Social theorists have connected social structures to what literary or philosophical people regard as the existential situation, which means the universal and fundamental experience of being in the world. That ties together social scientific objectivity with the realm of humanistic experience. Karl Marx connected some of the divisions of labor with alienation, which is a deeply and ubiquitous experience that it is difficult to pin down. Emile Durkheim connected the idea of norm with the experience of anxiety, everyone concerned to achieve conformity. Georg Simmel connected multiple lives and roles with the experience of metropolitan life, people now alive with choice and variety. Here is another connection between structure and experience, one that is a variation of Robert Merton”s role theory. The purely formal structure of what I will call an incomplete status sequence explains the sense of every person in life as caught between the present and the future and, as well, an experience as life always changing and surprising, which is different from the Durkheimian view, that everything is in a permanent present so that whatever is the norm is what that seems to be as it always has been and will be. A sociological concept therefore is able to unravel what might seem the always squishy and uncertain of what is the philosophical view.
Robert Merton usually dealt with status sets. That meant that a person had a number of simultaneous statuses. You had to juggle the statuses of being a wife and mother. There was also a contradiction between being a doctor and a Christian Scientist. Some statuses were salient in that one or the other status became always important however what were one’s other statuses. So being Black was salient in that it meant that white people would always take as Black being important whether he or she was a doctor or someone just walking while Black. The status, Merton thought, could not elude a person, even if there are some enclaves, such as hospitals and medical schools, where now but not when observing the social world of the Forties, that they do not stick out as Black. There are also, however, status sequences. It is the change in status over time. So people move on from Freshman to Sophomore to Junior and Senior. There are “Greenhorns” who become accommodated and then assimilated as they move on from initial immigrants. Shakespeare speaks of the seven ages of man, or Sophocles of the baby on all four legs, as followed by the man who is erect on two legs, and then the old man who uses a cane. So we can speak of the universal status sequence to describe some entire life, even if most people narrow down to particular sequences, such as courtship or in a career.
An incomplete status sequence occurs when a person does not know what is the next status that will occur. You can decide to be a postman or a baker and marry a girl who lives three blocks away or across the country, even if sociologists will emphasize what is likely: that a person enters the occupation of their family and that propinquity leads to matrimony. The usual does not mean without surprise. David Copperfield finds an incomplete status sequence when he finds himself to get a stepfather, even if it is not surprising that what is a fairly young mother might decide to remarry. In life, things keep happening rather than just do the same old.
It is possible to Illustrate the nature of an incomplete status sequence by engaging with some celebrity for the very obvious reason that there are a great many facts available for the life of celebrities. Jane Wyatt was a film star in the Thirties and then had a second act, to his surprise and so as to mark change, by becoming a notable sitcom television star in the Fifties. Most, except those two events, are remarkably stable, and so pleases the sociological view that life is for the most part to be over determined so that life will be without surprises. For the most part, people have mutually buttressing statuses. Wyatt went to Miss Spence’s School, which meant that she was wealthy and refined and, in fact, had a long lasting husband, a devotion to her Catholicism, and some acquaintance with FDR. She early on, however, had a theatrical bent. She left two years after Barnard to get theatrical training and after a few plays struck it big as the ingenue opposite Ronald Coleman in “Lost Horizon”, where she had spectacular reviews, even though she had only one or two speeches, enough to convey his crisp manner and deep voice and a sparkle and a presence accustomed as conveys the well connected, as was also the case with Katherine Hepburn. But his movies did not provide him with a stable star that allowed her one big hit after another, as was the case with Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck, each of them slotted with their own specific gravity of each of their particular class and manner. Wyatt was incomplete in that her life might have been seen as a flickering star, framed as the one very big moment, the rest of hier life not particularly important, something of a fluke rather than a resilient presence. So a person, still quite young though always illustrious, can re-shape the future as what has already shaped as it is already in her past, as a largely one hit wonder. She could reflect on that fluke and lucky occasion, whatever else was part of her non-celebrity career, she glimmering for the rest of her life of her anticipation on there being no second act.
Instead, Wyatt did have a second act, a great success that made her twenty years after “Lost Horizon” as an icon of middle class and midwestern solid values. Wyatt played Margaret Anderson, the mother in “Father Knows Best”. It lasted as a television series from 1954 through 1960. She was the sensible and attractive mother in her family, still melodious and warmhearted. Wyatt did not do much, however, after that longer than half decade ended, as if that second term was less than other of a significant accomplishment, presenting herself as being a little more stately than middle class, though plausible.
