Narrating Class in American Fiction

American Literature Readings in the st Century Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United States. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote By Thomas Fahy Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics By Steven Salaita Women & Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison By Kelly Lynch Reames American Political Poetry in the 21st Century By Michael Dowdy Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity By Sam Halliday F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness By Michael Nowlin Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories By Melissa Bostrom Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry By Nicky Marsh James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence By Piotr K. Gwiazda Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism Edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo By Stephanie S. Halldorson Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction By Amy L. Strong Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism By Jennifer Haytock

The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut By David Simmons Indians, Environment, and Identity on the Borders of American Literature: From Faulkner and Morrison to Walker and Silko By Lindsey Claire Smith The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery: The House Abandoned By Marit J. MacArthur Narrating Class in American Fiction By William Dow

Narrating Class in American Fiction

William Dow

NARRATING CLASS IN AMERICAN FICTION

Copyright © William Dow, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60982–2 ISBN-10: 0–230–60982–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dow, William. Narrating class in American fiction / William Dow. p. cm.—(American literature readings in the twenty-first century) ISBN 0–230–60982–1 (alk. paper) 1. American fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Social classes in literature. 3. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Working class in literature. I. Title. PS374.S68D69 2009 813⬘.309355—dc22

2008017506

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: January 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For my father, my mother, and Anne-Marie

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C on ten t s

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: The Case of Class

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1 Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass: “Hard Work and Blood”

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2 Class and the Performative in Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills, and Stephen Crane’s Maggie

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3 Body Tramping, Class, and Masculine Extremes: Jack London’s The People of the Abyss

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4 “Always Your Heart”: Class Designs in Jean Toomer’s Cane

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5 Meridel Le Sueur’s Salute to Spring: “A Movement Up Which All Are Moving”

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6 Class, Work, and New Races: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth

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7 Class “Truths” in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

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Conclusion: Going Back to Class

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Notes

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Works Cited

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Index

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Ack now l ed gmen t s

This book has been a long time in the making. Among the many friends and colleagues who have given extraordinary insight and encouragement to this project, I would like to offer a special thanks to Alan Wald, Karin Badt, Robert Shulman, Jon Delogu, Linda Wagner-Martin, Paula Rabinowitz, David Coad, Jeanne Campbell Reesman, John Hartsock, and Barbara Foley. The research for this book was substantially aided by several American University of Paris librarians. Thanks to Jorge Sosa, Isabelle Dupuy-Llorente, Anne Guerineau, Michael Stoepel, Sally Murray, Laurence Amoureux, and Jeff Gima. Portions of chapter 2 appeared in Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism, ed. Mary Papke (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003). Sections of chapter 3 were first published as “Down and Out in London and Orwell,” Symbiosis 6. 1 (April 2002). An early version of chapter 4 was first published as “The ‘Great Design’ of Toomer’s Cane” in MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, and is reprinted here with the permission of MELUS. I’m grateful to the editors and readers of these publications.

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Introduction

The Case of Class Narrating Class in America Fiction is about class as discourse, how class is represented in American fiction in the 1850–1940 period. My theoretical claim is that literature is a means to access the way class becomes part of subjectivity: how it forms, in conjunction with race and gender, a discursive subject. Beyond any simple dichotomy between fiction and reality, the power of the poetic word is rooted as much in its capacity to document the forces that shape the world as in its ability to reshape our most fundamental ideas about social and material determinations. The starting point for writing the book was the frustration I was experiencing in reading literary criticism—particularly from the United States—in which considerations of class and class representations were almost completely evacuated while such interpretive grids as gender and race were given the status of automatic concern and legitimacy. I began with the question, “why is class an afterthought?” Major exceptions of course exist, for example: Paula Rabinowitz’s Labor and Desire (1991); John Carlos Rowe’s At Emerson’s Tomb (1997); Gregory S. Jay’s American Literature and Culture Wars (1997); Amy Shrager Lang’s The Syntax of Class (2003); Barbara Foley’s Radical Representations (1993); George Lipsitz’s Rainbow at Midnight (1994); and Michael Trask’s Cruising Modernism (2003). Exceptionally, these works, in their multiplicity of approaches to class and culture, do not deflect, deny, or mystify class realities. And yet, especially in the United States, the category of class in literary analyses has far to go in catching up to the panoply of other by now almost “canonical” textual approaches. The core of my study uses textual and formal analyses to develop a hermeneutic that looks at how class and language inform each other, how literary strategies are influenced by class considerations, and how representations of class most assuredly involve questions of literary history. To my mind, no study on class has gone far enough in doing this, nor has any study satisfactorily traced the U.S. history of class discourses and vocabularies, especially during the 1850–1940 period. Examining the works of

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Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, Rebecca Harding Davis, Jean Toomer, Meridel Le Sueur, Agnes Smedley, Zora Neale Hurston, James Agee and others, my study clearly departs from the preceding work on class (and its recent critical caché) in both clearly defining this trajectory and in the following ways: (1) By illustrating how literary analysis is access to class representations while being suspicious of a priori definitions of class and social structure that have been imposed on literature. How might an author or reader’s actual class experience inflect the production and reception of the languages of class? (2) By examining the primacy of literary journalism,1 a form evolved from a variety of authors and writing styles, as an undervalued and under theorized genre in which most of the authors I discuss were immersed. Virtually no studies have been done on the relations between narrative representations of class and the discursive forms of literary journalism; (3) By emphasizing how such writers as Agnes Smedley, Jean Toomer, and James Agee challenged the political style and aesthetic forms of their times and pointed toward new aesthetic-political possibilities that literary theorists are still struggling with today. Overall, the book provides a counter-approach to class-empty studies by examining class representations in narratives that beg for class mappings. Each chapter introduces important discursive inventions in the literary renditions of class, taking up one or two writers who most significantly contributed to the creation of class discourses and tropes. Through such inventions, the writers I discuss modeled ways to talk about social ranks, assigned value to particular classes, and designated rules of group membership and interclass social discourse in the 1850–1940 period. This period, during which works of realism, naturalism, and modernism flourished is, arguably, the most experimental in American literature. The writers I engage—all experimenters in their own right—remind us of the importance of expressing authentic human life through open-ended dialogue, a defining literary feature of the period. What is important to note, all of them connected their literary experiments with some kind of social consciousness and a compensatory order: their literature requisitions social fact for specific real-life purposes. Interestingly, almost all of these writers were involved with journalistic writings that fused with their literary objectives.2 The 1850–1940 period is outstandingly rich because its craft-conscious and class-conscious writers saw, among much else, the socialization of readers as their principal task. My study traces the vocabularies or discourses of class during this period to show how its meanings were inevitably diverse—tinctured by, dependent upon, or in conflict with

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other basic categories of identity. Yet, at the same time, while exploring the imaginative construction of class, I wish to take the literary codes of class seriously, and therefore show why critics need to reexamine class and its mechanics. More specifically, what Narrating Class wishes to demonstrate is the critical importance of textual/authorial/narrational representations of class with a particular emphasis on the working class and its relations and effects. Here, though, I’ll follow, and later illustrate, the caveat proposed by Nicolas Coles and Janet Zandy in their recent anthology, American Working Class Literature: “. . . it is important to understand the concepts of ‘literature’ and ‘working class’ in elastic expansive ways” (xix). Although no longer considered a privileged locus of agency, “the working class,” as depicted in the fiction of the 1850–1940 period, possesses its own “class vocabulary,” amounting to much more than flat descriptions or merely matters of taxonomy, for it is animated with will, necessity, incipience, and dialectic. This is not to say that it necessarily constitutes an autonomous category, “a single discreet identity” (Coles and Zandy xx), but, rather, it can be characterized by its “rhetorical substitutability” that, along with much else, makes up the language of social identity. It is a vocabulary that is ceaselessly displaced, recontextualized, and deferred, but the literature of this period cannot be understood without considering it. Not only is this vocabulary one of our most important analytical categories in the works of Whitman, London, Davis, Crane, Toomer, Hurston, and Smedley; it is also a lynchpin in understanding other class languages in historical contexts. In reference to the American working class, the labor historian, George Lipsitz, writes, . . . the working class has always functioned as a subordinate force in American history, a group often capable of winning important concessions from those in power, but never capable of mobilizing itself and its allies sufficiently to set the direction for the nation’s economic and political life. (4)

Lipsitz goes on to argue for the necessity of learning from labor history “why workers lose most of the battles they fight” (4) and for the “need to analyze these defeats to learn how victory might have been possible, to see what was salvaged in the process of losing, and to understand how each victory or defeat creates a new context for the future” (4–5). Lipsitz’s plea to “learn from labor” and its legacy parallels a crucial intention of this book: to destabilize traditional categories of academic inquiry by learning from and providing a richer,

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more carefully multidimensional account of working-class vocabularies and images than we’ve had before. Another premise of this book is that class contains both objective and subjective elements: it is a process defined in relation to other processes, and is historically dependent (Fantasia 1). Thus, following Raymond Williams, this study approaches class as “a would-be description of a social formation” and “category” (Williams 61) and also as a concept that supersedes older names for social divisions. Class not only “relates to the increasing consciousness that social position is made rather than merely inherited” (Williams 61) but it also involves what one possesses or thinks about oneself—what Williams calls “a structure of feeling”: how one perceives the world, how one experiences what one perceives. While “ruthlessly economic,” the effects of class permeate the deepest recesses of culture, language, and subjectivity (Sequin 164). Oddly, literary theory and criticism has been generally underutilized in furthering our understanding of the literary representations of class. One reason for this is that class studies is incompatible with the academy’s wishful claim for universalism (to discern unity amid diversity), and another is the multicultural studies proclivity, now dominating literary studies, “[t]o see the poor as having a culture that reproduces itself from one generation to the next rather than seeing the poor as the effect of an economic or class structure” (Gandall, Class 4). I will return to both issues in the later chapters. Without overdetermining any one particular theory or approach and, at the same time, preempting any ideological bell jar in my analysis, I hope to use the criticism to create a new method of articulating literature’s relation to class.

Critical History To contextualize my argument, a brief overview of the recent critical history of class will be helpful. A class-oriented scholarship that took substantial new departures from the traditional narratives of organized labor included, in the 1960s, the work of Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, Herbert Gutman, David Montgomery, and Stephen Thernstrom. These scholars—the first generation of revisionary historians—depicted a working class in ways considered nonclass-specific or nonclass-induced. Gutman, for example, set out to understand “the workers themselves, their communities, and the day-to-day occurrences that shaped their outlook” (18). Hobsbawm, among much else, wrote on Methodism as a vehicle for popular protest. In a seminal work, Beyond Equality (1967), Montgomery explored how workers’

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movements in Northern and Western towns and cities in the Civil War and Reconstruction years raised fundamental questions about prevailing middle-class notions of equality. Thernstrom concluded in his Poverty and Progress (1964) that great jumps in social status were rare and that most mobility was intraclass, not interclass. Focusing their work away from trade unions, the traditional subject matter of labor historians, and toward subjects with less clearly directed economic concerns, they problematized the primacy of economics in class-oriented historiography. On the other hand, they remained committed to various forms of class essentialism grounded in integral identities and economic determinism (Dimock 5).3 Revisionists of the seventies and eighties, among them Sean Wilentz and Gareth Stedman Jones, challenged many of these earlier assumptions, called for a general shift away from defining a “class consciousness,” focused on ideologies that were primarily political as opposed to economic, and, especially in the case of Jones, marshaled significant attacks on orthodox Marxist beliefs. Although groundbreaking and revisionary in their specific studies—most notably Wilentz’s Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (1986) and Jones’s Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1882 (1984), both scholars tended to situate the working class as the principal axis of social transformation and as a more or less stable historical subject (Dimock 6). Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (1979; trans. 1984) is another contribution from this same period. Although his study takes very different forms, concentrating as it does on providing a “project of objectifying the mental structures associated with the particularity of a social structure” (xiv), and emphasizing the idea that taste functions to make “social distinctions,” Bourdieu similarly insists on clear essentialized markers—for example, in his categories of “high” and “low” “aestheticism” (Distinction 11–30). For Bourdieu, social values, being linked to economic and aesthetic values, gradually contributed to the hardening of class lines. These three critics openly regard class, in its practical terms and use, as the key principal of social identity. Work on class of the last twenty-five years, particularly that found in the common core of Western criticism, has largely bracketed the palimpsest of Marxism as a historical touchstone and globally inclusive determinant and critique of class. Of course, Marxist analysis of class retains considerable heuristic force, for it is still a productive source for new ways of understanding class. But the world has changed: the new global economy, we are told, has erased all fixed certainties. The

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traditional “working class,” its “consciousness,” its collective resistance to capitalist power, and its revolutionary aspirations have all been compromised, leaving behind new vistas of ideas and opinions on theorizing class. Very few commentators these days, even from the extreme left, see the diminishing industrial working class as a key to social change. That part, as Cora Kaplan notes, “has been taken by the ‘new’ social movements of the last forty years, although their success in effecting change and the meaning of the changes they have wanted to effect are much disputed” (10). Today the Marxian conception of class as “a changing temporal process of producing, appropriating, and distributing surplus labor” (Markels 1) appears to have few academic takers. As Julian Markels argues, “the only Marxists to have gained a significant voice in contemporary cultural studies are those like Fredric Jameson or Gayatri Spivak who have no analytical use for this conception of class and whose work leaves intact the methodological consensus by which class ends up being paid lip-service only” (1). The correspondences between class and fixed ideologies that might have been true in the past do not apply today. By now a critical commonplace: class per se can no longer be the subject of a stable ideology, nor do specific ideas and concepts necessarily belong exclusively to one particular class.4 What appears to be surfacing as a most dominant force, as evidenced for example in the writings of Stuart Hall, Frederic Jameson, E.P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams, is the central place of culture in the temporality of late capitalism. 5 Countering the generalizing abstractions of historical sociology and against the grain of classical Marxist theory, Thompson, for example, argues that class is a historical and cultural phenomenon and not a mere theoretical product; it is a “relationship” (9–11). Class is “something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships” (9). Thompson’s distaste for theory, what he termed “the poverty of theory,” went hand in hand with his refusal to consider class as a category. Instead his concern was with class as a “historical phenomenon” (9), with Marxism as a form of latent humanism, and with protecting class from what he saw as the empty systematizing of sociologists (Kaplan, “Millenial Class” 14).

Spotlighting On and Off Class: Present Glimmers The critiques of social class over the past several years have complicated the equations of Thompson and Williams, and any kind of “essentialist” pleading. Recently problematizing “cultural work” analyses, class

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has been placed in poststructuralist frames. J. K. Gibson-Graham’s Class and Its Others (2000), for example, links economic identities with social identities by creating a class discourse that hopes to take back “the economy . . . not as a homogeneous and unified level, sphere, or system, but as a discursive terrain, a set of concepts, issues, contradictions, identities, and struggles that falls outside the purview of most contemporary social theory” (1–2). According to the editors of the collection, . . . it is clear that class can no longer be understood as the organizing center of individual and collective identity. Nor can it be seen as ordained by or founded on positions in a larger social structure or as constituting social groups (classes) unified by commonalities of power, property, consciousness etc. By defining class simply in terms of the processes of performing, appropriating, and distributing surplus labor, we have detached it from an a priori social structure (in which both its reproductive and emancipatory functions are given and known) and freed it from the intractable and unrewarding problems of class-ification. (9)

Along similar lines, though without the directional Marxist adaptations and overlay, Wai Chee Dimcock and Michael T. Gilmore in their collection, Rethinking Class (1994), call for a rejection of “class essentialism, an implicit belief that shared forms of life—whether cultural or political—stem from an anterior economic determination” (6), and challenge “the explanatory adequacy of class by celebrating the limits of its generalizations” (9).6 The more extreme positions of such an approach posit that social structure, thought, and conflict are seen as semiotic systems to be treated as a text. In this way, the ideologies and rationalities that guide social action are largely the results of discursive moments. A basic idea derived from this approach is that meaning is relative and relational, a consequence of the positioning of the tools of discourse. Most recently, there has been a renewed focus, minus much of this epistemological relativity, in addressing the role of language in class formation, providing accounts of where to find languages of class, and how gender, race, and class should be seen as discursively intersecting. Building on Stuart Blumin’s thesis in The Emergence of the Middle Class (1989), that the American middle class was, in the 1760–1900 period, a consequence of its ubiquity as a cultural norm, Stephen Rice’s Minding the Machine (2004) and Amy Schrager Lang’s The Syntax of Class (2003), for example, analyze what the norm was and how it was represented in the writings of the nineteenth century. For Rice, the relationship of language to class, largely transparent and stable,

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emerged most forcefully through the popular discourses of mechanization in antebellum America; for Lang, this relationship grew out of the way nineteenth-century novels “naturalize” the mores, beliefs, and aspirations of an emergent middle class as exclusively universal American ideals. Both of these provocative works depart from a labor historian approach to class by locating class formation in language rather than in the material conditions of production. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literary discourses on class are not merely accidental nor residual. They are rather in the representational quandary that still plagues the current era in which writers apparently have no conscious hold on the agency of particular genres and discourses pertaining to class. Likewise, the principles of the construction of meaning have been harmfully superseded by the modes of the mimetic and the materialization of meanings. The present study works to redress such imbalances. While in the vein of Rice’s and Lang’s work, Narrating Class seeks to respond to the questions that Jan Mieszkowski has posed regarding the coming together of the “specter” of formalism and the “sterility” of historical criticism7: [A]re the models used to explain what literature means in terms of its creation compatible with the models used to explain what it means in terms of the understanding it facilitates or the representations it effects? What if literary language is distinguished precisely by its resistance to being determined as a product—be it the product of a social or cultural system, a historical period, or an individual writer? (Labors 1)

In what follows, I want to directly confront some of the methodological capital invested in class criticism. Far from putting class in the tried category of a consciousness that thinks itself to be exclusively in a hierarchical or binary relationship, this study is a rethinking, reworking, and reformulation of class that hopes to provide a new venue for literary criticism. Accordingly, this book has been oriented by several specific questions, including: how do the central issues of class combine with other categories and divisions (e.g., race, gender, nationality)? Why and how has class overwhelmed most attempts to study it in all its literary discursive variousness and difficulty? What is the place of workingclass culture—including its resistant, oppositional, and emancipatory accents—in the development of American nationhood? How have many of the writers of this study contributed to literary journalism as an emerging form of expression and as a platform of class advocacy

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and commentary? I try to situate an analysis of cultural forms, the various products of textuality and subjectivity most closely related to human identity and agency. The purpose for doing so is not only to further our understanding of historical forms of class consciousness and identity but also to put into question what so often is taken as culturally representative (but in fact is quite exclusionary) in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. Before getting to that task, though, I would like to make some final comments on my approach. While seeking to avoid the cul-de-sac of some deconstructive formalism, Narrating Class does emphasize single authors, or paired authors, and close readings of usually one or two texts as part of its analytical strategy. To this end I wish to properly portray an enormously complex phenomena—the literary representation and referents of class—but to do so both as a reflection of power and power relations and as a signifier of them. Given the formal and historical complexity of class, this will require, to say the least, a great deal of decoding to get at its meaning. I have chosen the authors, periods, and tropes that I consider most conducive to examining class languages and how class meanings were produced in canonical and noncanonical American texts. Integrated into such meanings, the role of literary journalism, especially because the form remains “the great unexplored territory of contemporary criticism” (Lounsberry xi), will be given as much attention as space allows. A brief synopsis of the chapters is as follows. Chapter 1 argues that class is central to the first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1851), in which he tropes the “incarnational” in his representations of America’s emerging class structures. In doing so, he anticipates the distinct working- and middle-class identities (forged from a variety of social and cultural practices) that began to take form by the 1860s, identities that frequently brought these classes into conflict with one another (Rice 5). Yet Leaves of Grass promotes a series of poetical frameworks that clearly undermine oppositional notions of class. Whitman attributes new meanings to the working body, distinguishes it from the nonworking body, and in the socioeconomic position of a free white laborer, associates primarily with the suffering and downtrodden. By offering a new perception of class and the nature of class relations, he ultimately promises membership in an abstract community where no bodies or status markers exist. Leaves of Grass is also Whitman’s journalistic afterlife. Transmuting individual potential into social motion, Whitman “forces the surfaces and the depths,” as he claims to have done in his journalism for the New York Aurora and the Brooklyn Eagle, making his poetry dense

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with American realities. Leaves is filled with the same events that filled the daily newspapers. As he argued in “A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads” (1888), “the true use for the imaginative faculty of modern times is to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science, and to common lives, endowing them with the glows and glories and final illustriousness which belongs to every real thing, and to real things only” (659). Whitman did not have to go out “into the field,” because he was permanently living in the field. Necessarily, then, his aim was to portray the look of the world—resonant with dissident American class vocabularies—and at the same time to recreate its feeling from a subjective point of view. This chapter will show how he was transfixed by class differences and also potentially imprisoned in his watching. Chapter 2 introduces the work of Rebecca Harding Davis and Stephen Crane from the perspective that both evolved a style that was utterly personal and without precedent. Rendering their physical environments foremost in terms of sensory impressions, Davis and Crane tried to come to terms with the social transformations that brought different class worlds (e.g., middle- and upper-class, middleand lower-class) together: for example, Davis’s Hugh and Doctor May in Life in the Iron Mills; Crane’s Maggie and Pete in Maggie. Adopting performative modes that escape the mimetic constructions that Life and Maggie propose, both writers asserted their own narrative authority to represent an interdependent society composed of competing and seemingly mutually exclusive class realities. Davis and Crane used vocabularies of class division that were quite standard for their times. Crane, for instance, “depicted late Victorian class structures as increasingly dichotomized, a two-tiered society separating the educated, genteel upper stratum of luxury from the world of misery and poverty” (Wilson 343). Davis viewed immigrants and the working poor with a contrasting vision of harsh sympathy, affection for their suffering, and a spiritual enlistment for what she cast as their ignorance and bestiality. But Life in the Iron Mills and Maggie also transform many of the dominant American class vocabularies of the period: “the tendency to see class through consumption, leisure, and cultivation rather than through labor as such; the feeling that class warfare marked itself on physical bodies; the notion that class division was a particular anathema to American ideals of nationhood; and the presentation of class divides through the medium of a noncommittal middle-class spectator” (Wilson 343). Crane often does so through presenting theatricalized spatial arrangements that display the meaning of contact, proper and improper, between classes, encoding in his descriptions class-delimited values for genteel readers.

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Davis, like Crane, is likely to acknowledge the “permanence” of class divisions and antagonisms. Life in the Iron Mills is a work in which the humanitarian bonds between the upper class and proletarian characters (including the novel’s narrator) are at best rarified; Davis wishes to render her classes equal while keeping them apart (Gould 76). Most important, their respective needs to express class are enmeshed with a concomitant necessity for the reader to come to terms with various discursive class modes. Extensively relying on direct address, Davis taunts her readers, vicariously daring them to enter the worlds of her Welsh miners; Crane in his journalism (e.g., his New York City sketches), while depicting class structure as increasingly polarized, wished, at the same time, to narrow the gulf between “subject and object” (Hartsock 59)—an intention he picks up in Maggie. He wanted to transform his newspaper pieces into someone’s experience, most often his own, that would question the alienating nature of the information and sensational models of objectified journalism. Chapter 3 explores the classed corporeal discourse of masculinity in the works of Jack London (People of the Abyss, The Iron Heel, Call of the Wild, John Barleycorn). In turn, oyster pirate, vagrant, gold prospector, socialist, successful writer, capitalist farmer, London transgressed the boundary between classes with impunity. Yet he had a lifelong desire for social justice and a sympathy for society’s outcasts, positions that often clashed with his fascination for social survivors, those who kept the “wilderness” within themselves, and his anxieties about “gentility” and “femininity” in the early twentieth century. Precisely because his work is so closely associated with such contradictions, I examine it through the prevailing turn-of-thecentury categories of class divisions and masculinity. By so doing, I hope to demonstrate London’s (ideal) social picture of the liminality of body and class. The “rites of passage” that he puts the human body through in his fiction are characterized by separation of the individual from an earlier fixed point in the social structure. Many of the vagrants, says London in “How I Became a Socialist,” “had been as good as myself and just as blond beastly”; their “life histories” began “under auspices as fair as mine, with . . . bodies equal to and better than mine, and which ended in the shambles at the bottom of the Social Pit” (1119). What London makes clear here and especially in Abyss is that “others” exert their control over him and his fellow tramps by quite literally appropriating their bodies—his relations of bodies, economies, and forms of representation. London’s syntax of class, so epistemologically represented, reminds us, among much else, not to treat class as a discrete category (it is inseparable from his

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corporeal discourse) but to challenge any assumed priority we give it historically. Abyss is also an example of how London’s literary journalism results in what Alan Trachtenberg calls, in reference to Stephen Crane, an “exchange of subjectivities” (“Experiments” 273). This chapter demonstrates how People of the Abyss, an important mixture of muckraking, sensationalism, documentary strategies (London quotes statistics, newspaper articles, and court reports), and “a literature of fact,” attempts to close the distance between subjectivity and the object. His journalistic discourse (this chapter includes a discussion of London’s neglected “The Dignity of Dollars,” 1900; and “Mexico’s Army and Ours,” 1914) represents one of the most powerful examples of a shift from the romance to the logic of naturalism reflective of an encompassing cultural transition from a market society to what London advocates in Abyss: a regulated relationship between bodies and “the disciplinary society,” which might ultimately allow for freely transgressing the boundaries between classes. While suggesting such a “socialistic” possibility, London’s reinvention of mimesis in Abyss set crucial ground rules for the emergent form of documentary. Chapter 4 takes up more of the discursive issues of class and class emancipation, most prominently in the forms of direct address in the works of Jean Toomer. One of the most experimental of American writers, Toomer valued the art of rural blacks and a newly urban black working class for its power to engage and overcome a U.S. racist history. Relatedly, he shared with his African-American middle-class contemporaries an urgent investment in the national emergence of a collective black voice as a celebration of racial self-discovery. And he departed from them with the exposition of his unorthodox acts of racial self-definition and his belief in a transformative power (artistic and social) derived from contact across class lines. Toomer’s groundbreaking Cane (1923), I argue, offers a blueprint for a full class-conscious formalism in African-American literary scholarship. Cane’s narrator, a teller in a social community, adopts a narrative design that shows us how a self-reflective storyteller can “essentialize” and “spiritualize” experience not incompatible with a class-loaded (and recoded) discourse. In Part One of Cane, for example, Toomer immediately wishes to make the bridge between the “I” and “You” a most conscious relationship, pushing the purely aesthetic phase of art “into a sort of religious function.” Thus he saw his artistic role, as suggested in a 1922 letter to Sherwood Anderson, as an interracial negotiator and unifier of representational identity: “And ‘I’ together with all the other ‘I’s’ am the reconciler” (qtd. in Helbing

INTRODUCTION

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138). By forcefully bringing together the narrator and reader and/or the narrator and implied reader, as he does in “Karintha,” “Becky,” “Carma,” and “Fern,” Toomer reveals false categories and separations that are both literary and social. Particularly in light of race, class itself can, in the twenties, be made to be seen as something little more than a juncture or relay rather than any foundational social identity. But Cane questions this assumption and hence signals a new relationship with the legacy of American slavery, class, and the modernist idiom. Chapter 5 focuses on the class-inflected trope of movement in Meridel Le Sueur’s Salute to Spring (1940), The Girl (1939), I Hear Men Talking (1984), and her political journalism. Best known in the 1930s for her reportage and her prize-winning short stories, Le Sueur, like many Depression-era writers, believed herself to be a part of a collective political and literary effort of revolutionary change. Le Sueur’s journalism is brought to the fore as a crucial framework that links politics and aesthetics as a way of making sense of both art and social movements. She was a central writer for such magazines of the thirties as the Hub (1934), the Dubuque Dial (1934–1935), New Quarterly (1933), Midwest (1936–1937), Anvil, New Masses, and Pagany. These writings constitute experiments in a proletarian aesthetic: a combination of a radical regionalism, a Lawrentian sexual lyricism, and an explicit feminism. This chapter examines how movement and stasis are at the heart of Le Sueur’s political project and aesthetics. This chapter also examines how setting, for Le Sueur, was as much a social understanding as it was a literary undertaking. For countless American writers of the thirties, Le Sueur included, documenting society had replaced the project of creating fiction. The fictiveness and partiality of the writing of Le Sueur, especially evident in Salute to Spring, was a clear concern for many American writers engaged in immersing themselves in (unfamiliar) settings during the 1930s. Yet critics of the 1930s have not adequately considered how the central value of these proliferating reality-based writings lay in the problems associated with narrators immersing themselves in or being involuntarily immersed by their settings. Le Sueur is an especially interesting case because her narrative reliance on and lifelong political and identifications with settings helped her avoid or take into new directions the sentimentalism, condescension toward a subject, and didacticism so prevalent in the literary journalism of the 1930s.8 Just as Le Sueur refuses to separate history and fiction, so too she blurs the line between setting and environment—and with it, the line between documentary reports and imaginative stories. While Le Sueur selfconsciously used her settings to register the hard-won meanings and

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indeterminate status of those caught between classes, at the same time she provided persuasive readings of social conditions, especially those that led to the suffering of women. Chapter 6 discusses class in terms of Zora Neale Hurston’s and Agnes Smedley’s “new race” forming in America. My contention is that Hurston and Smedley, in their respective novels, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1939) and Daughter of Earth (1929), rewrite “race” in light of the effects of work on their protagonists. From their respective rural folk traditions, Hurston and Smedley emblematize the feminine inner life of the 1920s and 1930s, in which their principal concerns were the subjects of reflection and self-development intermingled with their distinctive work ontologies. Smedley wrote out of a literary journalistic tradition (never objective or neutral, always unabashedly opinionated, autobiographical, “literary”) beginning with her work for the Call (1919) and extending to pieces published in Modern Review and The New Masses in the 1930s and 1940s. Hurston in Their Eyes drew on her signature of mixing genres—the folding-in of autobiographical elements, anthropological fieldwork and folklore. Both writers presented “everyday” heroines who struggled with their class transformations and both staged their texts as self-conscious “ethnographies,” addressing the relationships of their narrators to their subjects and readers. As part of their interrogations, Hurston and Smedley initiated and brought together twentieth-century American women’s fiction with their highly individualized forms of working-class fiction. Their Eyes and Daughter continually and self-reflectively foreground the way work can be rewritten to best represent lost or neglected voices, including those of the novels’ protagonists. These two works not only portray their characters and their labor, but in an (anti-)tradition of American labor and fiction examine and extend how readers might identify and evaluate alternative kinds of labor, ones that could be at once collective and autonomous and permit their protagonists affective involvements. The principal contribution of both writers to the class vocabularies of their time consisted in their exploring the collective dimension to individual identity. By conjoining gender, class, and race issues to their work ontologies, Hurston and Smedley attained insights into the mediations of class struggle in everyday life that, in their time, were unavailable to most male writers and to most male critics. In examining James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), chapter 7 brings together the crucial concerns of Narrating Class: an identification of the vocabularies and grammars needed to articulate

INTRODUCTION

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and analyze experiences and perspectives of social class (the “value” of Agee’s subjects disrupts our somewhat tidy discourse on appearance and reality); literary strategies informed by class considerations (Praise draws its energy and inspiration from the antithetical realm of the everyday, the popular world upon which modernist art and writing had demonstratively turned its back); the primacy of literary journalism as a mode of expression (Agee’s interrogation of the ways in which subjective perception and thought mediate any possible apprehension of the world); and a resultant aesthetic, mediated and impure, fraught with ethical and political difficulties that struggles to arrive at what Agee considered to be the most important “truths” of “human actuality.” Praise is potentially between two basic aesthetic tendencies: a “realist” typicality that allows the documentary to be “true-to-life” and hence socially functional; and a naturalistic or modernist particularity of the photographically rendered detail, which threatens to overrun verisimilitude in favor of the effective emotional or aesthetic impact of the image. This chapter contends that Agee deploys the trope of sleep to evaluate the reality of rural poverty in order to “perceive it as it stands” (Agee 28). Questioning both a “didactic” and an “aesthetic” discourse as inadequate for understanding the text’s subjects, the trope of sleep conjoins with his “pragmatic inquiry” to make readers rethink their relationship between representation and actual experience. Prefaced with the famous quotation from the Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto (1848)—“Workers of the world, unite and fight. You have nothing to lose but your chains, and a world to win”—Praise relegates these words to a “second theme” and raises “the poetry facing them” (13) to the first. Neither, though, I will argue, should be forgotten in reading Agee’s work, for he, selfreflectively, defiantly, ironically, links the 1930s’ tendency toward social commitment to a multiplicity of aesthetic forms. By so doing, he offers not only an alternative to Marxism and liberal humanism but also invokes the many problems in remaking class consciousness and identities. Regarding identities, these chapters chronicle how race, gender, religion, sexuality, and nationality each challenge any totalizing formula of class.9 Feminism, queer theory, postcolonialism, and other critical discourses have been essential to the dynamism of work on class and, as noted, will be selectively employed in the following chapters. But this book’s first concern is with literary discourse, narration and narrating, and the legacy of literary journalism, whose cultural interventions and inscriptions of class must be more clearly

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recognized. Because class is a necessary component of critical analysis, a component largely unexplored, this study argues that class is most visible in its discursive and aesthetic effects. Precisely because literature depends on imaginary constructions and no literature is class neutral, it can speak to our understanding of class, but not merely as a sociological category or an explanation of a given political economy, or as a front for identity politics. Rather, reading class in literature is a means of coming to terms with the specifically mediated representation of the social nature of literature. We thus need to think seriously about the abstraction of class as a subject, not merely to make it visible but to understand the complex processes that produce the literary representations of it. With the knowledge that no human being is formed along a single track of identity and that no analytic category of class is permanent or irrefutable (there are no terminological guarantees), class must be revisited.

