In Search of Soul. Alejandro Nava
the principles associated with the classic soul were at risk of going the way of the bison on the Great Plains.
One may choose to embrace the concept of the modern self over the old creed of the soul (this choice itself is one of the hallmarks of modernity), but I am interested in the growing feeling of alarm and foreboding, even outrage, about this decision in favor of the modern self. In nineteenth-century America, dissenting voices—warning of vanity like the preacher of Ecclesiastes—were heard from a host of American isolatoes, from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain. Whether or not they were “voluptuaries of the soul”—Theodore Parker’s description of Transcendentalists—there was a palpable concern among all of them about the survival of the soul in an age of positivism and “gilded” dreams.70 In some cases, showing a clear sympathy for Christian socialism, writers sketched grand capitalists as swindlers, confidence men, and vampire-like creatures, thirsty for the blood of the innocent. In Melville’s novel Redburn, for example, a man of this sort appears in all of his deformed and grotesque glory: “He was an abominable looking old fellow, with cold, fat, jelly-like eyes; and avarice, heartlessness, and sensuality stamped all over him. He seemed all the time going through some process of mental arithmetic; doing sums with dollars and cents; his very mouth, wrinkled and drawn up at the corners, looked like a purse.”71 There is something about this figure that conjures the image of Satan, with his deformed body mirroring his deformed soul. The spell of money has become a trance in the man’s life, and his soul is now comatose, dead to any higher values. If this grim apostle of money is a representative capitalist, Melville’s sketch is a cautionary tale of capitalism gone terribly wrong, a system without humaneness, without beauty. He registers the same concern that his mentor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, had about the United States: “a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, not anything but a commonplace prosperity in broad and simple daylight.”72
Though evident in most of his novels, the aspersions Melville cast upon capitalism achieve their finest formulation in Moby Dick, especially, in my view, when the author makes an explicit connection between slavery and the business of moneymaking. When Pip, the black cabin boy, is thrown overboard, Stubb can only think of the financial forfeiture if the whale is lost: “We can’t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama.” Ishmael’s response captures the species of being that Stubb represents: “Though man loves his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.”73 In recognizing human ambiguity—the capacity for both love and greed—Melville pays some attention here to the noble nature of humankind, but the stronger strain is the animal-like impulses that degrade the human spirit and transform our nature into that of a predatory shark or wolf: homo homini lupus. In business and politics, as in life, these latter propensities have a way of shipwrecking the higher aspirations of the soul.
As the twentieth century set in, the climate for the soul became even more inclement and severe, leading many writers of the age to warn of the soul’s wizening or disappearance altogether. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby can be read in this vein, as a cautionary tale about the high price that the pursuit of fortune exacts from one’s moral character and spiritual integrity. Jay Gatsby has been consumed by the romance of money, and his life has been given to the service of a “vast, vulgar, meretricious beauty.”74 However dazzling and magnificent this dream of wealth appears in his eyes, the novel shows how specious and cheap this mirage of beauty is, how much it can entice and ruin at the same time. Though Fitzgerald never displayed “the conviction of a revolutionary” in his work, he certainly channeled the “smoldering hatred of a peasant” toward the moneyed, leisured classes in America—the beautiful and the damned—in much of his fiction.75 Marius Bewley sums up The Great Gatsby thus: “In the end, The Great Gatsby is a dramatic affirmation in fictional terms of the American spirit in the midst of an American world that denies the soul.”76
This denial of the soul is by no means a temptation of the secular realm alone; for Fitzgerald, the malady had a long reach and spread like contagion into the heart of the church. The words of Beatrice Blaine in This Side of Paradise have much of Fitzgerald in them: “Often she deplored the bourgeois quality of the American Catholic clergy, and was quite sure that had she lived in the shadow of the great Continental cathedrals her soul would still be a thin flame on the mighty altar of Rome.”77
This character wants the warmth, incandescence, radiance, and burning colors of a darker, more mysterious variety of Catholicism. Thus the novelist pines for alternatives to American middle-class values (the cheery optimism, the family values, the worship of financial success, the triumphant God) and at one point declares an attraction to the “Mexican God,” who would be something strangely different, more like a baroque God from a land of “sad, haunting music and many odors . . . where the shades of night skies and sunsets would seem to reflect only moods of passion: the color of lips and poppies.”78 In this exotic mood—describing a dream of the pageantry of the soul—the novel closes with the protagonist throwing his pen and soul to the side of socialism, that most frightening idea for the bourgeois American. The implication is plain in Fitzgerald’s first novel: the soul flickers and falters in America, and he dreams of other fields and meadows in which his soul can grow, roam, and rebel.
If it is not obvious, I am arguing that the idea of the soul in the classic Christian tradition is bathed in sunsets and twilights of this sort, and many of the artists discussed here sought to preserve this vintage, dusk-like representation. In fearing the betrayal of the soul in America—where the soul is confused with commonplace prosperity without shadow, antiquity, mystery, or the cross—they raised their voices in foreboding and forewarning.
Many black and Hispanic writers would join this chorus of discontent. In Latin America the budding movement modernismo arose as a critical reaction to scientific positivism and economic materialism. (José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel and Rubén Darío’s poetry are classic examples, later followed by the avant-garde and so-called magical realism.) In North America African American writers cried out against assaults on the bodies and souls of their community in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In both cases, Latin Americans and African Americans largely embraced Christian ideas, adding their own signatures and styles to classic views of the soul and consequently fashioning fresh iterations of the “moods of passion”—haunting music, ostentatious pageantry, existential burdens—that are the stuff of the soul. Though often buried under the landslides of economic and political success in America, their perspectives are fresh riffs on the priceless value of soul in our modern or postmodern world. W. E. B. Du Bois held one such perspective; I begin with him because he is a powerful example of the kind of soul that burns brighter than a thin flame, more like a conflagration that swept across the plains and hills of America: the soul of black folks. Though Du Bois’s understanding of the soul was deeply informed by the black religious experience in America, it was also indebted to the romantic tradition, and for that reason I consider him in the second part of this chapter, with an emphasis on the cultural, stylistic, and profane understandings of the soul.
PROFANE INTERPRETATIONS OF THE SOUL
Romantic Soul: Herder and Du Bois
Du Bois’s life echoes many of the themes we have explored thus far, especially the construction of the soul as antibourgeois, a weapon of protest against the vulgar drive for material fortune. This theme emerges most explicitly from Du Bois’s notorious arguments with Booker T. Washington. As is well known, their relationship became strained and sour over fundamental definitions of success in America. In Du Bois’s estimation, Washington’s vision for education, in its concrete manifestation at the Tuskegee Institute, was far too conciliatory to the American idioms of triumphant commercialism and material prosperity and disappointingly silent when it came to black civil rights. To Du Bois and others like him, the model of industrial training at Tuskegee implied that black liberation would hinge on blacks’ success in the marketplace and adoption of the American dream, with all of its glittering promises and fantasies, its cornucopia of goods. The success of the black community would be assessed by how it capitalized