only the most superficial relationships. Reference C. Dickens Oliver Twist. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1966. 13-74. G. Gissing, Thyrza (1887; London: Eveleigh Nash and Grayson, 1927), 111. G. Simmel. Metropolis and Mental Life (College, University of Chicago) University of Chicago Press, 1961 H. Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (1913; Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1950), 277. H. James, 'In the Cage' (1898; London: Hesperus, 2002), 97-8; The Princess Casamassima, ed. D. Brewer (1886; London: Penguin), 281, 480, 1987 H. James, Portraits of Places (London: Macmillan, 1883), 219-20. The essay first appeared in Lippincott's Magazine in November 1877, and was lightly revised for English Hours in 1905. J. Baldwin. Another country. Vintage Books, 1993, 103. N. Freeman, Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art, 1817-1904 (2007, Oxford University Press, New York), 2007. 89. P. Marcuse, Cities in quarters, in G. Bridges and S. Watson (eds) Companion to the City. Oxford: Blackwell. 2000, 78. A. Conan Doyle, 'The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans', His Last Bow (1917), Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 1981), 913; R. Harding Davis, In The Fog (New York: R. H. Russel) 1901. Read More