CH A P T ER

1

Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass: “Hard Work and Blood”

No poet matters more to the literary history of class in America than Walt Whitman. Whitman’s registration of lived experience is a juncture of class and his poetry: a picture of an individual subject’s relation to the totality of class structures. As an artisan in the 1840s, the young Whitman was part of the Jacksonian lower-middle class, a class experiencing the nationwide change from an agrarian, artisan existence to an urban market culture.1 Participant in this shifting order, Whitman saw the old master-and-apprentice paradigm being replaced by a seemingly unbridgeable gap between capital and labor, the older ideologies of genteel patriarchy and individual artisanship giving way to a new middle-class (Whig) ideology of competitive individualism. As a response to these changes, the 1855 Leaves of Grass, while championing the cause of individual potential and freedom, holds that labor as opposed to property should be the dominant feature of the social order in which all work, both manual or mental, should be recognized and rewarded equally while fraternal association and apprenticeship should still serve as the structuring principles of society. What is most fascinating about Whitman’s response to this new order is how he establishes the trope of the “incarnational” to deal with the movements in class structure. The incarnational, for the poet of Leaves, means freely circulating among members of all classes, embodying various class identities, and disrupting and transgressing class boundaries. At the same time, Whitman’s incarnational stance highlights the contradictory class and psychological tensions at work in his conception of self. Whitman is, after all, “one of the roughs,”2 the base identity in Leaves that he attributes to the poet’s working-class persona. As a “worker” among many other workers, Whitman’s incarnational poet, a mixture of buoyant self-exposure

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and anxious assertion, follows his obsession with social, sexual, and racial exchanges, and asserts a commitment to lower-middle-class respectability and independence.3 Here is what is at stake: the fact that Whitman emphasizes a poetic persona who “becomes” the Americans described in the poem, and does so in an explicitly bodily or physical sense, is nothing new in itself—though how and why he does so are the more interesting issues. Nor is it a novel observation that Whitman’s poet identifies primarily with the working classes, although what these classes are and his motivations for doing so are topics of intense debate. Whitman’s class positions have been argued again and again, usually on very specific grounds, by Whitman scholars including David S. Reynolds, Jason Stacy, Jerome Loving, Richard B. Stott, and others.4 What I find missing in the criticism on Leaves, however, is a satisfying analysis of the relation between Whitman’s class identities and his literary expression: how he works language so that class and identity become inversive and convertible, each to the other, how his “democracy” stands less for a realizable mode of government than it does for a conception of the classed body, personal relations, and erotic intimacies that could be shared by anyone able to interpret him. I will therefore entangle Whitman with a much needed redefinition of his relations to the subjects he describes in Leaves by examining his troping of the incarnational as a base for drawing out his class vision. I will then proceed to analyze how in the poem Whitman uses a language that itself functions as an act, not a report of one, a language that gives social, racial, and gender meanings to the physical, working body while disassociating itself from the bodies of the nonlaboring classes. Replete with “quasi-class” exchanges (poet to reader) and resistant to any kind of social marginality, Leaves can be seen as offering important keys to the contemporary meaning of class. Put another way, the class relations of a society permeate language and shape it while language potentially reproduces or challenges the class relations of a society. Whitman, it must be recalled, spoke to his American readers from a society without a feudal history, one whose cultural, regional, geographic, and racial make-up were more diverse and more dichotomous than, for example, a contemporaneous England or France (Kosofsky Sedgwick 121). Not surprisingly, then, Whitman questions the idea of “class consciousness” as a unitary, coherent form of identity, proposing instead multiple identities and perpetual mobilities vis-à-vis the poet and his subjects.

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Secular Faith: Incarnational Premises Whitman’s idea of the incarnational stems from the Emersonian conception of the mind in which a radical freedom will necessarily produce universal value and the intensely private will result in a universal sense. For Emerson, diversity is not so much difference as it is an expression of “the forms and tendencies” of nature expressing its “own design” (Emerson, Nature (1836), 3). Like Whitman, it is generally agreed that Emerson internalized such diversity so as to be able to make it a part of himself and to use it to imagine anything. Emerson’s Nature (1836) is based on his conviction that the study of nature can reveal an intrinsic unity, or more precisely, “the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture which God paints on the instant eternity for the contemplation of the soul” (33). In the course of representing this picture, Emerson’s poet, as a lover of nature, incarnates, among much else, the “spirit of infancy” (Emerson, Nature (1836), 6), the unarticulated aspirations of children, women, and slaves while pointing a way for them, and others, to build their “own world” so that “a correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit” (Emerson, Nature (1836), 42). The spiritualization of Emerson’s transcendental man, and his ability to guide others, is achieved by a divine current that circulates through him: Standing on the bare ground—a head bathed in the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the universal being circulate through me. (Emerson, Nature (1836), 6).

The single self, for Emerson, is the simultaneous apotheosis for an all encompassing universal self. As a Platonist and spiritualist, he saw that a true self meant an abandonment of what is traditionally designated as the self. Thus, for him, “Man is man as far as he is triple, that is, a man-woman-child” (Journal and Miscellaneous Notebooks) JMN, 16: 146). With his divine acuteness, the poet in Nature incarnates the spirit that “within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form” (CW (Collected Works) 3:12). In witnessing the “flowing or metamorphosis” (CW, 3:12) of nature, the poet incarnates scientific as well as literary knowledge. He knows the workings of “astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation.”

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But he “does not stop at these facts,” for he possesses the “why” and therefore the “true science” (CW, 3:19). The poet experiences vividly what history and all externality can teach only second hand. Whitman’s sense of incarnation follows that of Emerson by, most literally, reconciling mind and body, seeing that the individual’s spirit is incarnate everywhere in nature. As Emerson argues in Nature (1836): . . . man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither man can be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man. All the facts in natural history taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life. (15–16)

The beauty and the interrelatedness of physical, outward nature lead the individual to inquire into the inner laws of nature that are a part of the mind: “[E]ach phenomenon has its roots in the faculties and affections of the mind. Whilst the abstract question occupies your intellect, nature burns in the concrete to be solved by your hands” (Emerson, Nature (1836), 42). Emerson’s lifelong project was to demonstrate how external nature and the human mind are related. He saw the imagination as the faculty driving, in his words, the “endless passing of one element into new forms, the incessant metamorphosis” (W (Complete Works) 8:15). Both Emerson and Whitman represented the spiritual life as one process, of perpetual change and energy, in which the only givens are life, transition, and the energizing spirit. A restless condition of the soul and its necessity to resist complacency and to push forward perpetually guide both writers. For Whitman, a major outcome of this restlessness is that the poet “incarnates [his country’s] geography” (Whitman, Leaves 7), an echo of Emerson’s claim that “[America’s] ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for meters” (Emerson, “Poet” 322). For both writers, poetry must come from embracing the American landscape and “living” its physical identity. Emerson, pushing the idea of landscape and imagination even further, believed that a study of nature could reveal a comprehensive unity whereby the poet could lose the sense of indistinction between his own identity and that of the natural world. Whitman posited that a study of other human beings and their interactions would result in a similar understanding. Whereas Emerson’s eye is drawn upward to the “stars” and “heavenly bodies” and in distances

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to “the expression of nature” (Emerson, Nature (1836), 5, 13), Whitman’s gaze goes downward to “turbid pools,” “dirt,” “grass,” and the effluvia of Manhattan streets (Whitman, Leaves 84–86). Whitman grounds the transparent, transcendent, Emersonian soul, suspicious of human contact and craving “infinite relations,” in the solidity and fragility of the human body, and into a classed body and world. Whitman sees himself not only as incarnate in American nature—“the ally of Religion” (Emerson, Nature (1836), 23)—but also, most forcefully, as incarnate in the lower and working classes (e.g., “the roughs”). Instead of Emerson’s fulfillment of an unlimited individualism, Whitman constantly tests the power of transcendence and its mortal limits by taking total possession of the actual classed world. According to Whitman’s incarnational conception, this possession takes as its principle a poetic vision of articulation. The “great poets,” as Whitman argues in the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass, are those who possess “a perfect sense of the oneness of nature and the propriety of the same spirit applied to human affairs” (18). Their respective incarnational renderings reveal further differences. Emerson’s writing centers on immediate physical experiences, but experiences dealing mostly with nature or natural phenomenon. “Crossing a barren, common, in snow puddles at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration” (Emerson, Nature (1836), 6). Nature is something one may “do,” a piece of divinity transferable to the poet, an ethical support as well. As Emerson writes in “Illusions” (1841), the eternal interest of the individual is “never to be in a false position, but to have the weight of nature to back him in all that he does” (Emerson, Essays and Lectures 1122). Whitman, on the other hand, though making his own claims for the poet’s divinity and a new democratic ethic, insists on his own sexualized body, on human touch, intertwinings, contact: “To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand” (Leaves 53). Indeed, the compulsion for physical contact becomes most forceful in Whitman’s language of “human labor” as a basis for his visionary incarnations. He blends his near-worship of the human touch, “Is this then a touch? . . . quivering me to a new identity” (Leaves 53), with the daily work of the nineteenth-century laborer, the blacksmith, the butcher, the factory girl. The poet in Leaves defines himself by the incarnational range of his identifications; he insists that he becomes whatever he encounters. Unlike Whitman, Emerson consistently places the values of nature above those of materiality and labor, insisting instead on abstractness

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and beauty: “you cannot freely admire a noble landscape, if laborers are digging in the field hard by” (Emerson, Nature (1836), 36). In a May 1843 journal entry, he frames his disdain for the perils of the body and the daily tasks of the laboring masses, “The life of labor does not make men, but drudges” (Whicher, Selections 220). Emerson’s “Fate” (1860) representatively evokes his tendency to divide society into a few “Self-reliant Men,” the incarnation of an authentically revolutionary elite, and the masses. Even though “the strongest idea incarnates itself in majorities and nations, in the healthiest and strongest” (Emerson, “Fate” 677), it is the “Great men” who best fulfill this role, for they perceive “the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it” (672). Workers will forever be inert and ineffective: “The German and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny” (Emerson, “Fate” 678–679). What might be interpreted as Emerson’s fear of intimacy, his depersonalizing of laborers in favor of a private, natural nobility of genius, can be found in his insistence on the poet as the highest incarnation of the “All Powerful,” the “same divinity transmuted and at two or three removes” (Emerson, “The Poet” 304). Emerson consistently subordinates the physicality of nature to its ideal and linguistic forms, mostly understandable to only the poet himself. “Whether nature enjoys a substantial existence without, or is only in the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and alike venerable to me” (Emerson, Nature (1836), 26). “Nature is an incarnation of a thought,” Emerson says in the essay “‘Nature,’ The Essays: Second Series,” “and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas” (405). Emerson called for a new intellectual elite, capable of incarnating Nature’s thoughts, although he also held hope for a wider conversion of the “sluggard intellect” (Emerson, “The American Scholar” 45) to an intellectual activity that would ostensibly transcend class conflicts. But Emerson’s claims for the potential convertibility of every man to intellectual power ran into serious problems. Although he tried variously to adapt his idealism to the changing social circumstances of mid-nineteenth-century America, his nonmaterialist thinking would not easily permit it. As John Carlos Rowe argues in Emerson’s Tomb, When Emerson in the mid-1840s did turn seriously to political issues of his day—women’s rights and the abolition of slavery, he was faced with the problem of adapting his transcendentalism to the pragmatics of political activism. (21)

Taken as a whole, Emerson’s writings reveal a multitude of conflicting identities, for his endorsing of liberal political positions (e.g.,

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regarding slavery and women’s rights) would seem to be fundamentally at odds with his transcendentalism, the anticommunal, ahistorical aspects of his philosophy, and that philosophy’s potential to inspire social reform. On the other hand, Whitman’s poetic project, founded on a highly egalitarian ontological and ethical system, took substantially different class and social forms. Far from opposing Emerson’s transcendentalism to his own credo of the body and the toil of honest labor, Whitman hoped to conjoin the two positions. Not surprisingly, then, the primary purpose of the poet’s incarnational powers in Leaves is to reconcile an Emersonian individualism with a Whitmanian mutualistic ethic. The poet in Leaves thus pursues an order inimical to the bourgeois “fatness and ease” while, by example, guiding the reader, “whom he takes with firm such grasp into live regions previously unattained,” much like a master would lead an apprentice: “the elder encourage[ing] the younger and show[ing] him how” (“Preface,” Leaves 22). As we shall see, Whitman engages his class vision with the incarnational to form his own dialectical interrelationship, asserting, among other things, a radical program for the future and the need to broaden the semantic field of poetry to register such a future.

Class Religion and the Common People Unique to New York in the 1850s, in Whitman’s opinion, were the small masters, craft workers, and laborers on whom he had based so many of his “democratic” hopes. He even retrospectively suggested (1881) that several of these workers provided the starting inspiration for Leaves of Grass: “I suppose the critics will laugh heartily, but the influence of those Broadway omnibus jaunts and drivers and declamations and escapades undoubtedly enter’d into the gestation of ‘Leaves of Grass’” (Whitman, Autobiographia 31). As a poet, Whitman made himself one of the first chroniclers of such persons and the vernacular culture they came from. This is certainly not surprising since, up until he was in his forties, Whitman was a typical worker—carpenter, printer, and sometimes newspaper editor—who avidly participated in the party politics of his time. He was a firm advocate and voice of artisan republicanism. Whitman’s most intense manifestation of class is, however, himself, which quite easily slides into a “religious” imparting of his opinions and sensations—what in Leaves of Grass (1855) he claims as his “clear and sweet soul” (27). Or, more pointedly, his “en-masse”’ proclamations notwithstanding, his “working-class” soul dwells in

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each of his poems—as, for example, he retrospectively proclaims in “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads” (1888), “without yielding an inch the working-man and working-woman were in my pages from the first to the last.”5 Whitman the poet cannot be separated or purified from class and political designs nor can he be firmly attached to such designs in a strict political sense. Rather, in his constant dwelling (or movement) between politics and poetry, and poetry and class, he confounds the traditional distinctions between them. It is no accident, of course, as Betsy Erkkila has argued in Whitman: The Political Poet, that the title page of Leaves of Grass (1855) contains no author’s name but only a frontispiece of Whitman himself dressed in a day laborer’s trousers and shirt, with a hat cocked jauntily on his head (3). This startling visual prop becomes Whitman’s first discourse of the poem.6 He makes visual his “soul,” signified by his workingman’s dress, placing himself firmly outside the conventions of a nineteenth-century author. Via a chosen style, Whitman suggests a working-class, “disorderly, fleshy, sensual,” democratic presence. The daguerreotype figure is not a literal representation but an alternative to, as Whitman said, the “cultivated classes as they are called,” for he situated himself firmly on “the platform of these same New York Roughs, firemen, the ouvrier class, masons and carpenters, stagedrivers, the Dry Dock boys, and so forth” (CW, vol. IX, 35–36). The poet constantly constructs the foundation of his incarnational self vis-à-vis the working class, as in “A Song for Occupations”: Grown, half-grown, and babe—of this country and every country, indoors and outdoors I see. . . . and all else is behind or through them. (89)

The poet’s most lasting meanings—meanings amplified by his involvement in a complex, energizing discourse—come through the common working-class men and women: A SONG for occupations! In the labor of engines and trades and the labor of fields I find the developments, And find the eternal meanings. Workmen and Workwomen! (PP 355)

Whitman’s song underlines one of his fundamental themes in Leaves: politicians and government institutions have failed America, and therefore one must look to common humanity—particularly

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to the joys and sufferings of the laboring masses—for the qualities (“Developments,” “eternal meanings”) that bind people together. Indeed, “A Song for Occupations” not only ennobles virtually every kind of worker and job, it emblematizes Whitman’s sense of the inner lives of the lower- and working class underscored by his incarnational categories. The poet constitutes an embodiment, a double, or a type of those he describes: If you stand at work in a shop I stand as nigh as the nighest in the same shop, If you bestow gifts on your brother or dearest friend I demand as good as your brother or dearest friend, If your lover, husband, wife, is welcome by day or night, I must be personally as welcome, If you become degraded, criminal, ill, then I become so for your sake . . . (PP 355–356)

This “dialogue” that Whitman enacts identifies the diverse nationalities, ethnicities, and professions he documents, with the intention of categorizing his various incarnational possibilities. He does so, however, conditionally (“If you . . .”) to suggest that he is capable of both mediating American social culture and of serving as a “physical medium” for and of this culture. Whitman’s dynamic relates directly to a social sense of the physical body.

The Incarnational and the Classed Body What does incarnational really mean for this poet obsessed equally with the body and the spirit? Most analyses of Whitman’s “poetry of the body” are celebratory, focusing their conceptions of the body on the sexual body while rarely considering the body’s other qualities—its class characteristics, for example.7 The Whitmanian idea of the body asserts that the body serves as the epistemological measure for one’s relations with the social and the natural worlds. The 1855 Leaves of Grass makes a strong case for representing Whitman’s versions of class through the incarnational body, of which “I Sing the Body Electric” is perhaps the most comprehensive and emphatic example. In the poem, the poet begins with this striking assertion: The bodies of men and women engirth me, and I engirth them, They will not let me offer nor I them till I go with them and respond to them and love them. (116)

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This statement about human bodies (and their implied fluidity vis-à-vis that of the poet’s) and the poet’s relation to them quickly takes on a class specificity. That is, in “I Sing the Body Electric,” the bodies the poet represents, and incarnationally embodies, doubles, or becomes are clearly indicated as working class, underclass, or slave. From the opening proclamation in section 2—“The expression of the body of man or woman balks account,/ The male is perfect and that of the female is perfect,” the poet begins to detail class makeup and origin: “The group of laborers seated at noontime with their open dinner-/ kettles, and their wives waiting”; “the woodman rapidly swinging his axe in the woods” (Leaves 117). The poetic persona’s rhetorical flow parallels his incarnational entering and leaving of the scenes that comprise the procession he describes: Suchlike I love. . . . I loosen myself and pass freely. . . . and am at the mother’s breast with the little child, And swim with the swimmer, and wrestle with wrestlers, and march in line with the firemen, and pause and listen and count. (Leaves 117)

As a kind of waiting, witnessing, incarnational figure, the poet “passes among” “those he likes” who almost invariably conform to his metonymic equations of class: the working class is associated with the outdoors, nature, nakedness and “the contact and odor . . . that pleases the soul well” (119) while the leisured- and upper class are given the attributes of dress and are most often located in “parlors and lecture rooms” (Leaves 122). The poet associates primarily with the former and the suffering and downtrodden. This equation, however, not only corroborates the proclivities of the incarnational poet, it also underlines Whitman’s deeper argument in “I Sing the Body Electric” and “Song of Myself,” that of challenging social inferiority8: Is it a slave? Is it one of the dullfaced immigrants just landed on the wharf? Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the welloff. . . . just as much as you, Each has his or her place in the procession. (Leaves 120)

In 1847, in a written prelude to “I Sing the Body Electric,” Whitman already attempted to contravene such authority incarnationally by

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entering, as a kind of mediator and restorer, the bodies of masters and slaves: I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters And I will stand between the masters and the slaves, Entering into both, so that both will understand me alike (Uncollected Poetry and Prose (UPP), 2:69)

As evidenced in sections 7 and 8 of “I Sing the Body Electric,” the discourses of slavery (antislavery, antiracist) entwine and the poet places himself in the position of the auctioneer, “the sloven who does not know half his business” (Leaves 121). This time, though, in “helping” the auctioneer, the persona adapts an incarnational voice that rebels against the act of bidding for and selling the slave: “Gentlemen look on this curious creature, / Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for him” (121). In section 7, his abolitionist discourse in tow, Whitman wishes to make persons of other colors (“red, black, or white”) imagine that they have been placed, through the poet’s figurative transferences, in the position of a slave. The poetic persona thus takes it upon himself to sell the slave’s body to the reader—a body, like all human bodies, that must not be degraded, defiled, or enslaved: “if life and the soul are sacred the human body is sacred” (122). When the poet enters into the body of the slave, however, he subverts conventional slave discourses (the body is not to sell but to aesthetically and sensuously understand and appreciate) and creates psychic and visual discourses that beseech the reader to understand the male slave in terms of evolutionary (and incarnational) “embodiments”: This is not only one man. . . . he is the father of those who shall be Fathers in their turns, In him the start of populous states and rich republics, Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments. (Leaves 122)

The poet suggests that race is not an absolute category, that the union of the races indeed could have existed in some untracable moment in history, and that the future progeny of race is ungovernable and unknowable9: How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring through the centuries? Who might you find you have come from yourself if you could trace back through the centuries? (122)

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Whitman’s blurring of bodies—white, black, male, female, child, adult, alive, dead, free, slave—leads in sum not only to a breakdown of distinctions, but also entails the absorption of the class realms into the poet. Leaves enlists the image of a timeless union (and understanding of human relations) in order to imagine comraderie and social intimacy in a way that eliminates the barriers of time. As Whitman states in the 1855 Preface to Leaves: Men and women and the earth and all upon it are simply to be taken as they are, and the investigation of their past and present and future shall be uninterrupted and shall be done with perfect candor . . . For the eternal tendencies of all toward happiness make the only point of sane philosophy. (15)

It turns out for Whitman that a kind of unity, based on these “eternal tendencies,” must be constructed, but it is a kind of whole that is, as Gilles Deleuze has argued in his essay on Whitman, “all the more paradoxical in that it only comes after the fragments and leaves them intact, making no attempt to totalize them” (58). The subjects in Leaves often act in reflective and deliberate ways, but their actions and reflections usually take place in a space of possibilities. It is their condition of possibility that makes them as images incarnational. The closest that Whitman comes to any kind of merger or totality is an incarnational passing through in which the tree, or the river, or the person, receives a bit of the poet’s consciousness. Leaves proposes itself as a confluence rather than precise portraits of figures or renderings of feelings. In turn, the poet in Leaves must constantly acquire and (temporarily) create human relations—relations that have many of their origins in the stream of class attachments and detachments.10

Language and the Incarnational: Close to the Ground The language of Leaves proposes a theory and practice based on affective attachments that bind people together, but in an American context in which language-making and class-making are profoundly inter-implicated. The poet in Leaves is the incarnational exemplar of intimacy that bypasses mere familiarity, which is why class, falling squarely within his seemingly limitless perceptual vision, offers such an enormously powerful conceptual model for his language of unity and attachment. It is as if the poet’s search for the “Real America” (PP 1334) must pass through not “lawyers, dough-faces, and the

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three hundred and fifty thousand owners of slaves,” but “laboring persons, ploughmen, men with axes, spades, scythes, flails . . . carpenters, masons, machinists, drivers of horses, workmen in factories,” so that he can find and proclaim the “spirit” and the “common-sense of These States” (PP 1334). Whitman’s commonsense intimacy presumes that the poet is the agent who effects identity and is simultaneously affected by it. The poet’s language in Leaves simultaneously portrays him as one of the people and that of the people’s leader, an itinerant bard “Stuffed with the stuff that is coarse, and stuffed with the stuff that/ is fine” (Leaves 40). He can at once be “not stuck up and in [his] place” (Leaves 41) and “deathless” and Christlike, haughty and imperious, urging his readers to listen to and to follow him. The poet deploys high and low levels of language, not only to create his democratic interplays and to suggest the unrestrained and undefinable but, like the people, to be “full of vulgar contradictions and offence” (Democratic Vistas 964). Most interesting, though, Whitman (extraordinarily) proposes an alternative to the used up old-world sense of the literary, and the “European” author (another echo of the 1855 frontispiece) in the creation of a “class” of “native authors”: Our fundamental want today in the United States, with closest, amplest reference to present conditions, and to the future, is of a class, and the clear idea of a class, of native authors, literatuses, far different, far higher in grade, than any yet known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions, breathing into it a new breath of life, giving it decision, affecting politics far more than the popular superficial suffrage . . . (Democratic Vistas 956)

Whitman took such a position seriously because only this class of native authors could infuse the kind of contradictory wildness and working-class fervor that he brought to his own language experiments: unexpected disjunctions, radical juxtapositions, abrupt shifts in time, place, and imagery. It was only this class that could record the many-layered facets of American culture and bring them together into an aesthetically successful whole. The language in Leaves is premised on agitation and conflict, rebuttal and subversion, a rhetoric designed to unmask that of the Old World literary class. Governing Whitman’s language, this unmasking forms transand interclass attachments that work to link together people from disparate regions, cultures, races, sexes, and political dispositions. For Whitman, “to be properly American,” as Peter Coviello argues,

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it is necessary “to feel oneself related in a quite intimate way to a world of people not proximate or even known” (87). This attachment can of course include sexual desire and aspirations to dismiss any form of racial suppression or superiority. But the sexual desire of the poet in Leaves echoes Whitman’s devotion to the working-class body and love of the working-class male, as in the famous bathing scene in section 11, followed by his descriptions of the “butcher-boy put[ing] off his killing-clothes” and the “[b]lacksmith with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil” (Leaves 34–35). This language of anonymous attachment can take almost mimetic forms as in the implication that it is the poet’s “unseen hand” that passes over the bodies of the men, “descend[ing] tremblingly from their temples and ribs” (34). A central question in Leaves: how does the language in the poem reveal forms of class-belonging produced in relation to male–male sexuality and how is that sexuality produced in relation to class belonging? Much of the power of the poem stems from Whitman’s vision of a sexual identity—not as a private, psychic identity but rather as something public, observable, as the poet observes the bathers: The young men float on their backs, their with bellies swell to the sun. . . . they do not ask who seizes fast to them, They do not know who pugs and declines with pendant and bending arch, They do not think whom they souse with spray. (34)

These bodies, certainly not of the bourgeois or upper classes, serve both as a kind of critical counter public and also as an ideal community where no status markers or hierarchies exist.11 Yet, Whitman’s visual key, as is so often the case, begins with a working-class figure or marker where the poet’s own erotic desires are linked to his outlook on nation and community (“Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs” 48). The poet puts his own eroticized body into this category of sexual-class logic where a virile (and working-class) masculinity dominates: If I worship any particular thing it shall be some of the spread of my body; Translucent mould of me it shall be you, Shaded ledges and rests, firm masculine coulter, it shall be you, Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you, You my rich blood, your milky stream pale strippings of my life. (49)

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Whitman deploys in Leaves a sexualized subversion (part of the linguistic unmaking that he assigns to the poem) by making sexuality irreverently public, rather than private, and by imbricating sexuality with the lower and working classes—a partial linguistic alternative to “Old World” categories. At the end of Leaves, however, Whitman widens his speaking from male sentimental friendship and virility— significantly class-based (i.e., that of “the young mechanic,” “the woodsman,” the “fisher,” “hunter,” “driver”)—to (re-)insist on his common language (“No shuttered room or school can commune with me,/ But roughs and little children better than they” 82) that equally calls for “young girls,” “wives,” “mothers” to “resume what [he] has told them” (82) and to become part of his critical counterculture. What is also prominent in Whitman’s language is the disjunctive and perspectival forms that it takes in the poem. At one moment the poet can be mockingly interrogative: “Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?” (Leaves 26); at another sincerely imperative: “Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origins of/ all poems” (Leaves 26). He can also in rapid succession shift the modes of address from the self referential (“It says sarcastically, Walt, you understand enough. . . . why don’t / you let it out then?” (Leaves 51)) to a threatening resoluteness (“Encompass worlds but never try to encompass me,/ I crowd your noisiest talk by looking toward you” (Leaves 51)). The poet appears to have as many occupations as those of his subjects in his diverse sets of times and locales. What is consistent in Whitman’s linguistic perspectives, though, is his constant placing of classes and types within specific spheres of honor. Not only does Whitman pay homage to the many incarnations of the poet himself (44, 46, 49, 51, 53) but the poem is a vast distribution of the poet honoring his subjects: a butcher (34), blacksmith (35), boatmen clamdigger (33), the “red girl” (33), a runaway slave (34), the “cleanhaired Yankeee girls” in factories and mills (38), the machinist (36), “newly-come immigrants” (36) and so on. Whitman makes this honor a plural and public act by suggesting a new structure of feeling developed in relation to the poet’s own (“masculine”) sentimentalism, one that counters any kind of privatization and abstraction located in class judgments. This is why Whitman’s incarnational language includes an infusion of social types and their functions: “The pedlar sweats with his pack on his back . . . the prostitute draggles her shawl . . . the fare-collector goes through the train . . . the plougher plows and the mower mows” (Leaves 38–39). Social bonds in Leaves are tested over and over again by means of common experiences, which often

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include various forms of work and physical suffering. Work is the humanizing activity; work is an ontological category permitting knowledge—which the poet must voice. The working-class figures in the catalogues are almost always configured as moving, converting, creating, changing something: the carpenter “dresses his plank”; the farmer “looks”; the jour printer “works”; the machinist “rolls up his sleeves”; the “wollypates hoe”; the deckhands “make fast the steamboat”; the “pavingman leans”: the “canal-boy trots” (37–38). The identity of his subjects, and that of the poet, adheres to the language of movement, where identity and the incarnational are best inscribed.12 Whitman transmutes the individual in his catalogues through a potential of social motion, marshalling each into a more inclusive identity.