The same thing happens in more ordinary lives when the murkiness of the future can reveal what might happen to a second or a third adventure. A person lives in one factory from the time one has left high school until a last paycheck before retirement. Nothing happens which is a surprise, and that makes a monotonous course is also a surprise, something expected to something happening somewhere in the course of life as it unfolds. There are many surprises in life. A grocer can have more than one shopkeeper, or even a half dozen starting up a new business and then over again and over again having to close. Moreover, in private life, people may have a single spouse or multiple ones. The point is that each of the businesses or the marriages are surprises in that they did not plan to have it happen or know that it would happen but that these things eventuated, not knowing in advance there would be three wives, maybe a divorce or maybe a death, even if people may be skittish rather than more loyal to spouses and so people can say that there was a suspicion of what might have unfolded, as if we could give each of our lives a trajectory that made sense rather than circumstance. The mystery is always hidden in what is to happen forward, and so there is no certainty that Wyatt would have two acts except when it has already happened. These matters are more quizical than the steady wife and religion than what are taken as the basic social structures of life while not allowing the uncertainties of what will eventuate in any person’s life.
But all in all, there is this fundamental thing. I, looking at Wyatt, I always think of her as having had a double star. I always see the irony of the two juxtaposed against her, savoring what she is one, then the other, and then back again. But Wyatt does not know there is a second turn. It isn’t that there had to be a disclosure of what had had to have happened. Rather, it was until something happened, and so the incomplete status history is always to the person as a mystery however much there is an attempt to heal a wound, as if it were, that subsequent events and prior ones are wedded together so as to make of oneself as a whole thing, even if the newness of adventure makes for people to be filled with adventure (as Simmel might say) or even as free will and surprise because there are always contingencies up until the death is done.
The difference to construct either a whole thing or else a multi-event thing is very deep, Indeed, it creates no less than the difference between the medieval and the modern points of view. Dante imagines that every person is always the epitome of his or her person. He is what he is and will be so for eternity, always the tragic and inevitable flaw however much the person can converse with his two visitors in Hell , Dante and Vergil,in an affable kind of way, as if one of the damned were just taking a time out before being reimmersed into excruciating agony. The person is not just a tendency to eat too much; rather, he is a glutton, that the quintessence of his nature, and so the glutton is not an overexcess but is rather someone whose atmosphere is super rich with dribs of fat and, perhaps, feces. His entire atmosphere is suffused with him. He cannot be other than what he is and so he will always be that, every person his essence. He does not change nor evolve except when he is in Purgatory, which is a question that requires thousands and thousands of years (which means, to Dante, quite a lot) until he has been shorn of his so difficult to alter nature. And even in the modern world, we cling to understand people as having a kernel of the person. Every person is more easily understood as a type of a person, whether a sluggard, or a womanizer, or an accountant, each of these summarizing a nature even if there are also incidental matters, as whether they may also have a race or a sports team, sometimes the race or gender regarded as also essential natures, so that a woman is always a woman, whatever else may kid you to be otherwise. So Dante looks from the eye of eternity, as happens when I work as Jane Wyatt is always a double, the product of her two acts.
The alternative is the modern Shakespearean view. In any number of his plays, the main protagonist is buffeted by circumstance and by fleeting inspiration. Prince Hal is sometimes a wastral, sometimes a competitor with Hotspur as a warrior, trying his parts, and only deciding to take on his identity as he has now become the King, and so willing to forsaken even his loyal Falstaff. The decision is both decisive and clear cut, announcing to himself the kind of person he will now be, a modern idea of identity the equivalent of Dante’s idea of an essence. The same happens with Macbeth. He also tries his temptation, a mixture of ambition and decisive violence but he does not simply find himself ever just more deeply into his inclination until his lust to power. Rather, he has transformed himself, decided to become what he has decided to be. To the contrary, he understands the murder of Banquo is a signal act that has reshaped him as a man who is driven to blood however it means he will be driven by his dreams and his superstitions, the early presence of the three witches only an image and fortent of what he might have become, but fully realized, in his own free well, as the person who says, finally, “Lay on Macduff”, as if he no longer could be anything other than what was his now identity. Hamlet is paradoxical in that he is a courtier, a bit of a madman, a harsh lover, a potential murderer, uncertain which to be to the point that it is anti-climatic. Why had he chanced to engage in the duel in that people were out to get him? His identity is never decided by himself but by Fortinbras who, understandably enough, thinks him, as he himself is, a warrior, and that might provide a thread of his identity as a whole life, he the antagonist out to revenge and turn topsy turvy the crown, which may be as good an epitome as any, though he seems best as someone who never finds himself as an identity, and this lack of it is his greatest tragedy.
The metaphysical arrow of time proceeds forward. One can barely imagine what might happen if time were curved or reversed. What intellectual history, however, is to fashion a meaning of that metaphysical fact whereby a person is an epitome or a decision to become an identity. Unlike the sociological alternatives that are used to say how unsettlingly deep and pervasive are alienation and anxiety, some of these make life more happy and free. Simmel thought people became free because they lived in a cosmopolitan life in that they could make and alter their circumstances and have the great variety of life that the life of the city makes possible. And it is also the case that the creation of an identity allows people to be surprised at life as it changes anew and, in the case of Jane Wyatt, her own contemplation of her own double star when that had happened. There are endless ways in which lives can be formed and the contemplation of that being once it has become, a wonder to all of us.