In the Middle of the Crowd

Imagine a person, male or female, just that. No more than the simplest person you can picture for a while. The person follows the commonest routine, as everybody does. Do not make any interpretation of that routine by now. Routines are recurrently alleged to be dehumanizing and tedious, but they bring life structure and predictability nonetheless; and we, people, need probability to proceed with an essential notion of safe. In spite of this all, the person suddenly gets an awkward sensation one morning and start wondering about the purpose or lack of thereof their actions have had, why he or she is here fulfilling the same process step by step, if this fits an internal certainty of happiness, satisfaction and humanity, what his/her role in society is, what an isolation s/he feel although living in a world full of people. Then the person sees him/herself alienated in the middle of the crowd.

The shock

Such perception of the self as the stranger in a world full of familiarity commences with a shock, a moment that defines the identity, establishing a before and after immediately store in the most profound part of oneself (Gutiérrez, 2000: 165-166). The unnamed protagonist of Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" is categorizing freely the people who walk around him, guessing somehow who they are, when he unexpectedly is strongly caught by the disturbing apparition of an elderly man. 

With my brow to the glass, I was thus occupied in scrutinizing the mob, when suddenly there came into view a countenance (that of a decrepit old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age,)—a countenance which at once arrested and absorbed my whole attention, on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression. 

“The Man of the Crowd”, p. 233

Harry Clarke's 1923 illustration on
Poe's short story.

It is easy to guess how things, how people, how places are and going to be, that is why strangeness is normally found alluring. The unpredictable leads oneself think about how I am going to react to this henceforth, am I going to be likely, unlikely? That is the challenge to our identity that the shock (caused by finding strangeness) triggers. Condition which is personified in the figure of an "old, short, thin, decrepit and apparently feeble" man who catches the observer's attention in such way that he follows him across the paths and passages of the city.

The observer in the decadent London in 1984 is Winston Smith, the central character of Orwell's novel, which begins precisely with the shock day of Winston: April 4, 1984. In a new social order sustained in a set of mechanism whose foundation is falseness, Winston is actually an agent that maintains the functionality of these precepts. His duty implies the reformulation of truth in a never-ending task to make population stay deceived. But in the latter days, he has started to dream, feeling the insisting desire of writing by hand in a new journal, trying to recall old memories of a blurred childhood when, he is almost sure, London was diametrically different to today’s lugubrious city. While he performs his role during the Two Minutes Hate, Winston gets aware of a persisting sensation of imprisonment. By the end of the novel's first chapter, he will be actually fully aware of his alienated condition, because of the consequences it represents in a world permanently watched: Being vaporized.

The arrests invariably happened at night. [...] In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: VAPORIZED was the usual word.

For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:

theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck I dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother (sic)

1984, p. 39

The search

Alienation emerges as a consequence of existentialism, that is, a consciousness about human existence, it mysterious and unsolved origin, purpose and end due to its inherent constraints -death, perception and interpretation- (Saleem, 2014: 68). After an age of apparently unstoppable human progression and perfection, in the Modern Era human capability to sow tragedy and extend suffering to their peers reached its topmost; thus, war, persecution, consumption, famine, inequality and ruin constituted a testimony of how far decay and pain can get (p. 69). 

Was Poe an example of
a real-life alienated person?
Why?

Logically, generations previous, current or later question themselves if they are equally able of doing likewise or agree at different extents. The answer for many was 'no', and this convinced 'no' lead to a search for an identity now dispossessed and lost, for that very deep purpose of life and meaningfulness of existence in a hostile and despairing world, the same that previous generation failed to find. 

The figure of the stranger towards who direct our hopes appears as a way to confirm alienation in “The Man of the Crowd”, if we considers how the protagonist reacts to the perplexity that the old man caused him. His walk behind the old man to snoop him is perhaps motivated by a desire of revealing a hidden meaning (Gutiérrez, 2000: 167). Why the observer surprises himself following an unknown man across the city? What could explain such fascination? We are here invited to follow the stranger the same way the protagonist does, perhaps encouraged by a strong desire, a deep conviction, that in the encounter of the only evidence of our alienation (another person who also seems to be) a turnaround to this emptiness will wait. 

Goldstein could be the ‘stranger’ followed by Winston, pursued by Winston, searched by Winston. Julia and O'Brien, the landmarks in the night city and its intricacies, alleys, passages, turns, corners and crannies that could lead you to the encounter in the same way they could get you away from it. They could give you the usefulness of a book, the candor of a relationship, relive the happiness of love, the certain of complicity, the safety from information, the pleasure of secrets, the hope for privacy in the midst of a world self-monitored by his obsession with the stillness of homogeneity. Dismally, you will ever prone to disappointment because of the tricky paths of a city, of the many layers of a person's face. In the mood of alienation, everyone deserves distrust, no one is completely certain, not even the stranger who is not desired as a person, but as what the person represents for the alienated: A break from desperation. 