Gender, Class, the Incarnational I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, / And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, / And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men. (Leaves 44)

It follows from such proclamations that one of the dominant issues in Leaves is how class representations become integrated into gender ideologies. Whitman defines neither manhood nor womanhood through material possession but through sexual and corporeal recognition and acceptance, fertility, athleticism, sexual passion, and religious vision. More specifically, in his respective categories, he conceptualizes womanhood as elevating agent, earth mother, child bearer, divinity; he sees manhood as liberty, freedom (separate from the domestic sphere), pride of craft, artisan cohesion—while ambivalent about patriarchal hierarchy and dominance. These categories, of course, were being challenged in the period’s quickening shift to industrial capitalism in which risk, competition, and calculation were emphasized. Nevertheless, while speaking collectively for men and women, as he constantly does in Leaves, Whitman puts aside feelings of rivalry, domestic authority, conventional moralities, humiliation, and competition to voice the possibility of a new class of workerthinkers, artisan-artists. And yet this class must also, ideally, confront the dangers associated with gender. Gender, for Whitman, is a kind of alternate account of class—as expressed incarnationally. In section 6 of Leaves, for example, his incarnational position, in its reliance on death, transcendence, and

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on the exchange of life forms through decomposition and growth, harmonizes class and gender differences: What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere; The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceased the moment life appeared. All goes onward and outward. . . . and nothing collapses. (30)13

Whitman recruits the incarnational to voice the idea that the problems resulting from gender differences can be translated into a vocabulary that makes a solution possible: I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new washed babe . . . . and am not contained between my hat and boots, And peruse manifold objects, no two alike, and every one good, The earth good, and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good. (Leaves 31)

The incarnational is yet another way in which Whitman takes the stress off difference and puts it on a shared commonality. Because for Whitman gender and class are written on the body—through which people become subject to domination and oppression—his corporative detachment (which the poet in Leaves applies to himself as well) takes an incarnational form.

Class and Mass: The Merge The poetic power that Whitman’s best poems contain results from the poet occupying a specific incarnational position as a conduit to the relational: Whitman as the incarnational mediator, observer, and substitute. To a significant degree—beginning with the frontispiece to the 1855 edition of Leaves—the central image of the body is that of the poet’s “working body,” the most pronounced example of the completely physical person. At one moment, like the “friendly and flowing savage” (Leaves 69), the poet possesses “slowstepping feet and the common features, and the common modes/ and emanations” (Leaves 70) that conduce him to picking the armfuls of “the dried grass of the

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harvest-time loads” (Leaves 32). “I help myself to material and immaterial,” he proclaims, “No guard can shut me off, no law can prevent me” (61). At another, he is a direct witness to the work of others: Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil, Each has his main sledge. . . . they are all out. . . . there is a great heat in the fire. From the cinder-strewed threshold I follow their movements, The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms, Overhand the hammers roll—overhand so slow—overhand so sure, They do not hasten, each man hits in his place. (Leaves 35)

And at still another—to more clearly establish the working-class persona and “to take part and see and hear the whole” (Leaves 63)—he becomes the pinnacle of the working sufferer that he describes, the slave: “I am the hounded slave. . . . I wince at the bite of the dogs” (Leaves 62). Thus Whitman projects himself into a trans-class space, one that can be understood in terms of interpersonal and interbodily relations that suggest a merging of social and physical selves. But as part of the incarnational flow and fluidity he describes, the poet must also stand back from his creation and his own workingclass persona: “Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am” (Leaves 28) to be “both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it” (Leaves 28). The poet’s authority can thus take on an impassive mood and mode in which he allows what he describes to pass, unobstructed and unmediated, through him. Leaves constantly shifts from the passive receptivity of the loafer (“I loafe and invite my soul” Leaves 25) to the active desires of the incarnating, participative poet. And yet loafing in Whitman goes far beyond the notion of inactivity associated in the 1840s, with derelict behavior among the urban underclass. Loafing is presented in the poem as a kind of celebrated roughness, with its excessive virility that includes a streetwise thoughtfulness and mastery of situation. The loafer, like the “Bowery boy,” is fiercely free, self-reliant, and autonomous.14 Loafing is, most importantly, a temporary stay from—or a momentary alternative tothe incarnationality of the poetic presence.

Whitman’s Form: A Move from Journalism to Poetry Whitman’s incarnational trope in Leaves is an extension of the personas he created in his journalism—from the eternal sympathizer to

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the trans-identifying figure of remonstrance, passing through the erstwhile, outside reformer, to one who intimately understands the working- and suffering classes. Significantly, the actual literary start of Whitman’s “daily communication” (Brasher 6) began in the 1855 Leaves of Grass not with poetry but with a ten-page prose essay on poetry and what he thought to be the representative American poet (PP 5). Whitman’s decision to begin with prose is indicative of the fact that, as Heather Morton has argued, The migration of Whitman’s free verse from poetry to prose and vice versa indicates the arbitrary nature of genre distinctions. Similarly, anyone who has seen Whitman’s manuscripts knows that at the point of origin, the composition process, distinguish in his prose from his poetry is not always easy and largely depends on the indentation that signals a “line” rather than a “sentence.” (230)

Something similar can be said about how the preface was printed—in the two columns commonly used for newspaper articles—as if Whitman wished to convince his readers that they were reading a journalistic piece. Like a “newspaper conductor” with his public, Whitman, it must be recalled, was trained as a printer, moved to reporter and editorial work as a young man, and essentially earned his professional living as a journalist during the 1840s and 50s, including the period in which the first edition of Leaves was published.15 Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Jerome Loving, and David Reynolds have argued how Whitman’s journalism was foundational to Leaves of Grass. Fishkin states, for example, that “facts,” for Whitman, “are all that he was able to hear, feel, and imagine” (22), even “his most conventional journalism play[ing] and important role in molding the poet that emerged in 1855” (23). Loving asserts that “Whitman’s journalism is known for its moderation, as well as its empathy with the working poor,” suggesting further that Whitman was largely a contributor to the “main mission of newspapers in antebellum America . . . to promote the improvement of manners in a society” (104). “[Whitman’s] experiences in Manhattan in the forties,” Reynolds argues, “show him surveying American society, familiarizing himself with its possibilities and its flaws, and preparing himself to produce fully representative poetry” (Reynolds, America 83).16 Commenting on his journalism years, Whitman himself observed, “Remember, the book [Leaves of Grass] arose out of my life in Brooklyn and New York from 1838 to 1853, absorbing a million people, for fifteen years, with an intimacy, an eagerness, and abandon, probably never equalled” (Myerson 43).

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What I’m interested in here, though, is a more precise sense of how Whitman not only blurred standard genre distinctions, but in the ways his “fact-romances” (Whitman, “Some” 100), echoing his claims of the superiority of “fact over fiction,” inflected his notions of poetic form and, inextricably, his ideas about class in the poem. A carry over from his belief that newspapers were “the mirror of the world,” the “reality of life” (UPP 115), it was Whitman’s intoxication with fact that the first edition of Leaves most clearly articulates. Doubtless, his journalism moved into poetry precisely because of his concern with the actual—a foundation for the poem’s form. It is through its very form that Leaves—form understood as the organization of the elementary parts of a work of art in relation to its total effect—is culturally enacted and staged and inseparable from class, history, and materiality. But form in Whitman is never merely formal, nor is it ever as empty and innocent as it might appear. Indeed, one of the central dilemmas of Leaves is to seek a social voice adequate to its form—a form that becomes, like the language of the poem itself, a mediation rather than a mirror of class in the United States. By 1856, however, Whitman had developed his own theory on form, pertinent to both his poetry and prose: Great writers penetrate the idioms of their races, and use them with simplicity and power. The masters are they who embody the rude materials of the people and give them the best forms for the place and time. (New York 56)

Form in Leaves never attains to the uniformity that a hermetic notion of form implies, in part because the very terms of form and class confront each other. Form, then, is the product or the arena of class in which class works less as a complicitous agent of form than as a corrosive grinding away at the apparently smooth surface of structure. The specific aestheticization of form aims toward the creation of coherent class-anchored subjects. The catalogues in section 15, for example, cast the poet as inclusively enumerating the roles of “all” classes— “carpenter,” “spinning girl,” “deacons,” “machinist,” “farmer,” and so on.—so that “one and all tend inward to [him], and [he] tend[s] outward to them” (39–40). Everything in Leaves reflects Whitman’s interest in obliterating boundaries between cultural and class levels and subverting narrative expectations (abrogating normal rules of punctuation, providing no titles for the twelve separate poems, etc.). Form, as the bearer of meaning, thus becomes the “content” of the

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text rather than the container of content. While form is the poet’s contesting of class (the poet refuses to draw a perimeter around sexual, social, class ties), it is also an engagement in which the poetic self and the reader’s interaction with class is acted out. To the extent that form is inseparable from history, form itself becomes the bearer of political and class meanings. Commenting on a blurring of form and style between American newspapers and American literature of the mid- and late nineteenth century, Karen Roggenkamp asserts, A natural and fluid connection existed between literature and journalism in terms of style and profession, and editors and reporters alike self-consciously reinforced the ideas that one textual venue bled into another and the pages of newspaper contained within them a particular literary aesthetic. (xiv)

For Whitman’s aesthetic (and “meanings”), I would include the “textual venue” of his poetry, which in relation to his best journalism of the 1840–1850 period operated within models of dramatic storytelling, relied on vivid and concrete descriptions, deployed narrative devices to engage the reader in the described scene, depended on vernacular constructions, advertised its own self-reflexivity, and expressed an engaged interest in the world of fact. The need for recognizing the literariness in general and the subjectivity in particular in Whitman’s journalism corresponds to the necessity for seeing the “flesh and blood reporter” and the implicit construction of this reporter in Leaves, his attempt to tell “[t]he latest news” (Leaves 28). Whitman’s journalism provides a blueprint for his class sympathies in Leaves. If by critical consensus, his journalism—for example, that of the Aurora, the Tattler, the Sun, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and other newspapers he wrote for and edited in the 1840s—was quite undistinguished, didactically moralistic, and conventional (Fishkin 25; Brasher 217; Reynolds, America 81–110), there are consistent reformist and sympathetic stances on female labor, working-class rights, and the plight of the poor that assail both his journalism and Leaves. Whitman’s implorations to sympathize with the working poor and working classes, seen in such Brooklyn Daily Eagle articles as “Female Labor” (August 19, 1846), “Facts for Working Folks” (August 26, 1846), “What is Best for Workingmen” (September 3, 1846), “Working Women” (November 9, 1846), and “The SewingWomen of Brooklyn and New York” (January 29, 1847), reappear

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in the descriptions of his “divine average” in Leaves: for example, “him in the poorhouse tubercled by rum and the bad disorder” (76); “the mechanic’s wife with her babe at her nipple” (72); “the loud laugh of workpeople at their meals” (52); “the endless races of working people and farmers and seamen” (41); “the deckhands” (38); “the pavingman” (38); “the carpenter” (37); “the quadroon girl” (37). The poem’s form is mediated by the poet’s multiple interpretations of these characters—positioned in dialogic relation to one another, with a resultant emphasis on process, diversity of voices, and the poet’s empathetic voice. What primarily comes out in the journalism, however, are Whitman’s exhortations to right injustices: “the low meanness” practiced, for example, by “the clothiers” toward “the sewing girls of New York” (Journalism, Vol. 2, 22); the high “import duties” that favor the “‘protected’ classes” . . . “strengthen[ing] the tongues and pockets of the fraction, at the expense of a class forty-nine times as numerous as they” (Journalism, Vol. 2, 31–32); or “the evils and horrors connected with the payment . . . for woman’s labor” (Journalism, Vol. 2, 111). When not expressing bafflement over the problem, the journalist Whitman calls for expedient solutions to it (Journalism, Vol. 2, 23, 32, 45, 178). My contention is that these “honest efforts” to reform “any old abuse, by means of newspaper writing” (Journalism, Vol. 2, 111) take on concomitant forms in Leaves: Many sweating and ploughing and thrashing, and then the chaff for payment receiving, A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming. (73)

Inveighing against “those who piddle and paddle here in collars and tailcoats” (74), the poet “put[s] higher claims for him there with his rolled up sleeves” (72). In “The Sleepers,” he hectors against a presumed wrong: “I have been wronged . . . I am oppressed . . . I hate him that oppresses me” (111). In “Song of Occupations,” addressing himself to “the souls of men and women” (88), Whitman evokes his most explicit (reformatory) position in the poem: I own publicly who you are, if nobody else owns. . . . and see and Hear you, and what you give and take. (Leaves 88)

Here the form shows how narrative authority can be appropriated to empower those in need of defending or criticism. Clearly, form is a social element. As Raymond Williams has argued, at any given

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historical moment narrative forms coexist with and overlap each other: The effective formation of most actual art relates to already manifest social formations, dominant or residual, and it is primarily to emergent formations (though often in the form of modification or disturbance in older forms) that the structure of feeling, as solution, relates. (134)17

Williams’s argument places a scrutiny of forms into a social and temporal matrix that Leaves elucidates. That is, the poem points simultaneously in two directions: toward the events described in the poem and toward the historical narrative (e.g., slavery, western migration), both of which serve as icons for class forms and structures. Whitman’s reformatory impulses, however, beginning with the radical poetic form of Leaves, clashed with his attempt to transpose class differences for he was also “transfixed” by them: “[b]oth in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it” (Leaves 29). Outfitted in clothes of the working class, he hoped to convince himself, through the eyes of an observing journalist and poet, that (re-) reading his poems was necessary for the workingmen and workingwomen of America, seriously believing that his poetry could make life-changing differences.

Conclusion It is impossible to authoritatively conclude what constitutes Whitman’s culture or knowledge or gender or race without including his class epistemology. In effect, his use of class as a trope for the incarnational, his incarnational rhetoric, his cultural program, his inextricable conjoining of sexual meaning with class, his (literary) journalism—all are based on such an inclusion. Yet, as David Reynolds has pointed out, Whitman became, in his final years, “both financially and ideologically entangled with capitalists and social rulers” (America 546), including Andrew Carnegie (America 546), and his emphasis ultimately “shifted from workers to the workforce, from individuals to industrial armies” (America 504).18 The 1880s saw Whitman participating in a Whitman commodification, including his Lincoln lectures, the commercial appearance of a Whitman cigar, calendar, tree, anthologies, church, and the start of various Whitman clubs and organizations (Reynolds, America 546). Clearly, Whitman’s vision of the working class, in his last years, became increasingly disjointed

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from working-class realities and the economic conditions of an industrializing America. As Ezra Greenspan contends: The problem with this otherwise perfectly enchanting vision of a nation of individual workers, each one singing his or her song of contentment, is that, even as an ideal, it belongs to a bygone world of small, independent mechanics, craftsmen, and farmers. That world . . . was being bypassed by the age of mass production and modern technology. Rather than singing Whitman’s song of self-contentment and self-help, American workingmen in the period following the Civil War would increasingly be given to chanting the slogans of emergent unions, a movement, significantly, with which Whitman had little sympathy. (216)

Undeniably, Whitman became more receptive to business and capitalistic enterprise after the Civil War and much less sympathetic to unions and socialistic programs. These new attitudes, including his rejection of radial labor reformers, echo his earlier rejection of abolitionist radicalism (Stacy 150). Whitman “despise[ed] and condemn[ed]” what he considered to be the “dangerous and fanatical” side of Abolitionism, while at the same time he disapproved of “the other extreme as well” (Whitman, Brooklyn). He criticized both abolitionists and pro-slavery Southerners, for both sides were calling for a separation of the North and the South. Similarly, although Whitman was generally anti– labor union and antagonistic toward Irish labor organizers in the early 1840s, he felt great affinity with Irish working-class “b’hoys” and their masculinist subculture. It is generally true that Whitman became more amenable toward the social elite of the day, not hesitating to defend, for example, such modern day monarchs as Frederick Wilhelm I and Queen Victoria. He appeared to accept as inevitable the exploitation of large corporations and trusts. Democratic Vistas (1871), for example, forcefully signals some of his later accommodating thoughts: “I perceive clearly that the extreme business energy, and the almost maniacal appetite for wealth prevalent in the United States, are parts of amelioration and progress, indispensably needed to prepare the very results I demand” (Prose Works (PW) II: 384–385). Conservative reactions enveloped Whitman after the Civil War—some are represented in Democratic Vistas, in which he expresses his political impatience with actual democratic processes. One of the most famous passages in the essay, for example, criticizes what Whitman sees as the excesses of democracy, calling (and not merely rhetorically, given the dire political state that informs his plea) for a slippery authoritarian solution: “I demand

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races of orbic bard, with unconditional uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet democratic despots of the west!” (PW II: 390). At times, in this same essay, Whitman expresses a revulsion for the “average” men and women, who prove to be “the meanest seen in the world”: Confess that everywhere, in shop, street, church, theatre, barroom, official chair, are pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity—everywhere the youth puny, impudent, foppish, prematurely ripe—everywhere an abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male, female, painted, padded, dyed, chignon’d, muddy complexions, bad blood, the capacity for good motherhood deceasing or deceas’d, shallow notions of beauty, with a range of manners, or rather lack of manners, (considering the advantage enjoy’d,) . . . (PW II: 393)

Concomitantly, Whitman, throughout his life, was skeptical about social reform movements, despite the fact that his journalistic pieces frequently called for reform. He had serious misgivings about the radical activists and anarchists of the day (e.g., Sylvester Baxter, Edward Bellamy) who possessed, he thought, no proprietary rights on social reform. For all his sexual and democratic adventurousness, Whitman had extremely conservative tendencies—an impulse toward moderation and away from political extremes. For example, he avoided the entreaties of British writer John Symonds to openly declare his homosexuality (Reynolds, Historical 7) in the early 1870s, he sided with the violent philosophy of the Irish Protestants in their anti-Catholic campaigns, and supported the Irishmen of the New York City Police Department when they beat up lower-class Irish Catholics (Kreig 33). And yet Whitman never dropped his critical position on American materialism and continued to criticize what he saw as the ill directions of American “culture”: “. . . but taste, intelligence, and culture (so-called) have been against the masses, and remain so” (PW II: 390). Democratic Vista’s intermittent conservative agenda also condemns the rampant corruption of the late 1860s: “The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except for the judiciary, are saturated in corruption . . . in business (this all-devouring modern world, business), the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain” (PW II: 369–370). The essay, in the canon of Whitman’s postwar writings, perhaps best represents his inclinations toward radicalism and conservatism, a bifurcation evidenced throughout his nonpoetic writings. Despite this bifurcation, though, he was extremely one-sided in his position on working toward a harmonious identity

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between the human body, human society, and (his Emersonian side) the natural environment: for example, “I am enamoured of growing outdoors” (Leaves 36). Leaves creates an ideal aesthetic realm distinguished by an intense focus on the material existence of the ideal human body—in most instances in Leaves, the laboring body, readily locatable in Whitman’s mid-nineteenth-century America. If Whitman was at times out of step with the late nineteenth century, if in his later years he found much that was reprehensible in the urban scenes of America and in working-class behavior in general, he also saw much promise and potential, most notably in a future America made up of an educated, dignified, and literary working class. Whitman’s 1855 Leaves should not be stripped of its class discourse (making literary the idiomatic register of the masses as opposed to a reproduction of the literary discourse of the elite) that represents America itself. Issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation can be seen as usefully integrated into and following on the heels of class representations. At the same time, Whitman wanted to obliterate any form of lower-middle-class “shame,” particularly that associated with the discrepancy between lower-middle-class norms and values and those perceived as superior and socially wished for. To be sure, one of the results of the Jacksonian dream for self-making resulted in Whitman both trying to hold on to the idea of the artisan system’s hierarchical order of owner-master, skilled journeyman, and apprentice, and, however inconsistently, adapting to the rise of the market economy during the Jacksonian period. The free-market’s leveling of hierarchy was, among much else, transposed into Whitman’s incarnational vision of leaving one order to go to another. Whitman, though, never gave up his commitment to lower-middle-class autonomy, respectability, and sense of the “decent” self. “[W]hen I mix with these interminable swarms of alert, turbulent, good natured independent citizens, mechanics, clerks, young persons,” he declares in Democratic Vistas, “. . . a singular awe falls upon me” (PW, vol. 2, 388). Class is, arguably, the greatest burden of writers of nineteenthcentury America who were dealing with a new formation of a nation. For me, Whitman’s fashion of dealing with this burden transposes into a language of inclusion and coexistence, anonymous intimacies, and relations other than those of hierarchy, “literariness,” elitism, and classification. The multiplicity of class, for Whitman, elides into a cultural program: I should demand a programme of culture, drawn out, not for a single class alone, or for the parlors or lecture-rooms, but with an eye to

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practical life, the west, the working-men, the facts of farms and jackplanes and engineers, and of the broad range of women also of the middle and working strata, and with reference to the perfect equality of women, and of a grand and powerful motherhood. (PW, vol. 2, 396)

As part of this program, class is an indispensable and subsuming category of Leaves and not just an object of contemplation, for it has the potential of empowering others (e.g., women and nonwhite men) to assert their own respective differences and untranslatibilities. The power of Whitman’s voice ultimately asserts that the language of class contains precisely the felt notions of the experience of class in which “hard work and blood” can never rest easy. Leaves not only comprises a linguistified system in which communicative action is foregrounded along with its accompanying discursive (ir)resolutions, but most importantly, it offers culture as a site of struggle—perhaps the only site of struggle—and class as a determinant act in any movement toward discursive and historical change.

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CH A P T ER

2

Class and the Performative in Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills, and Stephen Crane’s Maggie

At the forefront of Whitman’s cultural program, class was publicly scrutinized by the nineteenth-century novelists of realism and naturalism in ways that would expose the normally invisible and often deliberately concealed affairs of political and economic life. If the effacement of self was one of the effects of nineteenth-century naturalism, as one critic has recently argued,1 then the foregrounding of a world in which action and meaning are inextricably connected to cultural transformation was another. Providing a voyeuristic yet also an analytic view of the lower classes, Naturalism was a perspective (and mode) of cultural change, emphasizing, among much else, the conflicts and changes with class attitudes in the United States. The naturalist obsession with atavism, brutality, and economic squalor offered a compelling way of representing the disruptive forces of class domination, warfare, and social change.2 The erasure of the self and the spotlight on social forces led inevitably to the oft cited naturalist characters’ disposition toward atavism and transgression. More particularly, naturalist characters generally represent unsettling questions about social inequities within the mid- and late nineteenth-century system of industrial capitalism. Going far from Whitman’s “divine” workmen and workwomen, naturalist characters brought to the consciousness of a literary America the existence of the under- and working classes, now cast as subjects worthy of treatment and concern. Among the nineteenth-century “naturalists,” Rebecca Harding Davis and Stephen Crane (even in their resoundingly “non-naturalistic” moments) articulate most forcefully the fact that aesthetics is not a class innocuous domain. The “naturalism” of these two writers comes across less by the position that they take vis-à-vis contemporary

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social issues and controversies than through the discourses and forms they use to reproduce these issues. I’m therefore less concerned with defining the social positions of these authors than I am with how they construct the complex structures of representation upon which their work rests. This chapter examines some of the “semantic subtexts” of Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills (1861) and Crane’s Maggie (1893) with the view of bringing into focus new relationships to the world within which their class formations are inscribed. These two works are metaliterary and socially oriented: as they pursue their goals through multiple discourses, they comment on their own shortcomings and limitations. At the same time, Maggie and Life are apt illustrations that “literature has the capacity to preserve (however marginally) residues of phenomena that remain in some sense unrecognizable (if not unrepresentable) in our existing historiographic genres” (Brown 4). As naturalists (or would-be naturalists), Rebecca Harding Davis and Stephen Crane deployed techniques of seizing attention by means of daring and shock and then sustaining attention by narratives that seemed to permit the public to educate itself about the realities of its own life and times. What Harding and Crane required in their respective novels, Life in the Iron Mills and Maggie, was the highest key of appearance: not the representation of class per se but the discursive performance of it—staged with spotlighted characters, a visible audience, and such melodramatic clues as theft, lost love, suicide, murder, and spiritual redemption. When class is not only permitted to appear but is depicted as performance, the reader is asked to regard himself or herself as part of an audience and to become aware of both the details of class and the details of observation and attention. In this context, every character in Life and Maggie “is either a spectator, an inspector, or a specimen” enacting “the ceaseless theatricality of modern urban life and the externalization of the self onto evanescent social roles” (Kaplan, Social Construction, 7). At the same time, the cultural program of Davis and Crane, similar to that of Whitman, was not only to actively create and question the meanings, representations, and ideologies of their own times but ultimately to treat literary form as a kind of social practice, with the reader as an active participant. Performed, class in Life and Maggie is portrayed both as historical fact—in that the focus on “class” and “culture” becomes mutually determinant acts of historical change—and as unstable, provisionary, limitless. The representation and form of class in these novellas proposes less a given reality than performative ways of creating alternative realities that cannot be fully contained in the novels’ mimetic constructions. Both writers, through their performative modes,

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signal a change in middle-class styles for representing class and the urban poor while making their own (discursive) convictions about the dreams of mobility and stability that their characters act out. Unveiling the mediating conventions of their Realist contemporaries, however, Davis and Crane place their readers uncomfortably close to the live melodramas of the classes and class conflicts they portray. In so doing, they go far beyond the realistic and naturalistic labels so commonly attached to them. So far, in fact, much of the power of their writing lies in its steadfast ability to record the minutiae of everyday existence while giving priority to the use of spectacle and performative structures and evocations. Their respective needs to express class are therefore enmeshed with a concomitant necessity for the reader to come to terms with various discursive class modes. Again, as in the Whitman chapter, my focus will be on language— though this time primarily in its performative forms. Through a performative optic, I will examine some of the ways in which Davis and Crane render their sense of the surfaces and depths of class in America.3 I discuss naturalism in Maggie as a form whose task was to make fiction not so much a source of symbolic, mimetic, or transcendental truth but of its own truth. Under this view, naturalism is inextricably linked with Crane’s perceptions of the American city, mass culture (including American forms of elite and popular “performance”), emerging industrial capitalism, and class formations. Naturalism in Maggie complicates the idea of mimesis as it consequently liberates class discourse and understanding. Like Davis, Crane emphasizes aesthetic experience while using mimetic models to create an intermediate, “in-between” realm. My purpose is to trace in Maggie the interaction of naturalism with its own struggles for definition, ontological meaning, and class perspectives, focusing specifically on the performative and its reformulation into the ironic and parodic. In relation to naturalism, this chapter ends with an examination of Crane’s position on journalistic objectivity, how he attempts to solicit an empathetic response, and his narrative strategies in closing the distance between subjectivity and objectivity. My second objective is to bring Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills into dialogue with Maggie to show how the performative can be seen not only to coincide with the birth and rise of naturalism in the United States but also with its most salient class representations and (dis-)representations. Life testifies to the possibility that class representation need not be limited by the suppressive boundaries of material circumstances. Preceding Zola’s first “naturalistic” novels by some six years, the novella not only challenges the

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“traditional theories of the influences behind the movement from realism to naturalism,” it can be seen as putting into question many of the features contained in “a work of pure naturalism,” as it has recently been called (Harris 7–8). To put this differently, Life’s narrator aims at something not yet accessible to consciousness; she wishes to create a world that has not yet been identified. Consequently, whatever is represented in the text is meant less to define the world than to indicate a performed world. The term “performative naturalism,” I will argue, usefully highlights the constructed nature of these two fictional enterprises while it provides new ways of looking at class in nineteenth-century America.

L IFE

IN THE I RON M ILLS : Naturalism, Class, a Theatrical Heart

Published thirty-two years before Maggie, Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills uses performative strategies of persuasion to induce the reader to consider class on some level as a discursively mediated phenomenon and apparatus. At the same time, Davis employs such strategies to induce the reader to believe that she is referring to the “real.” The fictiveness of Life, however, as in many “naturalistic” works, is shaped as much by the logic of the narrative as by that of the subject. Life’s logic, as is indicated in the novel’s subtitle, “The Korl Woman,” centers on an aesthetic object, a mill-woman cut in korl. The narrator depends on the understanding of the most intimate subjectivity, the emotions and reactions produced in response to an aesthetic object. On his tour of the mill with Kirby, Doctor May, and others, Mitchell, in the performatively resonant “amphitheatre of smothered fires,” suddenly discovers the korl woman: “Mitchell started back, half-frightened, as, suddenly turning a corner, the white figure of a woman faced him in the darkness,—a woman, white, of giant proportions, crouching on the ground, her arms flung out in some wild gesture of warning” (31). Significantly presented in the middle of the novella, the sculpture prompts Mitchell and the other “visitors” to engage in their “pocket,” “heart,” and “head” argument (36–39). As in Davis, “truth”—social, political, psychological—can be understood most fully when it is filtered through some performative act or, in the case of Life, the korl woman, “[c]hipped to some purpose” (32), expressing “[o]ne idea: there it was in the tense, rigid muscles, the clutching hands, the wild, eager face, like that of a trusting wolf’s” (32). The exchanges among the mill visitors and the domestic descriptions that follow show Davis pointing to how industrial capitalism

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harms working-class families and creates class hierarchies that appear immutable. In this sense, Hugh Wolfe, furnace-tender and creator of the Korl Woman, poses one of the central questions of the novella: [Wolfe] seized eagerly every chance that brought him into contact with this mysterious class that shone down on him perpetually with the glamour of another order of being. What made the difference between them? That was the mystery of his life. (27)

Davis saw this essential deafness to the class differences as a product of the new industrial capitalist order in which laborers are trapped in wretched working and living conditions. For Davis, class divisions imperiled the democratic union just as the Civil War, at the time she was writing Life, was threatening national union (Tichi 9–10). And indeed, as amply evidenced in the criticism, Life can be located in the genre of industrial fiction for it sought to educate middle-class readers about the working conditions of the underclass, and particularly those of poor immigrant workers. What the narrator insists on at the outset, however, is that she can only approximate what Hugh Wolfe, as an “artist” and a laborer, is groping toward. While constantly urging the reader to “loo[k] deeper into the heart of things” (21), she does not “dare” to make her meaning any “clearer, but will only tell [her] story” (14). She can only create a drama of the approximate, the ineffable: “I can paint nothing of this, only give you the outside outlines of a night, a crisis in the life of one man” (23)—and fill it in with performative renderings. She cannot completely explain what she describes but can only make a “tragic story out of it” (50). This story, however, as it “becomes the story of the (male) working class, subsumed and wrapped in the frames of (female) bourgeois perception” (Rabinowitz, Labor 177), not only confirms the interdependency between class and gender, it also serves as a performative vehicle in which the narrator (who, importantly, never leaves her room) sets up an elision of sentimental sympathy, histrionic condemnation of the mill workers (and reader), and contempt for her own self-absorption. It will be noted as well that she can “scarcely see” (11) the figures who pass by her window while she recounts “a half-forgotten story” (14) and, significantly, writes it when “the deep of night is passing” (64). What effect does the narrator’s class have on her technique of telling? “Davis makes it clear,” as Jean Pfaelzer notes, “that her narrator

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is as trapped in her class as the reader she taunts. Romantic fogs and vapors obstruct middle-class perception of female- and working-class life and build toward Davis’s critique of nineteenth-century ways of knowing” (31). Yet in her “fascination with the social function of suffering” (Pfaelzer 25), the narrator most powerfully conveys that suffering and entrapment through performative renderings. Denied by her own middle-class dispositions, the narrator refuses to pretend that she thoroughly knows the effects of class on her subject. Rejecting the kind of domestic sentimentalism found in a Stowe or the erudite transcendentalism of a Hawthorne, she must come up with her own way of conveying class sufferings. Davis thus stresses the part played by the emotions in the reading process: her words invite us not so much to think about and judge as to feel into or become—to realize a complex experience given in language. Davis, like Crane, is dissatisfied with all definite formulations, be they concepts, metaphors, or larger formal structures. Instead, she, like the author of Maggie, resorts to using grotesque devices—in the character of Deborah, for example, with her “ghastly” face, “blu[e] lips,” and physical deformities (16). And she relies on melodramatic renderings, as in the case of Hugh’s death or Deb’s religious “rescue.” Davis’s melodramatic language aspires to a purity that severs it from referentiality: “There is no need to tire you with the long years of sunshine, and fresh air, and slow, patient Christ-love, needed to make healthy and hopeful this impure body and soul” (63). As suggested here, all knowledge-claims must pass through the funnel of individual consciousness. If, however, the performative sometimes seems to threaten the production of new knowledge, its very persistence reveals it as an inventive mode of knowledge and “truth” in its own right. Or, as Wolfgang Iser has argued in The Act of Reading: “What the language says is transcended by what it uncovers and what it uncovers represents its true meaning” (142). The narrator rejects the assumption that the effects of wage slavery are an inevitable result of industrialism. Rather, she wishes to establish an aesthetic mode of truth that sets the reader’s mind into motion and induces a fuller receptivity so that aesthetic judgments are not confined to the cognitive faculties but instead to a more complete “sensibility.” Davis advocates the part played by the body and emotions in the reading process: “This is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,—here, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this story” (13). Here it is clear that the narrator wishes the reader to take part in the

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performative rendering of the tale by “listening” to it; she wishes to unify the reader’s sensibilities with those of the suffering characters (e.g., Hugh, Deb, Janey). Through the “direct shock of poetic intensity” (Eliot 200), a heightened theatrical rendering (“the curtain . . . drawn back”), and a series of dramatically composed questions (e.g., “Has the power of its desperate need commanded the darkness away?” 65), the narrator concludes her tale. She returns us to the aesthetic object: Nothing remains to tell that the poor Welsh puddler once lived, but this figure of the mill-woman cut in korl. I have it here in a corner of my library . . . Sometimes,—to-night, for instance,—the curtain is accidentally drawn back, and I see a bare arm stretched out imploringly in the darkness, and an eager, wolfish face watching mine: a wan, woeful face, through which the spirit of the dead korl cutter looks out. . . . (64)

Staged, the korl woman appears as something that by nature is intangible. This staging, however, should not be interpreted as primarily a process of completion. Rather, the staged life (i.e., here in the performative object) defies completion, for there is no final limit to what might be possible. Multivalent, the korl woman cannot be reduced to one meaning. Each middle-class visitor to the iron mill interprets her differently. Thus, this final representation of the korl woman becomes a mode that functions to its maximum effect when, as ways of revealing the world, the knowledge and experience the novel posits come to the limits of their usefulness. The performative denies such limits. This is why Life can usefully be understood in terms of a performative struggle with the world the novel describes, in which a kind of derealization precedes representation. For example, the narrator’s description of Deb’s body, like that of the korl woman’s, unsettles any fixed notions about her: Miserable enough she looked, lying there on the ashes like a limp, dirty rag,—yet not an unfitting figure to crown the scene of hopeless discomfort and veiled crime; more fitting, if one looked deeper into the heart of things,—at her thwarted woman’s form, her colorless life, her waking stupor that smothered pain and hunger,—even more fit to be a type of her class. Deeper yet if one could look, was there nothing worth reading in this wet, faded thing, half-covered with ashes? no story of a soul filled with groping passionate love, heroic unselfishness, fierce jealousy? (21)

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The narrator exhorts the reader to go deeper into the scene for Deb, “half-covered in ashes,” only seems “fit to be a type of her class.” It is a sphere the narrator constantly brings the reader to: an intermediate position situated between an experiential and an intangible reality, between “dissatisfaction with human experience and the moral resolve to change reality” (Iser, Pater 167). As a prominatory indicator of Maggie, Life manages to make its case precisely in the combination of these aesthetic and social contingencies. Of course, like most fictions, Life can produce realities; it, after all, dwells on the “commonplace,” insisting, for example, that class oppression has resulted in a tragic joke: “You call it an altogether serious thing to be alive: to these men it is a drunken jest, a joke,— horrible to angels perhaps, to them commonplace enough” (12–13). Socially conscious, Davis bears testimony to the fact that the laboring bodies of men and women are excluded from the middle-class notions of manhood and womanhood. Yet, if Life emphasizes its participatory relation to the environmental conditions that it represents, it emphasizes as well an internal and irreducibly performative distance from those conditions. For instance, by her insistent use of direct address and present verb tenses, the narrator engages in an (almost) antagonistic and always performative dialogue with the reader, at once pushing the reader away from and implicating her in the story: What do you make of a case like that, amateur psychologist? (12) You may think it is a tiresome story enough, as foggy as the day, sharpened by no sudden flashes of pain or pleasure. (13) I will tell you plainly that I have a great hope and I bring it to you to be tested. (14) You, Egoist, or Pantheist, or Arminian, busy in making straight paths for your feet on the hills, do not see it clearly,—this terrible question which men here have gone mad and died trying to answer. (14) You laugh at it all? Are pain and jealousy less savage realities down here in this place I am taking you than in your own house or your own heart,—your heart, which they clutch at sometimes? (23)

Here the performative extends into the interior of the narrative, precisely in the relationship between the narrator and reader; or, more specifically, in the narrator’s staging of the various identities she

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imagines her readers possess. Life is, as Mark Seltzer has noted, not only “part of what it represents” but also “about what it represents” (468). The reading of it is more an act of creation (signaled in the narrator– “you” relationship) rather than reception, for Davis was not interested in characters in the traditional literary sense. Accordingly, Davis’s characters emerge less as an identity than as the impossibility of an identity (e.g., Hugh’s “thwarted life” as an artist ) or the potentiality of an identity (e.g., Deb’s middle-class redemption at the end of the text). They therefore cannot be read merely metonymically or mimetically. Instead, the meaning of Davis’s aesthetics lies foremost in its “staging,” its new figuralizations, and in its reliance on processes of mediation as opposed to mimetic acts. And yet, as I’m trying to suggest, Davis was certainly not excluded from the writers who (forcefully) expressed their views on class. Like Leaves of Grass, Life gives voice to the “long dumb voices” while mounting a frontal attack on nascent American industrialism: You may think it a tiresome story enough, as foggy as the day, sharpened by no sudden flashes of pain or pleasure.—I know: only the outline of a dull life, that long since, with thousands of them,—massed, vile, slimy lives, like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-butt. (13)

But if Life participates in an antebellum discourse of class discovery, it does so obliquely and largely performatively. It must be recalled that Life begins and ends with the narrator symbolically occupying the house where the Wolfes once lived (15, 65), dramatizing a (potential and actual) change of working-class misery to middle-class spaces and security. Class is indelibly inscribed in the consciousness (and inner speech) of the narrator. Directly connected to the narrator’s significant role in the text, Life’s performative language propels the narrative toward class representations (and potential transcendences and transformations) while calling attention to the larger (narrative) problem of finding an appropriate mode to describe the incipient workingclass and cross-class encounters.

M AGGIE : Class and the City as Performative Mystery While focusing, like Davis, on the working- and lower classes, Crane engaged in his own stagings and broadenings of discursive contexts.4 What is staged in Life’s milltown, “saturated” in the mystery of “fog

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and grease and soot” (12), finds its parallel in Maggie. In Maggie the wish for the commonplace, for the demystification of urban spaces and social distances, coexists with the wish not to explain mystery but to use it as a kind of surrogate experience for explanation. As Alan Trachtenberg has argued: By the end of the century spatial barriers appeared threatening and intolerable, and in the rhetoric of reformers the idea of mystery itself was the veil that hid the sight of the lower orders and their quarters from the “public,” the readers of newspapers and the payers of taxes for whom the slums were par excellence an “elsewhere” shrouded in awe and fear. (City Sketches 140)

To preserve the city’s mystery while seemingly revealing or explaining it, Crane relied on performative techniques. For example, he tried to convey physical landscapes equivalent to his perceptions of the subjective (classed) lives of his characters. He suffused his story with so much subjectivity that even the “objective” narrative renders it (Levenson 159). His New York is thus filled with windows that “uprear [their] forms amid squat, ignorant stables” (3), shadows of “grey ominous building[s]” (4), “gruesome doorways” that give up “loads of babies to the street and gutter” (6), and tenements that “quive[r] and crea[k] from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowels” (6). These perceptions come not only from the narrator but also from Jimmie, Mary, Maggie, and the “chorus” of tenement dwellers, who see and express in the dense, impenetrable city, their own sentiments and fears. It is a city that breathes, falls, and performs according to such perceptions. Crane delineates character in Maggie by performatively presenting the alterity of class and by showing his readers an uncertain and unknown world that could threaten them. He, like Davis, intentionally undercuts the traditionally safe class space enjoyed by the reader, doing so perhaps most explicitly in his stories—for example, in this urban description that concludes “An Experiment in Misery” (1894), published one year after Maggie: And in the background a multitude of buildings, of pitiless hues and sternly high, were to him emblematic of a nation forcing its regal head into the clouds, throwing no downward glances; in the sublimity of its aspirations ignoring the wretches who may flounder at its feet. The roar of the city in his ear was to him the confusion of strange tongues, babbling heedlessly; it was the clink of a coin, the voice of the city’s hopes which were to him no hopes. (Experiment 165)

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Here the city is an opaque and impenetrable space—dense, unreachable and at the same time menacing—a space, like Davis’s mill, segregated and stratified but, in its highly visual forms, open to cross-class viewing and interpretation. The privileged urban viewer is no longer protected, for Crane empties the city of the traditional middle-class success ethic and cultural capital. Yet, in doing so, he is less concerned with the accuracy of his accounts than in depicting the relative self-consciousness employed in the act of transposing such phenomena into text. Strikingly, the narrator-protagonist of “Experiment in Misery,” tells his elder companion that his purpose is not to become a tramp but to “discover [the tramp’s] point of view,” to use the experience in order to “produce a veracious narrative” (154). This continuous flow of self-consciousness (and the narrator as nonintervening witness, as observer of his own spectacle) in Crane’s city stories, as in Maggie, is the base for the performative. How does this kind of “veracity” play itself out in Maggie? Similar to Davis’s mill descriptions, Crane’s city descriptions overflow with a hyperbolic, overinsistent roar of outrage and mockery to create a landscape of “hysteria and hallucination” (Walcott 67). From Jimmie’s impassioned defense of his “honor of Rum Alley” (3), characterized by such phrases as “circles madly,” “furious assault,” “barbaric trebles,” “triumphant savagery,” and “taunting oaths,” to Maggie’s walk to the “final block” in which “[the] structures seemed to have eyes that looked over her, beyond her, at other things” (53), Crane insists on performative conveyances and expressions (e.g., “infantile orations” 168) that do not necessarily advance the exploration of his subject or the mimetic “sociological thesis” that is so often attributed to him. Instead, Crane’s characters experience the city from the inside. One may ask, as Philip Fisher does in his discussion of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, “What is around one when the city, around the body like a second, more spacious suit of clothing, is experienced in use” (Hard Facts 131)? Most often in Maggie Crane makes us aware of the narrator as a conveyor of performances for parodic and satiric reasons—or simply for effect. At one moment the narrator adopts a mock-heroic stance (“The mother and the son began to sway and struggle like gladiators” 29); at another ironically undercuts a character (“Maggie perceived that Pete brought forth all his elegance and all his knowledge of high-class customs for her benefit” 23); and yet at still another employs such attention-getting locutions as “the girl of crimson legions” (53), “the doorful of eyes” (48), “words of wind-demons” (13), and a “blue policeman turned red” (15). The language startles,

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calls attention to itself rather than to what it describes, and aims for impact and effect. Each character in Maggie is self-deceived, estranged from all others, and occupies a world of his or her own, a world most conducive to performative renderings. The performative quality of Maggie makes us see the elementary forms that link our own subjectivity with the world of originary experience. Performance offers its own metaphysical philosophy of the world: truth becomes an active construction of scenes put on “stage” by the author’s eye, rather than something that has to be uncovered. Truth, rather than a pregiven reality, becomes the subject of representation, but a subject that involves the reader in the stagings and enactments of the text. Unlike Life, Maggie’s urban depictions offer no possibilities for transcendent or spiritual truths. Crane’s characters suggest that moral sensibility has no privileged or scrutinizing power over emotions and desires; there is no transcendent order that might subordinate or control destructive appetites and propensities. And unlike Life, Maggie does not try to “arouse compassion for the victims of an unjust economic system” (Lang, “Strategies” 133) nor does it directly condemn the evils of “wage slavery.” Instead, to its middle-class readers, Crane offers slum dwellers and members of the lower classes as a spectacle to be consumed—much like their characters who are conspicuously preoccupied with spectacle (e.g., Maggie’s obsessions with melodramas and dime museums) and their own observed performances (e.g., Mary’s public “grief” over Maggie’s death) through which they can achieve some sense of self assurance, however delusionary. Rather than explicitly demarcating the line between characters and readers, Crane demands a level of identification that simultaneously blurs and reemphasizes class difference. To put this another way, in Crane the issue of class is neither solved nor repressed but is placed instead as a literary analogue in an amoral space in which the possibility of mobility is precluded. Rather than transcendence, Crane offers danger, spectacle, and performance itself—deploying an aesthetic that, diffused by its performative origins, revoices certain “new” middle-class ways of envisioning the urban poor.

Performative Unreality and Structure And yet a caveat is in order here: the world in Maggie is different from the one it refers to, for the performative world must differ from any extratextual existence. One of the forms of the performative, the theatricalization of reality, is signaled early in the novel when, for

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example, “the babe [Tommie] sat on the floor watching the scene, his face in contortions like that of a woman at a tragedy” (7), or when the tenement house hall “fill[s] with interested spectators,” intent on seeing the fight between Mary and Jimmie (30), or later in the scene in which Mary “reeled and swayed in the middle of the room, her fierce face convulsed with passion, her blotched arms raised high in imprecation” (32). And throughout the text it is signaled by the narrator’s rendition of “eerie or spectral effects,” as in a “great green-hued hall” (56), “pale green snow storms” (27), and suggestions of “artificial illumination or stage lighting” (Halliburn 57): “An old woman opened a door. A light behind her threw a flare on the urchin’s quivering face” (9). Within this world, the performative structure of Maggie is most clearly suggested by the three theatrical scenes that chart Maggie’s demise. The purpose of such an unreality is to overstep what is known as the realistic given and to create a world that is never totally deceptive nor totally dependable, a world that occupies a dramatically charged middle ground. Each of the three scenes signals Maggie’s further descent into apparent “moral” decay and her dependency on Pete. In the first scene in which Maggie is drawn to Pete, who “displayed the consideration of a cultural gentleman who knew what was due” (22), he performs for her, and she appropriately perceives him as bringing “forth all his elegance and all his knowledge of high-class customs for her benefit” (23). At one moment “gracious and attentive” and at another aggressive and imperious, regarding “with eyes of superiority the scene before them” (22), Pete is seen by Maggie as a “knight,” and she recognizes in him an air of “distinguished valor” (38), a figure “looming like a yellow sun” (26). Crane, however, sets Pete’s performative stance in the reality of the music-hall public and thereby brings us back to the Bowery: “the vast crowd had an air throughout of having just quitted labor. Men with calloused hands and attired in garments that showed the wear of an endless trudge for a living . . . The great body of the crowd was composed of people who showed that all day they strove with their hands” (22). This largely working-class audience sees in the play it watches the manifestations of the class divisions they encounter in their daily lives (Mariani 77). But the narrator stops short of explanation, of “naturalistic” causes and class effects, for the novel’s impact, its most prominent feature, serves to appropriate—and eventually subsume and recast—these elements. This venue’s audience, like Maggie herself, experiences what the narrator calls a “transcendental realism. Joy always within, and they,

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like the actor, inevitably without” (27). The performative unreality incites Maggie and the rest of the audience to “hu[g] themselves in ecstatic pity of their imagined or real condition” (27). Crane suggests here that his novel can best be conceived as a “mode of impacting” in which “the indefinability of our world is inscribed into it” (Iser, Act 267). The impact that the narrator strives for never loses sight of its situational condition or function; but at the same time his objects of representation, going far beyond any pregiven state, serve as material from which something new and unexpected is formed. In the second theatrical scene, the hall, more tawdry and ominous than the first, is of “irregular shape” in which a ballad singer sings “in the inevitable voice of brass” (38). While “men at other tables regarded [Maggie] furtively” and “grey-headed men, wonderfully pathetic in their dissipation, stared at her through clouds” (39), she “confined her glances to Pete and the stage” (39). This time, however, Maggie does not wish to become part of the performance, yet for most of the male spectators she is a part of it. She cannot escape it, though she wishes to do so and actually makes the decision (one of her rare decisions) for Pete and herself to leave the hall. This is not just a scene as played in ordinary life, nor is it one that unfolds and the reader merely watches; rather, like so many scenes in Maggie, it is both an ongoing event and a happening for the reader, enabling and encouraging direct involvement in the scene and, indeed, in the staging itself. In the third music-hall scene, there are “twenty-eight tables and twenty-eight women and a crowd of smoking men” (42); the hall is even seedier and more coarse than the first two. The smoke is “thicker,” the “rumble of conversation” is replaced by a “roar” (42), and confusion is everywhere. Crane turns up the performative volume. But, most importantly, this scene makes transparent Crane’s gestures toward joining semblance and performance. “Valiant noise was made on a stage at the end of the hall by an orchestra composed of men who looked as if they had just happened in” (42). The “mere boy” who has accompanied Nellie into the hall “smiled again as if resolved to wait patiently” (45), during which time “he exterminated a number of cocktails with a determined air, as if replying defiantly to fate. In the following Chapter, Maggie has “a shadowy look that was like a sardonic grin, as if some one had sketched with cruel forefinger indelible lines about her mouth” (48, my emphases). Similar to the effect of such words as “perceived” (43), “apparently” (43), and “assumed” (44) found in this third scene, as if suggests that the textual world is to be viewed not as a reality but as if it were a reality.

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And so such words and locutions imply that the text is not meant to denote the world, but a world enacted. Hence in disclosing itself, Maggie signals that everything is only to be taken as if it were what it seems to be, to be taken—in other words—as performance. While Maggie is often considered as naturalistic text, such a description overlooks the complexity of its naturalism, which depends upon staged performance and, as in Life, potential alternatives to concrete historical and class determinations: “I can paint nothing of this, only give you the outside outlines . . . whatever muddy depth of soul-history lies beneath you can read according to the eyes God has given you” (Life 23). Maggie suggests that what is staged is the appearance of something that cannot become manifest or completed, that cannot admit to any final limits. Thus, as part of an access to an infinity of possibilities, Maggie posits its own theory of subjective truth, rather than pointing to any particular truth to be “naturalistically” disclosed. At the same time, though, its “truth” is fraught with class ramifications. Crane places his working- and lower-class characters beyond the grasp of genteel reformers and their moral and psychological agendas. The underclasses he portrays, possessing no concept of remorse, conscience, spirituality, social consciousness, or will, have no thought or intention to adopt middle-class values of any kind. At the same time, protean and unsure, they are presented from a perspective that at times pushes their attitudes, postures, and tragedies to such performative excesses that any form of mimetic representation is deliberately parodied and therefore subverted.

Toward a Novelistic Theatricality: Melodrama and the Grotesque The Melodramatic This subversion of mimetic representation relies largely on a performative naturalism. Thus, much in Maggie, as part of this aim, suggests the melodramatic: shock, terror, violence apparently for its own sake; stereotyped characters; a plot revolving around malevolent intrigue and violent action; mawkish sentiment, and so on. But in Maggie Crane represents melodrama critically and subverts it for his own performative purposes. In so doing, he tries to show that the city, its poverty, and social problems are fit subjects for his kind of fiction and class renderings. From the beginning of Maggie, then, the narrator puts his characters and readers in the role of spectator, presenting his subjects in

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planned disproportion and satirizing the expected moral ending and material success. Melodramatic images are foregrounded in different versions of the actual melodramas Pete and Maggie witness: plays in which “the brain-clutching heroine was rescued from the palatial home of her guardian, who is cruelly after her bonds, by the hero with the beautiful sentiments” (27). The narrator significantly focuses on the perceptions of Maggie and those of the “loud gallery” who see “the hero’s erratic march from poverty in the first act, to wealth and triumph in the final one, in which he forgives all the enemies he has left” (27). A spectator, “seeking out the painted misery” for the comfort it eventually brings, “Maggie always departed with raised spirits from the showing places” (28). “[She] conceives of the possibility that her life could resemble what she sees on stage,” as David Halliburn has noted, “and the reader conceives of the possibility that what she sees on stage could resemble her life” (49). The melodramatic descriptions also take such conventional forms as Maggie’s perceiving in Pete “the beau ideal of a man” (19) and she “vaguely tr[ying] to calculate the altitude of the pinnacle from which he must have looked down upon her” (19); or, representing Maggie’s last chance for redemption (51), the clergyman who cruelly refuses to help her; or Mary’s convulsive weeping over Maggie’s “worsted boots” (57). Crane presents these melodramatic moments simultaneously as effect and perspective through which the reader can glimpse the narrator’s views and motivations. The melodramatic for Crane serves as a counter and a certain kind of defiance to the often made claims that the naturalistic novel, particularly in its late nineteenth-century manifestations in England and the United States, bordered on what critics of the 1980s and 1990s were calling the “pathological novel,” or what H. M. Stutfield, for example, characterized as a literature that is concerned with an external expression of an obsessional interiority, a literature that thrives on “super-subtlety,” “microscopic self-examination,” “morbid pessimism,” and which “expresses itself in the worship of ugliness, the minute and almost exclusive delineation of what is gloomy and squalid in life” (112). Melodrama in Maggie functions primarily as a parodic and comedic overlay to the kind of naturalistic world Frank Norris describes in “Zola as a Romantic Writer” (1896), in which “[characters] must be twisted from the ordinary, wrenched out from the quiet, uneventful round of every-day life, and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama” (309–310), a world he later creates but simultaneously critiques in McTeague. In Crane, the melodramatic shifts the emphasis from individual pathologies to mass public taste, in that the

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melodramatic, like Maggie itself, “is a vision of what typically happens rather than a report on what actually happens” (Ziff 109). The melodramas in Maggie have significant class consequences. “Late-nineteenth-century New York Bowery culture was . . . one obsessed with consumption,” as Robert M. Dowling notes. Ironically, while middle- and upper-middle-class Americans wanted to distinguish themselves from the working class, the working class wished to absorb the new consumer culture that would supposedly convert them to the more respectable folds of society and make them virtually indistinguishable from the middle class (46). The melodramas Maggie sees make her rejoice in “the way in which the poor and virtuous eventually surmounted the wealthy and wicked” (28). But by the end of the first orchestra scene, Maggie “wonders if the culture and refinement she had seen imitated. . . . by the heroine on the stage, could be acquired by a girl who lived in a tenement house and worked in a shirt factory” (28). The melodramas appear to enforce a kind of neutral, insipid conformity to convention. Crane, however, while recognizing the rising power of the new mass readership and the marketplace, wished to guard his artistic integrity, which he felt was being threatened by the repressive philistinism of commercialism (of which the melodramas in Maggie are emblematic), and by the material conditions of the production and distribution of fiction. An essential part of his literary agenda was to train a melodramatic optic on the naturalistic text. The Grotesque The category of the grotesque, for Crane, amounts to the semi-comic, the hellish, and the wondrous, and, like the melodramatic, points to a mocking of working- and middle-class tastes. Crane often joins his descriptions of public entertainment with those of the grotesque. For instance, in the first theatrical scene, a “small fat man” “began to roar a song and stamp back and forth before the foot-lights, wildly waving a glossy silk hat and throwing leers, or smiles, broadcast. He made his face into fantastic grimaces until he looked like a pictured devil on a Japanese kite” (24). The “finale” of this same scene shows the dancer “f[alling] into some of those grotesque attitudes which were at the time popular among the dancers in the theatres up-town” (23). After seeing this melodrama, Maggie wonders if “the culture and refinement she had seen imitated” was done so “grotesquely by the heroine on the stage” (28).

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For Crane, the grotesque takes the form of an overflow or some kind of temporary validation of excess. Authorial imagination produces aberrations (blood-filled violence, war “heroics” in Maggie) and strange configurations of feelings. What limits these imaginative soarings is that they are temporary, creating for the reader distinct perspectivistic moments. The interplay of such moments results in a staging of what was unavailable to the reader and indeed what can remain cognitively unfathomable. The portrayal of the visible in Maggie occurs as a series of performative acts. In this visibility the grotesque also has its class resonances. At times it reduces the subjectivity of working- and lower-class characters to brutal egotism and its variations (Pete’s brisk abandonment of Maggie; Jimmie’s obsessive concern about his “reputation”; the pathetic grotesqueness of Mary Johnson’s “forgiveness” of Maggie). Precluding an association with the values of the grotesque, middleclass values in late nineteenth-century New York were acted out on stage. But middle-class moral sensibility loses out to Crane’s new moral view of the urban poor. “Their oppression makes them holy,” as Keith Gandall writes, “because it makes them courageous and nonconformist, and it makes them attractive because it makes them uninhibited and pleasure-seeking” (Virtues 133). The grotesque, as a hybrid merging of the comic and tragic, works into Crane’s view of a loss of faith in the moral universe and a distrust in any pure cosmic order. At the same time, the grotesque features of Crane’s lower- and working-class character, particularly as portrayed in their appetites and propensities, confirms the fact that there is no hope for any kind of permanent transcendence—through class or otherwise.