The Fallen Hero

John Hurt as Winston Smith in Michael
Radford's 1984 film adaptation of the novel.

Heroism and alienation tend to be linked by readers as alienated characters are recurrently misinterpreted as a people blessed by a sort of empowerment that differentiate them from the crowd and, in turn, placing them at a superior position of awareness; consequently, the alienated character is expected to manage significant change for both him or herself and the others, provoking a chain of revolutionary facts that leads minds to a wave of awaking that free masses from their existential struggles (Resch, 1997: 155).

Notwithstanding, the self-recognition of alienation do not necessarily denote heroism. We may interpret that for Poe's protagonist, there is a hope of heroism deposited in the stranger. The stranger is considered by the observer as someone who fastens the two extremes of a circle the observer himself has not been able to: Have an identity in a dispossessed world and the observer does get from this idol an image of his behavior which is coherent to the fascination he has been object of: The stranger never breaks down the illusion, there is no more sense in following him, that his nature, being an enigma.

…the shades of the second evening came on, I grew wearied unto death, and, stopping fully in front of the wanderer, gazed at him steadfastly in the face. He noticed me not, but resumed his solemn walk, while I, ceasing to follow, remained absorbed in contemplation. “This old man,” I said at length, “is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds. 

“The Man of the Crowd”, p. 237

Although the protagonist seemed to get what he expected at some extent, much of the stranger’s heroism comes from his mind rather than reality. The alienated needs the alienated, that’s why he created a hero somehow, likewise many readers do with Winston. As for the reading of 1984, Winston is mistaken as an archetype of political leader, a revolutionary icon and, ultimately, a hero. Although, if we consider his hopeless on the possibility of the prole's recovery from their inability to think by themselves, the image of Winston as the potential middle-class hero within the dictatorship of the Big Brother vanishes in some way. 

Talking [Winston] to her [Julia], he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

1984, p. 185

Thus, Winston moves dramatically from the generosity and stoicism of heroes to the prejudices and egoism of an individual who just desires desperately to escape from the system of which he is captive (Resch, 1997: 171). This is a powerful portrait of how alienation is rather connected to the risk of individualism than the willingness for heroism. Winston does not believe profoundly in the possibility of a new and luminous society, he is rather certain that collapse approaches every day (p. 172). And he just wants a chance, an alternative to not be there when the day has come.

Alone in a world of lonesome people

From the reading of the both Poe’s and Orwell’s work as well as the essays consulted to deepen the theme of alienation, I have noticed how alienation is markedly connected to the celebration of our individuality and an overemphasized concern on it. At a point of our lives, we, or some of us, feel we have diluted in the middle of the crowd, which terrifies us as it contradict a natural tendency to wish the certainty of meaningfulness. Think about globalization: By approaching cultures around the world, aren't we taking the risk of homogenized traditions, beliefs and values in such way that diversity would extinct? What the purpose of being another else? Distinction is a mechanism to make our identity noticeable, at least for ourselves. Who knows, maybe want they the observer suddenly look at us and think “that person… that person who is so…” or we can inspire the search of a freer world in the next Winston Smith. We need the certainty that we are someone. Not only someone else.

Thought-provoking questions

George Orwell

After reading this entry’s conclusion, would you agree or disagree? What would you say it could another factor, maybe a more decisive, which would explain alienation?

Is alienation a phenomenon that has affected any character you know from another work? I’d like to know what you could share. 

I personally hypothesize that Orwell's perception of his own alienation was one of the factors that led him write 1984, what do you think about?

I proposed an analogy between globalization and alienation. How elese could you relate these concepts?

If you have finished 1984 and “The Man of the Crowd”, what’s the parallel you could establish between how both protagonist finally resolved the identity struggle and the search for a figure of heroism?

Comments are welcome! :^)

References

Gutiérrez, F. M. (2000). Edgar Allan Poe: Misery and Mystery in "The Man of the Crowd". Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense, 1(2), 153-174.

Orwell, G. (2009). 1984. Buenos Aires: Emecé.

Poe, E. A. (2006). The Man of the Crowd, in Kennedy, J. G. (Ed). The Portable Edgar Allan Poe. London: Penguin Books, 229-237. 

Resch, R. P. (1997). Utopia, Dystopia and the Middle Class in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Boundary, 2(1), 137-176.

Saleem, A. (2014). The Theme of Alienation in Modern Literature. European Journal of English Language and Literature Studies, 2(3), 67-76.