Performative: Toward the Type Crane’s concern with the grotesque and its theatrical potential can be explained partially by the fact that in Maggie characters cannot throw off their performative roles. On the contrary, the performative draws the character away from individuation toward the type. These types in Maggie, as in Life, make for easy class identification. Indeed, a character’s exterior may be all that the reader will be offered, and the character’s private self may be indistinguishable from his or her public self. Hence, the naturalistic inclination “to estrange us from the notion of self” and the performative type come together. This performative alignment is particularly evident in Maggie, signaled by the use of stereotypical words or phrases to designate characters. Thus following Pete’s abandonment of her, Maggie is called “a

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girl of the painted cohorts” (52). The young man who accompanies Nell to the “hilarious hall” remains nameless; the narrator simply describes him as “the mere boy” (43, 45, 46). In Chapter 18, Pete is repeatedly called “the man” (53–54) and Nelly “the woman of brilliance and audacity” (55–56). The Rum Alley tenement house characters are labeled as “spectators” (30). Crane closes Maggie in a performative flurry in which Maggie becomes what such stereotypical descriptions of her have been leading toward—a theatrical exhibit: Through the open doors curious eyes stared in at Maggie. Children ventured into the room and ogled her, as if they formed the front row at a theatre. Women, without, bended toward each other and whispered, nodding their heads with airs of profound philosophy. A baby, overcome with curiosity concerning this object at which all were looking, sidled forward and touched her dress, cautiously. (48)

Pacing back and forth, Maggie’s mother, “expounding like a glib showman at a museum,” “wheel[s] suddenly and point[s] with dramatic finger” (48). The stage metaphors and images continue as Maggie, rejected by her family and the tenement “crowd,” leaves the apartment, followed by eyes that are strangely like a spotlight, “sending broad beams of inquisitive light into the darkness of her path” (48). In Chapter 17, Maggie makes her final appearance and exit, appropriately enough just as “[t]wo or three theatres emptied a crowd upon the storm-swept pavements” (51). Maggie then walks away from “the glowings of the stage . . . a place of forgetfulness” (51) to where “[a] concert hall gave to the street faint sounds of swift, machine-like music, as if a group of phantom musicians were hastening” (52). She passes a “tall young man,” another of Crane’s types, who suddenly discerns that “[Maggie] was neither new, Parisian, nor theatrical” (52) before she goes into “the blackness of the final block” (53). Here, then, we witness an erasure of the illusion of certainty— inherent in these multiple descriptions and portrayal of types—that what is suggested by the appearance actually exists. Consequently, semblance takes over, revealing itself as a form of mediation between truth, or a consciousness of truth, and that which is withheld from consciousness. Crane’s types further contribute to the understanding of semblance as presupposing a reality on which it depends but which it always must go beyond since it cannot arrive at reality itself. It must be noted, however, that the characters in Maggie, in partaking of their performative realities, equally participate in an entirely

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different form of morality—inseparable from their class status. Maggie’s lower-class characters have no concept of will, eternity, collectivity, social change, or reason as a guiding faculty. It is a given that Crane never judges his characters in terms of traditional middle-class morality. No moral sensibility or mental faculty subordinates desire and emotion because Crane locks his characters into a performative world. Performance offers them the only alternative to feeling for others—and the only possibility (however delusionary) of self esteem.

Crane as a Stylist of Performance Following Rebecca Harding Davis, Crane appears to have remained immune to many of the assumptions of realist-naturalist thinking but probed such assumptions deeply enough so as to bring out their inconsistencies and contradictions.5 Crane’s style, for example, was a contradiction in itself: “a radical challenge to a central tenet of realism—that the appropriate style for fiction is plain and literal” (Colvert 15–16). At the same time, he claimed that he simply wished to describe how “environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless” (Letters 14). Maggie articulates and largely refigures this shaping by grounding it in the nature of class; it gives class a discourse characterized by a propensity toward transgression. To several reviewers of the mid-1890s, Maggie seemed full of “oddities,” “petty tricks,” an exhibit of “ironic self-consciousness” (Bell, Problem 30), stated with “hollow sentimentality” and “lurid melodrama” that turned Crane into “a caricaturist without humor” (Bright 152). What must be recognized here, however, is that Maggie is an implicit critique of conventional naturalism and realism, exposing the reductiveness of Howellsian theory, which excluded all “realisms” that did not aim to generate “a reality unmediated by language, accessible to the reader,” that did not signify “a direct transmission of ‘real life’ in which style remains transparent” (Bell, Problem 133). Crane’s performative style can largely explain the causes for these negative reviews, advance the argument of Crane as a doubtful realistnaturalist—too intrusive, too literary, too artful—and encourage us to disengage Maggie from the tradition of literary naturalism.

Conclusion Not surprisingly, the performative came to be the visceral, spiritual essence of Crane’s aesthetic—within which Maggie is presented less as a means of explaining than as circumstantial narratives of responses

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and reactions. It is of course simply impossible for any writer to avoid issues of performance, as every testing for the conventions and frames for presenting a text can find language “performing.” But the performative, particularly in the “naturalistic” text but also in Crane’s literary journalism, makes conceivable the extraordinary possibilities of human beings, who, precisely because they do not seem to have a determinate nature, can be represented in almost unlimited ways. The performative in Maggie is marked, in its radically new way of discursively constructing class, by a drive to render the social world legible. Indeed, unlike most formalistic approaches that deny any connection between literature and the world and any distinction between fictional and factual narratives, the performative in Life and Maggie signals the need of realist-naturalist texts to maintain some point of contact with the world while, at the same time, distancing itself from it—a need that guarantees that their relation to that world will not be purely one of opposition.6 The performative certainly challenges the “totalizing” capacity of naturalism as it asserts its value and meaning against the possibility and existence of the recorded or represented. For Davis and Crane, naturalism—and its potential for the discursive articulations of class—is most valuable when it is more expressive than representational, focusing on performed actions rather than mimesis, and making judgments for “truth” a matter of active construction rather than a comparison with an a priori reality. Crane’s contemporary, Frank Norris, distinguished accuracy from truth in arguing that accuracy was merely part of the truth, that indeed “it is not difficult to be accurate, but it is monstrously difficult to be True” (qtd. in Campbell, 112). Similarly, Davis and Crane underscored the contingency of “realistic” viewpoints while actively and aggressively exploring the value of cross-class viewing and their own “truths.” Conceiving of these two writers as performative rather than representational stylists can help us recontextualize the commonly held critical notion that naturalism has no place in current literary theory, invigorate discussion of these two “naturalists” as prose stylists, and revise our notions of the relationship between literary naturalism and class in nineteenth-century America.

Crane’s Literary Journalism: Class Identities and Discontents Crane’s performative artistry can help explain the complex class subtexts in his newspaper pieces of the 1890s. As a journalist, he lacked

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any interest in conventional reporting, wished to create news articles free from verifiable facts, and, in Michael Robertson’s words, was part of the shift during this period from “an antagonistic to a symbiotic relationship between journalistic and literary careers” (4). But how Crane specifically employed this synthesis in inscribing social class in his literary journalism has gone largely unexplored. My argument is that Crane renders a world governed by “laws of conspicuous and performed identity” (Fisher, “Appearing” 165) because he sees the problem of class difference as a problem of social justice and of representation. Willing to cross the boundaries of his class, he views as his principal task the reinitializing of reader perception in which, in his system of meanings, he serves as an expeditionary guide into the illdefined territories of the working- and underclass. Like Whitman the journalist, Crane the reporter concentrated “not [on] unity of action but [on] a unity of topic and observation” (Howard 152), which, while evoking a social protest agenda, best served his performative purposes. Unlike Whitman, however, Crane continued his (literary) journalism throughout his literary career, which is why he falls outside the facile progression of “observation to journalism to fiction” (Robertson 77), with journalism as a poor cousin to literature. Crane wrote much of his literary journalism after producing Maggie and The Red Badge of Courage. In fact, in reference to his New York journalism, Crane, unlike Whitman, avoided “monitory articles warning of urban dangers and sentimental crusades to aid the poor” (Robertson 90). Instead, in reporting on the working- and underclasses, Crane, in a strategy that magnifies the techniques of Maggie, The Monster, and much of his short fiction, renders the “theatrical unmaking of the human” (Brown 46). His most successful journalism illustrates how performative figurations of class must be given a broad explanatory power when it comes to reading literary texts as a way of (re-)writing history. Let me illustrate this position by examining a representative sample of Crane’s journalism from the 1890–1899 period. The narrative voice in many of Crane’s journalistic pieces provides, as Whitman’s does in his journalism, a middle-class perspective that mediates the scene and interprets its significance. For example, in “On the Boardwalk” (Tribune, 1892), Crane functions as a conduit to his readers by interpreting the social types he portrays amidst “the world of the middle classes”7: “the average summer guest,” who is “a rather portly man, with a good watch-chain and a business suit of clothes, a wife and about three children” (PP 439), or the “long-famous summer girl,”

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“a bit of interesting tinsel flashing near the sombre hued waves” (PP 460), or “the golden youth” to which “everything is new” and “in consequence, he is a new young man” (PP 460). These vacationers to Asbury Park are ironically tallied up by their proclivity to class mimicry and performed identities, appearance and social function, and how they “exactly fit” their “new environment” (PP 460). The Boardwalk—one mile long by 50 to 100 feet wide—is “the center of the world of people” in which Crane theatricalizes the specific visibilities of diverse class space. His infamous “Parades and Entertainments” (Tribune, 1892) chronicles the infringement of a different kind of “middle-class” descending on the usual Asbury Park crowd: “Such an assemblage of the spraddle-legged men of the middle class, whose hands were bent and shoulders stooped from delving and constructing, had never appeared to an Asbury Park summer crowd, and the latter was vaguely amused” (463). Contrasting with the figures in “On the Boardwalk,” those in “Parades and Entertainment” provide a potential subversion of (middle- and upper-) class imitation, for they do not “fit” into their alien environment nor do they possess aspirations to become like typical Asbury summer visitors. Instead, despite a “plodding” “emblematic of their lives,” these workers, because they “possess principles,” are somehow “dignified” with “sun beaten honesty” (PP 463)—and all this despite Crane’s usual irony and satiric bite, some of it aimed at the workers themselves. He then, as if to deflate his own comparison, implies that “seeing suggests no more than seeing” (Brown 61), for the mechanics appear to represent little more than a momentary diversion for Asbury Park, which “creates nothing. It does not make; it merely amuses” (PP 463). This is why, too, the piece ends with Crane recording Asbury Park according to its “social entertainment” (PP 464): ho-hum piano recitals by two prominent Asbury Park visitors. Crane’s “In the Depths of a Coal Mine” (McClure’s, 1894; in Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry) extends further his performative devices (in a literary journalistic sense) while adding to the claim, as made in “Parades and Entertainments,” that his naturalism reflects the relation of a relatively privileged class to the conditions that made such privileges possible. Originally published as a commissioned article for McClure’s Magazine, the piece begins with a performative flourish: The [coal] breakers squatted upon the hillsides and in the valley like enormous preying monsters eating of the sunshine, the grass, the green

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leaves. The smoke from their nostrils had ravaged the air of coolness and fragrance. All that remained of the vegetation looked dark, miserable, half-strangled. Along the summit-line of the mountain, a few unhappy tree were etched upon the clouds. Overhead stretched a sky of imperial blue, incredibly far away from the sombre land. (PP 605)

Yet if the metaphoric descriptions here, suggesting that the mine monstrously consumes men, form part of Crane’s “intolerance of America’s moral and economic order” (Brown 32), they also, more pointedly, foreshadow his effort to make this a symbolically shared (narrator–reader) experience. Following Davis’s infernal surreality in Life, we once again have a mill tour from the perspective of a middleclass narrator, but one in which Crane places the miners in a bizarre performative world of distorted perceptions and fearful malevolence where “the meaning of it all” [is] “the endless battle between man and nature” (PP 611). Crane takes the reader into the mine, on a “journey that held a threat of endlessness” (PP 608) Yet Crane’s incorporation of the performative and spectacle (e.g., “[the miners] slowly uprose with ghoul-like movements, mysterious figures robed in enormous shadows,” PP 610) does not exclude contemporary descriptions of “the grim strange war” (PP 605) between the mine owners and workers. Highly unusual for Crane in that he rarely cites specific economic details, he provides here exact working wages (paltry by 1894 standards): the boy “slate-pickers” “earn fiftyfive cents a day each” (PP 607); “[the miner] gets three dollars per day, and his labourer one dollar and a quarter” (PP 613). Crane’s sympathetic feelings for the miners come through most forcefully in his descriptions of their bodies, a mode through which the reader might perceive the brute materiality of labor. Consistent with the performative precept that the specific features of what the narrator interacts with as reality are not prior to and independent of those interactions but emerge and acquire their specificity through them, he avoids realistic description. In doing so, he invokes instead a performative rhetoric, as in his depiction of the child slate-pickers: “Through their ragged shirts we could get occasional glimpses of shoulders black as stoves” (PP 606), or in the men issuing forth from the mines: “Men with wondrously blackened faces” (PP 605), “steel-gleaming eyes” (PP 610), “black faces and crimson and orange lights” (PP 614). Crane’s workers appear to possess no sensory life, no social consciousness, but rather, in the midst of “the crash and thunder of the machinery” (PP 607), the slate-pickers “are uncowed; they continue to swagger” (PP 607); two miners, “terrible spectres” (PP 609) crouched

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in a narrow passage, are un-phased, “[t]heir mouths expanded in smiles—wide and startling smiles” (PP 609); and despite the narrator’s expectations, the men “were not about to spring at each other’s throats” (PP 609). It is the mindlessness of modern labor that Crane foregrounds, and his performative displays, much like those of Davis’s in Life, serve to exhibit the aesthetic life denied to these workers who lack human agency and political consciousness. Similarly, his antagonism toward the mine owners is cast in the metaphor of a “non-human agency”: they, like the coal breaker, are “imperturbably cruel and insatiate, [a] black emblem of greed” (PP 614). Conjoining with the dominant images of the 1890s, in which the “socially peripheral” exists as the “symbolically central” (Babcock 32),8 Crane’s performative descriptions are coded as displays that serve both political and artistic ends. Jean-Christophe Agnew has argued that the 1890s was a period in which the conception of the coherent, stable individual evolved into a more diverse idea of the human “as a protean effect: a display in which the personal properties of the self mingled with the stage properties of its immediate surroundings” (142). Crane’s “When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers,” published in the New York Press in 1894, illustrates a self as an (unconscious) performing identity for the mostly curious and unfeeling spectators, a self that merges into an urban space of theatrical scenes. The sketch describes an Italian working-class figure accompanied by a boy who is, with other “laborers, shop men and shop women, hurrying to their dinners” (PP 600). Suddenly the Italian laborer apparently experiences a stroke and falls helplessly to the pavement, where a crowd gathers: Down under their feet, almost lost under this throng, lay the man, hidden in the shadows caused by their forms which in fact barely allowed a particle of light to pass between them. Those in the foremost rank bended down, shouldering each other, eager, anxious to see everything. Others behind them crowded savagely for a place like starving men fighting for bread. (PP 600)

As in “In the Depths of a Coal Mine,” class locations (the Italian helpless on the pavement) combine with performative locutions (e.g., “There were men who nearly created a battle in the madness of their desire to see the thing” PP 602) to carry Crane’s points. The Italian laborer and boy are helpless and speechless amidst the thronging crowd until rescued by the authoritarian doctor and policeman. “The first part of the little play” (PP 602), the falling of the laborer and the gathering of the crowd, ends with the arrival of the policeman. The

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second scene involves the intervention of the doctor and the arriving ambulance while the threatening crowd attempts to come even closer. The third occurs when the “limp body” is taken away in an ambulance followed by the crowd (now a “silent mob” PP 604) expressing “discontent at this curtain which had been rung down in the midst of the drama” (PP 604). Here again Crane creates an almost “physiological aesthetics” in which material sensations and their performative descriptions combine into a kind of phantasmagoric sensationalism that impresses itself on everyday life.9 That Crane relies on this sensationalism in many of his literary journalistic pieces from the 1890s (“An Ominous Baby” (The Arena, 1894); “A Dark Brown Dog” (The Cosmopolitan, 1894?); “Why Did the Young Clerk Swear” (Truth, 1893)) does not detract from his working- and underclass sympathies but heightens them. Such sympathies as those in “In the Depths of a Coal Mine” are made even more explicit in “Nebraska’s Bitter Fight for Life” (1895) and in “The Mexican Lower Classes” (1895), though both contain Crane’s sustained engagement with “extreme situations” and theatrical spectatorship. The explicitness in “Nebraska’s Bitter Fight for Life” can be explained partially by the “quantity of pure reporting that is unique in Crane’s work” (Robertson 118). For example, unlike most of Crane’s New York City features, “Nebraska’s Bitter Fight for Life” registers proper names (Governor Silas A. Holcomb and Secretary of the Relief Commission L. P. Ludden), proffers numerous statistics (e.g., “The general average [rainfall] for 1891, 1892 and 1893 was 23.85 inches” 698), and even offers excerpts from interviews with Holcomb and Ludden. The piece also is revealing for its epic sweep, focusing particularly on the farmers’ heroism against the deadly drought. These farmers now found themselves existing in a virtual desert. The earth from which they had wrested each morsel which they had put into their mouths had now abandoned them. Nature made light of her obligation under the toil of these men . . . And yet, for the most part, there was no wavering, no absence of faith in the ultimate success of the beautiful soil. Some few despaired at once and went to make new homes in the north, in the south, in the east, in the west. But the greater proportion of the people of their stricken district were men who loved their homes, their farms, their neighbourhoods, their counties. They had become rooted in this soil, which so seldom failed them in compensation for their untiring and persistent toil. (PP 690)

Unusual for Crane, there is little irony or social satire in the sketch, but rather a moralistic compassion sometimes expressed in a stilted

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and elevated language that champions the farmers’ cause. The piece even ends with the kind of conventional melodramatic ringing that Crane normally rejects: “In the meantime, they depend upon their endurance, their capacity to help each other, and their steadfast and unyielding courage” (699). And yet, there is a constant spectacularization at work in “Nebraska’s Bitter Fight for Life,” most visible in the sustained sentience of the landscape: The country died. In the rage of the wind, the trees struggled, gasped through each curled and scorched leaf, then, at last, ceased to exist, and there remained only the bowed and bare skeletons of trees. The corn shivering as from fever, bent and swayed abjectly for a time, then one by one the yellow and tinder-like stalks, twisted and pulled by the rage of the hot breath, died in the fields and the vast and sometimes beautiful green prairies were brown and naked. (PP 689)

The prairies suffer, heave, and die, converting the land from a “gardenlike” utopia to “a virtual desert” (PP 689) devoid of life. Typical of Crane, the main actors of the story, the farmers, are intensely depersonalized, typologized by profession, serving, like the landscape, as sensory receptors on which to develop extraordinary performative images: “Then came the struggle of the ones who stood fast. They were soon driven to bay by nature, not the pitiless enemy. They were sturdy and dauntless. When the cry for help came from their lips it was to be the groan between the clenched teeth” (PP 690–691). The dialectic of class sympathy (or disapproval as in that of “the business men in the eastern part of the state” (PP 697)) and heavy-handed moralism (the farmers are “morally certain” PP 690), on one hand, and abstraction and sensation, on the other, suggest both an aesthetic consumption in which the natural disaster is “de-realized” and a contemporary (1894) class commentary (e.g., “Men began to work at the rate of twenty-five cents a day, but, presently, in the towns, no one had work for them” PP 691). This piece of literary journalism, though, is committed above all to producing visual sensations that bolster Crane’s political ends. It is also a striking illustration of how his naturalism performs. “The Mexican Lower Classes” (never printed in Crane’s lifetime) is a significant example of June Howard’s assertion that “one of the reasons naturalism has proven such an uncomfortable form for contemporary literary critics is its open interest in class” (96). In this piece, Crane, the middle-class observer, takes another anthropological expedition into the alien territory of the working- and lower classes.

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Starting off from his belief that “the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another” (728), Crane inquires further into his own observation. In an unusual reliance on the first-person voice (this is one of Crane’s most self-reflective journalistic pieces, differing from his standard third-person narratives), he warns both himself and his reader, “Let him then see all he can but let him not sit in literary judgement of this or that manner of the people” (PP 728). In what follows, however, Crane’s visual observations—the impoverished Mexicans he observes never speak, are never allowed to express their point of view, never appear socially conscious—subsume any kind of sociological conclusions. Instead, in treating his journalistic occupation foremost as a matter of vision, he downplays the importance of “psychological vision” (PP 728) while he advocates the certainty “of two things: form and color” (728). But this does not mean that Crane is insensitive to social injustice; quite the contrary, it expresses his sense that as a foreigner he can never understand the Mexican poor and “lower classes.” The closest he can come to doing so is to trust his own “perceptions” (729) and “fears” (729), which he then recontextualizes in this contrast to the American underclass: The people of the slums of our own cities fill a man with awe. That vast army with its countless faces immovably cynical, that vast army that silently confronts eternal defeat, it makes one afraid. One listens for the first thunder of the rebellion, the moment when this silence shall be broken by a roar of war. Meanwhile one fears this class, their numbers, their wickedness, their might—even their laughter. (729)

Although in the 1890s there was not a belief that revolution and anarchy were imminent, the fear of class warfare was a vital element of the ideology of the period (Howard 77). Crane, though, transposes this fear into a social indignation mixed with a certain philosophical acceptance of “the accident of birth” (PP 729) while expressing doubt about his own “handsome theories” (PP 729) on the “futile” lives of the Mexican poor (PP 728). However, what is most significant about his evaluations of their “morality” (“one of the highest”) and “virtue” (“The virtue of the rich is not so superior to the virtue of the poor that we can say that the rich have a great advantage”) (PP 730) is that he materializes the very process of perception as a spectatorial apparatus. With reference to the Mexican Indians, Crane thus expands sensory experience beyond the merely visual: “I measure their morality by what evidence of peace and contentment I can detect in the average

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countenance” (PP 730). The visualizations of the narrator, his detections, and arrangements (he “perceives” (PP 730) that the virtue of a Collis P. Huntington and William D. Rockefeller is not “superior” to his own (PP 730)) take narrative authority while “frustrat[ing] realism’s science of the social and the individual” (Brown 218). But of equal importance, Crane, like Rebecca Harding Davis in Life, provides a powerful revaluation of visual experience, attributing to it an unprecedented evaluative power and exchangeability, which can deny any founding site or referent. Providing new modes of looking, Crane’s journalism renders not only the significance of spectatorial viewpoints, but the potential mutuality that active cross-class viewing (and experiencing) makes possible.10

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CH A P T ER

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Body Tramping, Class, and Masculine Extremes: Jack London’s The People of the Abyss Is this picture overdrawn? It all depends. For one who sees and thinks life in terms of shares and coupons, it is certainly overdrawn. But for one who sees and thinks life in terms of manhood and womanhood, it cannot be overdrawn. The People of the Abyss (97–98) Are they men? The People of the Abyss (117)

Rendering their physical environments foremost in terms of sensory impressions, Davis and Crane tried to come to terms with the social transformations that brought different class worlds (e.g., middleand upper-class, middle- and lower-class) together. Accordingly, Life and Maggie handle class anxieties at a more properly aesthetic level, though with unsettling literary approaches to the nature of class difference and mobility. Like many other nineteenth-century writers, Davis and Crane increasingly saw the urban environments of America as a focus of the widening class rift between the poor and rich. Both writers created the identity of a middle-class reader in direct contrast to the commonly believed barbarism, perversion, and chaos embodied in the slum, working-class, and lower-class worlds.1 At the same time, wishing to bring into view what is hidden from the general view, what is unofficial, subversive, and even scandalous for their perceived readership, Davis and Crane generated stunningly new instances of cross-class perspectives. While in Maggie Crane often proposes Fate (destiny, chance) as the last determining factor of narrative, and by implication social conditions,

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in Life Davis, on a completely different register, offers a Quaker-like solution of communal responsibility and Christian transcendence; Jack London in his novels clearly comes down on the side of history and human agency. Using both to instigate a closer look at class relationships, London’s fiction can usefully be read as a direct response to the conflicts and pressures of masculinity and class at the beginning of the twentieth century. His response, however, cannot be separated from the radical fluctuation of gender and class relations, neither entrenched nor settled, during this period. Nor can it be removed from London’s idea of his own (temporarily) vagrant body, its improvised contacts across class and status lines, and its downward glances into the social abyss. The People of the Abyss (1902) is London’s prototype and testing ground not only for “one who sees and thinks life in terms of men and women,” but also for his belief that masculinity is in crisis and under class subjugation.2 American masculinity, of course, has always been in crisis, in the sense of being constantly engaged in its own redefinition. But in his “measur[ing] of manhood less by political aggregations than by individuals” (6) London resituates the crisis both through a projected ideal male body, which symbolizes a healthy, well-ordered society, and also through himself, London the male subject and narrator, who suggests no alternatives to what he deems the acceptable self. Through London’s agency, this self suggests that, above all, class is a matter of a corporealized identity. In Abyss, London’s class judgments are inseparable from the physical status of the bodies he observes, including his own. Once again, within the matrix of textual analysis as “historiographic operation” (Brown 26), an author’s language will be my focus. In this chapter I argue that London conjoins his own configurations of masculinity and class in the form of a corporeal discourse that serves not only as a means of rendering his cultural message in extremis but also as a way of knowing the environment he finds himself in. For London, the visibility of the body, particularly the white male body, is imperative in fostering between himself and the white laboring men he encounters the mythic projection of a de-racialized, universal whiteness.3 Importantly, however, for him, the laboring male and female bodies in Abyss are the final irreducible sites of knowledge, bodies that, in their “unreasoning,” resist social change. Using Abyss as a platform, this chapter examines as well London’s literary journalism, which privileges documentary forms, movements from individuation to abstraction, and an authoritarian vision that brings back the working class into a society that has largely excluded them.

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Revolutionary Residue The People of the Abyss is a sociological study based on London’s sixweek stay on the East End of London in 1902. Abyss was London’s favorite full-length work and the one in which he felt most intimately involved: “Of all the books on my long shelf,” he recounted near the end of his life, “I love most ‘The People of the Abyss.’ No other book of mine took so much of my young heart and tears as that study of the economic degradation of the poor” (Charmian-Kittredge London, Book I 381). Written as a series of vignettes in a style that entwines statistical information from (mostly) British sociological studies and passages from newspaper or police-court reports, Abyss is, above all, a class enacted description of people, dialogue, and setting. London, it must be noted, was the first significant American writer to write about the tramp or hobo from direct experience and knowledge, the portrayals of which, in The Road (1907) and The People of the Abyss, were unprecedented: in documentary-like form, the tramp becomes an “economic fact” (Feied 23) in which class discontent is reconfigured through the language of necessary and forced movement. However, for London he becomes much more: a body—as motive and object of narrative—that serves as a self-referential discursive grid, the foundation for how the male physique becomes a political symbol. As London puts it in “How I Became A Socialist” (1905): All my days I have worked hard with my body, and according to the number of days I have worked, by just that much am I nearer the bottom of the Pit. I shall climb out of the Pit, but not by the muscles of my body shall I climb out. I shall do no more hard work, and may God strike me dead if I do another day’s hard work with my body more than I absolutely have to. (1119)

Just as London’s body is an organizing trope of “How I Became a Socialist,” in Abyss it is the site at which all other discursive exchanges come into being. Here London wishes to find an alternative to the body, namely to become “a vendor of brains” (“What” 91), but the intellectual argument for becoming a socialist cannot supersede the corporeal fear for doing so: . . . no economic argument, no lucid demonstration of the logic and inevitableness of Socialism affects me as profoundly and convincingly as I was affected on the day when I first saw the walls of the Social Pit rise around me and felt myself slipping down, down, into the shambles at the bottom. (1120)

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At the most literal levels in Abyss, the body of the tramp is a host for a transformative set of developments and equations—social, economic, political, discursive. The tramp body becomes a vehicle for every conceivable experience and postulation, including the deployment and definition of London’s masculinity. And yet, though he often uses the male body, or his own body, as model of “manhood,” he most fully defines his masculinity in reference to a common human body. As in Abyss, in “How” he is concerned with the ways in which anxieties about agency, identity, and the integrity of the natural body are distributed across physical landscapes. Directed by the “violence it suffers and the care it is offered” (Gliserman 33), the body becomes self-referential, politically problematic, epistemologically fragmented, what can be exposed and apprehended. Such concerns are part of London’s strategy in “How I Became a Socialist,” particularly when he describes the sort of men he found among the hoboes: “I had dropped down from the proletariat into what sociologists love to call the ‘submerged tenth,’ and I was startled to discover the way in which that submerged tenth was recruited.” Many of these men, says London, “had been as good as myself and just as blond-beastly”; their “life histories” began “under auspices as fair as mine, with . . . bodies equal to and better than mine, and which ended in the shambles at the bottom of the Social Pit” (my emphasis) (“How” 1119). What London makes clear here is that “others” exert their control over him and his fellow tramps by quite literally appropriating their bodies. In the very movement from the “proletariat” to the “submerged tenth,” from integrity to dissolution, from survival to poverty, the body serves as the receptacle, the site in which other discursive exchanges (e.g., London’s ensuing espousal of “Socialism”) come into being. “What Life Means to Me” (1906) extends and encapsulates London’s notion of the common human body as a socioeconomic commodity: I became a tramp, begging my way from door to door, wandering over the United States and sweating bloody sweats in slums and prisons. I had been born in the working-class, and I was now at the age of eighteen, beneath the point at which I had started. I was down in the cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths of misery about which it is neither nice nor proper to speak. (90)

For London there is no end to the disclosing and accounting for the discrepancies between what the body looks like (“a tramp . . . sweating

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bloody sweats in slums and prisons”) and what it “is” (“the shames and uncleanness of the capitalist system,” “What” 87); no end to the work of “adjusting” subjects to their social structures and the upswings and downswings of social position. Applying his observations to class, London followed the changing standards of masculinity emerging in the late nineteenth century: “the male body moved to the center of men’s gender concerns,” as Anthony Rotundo has argued, and “men began to look at the ‘primitive’ sources of manhood with new regard” (222). Equally important, and particularly applicable to London’s Abyss, men were increasingly alert to a lack of health and command in other men’s bodies and characters. “How I Became a Socialist” and “What Life Means to Me” reflect the paradoxical embrace of the primitive that emblematizes turn-ofthe-century white American masculinity in which men, according to sociologist Michael Kimmel, to prove themselves as men in the unpredictable spaces of the market, had to exert a preponderant control over their bodies (81–88). London’s concern involves reconciling the laboring body’s materiality with an early twentieth-century rhetoric that equated white manhood with coming to terms with, and ultimately transcending, the material body. Kimmel holds that the sudden spread of monopoly capitalism threatened the style of manhood that had formerly relied on self-mastery and control. For London, this meant a struggle against the forces that serve to degenerate the physically fit body and a concerted effort, central to London’s acceptable self, to achieve regeneration. London’s “masculinity” thus constitutes a complex of defiance and sentimentality that, while based on the temporary conditions of his experiences in the abyss, take on, for him, more permanent epistemological forms. In Abyss his body and those of others recreate and contain the prescribed and proscribed range of social behaviors and potentials fundamental to the concerns of masculinity. These bodies are sources and loci of meanings with narrative significations that society, while blurring the “natural” and technological, tries to render invisible.

Living Studies and Diagrams Because such subjective tellings cannot be omniscient, they lack closure, which puts Abyss into the form of what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the “novel” of the “inconclusive present” (40), as opposed to narratives “structured . . . in the distant image of the absolute past” which is a “zone outside any possible contact with the present in all its openendedness” (19). London, though, in his non-omniscience, destabilizes

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the structure of his own narrative by trying to come to terms with the threat of truly becoming what he initially only wants to imitate—a victim of the abyss. The constant battle between the “I” and the “they,” between middle-class sympathy and working-class identity, is transformed into a painful reenactment of his own past. As Jonathan Auerbach argues: [F]or London the trip to the East End represents a kind of atavistic return to the site of his origins, along the lines of The Call of the Wild or his story “Li Wan, the Fair.” The book’s underlying atavism entails a racial return (England as the source of his presumed Anglo-Saxon ancestry) and a literary return (hence the book’s allusions to those British masters). (139)

But, equally urgent, and firmly linked to his racial and class quests, London seeks to test and define his masculinity, which, despite his many efforts, resists any kind of finality or closure. And what better way to do so than through a narrative resembling, according to London’s 1902 description of Abyss’s form, “a series of letters” (qtd. in Auerbach 116). As he relates each segment of his story, he has access only to his own consciousness. Dependent upon an intimate subjectivity and locked into the immediate present (he cannot “live” beyond the moment at which he is writing) the form becomes a conduit through which London seeks both to reform and to confess himself. Focusing his efforts on discovering the covert language of the body, London wants to show how the “Abyss seems to exude a stupefying atmosphere of torpor, which wraps about [those living on the East End] and deadens them.”4 Specifically, in his struggles and contradictions, he sought to establish voice and/or authority for his vision of bodily health and its sociocultural implications. As Eric Schocket has argued in his study on “class transvestite narratives” (111), “sociological authority emerges out of the ability to have an ‘authentic’ lowerclass experience while retaining a supposedly middle-class ability to ‘objective’ assessment” (28). Personal involvement is London’s main concern. His experience as an “investigator-tramp,” however, fuses a middle- and working-class perspective resulting in the position that workers and the lower class are not innately resistant to understanding and integration. Hence, in Abyss, there is very little human effort that does not in one way or another emanate from or return to the human body—and it is always either London’s body, or, similar to Whitman, the body of the underclass or worker. For London, the male tramps and casual workers of the abyss, in contradistinction to

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his own masculinity, participate in a social mobility whose lack of inherited direction inverts the ethos of class progress as a gradual and orderly elevation of the self.

Into the Abyss The descent into the abyss begins with London reconceiving social hierarchies or, more accurately, building them from scratch: he “plunge[s] into that human wilderness of which nobody seemed to know anything” (9). In phenomenological terms, these hierarchies are those of encompassment: inferior elements are swallowed up and “naturalized” into subservience: The work of the world goes on above [the people of the abyss], and they do not care to take part in it, nor are they able. Moreover, the work of the world does not need them. There are plenty, far fitter than they, clinging to the steep slope above, and struggling frantically to slide no more. (28)

These hierarchies can best be (and in some cases, only be) deduced from a personal involvement in a particular social environment. London’s ongoing definitions of social hierarchies (e.g., “A short and stunted people is created—a breed strikingly differentiated from their masters’ breed” (220)) are juxtaposed to his belief that a man controlling his environment is the prevailing image of masculinity. London’s personal experience formulates this hierarchical equation: either the body drives and directs action or the body is acted and imposed upon.5 Female bodies in Abyss are an inherent part of that “new and different race” London describes in his first contact with the East End. Women are equally swallowed up in that “political machinery” (6) that reflects the inexorable demographic and technological changes of early twentieth-century London: Here was a woman, of the finest grade of the English working class, with numerous evidence for refinement, being slowly engulfed by that noisome and rotten tide of humanity which the powers that be are pouring eastward of London Town. (21)

Women are on the same trajectory as men in their dizzying descent to the bottom of the social hierarchy: “I talked with a woman who was representative of that type which has been jerked out of its little

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out-of-the-way streets and has started on the fatal fall to the bottom” (32).6 Without distinction, everyone in the abyss belongs to “the social shambles”: a “progeny of the prostitution of men and women and children, of flesh and blood, and sparkle and spirit” (165). There is no polarization of the masculine and feminine, though there is a racial/ cultural theory built on a polarization of the biologically healthy and unhealthy. While frequently operating as social commentary or critique, London’s constant focus on the body produces or reproduces spectacles that cross race, class, and gender boundaries. What is unique about the expression of the body in Abyss, however, is that it offers not only a particular way of experiencing the world, but, in its provisionality and duality, a fundamentally different mode of knowing. Such is the idea suggested by the description of the protagonist, Freddie Drummond, in London’s “South of the Slot”(1909): His hands were soft. His extraordinary politeness was ominous. His first idea of the role he would play was that of a free and independent American who chose to work with his hands and no explanations given. But it wouldn’t do, as he quickly discovered. At the beginning they accepted him, very provisionally, as a freak. A little later, as he began to know his way about better, he insensibly drifted into the role that would work—namely, he was a man who had seen better days, very much better days, but who was down in his luck, though, to be sure, only temporarily. (818)

The dualistic, temporarily tired, worn (and even wounded) body is a language, a gesture, a sign, and a form of speaking in and to the world. While both real and unreal, class united and divided, disguised and representative, and defensively masculinized, the body (particularly the defeated body) offers a site of openness to London’s socialistically envisioned change. Thus a reader’s receptivity, as opposed to any aesthetic interaction in which the body is marginalized, must include a “full bodied” response—an incorporation of the body into the reader’s imaginative reflections. London, in soliciting such a response, entertains the larger questions of how the (provisionally) suffering body becomes a supreme form of “authentic” knowledge. Through a discursive system that tends to define a proletarian body (grotesque, undisciplined, dirty) in opposition to the bourgeois body (sublimated, neutralized, classical),7 London had to objectify its felt-characteristics and make them steadily visible. To achieve such an effect, he resorted to a “modernism” that included not only his inclination “to move ‘inside’ and to eliminate

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the distance between subject and object into one performative ‘narrational body’” (Schocket 110) but also one which takes on a “bodily” form, embedding the class conflicts it encounters. As a creative force and a site of social and class knowledge, London’s body in Abyss serves both as a self-referential discursive grid and also as a signifier— the place that inscribes meaning—especially those involving “social anxiety.” By entering into the world of misery, and by perhaps naively assuming he could mediate between classes, London uses his body problematically as a marker of nationality and an indicator of national and class supremacy. At the same time, London conceived of the body in more (socialistically) universal terms—as the most important base on which to build a new class order. The People of the Abyss repeatedly draws on scenes of human degradation and mass ugliness about which London expresses his own disgust and fear. Preparing for a “descent” into the abyss, he exchanges his clothing for that of a tramp: Here, next day, I took off my shoes . . . and my soft gray travelling suit, and, in fact, all my clothing; and proceeded to array myself in the clothes of the other and unimaginable men, who must have been indeed unfortunate to have had to part with such rags for the pitiable sums obtainable from a dealer. (12)

The description demonstrates how London tells the story of a body’s entrance into meaning—his own body’s search for status, confirmation, and a self-conscious individuality. The problem of the body and its various embodiments governs the accounts of persons and things and the intimations of the body in relation to the culture he describes. A change of clothing serves as a restaging of the equivocal meanings of civilization and progress in London’s time. Consequently, the language in Abyss seeks to remotivate itself as a symbolism with an original referent in the body: to become an embodied language. London’s change of clothing also signals a separation of the narrative subject from “normal” existence. Of the “disguised” body, London writes: No sooner was I out on the streets than I was impressed by the difference in status effected by my clothes. All servility vanished from the demeanor of the common people with whom I came in contact. Presto! in the twinkling of an eye, so to say, I had become one of them . . . In my rags and tatters I . . . encountered men on a basis of equality. (13)

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For London, his adopted identity and its relationship to his material was of a different character than most middle-class investigators (Charles Booth, Richard Harding Davis, Greenwood, Wyckoff, and others), for whom the question of one’s personal relationship to the material was not problematic. Such investigators “saw themselves as reporters coming from outside the social life of the working class, who stay in the working class environment only long enough to collect the material” (Conlon 229). But for London, issues like “equality” and “inequality” were of extreme personal importance. Although born into the working class and appalled by the conditions of the East End poor, London feared falling back into the “social pit.” To progress in the task of overcoming mere existence, to be self-sufficient and autonomous, all of which poverty does not allow, London relied on his masculinized sense of self. As a partial consequence, his sympathy for the poor (and their dependencies) is unsentimental. And his sense of class anxiety is alleviated by his belief in America’s idea of itself, under a socialistic banner, as a kind of ongoing social revolution. Yet at the beginning of Abyss, London is “impressed by the difference in status” effected by his clothes. And he too becomes one of the “common people”: “It made me of like kind, and in place of the fawning and too-respectful attention I had hitherto received, I now shared with them a comradeship” (13). At the same time, London does not lose sight of his own bodily health and well-being, of his un-commonality: First of all, I must beg forgiveness of my body for the vileness through which I have dragged it, and forgiveness of my stomach for the vileness which I have thrust into it. (56)

London was concerned with the relays between individual physiology and a physical geography as an entry into or exit from this common humanity. He wished, in Peter Brooks’ words, “to make the material body into a signifying body” (1) and, as evidenced by direct testimony from the tramps and urban poor in Abyss, to say something about how a culture viewed itself at a particular historical moment.

Language Wise If, as critic Robert Peluso has recently argued, London’s “contact with people of the East End drew from London a powerful reaction that marked his estrangement from the working class and a growing, if uneasy, commitment to middle-class life” (57), it often took

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the form of a marking or a signing of the body. That is, the body is made the signifier, or the place on which meanings are written. This is particularly true in Abyss, where the body’s story, through the trials of desire and over time, is very much part of the story of the narratorprotagonist. It is significant, for example, that London first describes the poor of the East End in terms of the body: “The streets were filled with a new and different race of people, short of stature, and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance” (9–10). In Chapter 7, when at the Whitechapel Workhouse, the narrator reacts physically to the long line of people waiting for entry: It was a most woeful picture, men and women waiting in the cold gray end of the day for a pauper’s shelter from the night, and I confess it almost unnerved me. Like the boy before the dentist’s door, I suddenly discovered a multitude of reasons for being elsewhere. Some hints of the struggle going on within must have shown in my face, for one of my companions said, “Don’t funk; you can do it.” (41)8

In a like manner, the body is the discursive grid from which London makes his point about “no progress” (30) and generational poverty: It is incontrovertible that the children grow up into rotten adults, without virility or stamina, a weak-kneed, narrow-chested, listless breed, that crumples up and goes down in the brute struggle for life with the invading hordes from the country. (31)

Conversely, the first, and perhaps only, descriptive “relief” from London’s social pit misery centers on the body. In Chapter 23, London proclaims that the only beautiful sight in the East End is that of children dancing to the organ grinder’s music: It is fascinating to watch them, the new-born, the next generation, swaying and stepping with pretty little mimicries and graceful inventions all their own, with muscles that move swiftly and easily, and bodies that leap airily, weaving rhythms never taught in dancing school. (158)

My point here is that London not only “discovered a discursive formation to discuss urban poverty that could tie together his long-standing belief in Anglo-Saxon supremacy” (57), as Peluso has argued, but that he began forming a discourse, inseparable from his masculinity, that would inform such later works as The Road (1907) and John Barleycorn (1913), and ultimately lead to a politics of the body.9 The appropriate middle-class masculine discourse (and its accompanying

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emotions), London suggests in Abyss, could reframe. existing forms of power and thereby be socially transformative, even revolutionary.

Further into the Abyss When London states in his preface to the Abyss, “I went down into the under-world of London with an attitude of mind which I may best liken to that of the explorer. I was open to be convinced by the evidence of my eyes, rather than by the teachings of those who had not seen, or by the words of those who had seen and gone before” (5), he highlights the “corporeal” distance between his own work and prior literature on working-class and tramp life in London. What makes London an explorer is that he is writing about himself in conjunction with the life of the body. For example, in Abyss’s first chapter, “The Descent,” London begins to define, in terms that threaten his own body, the relationship between himself and the poor surrounding him: . . . for the first time in my life the fear of the crowd smote me. It was like the fear of the sea, and the miserable multitudes, street upon street, seemed so many waves of a vast and malodorous sea, lapping about me, and threatening to well up and over me. (10)

But he quickly adapts to his circumstances on the East End: And when at last I made into the East End, I was gratified to find that the fear of the crowd no longer haunted me. I had become a part of it. The vast and malodorous sea had welled up and over me, or I had slipped gently into it. (14)

London appears to be perfectly integrated and at ease, even though his body will later resist the claims of correction, disguise, and conversion asserted on it. Thus, as we progress through the text, these initial states reverse themselves. London, it must be noted, was able to get out of his tramp clothing, to literally exchange one body for another, to find at will sustenance and relief: While living, eating, and sleeping with the people of the East End, it was my intention to have a port of refuge, not too far distant, into which I could run now and again to assure myself that good clothes and cleanliness still existed. Also in such port I could receive my mail, work up my notes, and sally forth occasionally in changed garb to civilization. (17)

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This is not to say that he becomes less participative and involved in his subject as Abyss goes on; rather, London’s self-understanding and projections produce a kind of “imaginative geography and history,” replete not only with revelations of artifice but with an accumulative “separateness” between “those on the edge” and his developing sense and representation of self. At the same time, London makes it clear that what is at issue for his masculinity is male friendship, intimacy between and among men that informs male identity and direction. His many “naturalistic” descriptions in Abyss contribute to establishing the parameters of his identity vis-à-vis those of the people he encounters: But at the best, it is a dull, animal happiness, the content of the full belly. The dominant note of their lives is materialistic. They are stupid and heavy, without imagination. (30)

So many of the descriptions in Abyss center on the body as a more open, public, cultural construct. Here is London’s description of the “nightly horror” of Picadilly and the Strand: Their bodies were small, ill-shaped, and squat. There were no swelling muscles, no abundant thews and wide-spreading shoulders. They exhibited, rather, an elemental economy of nature, such as the cavemen must have exhibited. But there was strength in those meagre bodies, the ferocious, primordial strength to clutch and gripe and tear and rend. (163, my emphasis)

London constantly tries to maintain a tenuous balance: to be truthful to his perceptions without violating the goodwill of his audience; to speak the “truth” while trying to avoid the socially prevalent categories; to invent a new body subjectivity and aesthetic while distancing himself from any resemblance to the status quo. London’s masculinity, as part of this larger project, becomes a compensatory response to his exclusion of explicit sexual content. Abyss does not present sexuality as the surface subject or focus; but it gives it attention as a vicissitude for and a denial to the physical body. To London, sexuality is often the unnamed, the inarticulate space of the body. Far from possessing sexually healthy bodies, the adult poor of the East End are becoming physically degenerate, “premature wrecks” (27), and their degeneracy—“utterly unmoral and materialist” (27)—is being passed down through the generations. The young fireman he drinks with in Chapter 4, for example, who

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“proclaim[s] that booze is the sole end of existence,” signals London’s sexually defeated: “‘Wimmin!’ he thumped his pot upon the bar and orated eloquently. ‘Wimmin is a thing my edication ‘as learnt met’ let alone’” (26). After commenting on the fireman’s “more than average physique” (27)—“I have never seen one who stripped to better advantage than this young sot of two and twenty, this young god doomed to rack and ruin”—London makes this startling declaration: And day by day I became convinced that not only is it unwise, but it is criminal for the people of the Abyss to marry. They are stones by the builder rejected. (28)

London measures his own body, his masculinity, against the corporeal decay and destruction he sees around him. The body is “[the] site of degradation,” as Auerbach points out, “as well as the sign of authorial integrity by which he tries to keep himself (London) distinct from the people of the abyss” (145). But this assertion equally applies to London’s own sexuality, his notions of the “naturalness of nature” as well as to his conception of sexual relations.

Attempts at Crossing: Direct Address While London uses pseudonyms in the presentation of his tramp identity, he resorts to direct address. Anonymous in status, he temporarily enters the world he wishes his reader to enter. Certainly London’s descent into the abyss was filled with a “psychic peril” in which he appropriates the urban poor into a vision that transmutes them into moments within his own body and identity. “But, O dear, soft people,” London writes, “full of meat and blood, with white beds and airy rooms waiting you each night, how can I make you know what it is to suffer as you would suffer if you spent a weary night on London’s streets?” (46). Here London insists on the lack of his powers to portray and the virtual impossibility for the reader to understand his “sinking [him]self down into the East End of London” (7). At other times, London implores the reader to enter into a particular situation of distress, as is the case of the widow and blouse maker in Chapter 18: . . . imagine yourselves marketing and keeping house on such a scale, setting a table for five, and keeping an eye on your deputy mother of twelve to see that she did not steal food for her little brothers and sisters, the while you stitched, stitched, stitched at a nightmare line of

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blouses, which stretched away into the gloom and down to the pauper’s coffin a-yawn for you. (123)

Or in this doss house description in which London engages the reader as a kind of empathetic ally: Certainly there could be nothing homelike about it to you and me, who know what home really is . . . you must put up with all this, and with prison regulations which impress upon you constantly that your are nobody, with little soul of your own and less to say about it. (142)

Through direct address London attempts, if not to bridge the abyss that separates his middle-class readers from the urban poor, at least to narrow it, but he recognizes the constraints and limits of such an enterprise. Two questions plague the text: can London, as an investigative explorer in his respective time, convincingly relate the story of his body to his readers? Is the body a common experience for all (as suggested by many of the uses of direct address in the text) or is it an autonomous object, known most specifically through the kinds of measurements, tables and statistics provided by London? London appears to turn the narrative eye (and body) back onto the reader, the (passive) witness. An effect of this inversion not only immerses the reader in the bleak realities of poverty, it leads to the fact that London does not want to rest with a simple designation of the differences between his readers and the people of the abyss. Significantly, to suggest the possibilities of having his middle-class readers relate to the people of the abyss, the sensibilities London expects from his readers often appear in the qualities of his “working-class” protagonists. The protagonist of The Iron Heel (1908), Ernest Everhard, for example, possesses organic and human sensibilities for the great masses of common people, like those in the abyss, who, living in despair, are brutalized by industrial exploitation. Not coincidentally, Everhard is the kind of organic working-class hero, “the natural aristocrat” (326) whose body, like his way of speaking, cannot be contained: In the first place, his clothes did not fit him. He wore a ready-made suit of dark cloth that was ill adjusted to his body. In fact, no readymade suit of clothes ever could fit his body. (325)

Everhard’s body (and bodily boldness), as the sympathetic “middleclass” narrator Avis Everhard quickly recognizes, becomes the potential for transcending class—or, perhaps more accurately, for not accepting conventional class divisions: “Such boldness on the part of

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a man of my own class would have been unforgivable . . . but this boldness that I took to be presumption was a vital clew to the nature of Ernest Everhard” (326). Authentically “organic,” physically and intellectually powerful, fearless in his political commitments and Marxist vision, Everhard is London’s alter masculine ego,10 a persona that begins its shape in the earlier Abyss. It is Everhard’s belief in “authenticity” (not what actually is or should be, but what is grounded in the material world) that makes him “a superman, a blond beast such as Nietzche has described, and in addition he was aflame with democracy” (326). Predictably, when focusing on Everhard’s body, London resorts to animal and organic imagery: And as he spoke he extended from his splendid shoulders his two great arms, and the horseshoer’s hands were clutching the air like eagle’s talons. He was the spirit of regnant labor as he stood there, his hands outreaching to rend and crush his audience. (376)

This same kind of imagery, expressive of London’s conjoining of the biological and sociological nature of the human being, forms here, as in Abyss, a class ethos. Like Everhard’s imperious physical individuality in front of his determined and privileged listeners, “the cool captains of industry and lords of society” (379), Abyss’s narrator constantly relies on his body as a vehicle for survival and as a tool for understanding the desperate and disorganized majority—the people of the abyss. As evidenced in London’s use of direct address and his belief in such organic sensibilities, the body is inseparable from his conception of the social order, the dynamics of its movement, and his own class consciousness.

National and Unnatural Cases Social order, masculinity, class consciousness—all are essential components of London’s “Americanness.” In Abyss, he constantly highlights such an “Americanness” by repeatedly advocating an American value system as his own to confirm his distance and difference—often inscribed on the body—from the East End poor. According to London, the relatively higher standard of living in the United States means a well-nourished body that results in greater productivity than in England: . . . while as an American laborer I have eaten a breakfast for twelvepence such as that the British laborer would never dream of eating . . . in

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return, I would turn out an amount of work in the course of the day that would put to shame the amount he turned out . . . The man with the high standard of living will always do more and better than the man with the low standard of living. (136)

London’s masculinity defines itself perhaps most stringently through work, but work as inscribed in an “American” system of social fluidity as opposed to a British system in which the forces of the “whole industrial fabric” are unconstructive and static. He frequently tropes the working body to assert, for example, his comparative theories on “industrial elimination” (115) and “class supremacy”: The good body (which is there because its brain is not quick and capable) is speedily wrenched and twisted out of shape: the clean mind (which is there because of its weak body) is speedily fouled and contaminated. (115)11 Class supremacy can rest only on class degradation; and when the workers are segregated in the Ghetto, they cannot escape the consequent degradation. A short and stunted people is created . . . The men become caricatures of what physical men ought to be, and their women and children are pale and anemic, with eyes ringed darkly, who stoop and slouch, and are early twisted out of all shapeliness and beauty. (131)

London extends his comparison to tramps as well: In the United States the tramp is almost invariably a discouraged worker. But this is not true in England. Here the powers that be do their utmost to discourage the tramp and vagabond, and he is, in all truth, a mighty discouraged creature. (115)

London frequently resorts to such cultural chauvinism in Abyss, but, more important, he uses traditional American meanings and values to enable the cause of his aesthetics of the body. The body becomes a way to index class, gender, and race in order to create hierarchies of power that support the economic, cultural, and moral state of a nation. Indeed, it is foremost in this sense that “London’s self-understanding converges with the national self-understanding to produce that ‘imaginative geography and history’ needed to advance American imperialism at the turn of the century” (Peluso 58). London refuses to separate the body from the nation (his own body, as highlighted in his working-class experiences in the novel, is part of the nation-building enterprise), though he puts a psychic

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and metonymic distance between his body and those of the people of the abyss. Irrevocably linked to his depiction of Anglo-American masculinity, London’s rendering of the body cannot be separated from specific imperialist debates of the turn of the century.12 With the SpanishAmerican war and the principal results of that war, in the years 1898– 1899, the United States became, in effect, a “colonial power.” As Peter Conn has pointed out, “the election of 1900 was contested in large measure as a plebiscite on imperialism, and McKinley’s solid victory indicated that after a century and more of resisting foreign entanglements, many Americans were ready to endorse an expansionist policy” (8). “The Spike” chapter in Abyss most forcefully suggests London’s theories on American progression, its supposed status as a force of international stability and order, and its abundance. At the Whitechapel casual ward, for example, London comments: Several men in the line had been to the United States, and they were wishing that they had remained there, and were cursing themselves for their folly in ever having left. England had become a prison to them, a prison from which there was no hope or escape. It was impossible for them to get away. They could neither scrape together the passage money, nor get a chance to work their passage. (58)

But was America the exemplar of prosperity and health? Did America want to become the newest Empire—replacing, for example, Spanish rule in the Philippines—or the great colonizer in the Pacific and the Caribbean? Politically speaking, it became increasingly apparent before the end of the nineteenth century that Britain’s physical ability to control world events was in rapid decline. This, of course, is one of the subtexts of Abyss. It was also recognized at the time that both Germany and the United States would surpass Great Britain economically sometime around the turn of the century; consequently, both would be in better positions as potential colonizing powers. For the United States, this was something of a novelty, for outside the continent most Americans had long been uneasy and distrustful over acquiring territory. London’s territory, however, was largely ideological: he was, by 1900, committed to an international socialism, fervent nationalism, class equality, and Anglo-Saxon supremacy. The American chauvinism that grew in its virulence and scope after the war with Spain firmly planted itself in London’s own body in Abyss. This is why representations of masculine self-making in London are symptomatic of

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a complete symmetry between claims to nationality and individual experience. The human body, like the United States itself, could be a site of degradation or a place of integrity (bodily supremacy in Abyss easily slips into cultural supremacy); because it was an instrumental part of a larger abstract economic and social system, it had to possess enough personal agency, personal power, and will to succeed within that system. Merely arrayed in “the clothes of other and unimaginable men” (12), his own body was thus preserved as American; a body attempting to keep its sympathy and pity “fresh” (7) while asserting its own discourse of differences from the East End environment. London’s tropic renderings of his body, his “tramp-monster,” points to the body as a crucial site of sociocultural struggle. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, the body is “the most indisputable materialization of class taste” (Distinction 190). Bourdieu proposes that struggles to define “the legitimate body” and legitimate taste lie at the heart of the struggle to preserve—or dismantle—a social structure based on class inequality. As London was aware, most successful challenges to dominant definitions of the legitimate body simply reformulate the terms by which the dominant class embodies its privilege. But such challenges also carry the threat of abolishing the embodiment of class privilege altogether by subverting the system of distinctions that a society uses to rank one body above another. For London, evidence of class exploitation and inequality begins and ends with the body. Thus the socially classed body becomes the operative concept (even as it filters through that of nationality) to conceptualize difference and to provide “a transcendent unitary identity” (Auerbach 118).

Modest and Immodest Solutions Toward the end of Abyss, the solutions that London offers to alleviate the problems of the body and tramphood are quite (in a socialistic sense) conventional, centering on a structural reorganization, since the problem of English society is largely “mismanagement”: “In short, society must be reorganized and a capable management put at the head” (181). “Civilization,” London summarizes, “must be compelled to better the lot of the average man” (181). A reference to collective bodies in the chapter “Management” concludes Abyss: The food this managing class eats, the wine it drinks, the shows it makes, and the fine clothes it wears, are challenged by . . . twice eight million bodies which have never been sufficiently clothed and housed. (182)

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Interestingly, London never implies that he will work toward the implementation of his suggested reforms.13 He does suggest, however, that the healthy body becomes the subtext for an image of political corrective or utopia, while the battered, decaying, filthy, diseased body becomes the image of political reality. Thus when criticized for presenting Abyss as a “Socialist Treatise,” London responded: “I merely state the disease as I saw it. I have not, within the pages of that book, stated the cure as I see it” (Charmian-Kittredge London, Book I 381). In order to construct social order—and even a social utopia, which for London is amply infused with an agrarian utopianism—the cure begins with the body. As Bourdieu has argued, once one begins “to map out a universe of class bodies,” one “tends to produce in its specific logic the universe of the social structure” (Distinction 193). And yet, for London, the autonomy of the individual body must be resisted as a political metaphor, and the body returned to its contexts of community and nation, transcending the narrow borders of (the city of) London, and set within a larger global system.

Body Narratives/Autobiographical Forms Abyss uses and modernizes the making and representing of bodies as a means of social exploration and a device for social commentary, class criticism, and masculine self-making. The narrator-protagonist’s fall from his portrayed “middle class” position (a position and perspective briefly outlined in the “Preface”) into that of lower-class poverty is both represented as actual suffering and want and at the same time mitigated by the convenience of intermittent respite. London’s narrative of the body, in its most significant variant form, fits into the nineteenth-century tradition of the investigation of urban slum life, a line that begins as early as 1815, and to which such diverse writers as Pierce Egan, Dickens, Engels, L. C. Greenwood, and Beatrice Webb made contributions. It also anticipates the documentary forms that emerged as “the predominant narrative form of liberal and radical culture in the 1930s” (Rabinowitz, Represented 5). As we’ve seen, Abyss is based on how an observer slides into his role of participant to justify his truth claims. Although his relations to the “genuine middle-class” is problematic,14 London follows in this tradition because he projects and represents middle-class identities (while not fully embracing them) that supersede the mere performative, or the self-consciously ironic, or concerns with presenting a public self. Consider, for example,

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London’s hurried “cleansing” of the body at the conclusion of “The Spike” chapter in Abyss: Straight to my room I hurried, changed my clothes, and less than an hour from my escape, in a Turkish bath, I was sweating out whatever germs and other things had penetrated my epidermus . . . (68)

As a signifier in the work, class differs from, say, race and gender, in that London, while using his body as an ontological marker, can suggest a strong disjuncture between a felt identity and an act of impersonation. Class is then, in one sense, nothing more than the sum of its physical manifestations. At the same time, London cannot escape the fact that his repulsion is largely due to the fact that he is (or was) socially mobile, with specific psychic and psychological proclivities and positions. The narrative of the body and London’s own masculinity is, among much else, a means for dramatizing both upward and downward social mobility, for achieving perspective on one’s own identity and on the relations and differences among the classes. In Abyss, London demonstrated that he was a master of these forms of social and literary representations and perhaps one of their last important modern practitioners. Abyss, however, in eroding the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, produces a provisional and contingent self, which parallels the temporary explorer-investigator identities of London. The selves, the bodies, that are created in Abyss are thus best seen as bound and determined by the constraints of the linguistic resources and narrative tropes available to the author. In an age in which the poor, by definition, were those suffering from some disease as an integral part of their lives, London tropes the body as an extreme form of alienation, stepping far from American literature’s classic tradition of turning away from social reality.15 Clearly, London, in responding to his tramp identity and its subject material, wishes to become transparent to his readers—despite the provisionality that prevents him from doing so. Clearly also, the authority of London depends less on the relation between narrative and life-history than on the more immediate links among the text, self, and body. And even though the body is far from being the only thread in the linguistic complex of Abyss, it most fully inscribes the works’ conflicts and transforms them into language. In converting material bodies into signifying bodies, London was modern and modernist in his self-consciousness, his inner dividedness, his acting-out and risk-takings, and in his radical social desires.

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Although London constantly confers the power of masculinity to his aestheticized patterns of order and significance, he never achieves an absolute masculinity in Abyss. Because the attainment of it and the implementation of a new social order are inseparable, he defers both to a “challenge”—“Civilization must be compelled to better the lot of the average Man” (181)—appropriately ending his work with the Longfellow poem, “Challenge” (183–184). Ironically, London’s own body, so heavily invested in a masculinized practice of interpretation, was in a terrible physical state during the last years of his life: his kidneys were failing him, his liver was poisoned, he had lost all his teeth.16 As he writes in the autobiographical John Barleycorn: The joints of the legs that bear me up are not so adequate as they once were, when in wild nights and days of toil and frolic, I strained and snapped and ruptured them. . . . I am aware that within this disintegrating body which has been dying since I was born I carry a skeleton; that under this rind of flesh which is called my face is a bony, noseless death’s head. (191)

Yet, perhaps most importantly, the creative and illuminating nature that is discerned in Abyss suggests “a new and more profound sense of truth as an expression of inmost being, a likeness no longer of things but of the person” (Gusdorf 45). London wished to get past the body to a deeper truth: this meant to go “down through the skin and the flesh to the naked soul of it” (104), ultimately to transcend the logic of visualization as a historical, epistemological, and cognitive imperative; this also meant to intimately comprehend “the meagre bodies,” “small, ill-shaped, and squat” (163), in which hereditary distinction is neither permanent nor unique. His vision of a new class order where people would enjoy a footing of equality, solidarity, and mutual selfrespect ultimately turns on the achievement of such a truth.

London’s Literary Journalism: Class Politics or if “Fancy Could Father the Fact” The class divide between most journalists and poor and working-class Americans is as real and wide today as it was when London wrote Abyss. “Contrary to the comforting notion of the press standing firmly behind the little guy,” journalist Brent Cunningham writes, “there was never a Golden Age when American journalism consistently sided with the powerless against the powerful” (33). Although

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London was certainly not part of any “Golden Age,” his affinity to the working class, as Abyss bears out and as reechoed in his other literary journalistic works, is both compassionate and politically troubled. For London, as we’ve seen, the working class can be both a site of degradation and the sign of his own past and integrity. Like Crane (e.g., “The Mexican Lower Classes”), London was most convinced by his own visualizations of and experiences with his subjects; hence in Abyss, he writes, “I was open to be convinced by the evidence of my own eyes, rather than by teachings of those who had not seen . . .” (5). But unlike Crane, he was unabashedly self-reflective, “I”-centered in his narratives, aggressively opinionated about colonized people abroad (at least one critic claims with “proto-fascist feeling”), and obsessed about how life was a battle of “power” (Gray 306). My contention here will be that London’s “The Dignity of Dollars” (Overland Monthly, 1900) and “Mexico’s Army and Ours” (Collier’s, 1914), as forms of literary journalism, invoke realities while destabilizing the aesthetics of realism, demand exchanges of subject(s) and reader, and insist (volubly) on crossing class boundaries. These pieces purport to tell the “truth” while at the same time differentiating themselves from nonfiction, and, for London, remaking the relationship of truth to his ideological agenda. They also complement and extend several of the themes and motifs of his most important literary journalistic work, The People of the Abyss. As part of his “self-construction” (Auerbach 36), the creation of his own public voice and trademark, London’s journalistic career spanned his entire writing life: throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century, his journalistic pieces appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Collier’s, The Overland Monthly, The Writer, Dilettante, The Critic, Cosmopolitan, and elsewhere.17 As with Crane, London incorporated his journalism into his literary career, problematizing, as most of the writers in this study do, distinctions between literature and journalism and the journalism-as-apprenticeship-to-fiction argument made by Fishkin (From Fact to Fiction, 1985). Clearly, London’s participatory reportage fits into a cultural phenomenological mode, later picked up by the New Journalism, which focuses on “observing as a form of lived experience . . . that actor and spectator create in their interaction, the dynamics through which each is created in the reporting process” (Eason 57). Yet he gives the observational a consistently different twist. In his literary journalism he foremost presents his perceptions, instincts, and will as weapons against “the shames and uncleanness of the capitalist system” (C. London, vol. 2, 106).18 To be sure, in doing so, he followed, as did Stephen Crane

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in the 1890s, the general flow of the newswriting of his time. As Peter Parisi has argued in reference to the literary journalist Lincoln Steffens, a London contemporary: “The ‘inverted pyramid’ structure had not yet transformed narrative into a hierarchy of fact. The spot news story was frequently told in chronological order with fully rendered character, setting, and dialogue” (102). Like Steffens, Abraham Cahn, Hutchins Hapgood, and Agnes Smedley, London brought into journalism a more “literary” perspective, a fuller account of “people typically invisible in the official news narrative” (Parisi 106). Published in the Overland Monthly in 1900, “The Dignity of Dollars,” while incorporating such spot news story traits, reflects how perception in a London narrative is almost always grounded in social position. The opening paragraphs of the piece show London allegorically expostulating on how “the common clay-born man” (1) is a slave to his environment and “heritage,” unconsciously obeying “every mandate of that heritage” (1). He then goes on to identify himself as “merely a clay-born, a son of earth” (2) contrasting his errant self to first, a “civilized people” (2), next, “a very mortal of a man, working industriously among his cabbages” (3), and finally, a “college professor” figure who has an “aristocrat’s undisguised contempt for the canaille” (4). London creates such archetypes (the adventurer, the laborer, the elite capitalist “intellectual”), taking the narrative away from “realism” (if only, in the end, to return to it) while suggesting Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus, that members of the same class are “the product of the conditioning associated with a particular class of conditions of existence [which] “unites all of those who are the product of similar conditions while distinguishing them from all others” (Distinctions 56).19 Sometimes problematically so, London’s archetypes usually function as analogies for social and political hierarchies and, thereby, as a means for evoking unequal social capacities and entitlements.20 Further, typical of London’s literary journalism, “The Dignity of Dollars” contains a mixture of discourses: monologue, impressionistic imagery, symbolism, characterization, improvisation, and social analysis held together by the consciousness of an author promoting his own image (“I remember once absenting myself from civilization for weary months. When I returned, it was to a strange city in another country” (2)).21 Under the “mythological-allegorical” mode of the narrative (complete with references to Shakespeare, Erasmus, and the Bible), and London’s typical blend of editorial and story, the narrator searches to save his “dignity” in a system that wishes to take it from him; he enacts resistance to a “world, knowing me not” (2). The piece

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is devoted to constructing not only a vision of truth and London’s (self-) identity but an appropriate way of understanding that vision. Compellingly, in relation to Abyss, London dramatizes his politics, integrity, and manhood through his own body. Consider how he describes his sudden realization that “All men were my brothers” (the exploitive, usurious “aristocrat” being the one exception) and his newfound revolutionary zeal: And there was a spring to my body, an elasticity of step as I covered the pavement. Within me coursed an unwonted sap, and I felt as though I were about to burst out into leaves and buds and green things. My brain was clear and refreshed. There was a new strength to my arm. My nerves were tingling and I was a-pulse with the times. (5)

Nevertheless, the conclusion of “The Dignity for Dollars” is quite ambiguous, non-triumphal, and dampens the narrator’s bodily elation. In its last paragraph, London exclaims, “I would go back and, wreck the establishment. I would disrupt that black skull-cap, burn the accounts” (5), but then, upon further reflection, his “ancient dignity” having returned, he writes, “There was a tinkling chink as I ran the yellow pieces through my fingers, and with the golden music round me I caught a deeper insight into the mystery of things” (5). Capitalism’s power over the individual is not so easily dismissed. Here as elsewhere in London is the tension of “fancy fathering the fact” (5) and the social realities of America at the beginning of the twentieth century striking back. Rarely discussed in London criticism, “Mexico’s Army and Ours,” published in Collier’s in 1914, shows the best and worst of London: on one hand, it can be argued that he makes “community” the subject of his work and “focuss[es] on the twin themes of justice and imagination” (Walker and Campbell Reesman xi). On the other, he can be seen as revealing an “overt racism” against Mexicans and what Amy Kaplan describes as “reconstructing American identity as a biological category of Anglo-Saxon masculinity . . . project[ing] imperial adventures onto imaginary open frontiers” (“Empire” 263). To be sure, for some critics London is a source of acute embarrassment or condemnation (Kaplan, “Empire” 263–266; William E. Cain 604–605); for others he is essentially a muckraker and sensationalist (Hartsock 134–135, 149–150; Browder 94) and for still others (not despite but because of his inconsistencies and contradictions) an “impassioned realist,” “a pessimist and a humanist,” and “one of American literature’s representative men” (Cassuto and Campbell Reesman 9; Labor 217–223).

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“Mexico’s Army and Ours” encapsulates many such contrasts while serving as an example of London’s literary journalism. Written during the period just preceding his break with the Socialist party (over American intervention in Mexico and the involvement of the United States in World War I), 22 the piece chronicles the American occupation in 1914 of Vera Cruz, a city on the coast of Mexico. In 1914, Mexico had arrested American sailors and refused to apologize to the United States—in the demanded form of a twenty-one-gun salute. Consequently, Vera Cruz was bombarded by American warships and a hundred Mexicans were killed (Zinn 357). Collier’s magazine asked London to go to Vera Cruz as a correspondent, “embedded,” as one now says, within Frederick Funston’s army (Hendricks 126). London comments further on the American intervention in the follow-up pieces, “The Trouble Makers of Mexico” (Collier’s, 1914) and “Our Adventurers in Tampico” (Collier’s, 1914), works I will refer to later. Thickset with ironies and ambiguities typical of London, “Mexico’s Army and Ours” mixes his sympathy for the underdog ([“The Mexican Indian] is so much property to his rulers, who work him, not with treatment equal to that accorded a horse” (7)) with his accounts of white superiority (“Vera Cruz was cleaned and disinfected as it had never been in all its history” (2)). At the same time, it moves from a focus on the plight of the Mexican Indian, the “peon” (“All over Mexico they gather the peons into the jails and force them to become soldiers” (4)), to the broader collective and historical implications of “the peon” over “many centuries” (4). Similarly, at one moment, London derides the conscripted Mexican soldier’s ignorance, fatalism, self-destructiveness; at the next, for example, after witnessing an amputation, he expresses sympathy for their suffering: “And as I gazed at that leg, limp yet with life being carried out of the operating room, and realized that this was what men did to men in the twentieth-century after Christ, I found myself in accord of sentiment with the peon . . .” (5). These resulting abstractions and boundary crossings—for this is another example of London’s determination to enter into a culture not his own and to describe it from within—bifurcate into a humanist political philosophy and his investment in Anglo-Saxon superiority. That is, at one moment London will proffer his socialistic solution: “But a wider social vision is growing in the foremost nations that property rights are a social responsibility, and that society can and must interfere between the owner and his mismanaged property” (7). At the next, he will rail against the “mixed breed rulers” (6) and sermonize on how “The big brother [the United States] can police,

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organize, and manage Mexico” (7). Oddly, as Andrew Furer has noted, “London often ignored [the] implication of his own views”— especially, I would add, concerning race—“and valorized the collective over the individual” (“Zone-Conquerers” 171). Yet the collective is an instrumental part of London’s cross-class viewing, imbricated here with the realization that such witnessed suffering and exploitation are a staple of a liberal society’s guilt and misperceptions. As he argues in “The Trouble Makers of Mexico,” published in Collier’s in June 1914, a month after “Mexico’s Army and Ours” appeared: The chief cause of our misunderstanding to-day of the Mexicans is that we have created them in our own American image. With a comfortable sense of fairness we have put ourselves inside the Mexicans, along with our morality, our democracy, and all the rest of our points of view, and accepting therefore that the Mexicans should think, feel, and act just as we would under similar circumstances, we are shocked to find out that they won’t do anything of the sort. (1)

This statement, resonant of Crane’s “The Mexican Lower Classes,” while contradicting the “disfiguring ideas” (Cain 605) London espouses on ethnicity and race in “Mexico’s Army and Ours,” evidences his usual unsystematic, self-contradictory compassion for the poor and underclass.23 London’s critical reflexivity, his class-based perceptions, his stress on what he called “human documents” all inhabit the narrative strategies of “Mexico’s Army and Ours.” While describing the fighting qualities of the soldiers, the “exciting sight” of “the five minutes of shell fire from the Chester,” or “thousands of poor Mexicans” pillaging the Naval Store (3), he self-reflectively reminds us of his presence as a narrator-witness: “. . . as I look down at our sun-bronzed troopers . . . my mind reverts to . . .” (3); “I was through a Mexican barracks. It was like a jail” (4); “I have just come back from the vast Cuartel, or Barracks, of Vera Cruz . . . Such a destruction of the labor of men!” (5). Nothing, it would seem, escapes his perceptions; no perspective appears to go unexamined. The piece begins with London’s self-description of shaking hands with “many officers,” though, as it turns out, only two are mentioned by name (“Admiral Fletcher,” “General Funston” (1)). None of the American sailors or soldiers are named, nor are any Mexican citizens or soldiers. Instead, characteristically, in a scene by scene construction (the narrator is present in every scene) London resorts to types and typologies in his descriptions: “Our soldiers and sailors are markedly

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different in type” (2); “The peon soldier is not a coward . . . The peon bends to the mailed fist of power, but never breaks” (3). The military typologies, however, shift quickly to the broader class, communal, and national categories of “north Europeans,” “Americans,” Aztecs, “Mexicans” (6): “The men of the civilized nations are only frail, fallible, human men, with all the weaknesses common of human men just in the process of emerging from barbarism” (6). Rendering his “felt detail[s]” (Trachtenberg, “Experiments” 278), the narrator describes war through water metaphors: “this wave of war rolled south and broke on the shore of Mexico” (1); “And yet the river of men flowed on . . .” (2). Features common to his semi-, quasi- or “verifiably” autobiographical works (People of the Abyss, John Barleycorn, Martin Eden), locale, mobility, and documentation are as well the mainstays of “Mexico’s Army and Ours.” Most importantly, what London termed “‘human documents,” a literary recreation of “the photographic veracity of the sources for his fiction” (Williams, “Commitment” 15), dominate his descriptions of “thousands of sailors” marching” (1), “thousands of poor Mexicans” (3) battling over “old shoes shattered furniture, and discarded clothes” (3), and the streets of Vera Cruz “teem[ing] with beggars” (5). Tied into these “human documents,” Vera Cruz becomes a symbol for the “sad world”: “It is a sad world wherein the millions of stupid lowly are compelled to toil and moil at the making of all manner of commodities that can be and are on occasion destroyed in an instant by the hot breath of war” (5). My point is that London’s verifiable content is shaped and transformed into a story—that of America’s occupation of Vera Cruz—by narrative devices generally associated with his fiction. In this way, London’s journalism not only gained its literary power (however modest compared to an Agee, Le Sueur, or Crane), it also aided him in offering accounts of the news that suggested its connection to larger social issues and global patterns. Finally, it is significant that two years after writing the 1914 articles on Mexico, London resigned from the Socialist Party, claiming that it lacked “fire and fight.” The underlying issues that dominate the three articles—class, race, and revolution—reappear as bases for his resignation, though now in a most explicit combinatory shape, forming, perhaps, his last words on the subject: . . . I believed that the working class, by fighting, by fusing, by never making terms with the enemy, could emancipate itself . . . If races and classes cannot rise up and by their own strength of brain and brawn, wrest from the world liberty, freedom and independence, they never in time can come to these royal possessions.

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. . . Since the whole trend of Socialism in the United States during recent years has been one of peaceableness and compromise, I find that my mind refuses further sanction of my remaining a party member. Hence, my resignation. (Letters 3: 1538).

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CH A P T ER

4

“Always Your Heart”: Class Designs in Jean Toomer’s Cane 1

“I want great art. This means I want great design.” Jean Toomer, “Open Letter to Gorham Munson”

Barbara Foley, one of the most astute of Toomer critics, has rightly argued that class has been seriously omitted in most Toomer criticism, “divest[ing] Toomer’s work of a crucial social and historical dimension” and that beginning with a “high modernist a priori lens,” most critics have, in trying to come to terms with Toomer’s “design,” sought “a representation largely untrammeled by specific historical reference” (“Washington” 312). By arguing that “class matters” in Toomer’s work, Foley has stressed that in “many readings” of Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), “race is decoupled from class: Toomer’s articulation of the problematic of racial identification is construed largely in isolation from considerations of economic power and social stratification” (“Washington” 291). But while seeking to establish the relation of “historical features” to “fictional features” (“Sparta” 748) and in making her case not to treat “the South of Cane as a mythic realm defying the incursions of history” (“Sparta” 748), Foley tends to fall into the inverse danger of setting some expectations for Toomer as author that overlook his own idiosyncratic contributions to political critique.2 And yet Foley has convincingly demonstrated that Toomer, during his Cane period, saw his own writing “as part of a project of Class emancipation” (“Washington” 304). There is much evidence for this position. While Toomer was certainly not a systematic thinker on class insurrections and racial militancy, nor a card-carrying leftist, his writings, especially during the early twenties, indicate an important revolutionary concern with issues of race and class. As he stated

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in 1923 to his publisher, Horace Liverwright: “this whole black and brown world heaving upward against, here and there mixing with the white. The mixture, however, is insufficient to absorb the heaving, hence it but accelerates and fires it. This upward heaving is to be symbolic of the proletariat or world upheaval. And it is likewise to be symbolic of the subconscious penetration of the conscious mind” (March 9, 1923, TP, Box 60, Folder 16). In a journal entry from this same period, Toomer indicated that it was imperative for blacks to radicalize, to empower themselves in a class-conscious way: “if the workers would bellow, ‘We Want Power,’ the walls of capitalism would collapse. They are as yet too weak for that . . .” (TP, Box 60, Folder 1411). Similarly, in a critically neglected piece entitled “Reflections on the Race Riots” (1919), Toomer notes his consternation with racism and racist violence in terms of a new proletarian oppression : “[it] now confronts the nation, so voluble in acclamation of the democratic ideal, so reticent in applying what it professes, to either extend to the Negro (and other workers) the essentials of a democratic commonwealth or else exist from day to day never knowing when a clash may occur, in the light of which the Washington riot will diminish the pale . . . This is essentially a time for action” (8). Despite such statements, however, Toomer’s struggles with his own racial ambiguity spill over into his complex attitudes about class and his own conflicting class loyalties. That is, he disliked having any racial designation attributed to him besides “American,” and his class politics were an admixture of early social snobbery and social activism mixed in with later vacillating interests among left-wing social positions, Quakerism, and the teachings of Gurdjieff. While noting this complexity, I wish to provide an analysis of the class discursiveness of Cane, which will bring new light to Foley’s emancipatory claims. Like my preceding chapters, this one will attempt to steer a middle course: although frequently grounded in history,3 Toomer’s class manifestations and positions result largely from his narrative techniques that, for their effect, are dependent on “class transactions,” translatabilities, and interactions directly involving the novel’s narrators, readers, and implied readers. These techniques, however, are not only class embedded but are also inseparable from both Toomer’s interracial and aracial visions and crucial to understanding the formal design of Cane. To the extent that no human subject can be reduced to a single category of existence, class is, of course, only a constitutive component of such traits as gender, sexuality, and race. But in Cane the novel’s class meanings are not mere attachments or supplements but rather serve as a springboard for the presence of Toomer’s

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visionary world in which he positions readers to analyze the class consequences of his narrative. This chapter will be devoted to how race and class can be better mutually understood through Cane’s discursive formations. Part One involves the narrator building a foundation of restoring “race” to a metaphorical position equal to, even identical with, the “soul” while at the same time he expresses the impossibility of sustaining such a creation. Through his use of direct address, the narrator becomes an interracial and interclass negotiator, although at the same time he discloses his inability to fully enter the communities he describes. While keeping Part One’s narrative strategy as a subtone, Part Two centers on the fragmentation, uncertainties, and multi-social positions of the new urban black communities that the narrator attempts to “reconcile” but with which he cannot totally identify. The multiple discourses of this section, however, suggest a more complex sympathy with the narratee as well as a deep identification with a new racial and class future. Part Three focuses on a narrator who, while identifying with the protagonist “Kabnis,” self-reflectively points to Toomer’s own racial reexamination and the need for a new racial discourse and expansion. Kabnis’s intimations of self-closure and self-repression, however, mark off his inability to enter this discourse or to connect with his community. All three sections similarly attempt some kind of interracial and class unity in which the “I” and “you” can be represented by the same voice, but each section reveals differences in attempting to achieve this unity. Toomer probes for a voice that would reconcile his own racial dichotomies—imbricated with his trans-class positionings—and those of the United States in the 1920s. Toomer raises the issue of social and class transactions implied by the choice of narrative method and by the identification of narrator, narratee, and reader. In effect, Toomer does not assert cognitive authority but concentrates instead on articulating modes of narrative authority and patterns of feeling that directly modify not how we understand the world so much as how we engage it. He suggests that there are modes other than “race” that afford significant ways of resisting the dominant cultural emphases on difference. I want to show how these concepts and modes are inflected by the geographical movements of the book, what shifts in the identification of narrator and narratee are implied by shifts in the nature of the communal experience in Cane’s three sections, and how the subjectivities of characters, narrators, and real and implied readers have been shaped by different class experiences. Cane is a productive rewriting of “race” allowing for the recognition of multiple authentic African-American voices, identifications complicated by

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class, gender, and geography, and greatly enriched by the significant modulations in narrative address that Toomer undertakes.

Absolutions of Seeing There is, in the abundant criticism on Cane, remarkably little said about the formal qualities of direct address and narrative authority and virtually nothing on the relation between these qualities and class. And yet in Cane, Toomer’s use of direct address, going against interpretations that marginalize his representations for being insufficiently “folk” or “racial,” is crucial in evoking a relationship of sympathy and identification in the reader while creating a distinctly class embedded form of storytelling. Cane’s narrator,4 a teller in a social community, adopts a narrative design that shows us how a selfreflective storyteller5 can “essentialize” and “spiritualize” experience not incompatible with a class-loaded (and recoded) discourse. At the same time, Toomer undertakes a rhetorical project of positioning his readers in a variety of identifications, which serve to illustrate his repudiating of essentialist notions of race and class. By forcefully bringing together the narrator and reader and/or the narrator and implied reader, Toomer reveals false categories and separations that are both literary and social. The relationship between the narrator and his addressees thus becomes Cane’s plot. Part of Toomer’s “great design” in Cane is that his text, like any written text and paralleling any oral performance, is by someone and to someone. It is, then, a social (and trans-class) transaction that does not present what is said to the exclusion of who says it to whom and for what purpose (Ricoeur 11–12). Although Cane’s characters receive relatively brief treatment, the identity of the novel’s narrator is presented in more fully developed terms, both as a process of consciousness and unconsciousness and as a subject impinged on and affected by interactions with his characters and narratee. The narrator renders his “individuality” through a socialized interdependence based on forms of direct address and a creative negotiation of narrative authority. Toomer’s radically new formal transgressions, which follow his radical positions on race, culture, and class, speak of the need to understand Cane in terms of both stylistic function and thematic expression. In Part One of Cane Toomer immediately wishes to make the bridge between the “I” and “You” a most conscious relationship, pushing the purely aesthetic phase of art “into a sort of religious function.” Thus he saw his artistic role, as suggested in a 1922 letter

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to Sherwood Anderson, as an interracial negotiator and unifier of representational identity: “And ‘I’ together with all the other ‘I’s’ am the reconciler” (qtd. in Helbing 138). This position cannot be separated from Toomer’s emerging beliefs, formulated throughout the 1920–1922 period, in which he puts forth the idea that “here in America we are in the process of forming a new race, [and] that I was one of the first conscious members of this race” (qtd. in Helbing 144). Toomer’s vision of the integration of various racial elements within himself is inscribed into the narratorial “I” pronoun in Cane: I am at once no one of the races and I am all of them. I belong to no one of them and I belong to all. . . . Heredity and environment will combine to produce a race which will be at once interracial and unique. I may be the turning point for the return of mankind, now divided into hostile races, to one unified race, namely, to the human race. (“Crock of Problems” 58–59)

Never comfortably identifying himself with any one element of his racial heritage, Toomer acts out his own racial anxieties while attempting to deconstruct a stable racial identity in Cane, two notions that are not incompatible. Indeed, the tension between these conflicting impulses informs every chapter in the novel, leading to Toomer’s desire to integrate his own heterogeneous identity into an “American” identity and to portray himself as “representative.” But Toomer’s narrative vision never reaches its goal of thematic and racial unification. Instead, claiming that Cane is a “swan song,” Toomer suggests that his vision, though not immediately realizable, can ideally lead to a modern sense of belonging (complicating, even going beyond the black vs. white binary) that might eventually replace visible, concrete communities, abrogate class divisions, and redefine relational and national orders. In this sense, “Reflections on the Race Riots,” preceding Cane by three years, can be seen as a helpful premonitory frame for understanding the objectives of Toomer’s narrative techniques in the novel. In the essay, Toomer views race oppression and violence as a consequence of class oppression: It is generally established that the causes of race prejudice may primarily be found in the economic structure that compels one worker to compete against another and that furthermore renders it advantageous for the exploiting classes to inculcate, foster, and aggravate that competition. If this be true, then it follows that the nucleus of race

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co-operation lies in the substitution of a socialized community for a competitive one. To me, it appears that nothing less than just such an economic readjustment will ever bring concord to the two races. (8)

To be clear, in 1919 Toomer was not an active organizer for socialist movements nor did he continue to write for the The New York Call, the Socialist Party mouthpiece in New York, where the article was first published. Nevertheless, the left-wing ideas espoused in “Race Riots,” particularly those centering on class emancipation, find their way into the race–class vision of Cane. To evoke such a vision in the novel, Toomer wished to inspire actual readers with the “you” in the text.6 In the first four stories the narrator, as an attached observer and creator, seeks to (sympathetically) understand and identify (though sometimes admitting the impossibility of such a task) with the working-class “Karintha,” “Becky,” “Carma,” and “Fern.” Employing narrative interventions that are almost always spoken in earnest, he invites the reader to share in the mystery and elusiveness of these women. As an “engaging” and “unifying” narrator, he “addresses a ‘you’ that is evidently intended to evoke recognition and identification in the person who holds the book and reads, even if the ‘you’ in the text resembles that person only slightly” (Warhol, Gendered 29). In this way, the narrator addresses his readers as people “like” himself, which means that each will be both similar to and different from him.7 Toomer’s use of direct address and narrative authority serves to confirm these assertions. In this first section the “you” points to a fictionalized version of the reader, a “narratee.”8 As the section progresses, however, the narrator tries to close the gap between the “you” and the actual reader, drawing the reader into the sketches before the pronoun is particularized. At the same time, the “you” can also refer to a narrator who is either talking to himself or using the “you” to substitute for or disguise a self-referential “I.” In all these cases, however, judgment (of himself, the described community, the South and its “dying” way of life, the narratee) is the narrator’s principal task. The nature of this judgment is shaped by the “you” and “one” pronouns in relation to personal and communal responses. The narrator wants to confer some kind of authority on his description of events while wishing the narratee (as he draws the narratee into the described community) to share in his elations, trepidations, and failures, however provisional, partial, and incomplete. The Southern setting of the tales in Part One not only works to identify the various narratees, but to reveal the narrator, through

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the characters and communities he describes, as a self-reflective commentator. The geographical and temporal become integral to the narrative itself, the novel’s actual reader understanding the narrator’s characterization of the embedded “you” as subjective, provisionary, flawed, but (increasingly) aimed at her or him. This aiming reinforces the notion that individual and communal remembrances are the narrator’s imperatives: to counter and immortalize a “dying” way of life. At the same time, the second-person address can both blend with and differentiate itself from an address to actual readers, readers who simultaneously occupy the position of addressee and observer. Thus in his use of descriptive anecdotes, legends, and communal gossip surrounding “Karintha,” “Becky,” “Carma,” and “Fern,” the narrator resorts to various forms of direct address. In “Karintha” he speaks directly to the “you,” and begins with a sensory appeal: At sunset, when there was no wind, and the pine-smoke from over by the sawmill hugged the earth, and you couldn’t see more than a few feet in front, [Karintha’s] sudden darting past you was a bit of vivid color, like a black bird that flashes in light. (3)

The narrator shifts from the pronoun “you” in these sentences to “one” in the next: With the other children one could hear, some distance off, their feet flopping in the two-inch dust. (3)

“Fern” contains similar shifts: what thoughts would come to you, had you seen her in a quick flash, keen and intuitively, as she sat there on her porch when your train thundered by? (18) When one is on the soil of one’s ancestors, most anything can come to one. (19)

The implied situation of the “one” and “you” serves the narrator’s integrative purposes: he wishes the actual reader to “enter” in the described community through glimpses that suggest immediacy and physical closeness: the darting, twelve-year-old Karintha who appears to come from nowhere, or Karintha as a quick flash seen from a train window. The narrator contrasts the child Karintha whose run was a “whir,” with the other children whose feet “flo[p] in the two-inch dust” (3).

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The narrator then goes from Karintha’s specific case, “Karintha had seen or heard perhaps she had felt her parents loving,” to an interpretive maxim aimed at both Karintha and the narratee, “One could but imitate one’s parents, for to follow them was the way of God” (4). The comment on the ancestors’ “soil” in “Fern” serves a similar purpose, coming, not surprisingly, after this sentence: “People have [visions] in Georgia more often than you would suppose” (18). By offering these different interpersonal orientations, the narrator operates to evoke a personal and communal (public) response. In both “Fern” and “Karintha,” the “one” pronoun refers to a broader and more inclusive narratee than does the “you” pronoun, evoking the narrator’s attitude toward his “dissimilar” community (which can include himself and the narratee as outsiders). In his stance toward the reader, the narrator places “one” on the same plane of reality that he himself occupies. In this way Toomer begins to establish his pattern (narrator to character, narrator to community, narrator to narratee, narrator to actual reader) of a socialized racial and class interdependence.9 In “Karintha,” the narrator while alternately presenting a romanticized notion of mystical truth, “Men do not know that the soul of her was a growing thing ripened too soon” (4), along with a communal vision of reality, “the interest of the male . . . could mean no good to her” (3), assumes his role as a kind of link or mediator among the story’s differentiated racial groups. It must be noted, however, that in this role, the narrator’s knowledge about his characters is incomplete and limited, and consequently the stories end in suspension, speculative refrain, or a comment about the narrator’s insufficient understanding. “Karintha,” for example, concludes with a tension between the possibility of transcendence, “smoke” in “odd wraiths about the trees,” and doom, as presented in the refrained image of Karintha, at twenty, her “skin like the dusk on the eastern horizon/ . . . When the sun goes down/ Goes down . . .” (4). The doubts and expansive possibilities the narrator expresses are an acknowledgment that his vision is subjective. But by stressing his subjectivity, the narrator also implies that he is reporting events that are only provisionally “true” and therefore open to the reader’s subjective interpretation. By placing his readers in a variety of identifications and positions of reception, the narrator’s promulgation of “race” and “class” is made, as we shall see, literally indistinguishable from his strategies of narration.10 In “Becky,” for example, the narrator, in conducing his story to strategies of social and racial interdependence, embeds the voices of

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white and black responses: Becky had one Negro son. Who gave it to her? Damn buck nigger, said the white folks’ mouths. She wouldn’t tell. . . . Who gave it to her? Low-down nigger with no self-respect, said the black folks’ mouths. She wouldn’t tell. (7)

Here the narrator, by directly addressing a witnessing community, prepares a participation that not only intensifies his voice in the community, but also allows him to become the community’s spokesperson and storyteller. Again the variation of address creates a story that is his as well as the community’s, but this time it includes the narrator’s guilt and fear: “We who had cast out their mother”; “fear closed my mind” (8). As in “Karintha,” the narrator cannot give the community the final, true “word” (9), and we have the contradictory (destructive/transcendent) images of smoke from Becky’s chimney and the imploration/exclamation to Jesus: “O pines, whisper to Jesus”; “Pines shout to Jesus” (8). Aesthetically and socially, “Karintha” and “Becky” set the pattern of conflating speech, song, and refrain into an improvisatory, transformational power that the female protagonists appear to possess but that the narrator can only partially understand and articulate. The narrator does not claim to speak from a privileged “in-group” vantage point.11 The subjectivities of the narrator, characters, and narratees are shaped in different ways by the communal experiences in Part One. When the narrator changes from a passive observer (“Karintha”) to a participant witness (“Becky”), he asks the narratee to respond, to build connections and patterns, to become part of the “we” that passes Becky’s cabin and “g[ets] away” (8–9). But he does so under the conditions that the narratee recognizes in “Becky” and “Karintha” a communal cowardice and incomprehension. The emphasis he puts on the visual and seeing in these two sections (“Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon,/ O cant you see it, O cant you see it” (3)) serves as a self- and communal remonstrance and an invitation to the narratee to “reperceive” the stories by seeing them from the views of the titular subjects. Toomer’s socialized and racialized interdependence takes a multitude of forms in Cane. As in “Karintha” and “Becky,” in “Carma” the narrator interacts, this time even more directly, with his subject character: “I leave the men around the stove to follow her with my eyes down the red dust road. . . . Maybe she feels my gaze, perhaps she expects it” (12). As in the previous stories, the narrator relates a “sad story song” that centers on a vision, but one more expansive

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and transportive than those in “Karintha” and “Becky,” a vision that parallels the narrator’s notion, under the spell of Carma’s “dance,” that “time and space have no meaning in a canefield. No more than the interminable stalks” (13). In an open voice the narrator implores the reader to “Come along,” to enter the “wind” that sweeps over the cane (12–13), to become part of this vision based on an almost physical palpability. As the section moves to “Carma,” the narrator focuses on a spiritual power that dominates his imagination. “Carma” becomes the “wind” in the cane, and “[t]he sun, which has been slanting over her shoulder, shoots primitive rockets into her mangrove-gloomed, yellow flower face” (12). The narrator wishes both Carma and the narratee to “feel [his] gaze,” to recognize his presence as a communal and spiritual mediator (however unsuccessful his endeavors might be), and to solicit, “Come Along” (12–13), the creative involvement of the narratee. The narrator’s “representativeness” and self-reflectiveness converge in Cane. Although an observer to Carma’s incident in the cane field (and many events in these first four stories), the narrator is, more importantly, aware of himself as a writer (“this Carma . . . whose tale as I have told it” (13)) and participant in his tales (“I began to wonder if perhaps my own emotional sensibility had played one of its tricks on me” (18)). He manifests no desire to screen himself from the reader’s attentions: we are directly brought into his conscious and unconscious process of forming a narrative identity. We are given a sustained, inside view of relationship to his characters. In “Avey,” for example, he proclaims, “But what a bluff I put up about forgetting her” (47). The narrator, in broad terms, creates social interaction by defining himself in relation to his characters, community, and narratee, and gives the reader the responsibility for acknowledging (racial and class) diversity. This process gains force as the narrative progresses. The narrator becomes even more participative in “Fern” and intensifies his plea that the narratee (the “you”) seek an even closer intimacy with the tale: The soft suggestion of down slightly darkened, like the shadow of a bird’s wing might, the creamy brown color of her upper lip. Why, after noticing it, you sought her eyes, I cannot tell you. Her nose was aquiline, Semitic. If you have heard a Jewish cantor sing, if he has touched you and made your own sorrow seem trivial when compared with his, you will know when I follow the curves of her profile, like mobile rivers, to their community. (16)

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And, more than in the preceding stories, he stresses his own presence as well as the narratee’s: I first saw [Fern] on the porch. I was passing with a fellow . . . (I was from the North and suspected of being prejudiced and stuck-up). . . . (17)

He then implicates the narratee in his analysis of character, suggesting, for example, that Fern would be better off listening to “folk-songs at dusk in Georgia, you would say, and so would I” than “sitting at a tenement window looking down on the indifferent throngs of Harlem” (17). In this story the narratee is endowed with certain qualities, inclinations, and faculties that parallel the narrator’s opinions and the obligations he feels should be respected: You and I know, who have had experience in such things, that love is not a thing like prejudice which can be bettered by changes of town. You and I who know men in these cities will have to say, they could not [bring her something left vacant by the bestowal of their bodies] (18)

Here the narrator refers to an anterior, extratextual experience known to the narrator and narratee and, in a new twist to the interdependencies that underlie the novel, designates the narratee by the word “friend” (18). To the “Fern” narratee, the narrator multiplies his explanations and justifies the particularities of his narrative. What appears to count here, then, is not only the extent of the narratee’s agreement with the theses of the narrator but the narrator’s solicitation to the narratee: “Your thoughts can help me, and I would like to know. Something I would do for her” (18). As in no other story in Cane, the narrator entreats the narratee to enter into his situation of distress. Here the narratee constitutes a relay between the narrator and the reader and the character Fern; he aids in establishing the narrative framework, and he serves as a reflector of the narrator and the narrator’s “pre-Fern” world. At the same time, the narratee is prompted by the narrator’s urge to accept the patterns of consciousness that include transcending a mere racial content. As in the first three stories, the emphasis in “Fern” is put on the narrative discourse as opposed to story and on the narrator’s responses as opposed to plot. Most importantly, however, the narrator through his discourse spiritualizes the experiences he treats, applying his observations to himself, the narratee, and the reader.12 Like Karintha, Carma, and Becky, Fern incarnates something mysterious

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and mystical: the “whole countryside seemed to flow into her eyes” (17), and the narrator sees “her face flow into them” (19). Earlier the narrator “feels that things unseen to men were tangibly immediate. It would not have surprised me had I had a vision” (19). “Fern” ends with one last appeal to the narratee: “Something I would do for her. Some fine unnamed thing . . . And, friend, you?” (19). The narrator’s concern about the titular subjects culminates in “Fern,” the woman with whom he has the most personal and sustained contact. Significantly, “Fern” is the story that contains the most “I’s” and “you’s,” indicating that the quest for the actual reader is to cross the gap between “I” and “you,” a transaction that becomes the central plot and metaphor of Cane. In this first section, the “I” may seem to possess the power to wander freely from community to community, subjectivity to subjectivity, but in fact he has to keep returning to his readers, and he constantly works to bring his readers to him and into his described community. An instrumental part of such transactions, direct address in “Fern” does not so much represent an event as produce one. It is not only a means by which the narrator works to promote a sense of the author’s own presence in the text, but it serves to bring together (through its constant appeals to the narratee for confirmation and approval) the objective and subjective content of the tales.13 Not resorting to direct address, “Esther” is the first portrait in Part One to adopt a third-person narration. But as in the other sections, form becomes a sequential process of construction, emphasized by Esther’s age (nine, sixteen, twenty-two, twenty-seven) prefacing each section, and, as in the previous sections, producing a series of provisional hypotheses in the mind of the narratee. Toomer emphasizes process as opposed to structure to create his design. In so doing, he casts his narrative exclusively in the present tense, suggesting that everything takes place as if the question of the story’s duration had no relevance. Because the narrative “I” is not used in “Esther,” the narrator appears to lose his mediatory role, adopting instead realistic, grotesque, comic descriptions, and symbolic representation, though still relying (through Esther herself) on self-conscious moments. Thus instead of Karintha’s beauty, “perfect as dusk when the sun goes down” (4), or Fern’s mystically eerie connections (19), Esther at twenty-seven becomes “lean and beaten” (25) and her face is “the color of the gray dust that dances with dead cotton leaves” (25). Esther is, arguably, the most racially anguished of Toomer’s characters not only because she is the first woman in Part One to be given an interior consciousness (a device conducive to denoting her personal torment) but because she is “near white” and “her father is the richest

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colored man in town” (24). Esther is a racial outsider. We receive a sustained, inside view of Esther’s mind (what she dreams, thinks, sees, hears, knows), which temporarily turns her into a kind of narrator. Like the narrator in the previous sections, Esther becomes the focus of an examination of socio-racial relations in a small Southern town, but she loses the narrator’s reconciliatory role. Instead, Esther’s pain, as poignant as Fern’s and Karintha’s strength and beauty, stresses the need for such unity and the reconstitution of the black–white community that rejects her. Not coincidentally, as in no other section, the narrator constantly juxtaposes blacks and whites who contrast with, and ultimately pit themselves against, Esther: White and black men loafing on the corner hold no interest for her. (22) The town fire department rushes madly down the road. It ruthlessly shoves black and white idlers to one side. (24) Women, fat chunky Negro women, lean scrawny white women, pull their skirts up above their heads and display the most ludicrous underclothes. (24) A sharply dressed white girl passes by. For a moment Esther wishes that she might be like her. Not white; she has no need for being that. But sharp, sporty, with get-up about her. (25)

As the subject and object of focus, Esther must consider “the town folks” (22) in her resolve to tell King Barlo, the itinerant gambler, preacher, and epic visionary, that she loves him. But both blacks and whites want to drive Barlo out of town, which is why “white and black preachers confer as to how best to rid themselves of the vagrant, usurping fellow” (23). Strangely, according to town legend and Esther’s perceptions, Barlo appears to possess the power to make “angels and demons parad[e] up and down the street all night”; to make “Limp Underwood, who hated niggers, w[ake] up next morning to find that he held a black man in his arms”; to inspire a Negress, “of wide reputation,” to draw “a portrait of a black madonna on the courthouse wall”; and to leave “his image indelibly upon the mind of Esther” (23). Indeed, Barlo becomes “the starting point of the only living patterns that her mind was to know” (23). Esther senses and pursues Barlo’s mystical qualities, though by the end of the tale the

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reality of Barlo and the disapproving community make her “dra[w] away, frozen” (27). “Blood Burning Moon,” the last story of Part One, enacts a conflict between whites and blacks only suggested in the previous sections. The characters take on a behavioral complexity and a consciousness of their own. We are again given access to characters’ interiors, as in the case of Louisa: [Tom Burwell’s] black balanced, and pulled against the white of [Bob] Stone, when she thought of them. And her mind was vaguely upon them as she came over the crest of the hill, coming from the white folks’ kitchen. As she sang softly at the evil face of the full moon. (30)

Centering on the confrontation between the white Bob Stone and the black Tom Burwell, action and dialogue dominate the narrative. More specifically, the plot of the story is its focus, and becomes a form of understanding and explanation of racial antagonisms. The narrator in this story, cast in the third-person is “undramatized” and impersonal, and largely stands apart as an observer. Interestingly, though, narratorial presence comes most forcefully in the depiction of the “Blood Burning Moon,” which at once symbolizes racial hostilities and appears to take Louisa’s attention away from the two competing men: A strange stir was in her. Indolently, she tried to fix upon Bob or Tom as the cause of it. To meet Bob in the canebreak, as she was going to do an hour or so later, was nothing new. And Tom’s proposal which she felt on its way to her could be indefinitely put off. Separately, there was no unusual significance to either one. But for some reason, they jumbled when her eyes gazed vacantly at the rising moon. (30)

The rising moon that ends section one prefigures the rising sun (117), the symbol that ends section three. The former is “an evil thing, an omen” (36); the latter, “a birth song” (117), but a song that offers no tangible hope or completion. The point is that in both sections a natural symbol has the final word, making us conscious of the narrator’s experiencing mind whose views of the experience intervene between the narratee and the event. At the same time, the natural symbol, deeply rooted in the experience of the physical body, reinforces the sensory and visionary atmosphere of Part One.

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Although containing no uses of direct address, “Esther” and “Blood Burning Moon” forward Toomer’s design. What happens most often in these two stories, both set in small Southern towns, is that, in “juxtaposition[s] of the white and black races . . . so typical of Southern life” (Toomer, “South” 12), poetic passages battle the realistic elements of the text for narrative control. This conflict is never allowed to reach its completion (formally expressed, for example, by long dashes to break paragraphs in “Esther” (23) and the use of ellipses in “Blood Burning Moon” (35)). Most pointedly, this competition between lyrical and realistic elements extends the form that the narrator tries to give to complex states of human consciousness while simultaneously putting forth his own inner states of racial awareness, divisiveness, and conflict. What is striking about Toomer’s narrative methods in Part One is the importance he places on the attachment of the actual reader to the narrator and the communally detached female characters. The second-person narrative in this section correlates with the most profound emotional depths of the novel because the dialogic relationship it establishes guides the reader to new inscriptions of place, race, and social need. Toomer’s decision to avail himself of the second-person in Cane is a self-conscious one; the narrator wishes to alert the reader to pay attention to what he describes because the reader may be called upon (as evidenced by so many of the imperative syntactical constructions) to respond and react. Although the creation of such a community is continually frustrated by the racial realities represented in the text, the narrator wants to bring the reader into a “new” nonessentialized community of possibility. To put this another way, the narrator in Part One attempts to harmonize the differences between his titular subjects and the reader by rendering these differences inessential—or anyway nonpermanent by comparison to their identity with the reader and narratee. At the same time, Toomer’s mysticism and celebration of the folk spirit is rarely separated from suffering and a nonmystical, non-illusory representation of social forces. Toomer deemphasizes individual change in these women while he, in his mediative role, suggests that class, like race affiliation, is not inescapable. “There are no such things as innate racial antipathies,” Toomer writes in the later “Race Problems and Modern Society” (1928). “We are not born with them. Either we acquire them from our environment, or else we do not have them at all. . . . There is no need to present new facts to support the statement that race problems are closely associated with our economic and political systems. . . .” (81–89).

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Occupying Forces The shift in time and place to Washington, DC and Chicago in the second section intensifies the narrator’s need to anchor the self, confirm control, and finally, as in “Avey,” assert his often tenuous, provisional beliefs over others. The “Avey” narrator, Foley argues, “simultaneously criticizes the cultural shallowness and sexual repressiveness of his class and asserts his ambivalent identification with that class” (“Washington” 310). These urban environments contribute to the self-repression and apathy of the characters while making the narrator more assertive and aggressive. In “Avey” the narrator “sp[eaks) sharply” (48) to Avey who shows no particular interest in his monologue and appears incapable of deciphering his references to spirituals and black folklore. She falls asleep while listening to him. Conversely, the role of the narratee gains in relative importance: the narrator and narratee can share in the same “realm” of existence, a realm not necessarily available to these urban characters (Rhobert, Avey, Muriel, Bona, Paul). Thus rather than using local descriptions to illustrate a hermetic and lost world, the narrator relies on the resources of expression to make them functional, to call the narratee into these “present” communities, and to share the levels of both story and discourse. The geographical movement to Washington, DC and Chicago in Part Two, however, emblematizes the impossibility of sustaining the reflective “swan song” of Part One. One linguistic result of this effort in Part Two is that the narrator becomes multipersonal and, reflecting the fragmentation and shattered quality of these urban environments, the narrative voices, while more imperious and aggressive than in Part One, become disparate and diffuse. The narrator’s role as reconciler and unifier commensurately suffers. At the same time, the shifting use of the narrative “you” is deployed to create an identity between the reader and the dispossessed urban characters. Toomer’s narrative strategy is to relate the means of narration to live social experience in order to stress (racial, social) diversity—in all its indeterminacies, potential dangers, and complexities—and the narratee’s role in this diversity, a role most directly inscribed in the novel. In Part Two the narrator continues to rely on forms of direct address, first-person narration, and invocation, but adds a strident undercurrent of irony and urgency. “Seventh Street,” for example, a transitional sketch denoting the working-class black culture of Washington, DC, presents images of decadence, “Ballooned, zooming Cadillac,” and corruption, “Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts,/Bootleggers in silken shirts” (41), toward which the narrator,

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in relation to Sempter, takes a more critical stance. “Black reddish blood,” the narrator enunciates, “[p]ouring for crude-boned soft skinned life, who set you flowing?” and then three times repeats the refrain “who set you flowing.”14 As Toomer said of this second section, the life [in Washington, D.C.] becomes more conscious, more restless and stirring, and hence more complex. But the soft loveliness of the city streets, the rich warm taste of dark-skinned life, and the music and the humor give a pervasive sub-tone which is distinctly of the South. (Toomer “South” 14)

The “sub-tone” in “Seventh Street” foregrounds the interplay between the black and white communities: “black reddish blood into the white and whitewashed wood of Washington” (41); “White and Whitewash disappear in blood” (41), a process that the narrator describes as natural, flowing, organic, despite the white racial forces that threaten this new existence. In its “eddying” and “swirling” the blood has literally and figuratively brought a new life to the city.15 “Seventh Street” represents a new shift in subjectivities. The narrator’s sensibilities flow into the “life-giving blood” of Seventh Street in order to explore the psychological oppression, violence, and uncertainties of these new black communities. The narrator directs his “you” toward the blood itself, “Who set you flowing?” (41). The next sketch, “Rhobert,” shifts emphasis, evoking the hopelessness that is a product of the spiritual corruption and fragmentation of the figures in Part Two. The tone is more sardonic, intellectualized, than in “Seventh Street,” but the narrator continues his different varieties and styles of address: “it is sinful to draw one’s head out of live stuffing in a dead house”; “It is sinful to have one’s own head crushed” (42). The narrative voice, filled with ironic sermonlike exhortations to the narratee (“one”), is distant and aloof. Here the one pronoun is on the scale between narration and interior monologue, where the text’s address can be read as an instance of selfaddress (through which the narrator communicates his despair to the narratee). In direct appeal, the narrator concludes the tale with a corrosive “elegaic” address to Rhobert: Lets give it to him. Lets call him great when the water shall have been all drawn off. Lets build a monument and set it in the ooze when he goes down . . . Lets open our throats, brother, and sing “Deep River” when he goes down. . . . (43)

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The narrator’s suggestion for a reconciliation of the past (signaled by the “monument” and the song “Deep River”) and a movement beyond the present into future identities is surpassed by the section’s nonreflective claims and sardonic phrasings. The community cannot change the fate of Rhobert but only sing to him as “he goes down.”16 “Avey” signals a return to a first-person narrative. Convinced that he can “understand” her and transform her folk spirit into art with him as the recreator, the narrator describes Avey as a receptacle of his own cause: I describe her own nature and temperament. Told how they needed a larger life for their expression. How incapable Washington was of understanding that need. How it could not meet it. I pointed out that in lieu of proper channels, her emotions had overflowed into paths that dissipated them. I talked, beautifully I thought, about an art that would be born, an art that would open the way for women the likes of her. I asked her to hope, and build up an inner life against the coming of that day. (48)

But like the other titular subjects in Cane, Avey and the responses she evokes, “The general gossips could hardly say more than they had” (46), cannot be fully understood: “Just how I came to love her . . . I do no know” (44). Even beyond this, in coming to the forefront to participate in such an intimate struggle, the narrator draws the reader’s attention to himself, to such a degree that the narrator (and his delusion, his “promise-song”) becomes the principal focus. Avey, however, like many of the female characters in Cane, is represented less as an individual than as a figuration or movement, in this way resembling the function of the fluid and combinatory modulations of Toomer’s narrative addresses. Like “Seventh Street” and “Rhobert,” the “Avey” section represents the narrator’s self-reflective ponderings on how the culturally conservative elite of Washington cannot understand the urges for selfexpression and those of one’s inner life. These three sections criticize Washington’s cultural shallowness and how incapable “Washington was of understanding the need” (48) of women like Avey. All three sketches condemn the sexual conservatism of the Washington community the narrator is a part of while the narrator, especially in the Avey section, remonstrates himself, his career “ambitions” (46), and his own ambivalence toward his education and class.

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The second part of Cane is dominated, of course, not by a firstperson narrator or forms of direct address but by a third-person narrative. The second part depends on internal monologues (“Theater”), free indirect discourse (“Box-seat”), and quasi-direct speech (“Bona and Paul”), in which one is unsure whether the source of the utterance is the narrator, the character, or both at once. Toomer does not hesitate to establish between narrator and characters, and narrator and reader, and narrator and community “a variable or floating relationship, a pronominal vertigo in tune with a freer logic and a more complex conception of [the narrator’s] ‘personality’” (Genette 185). But this relationship (with all addressees) results from a common appeal to self-reflectiveness that is, in Robert Siegle’s words, “not a singleminded focus on art for art’s sake, and hardly a betrayal of the larger issues challenging the narrative artist, but rather is the most comprehensive fulfillment of those challenges that considers not only what it will say but the philosophical ground and means for saying it” (3). Although the narrator wants his readers to “follow” him by placing them in a variety of rhetorical, geographical, multiethnic, class positions, and, in so doing, to express his commitment to a new ontology of racial identity, he continues to struggle to define and become part of the community’s “common soul” (qtd. in Helbing).17 In structure, “Theater” is a combination of lyrical description, dialogue, “dance instruction” (“Its three counts to the right, three counts to the left, and then you shimmy” 54) interfused with “jazz songs,” (53) and descriptions of dream states. Set in the Howard Theater in Washington, “Theatre” highlights the distinction between spoken words—audible to others and perceptible even when narrative attention lies with someone else—and unspoken words, thoughts, internal monologues, dreams, which no matter how developed are not perceptible to other characters. The effect of this convention is that readers are given extended information about the thoughts of characters, which the other characters are unaware of. Toomer conveys these thoughts, however, in the way a playwright would generally designate that a character’s speech will follow (e.g., “John:” (53); “Dorris:” (54)), as when Dorris asks these questions about herself:18 Dorris: Nothin doin? Aint I as good as him? Couldn’t I get an education if I’d wanted one? Don’t I know respectable folks, lots of em, in Philadelphia and New York and Chicago? Aint I had men as good as him? Better. Doctors and lawyers. Whats a manager’s brother, anyhow? (53–54)

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The narrator also resorts to this device when relating a character’s feelings and “dreams”: John Dreams: Dorris is dressed in a loose black gown splashed with lemon ribbons. Her feet taper long and slim from trim ankles. She waits for him just inside the stage door . . . John’s melancholy is a deep thing that seals all senses but his eyes, and makes him whole. (55)

The narrator does not, however, merely describe John’s dream, as the punctuation might indicate, but interprets John’s dream— and his “sadness” “too deep for sweet untruth,” and his potential “whole[ness]” (55). The overall effect is that the narrator, while creating the impression that “Theatre,” as the name suggests, is character driven, dramatic in structure, and interactive, gives free reign to his narratorial presence. I would agree with Nellie Y. McKay that in “Theatre” “Toomer uses the divisive effects of class distinctions among black people to continue to explore the negative results of unnatural social restraint” (139). Less obvious is the narrator’s strategy in articulating his position on this divisiveness and restraint, and his subsuming the “dialogue” with characters’ thoughts and his own interpretations and interventions. Lyrical descriptions blur into dialogue, which blurs into internal monologue that, in the narrator’s multiplicity of codes, is transformed into a virtual image of his attitudes. Marking his discourse in such multiple ways, Toomer easily goes from a third-person to a second-person narration in “Calling Jesus,” which presents an unnatural separation of a woman’s body and soul to which the narratee is witness. But blurring the distinctions between narratee and character (and later narrator and narratee), it also presents (reinforcing Toomer’s free-floating social interaction) an unusual combination of third- and second-person voices: When you meet her in the daytime on the streets, the little dog keeps coming. Nothing happens at first, and then, when she has forgotten the street and alleys, and the large house where she goes to bed of nights, a soft thing like fur begins to rub your limbs, and you hear a low scared voice, calling, and you know that cool something nozzles moisture in your palms. (58)

“Calling Jesus” gives no priority to any of the narrative voices, suggesting that the discourse has a variant core, a sequence of voices

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that can be presented in a number of ways. The narrative and social interaction therefore seems to become something that exists independently of and prior to narrative presentation.19 The communal conflicts in “Box Seat,” the next section, center on the loss of the folk culture and the struggle to find new urban values to replace it: for example, Muriel tries to get Dan Moore “to get a job and settle down . . . to work more and think less” (62). But Dan believes her “aim is wrong. There is no such thing as happiness. Life bends joy and pain, beauty and ugliness, in such a way that no one may isolate them” (62). Echoing Dan’s poetic call, the narrator at the beginning of “Box Seat” addresses the community (and himself), but also wishes the narratee to share in his subjectivity: “Stir the root-life of a withered people. Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream” (59). Here the narrator depicts the rhetorical situation as a very communal one. Such a situation is later extended by Muriel in her thoughts about Mrs. Pribby: What has [Mrs. Pribby] got to do with me? She is me, somehow. No she’s not. Yes she is. She is the town, and the town wont let me love you, Dan. (61)

Two conflicts are at work here. One is broadly racial, ever present, but not overtly confrontational: “The lean white spring” (59) is set against the “[d]ark swaying forms of Negroes [that] are street songs that woo virginal houses” (59). The other is communal and relational: Muriel and her black urban, and highly class-conscious, environment is pitted against Dan Moore and his world of prophetic vision and the former folk culture. Not coincidentally, Walt Whitman, with whose ideas on the “new American race” and a “transcendental” America Toomer largely agreed, is the “strange force” to which Dan, “a new world Christ . . . coming up” (65), is drawn (68) (see Jones, Prison House 71–72). Importantly, the narrator sympathizes with Dan, “a green stem that has just shed its flower” (69), encouraging his “forgotten” (and for the black urban community, frightening) song: “Come on, Dan Moore, come on. Dan Sings” (59). Part Two ends with “Bona and Paul,” set in Chicago, a sketch that returns to the theme of forging a wholeness out of the fractured relations between the black and white communities. Thought to be black, but apparently multiracial like Toomer himself (and indeed resembling him physically and intellectually),20 Paul wishes to bring

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to his consciousness the natural and racial beauty of the South: Paul follows the sun to a pine-matted hillock in Georgia. He sees the slanting roofs of gray unpainted cabins and tinted lavender. A Negress chants a lullaby beneath the mate-eyes of a southern planter. Her breasts are ample for the suckling of a song. She weans it, and sends it, curiously weaving, among lush melodies of cane and corn. (73)

Inseparable from Paul’s own efforts toward racial wholeness, this beauty is foremost an aesthetic beauty, which Paul must create not only to attain self-understanding but to come to terms with his racialized community. In so doing, he must, while fashioning his own “racial” interiority, completely figuralize his relations to his white community and white friends: Mellow stone mansions overshadow clapboard homes which now resemble Negro shanties in some southern alley. (75–76) Perhaps for some reason, white skins are not supposed to live at night. Surely, enough nights would transform them fantastically, or kill them. And their red passion? Night paled that too, and made it moony. Moony. (75)

Bona Hale, a white southern woman in love with Paul, cannot transcend the racial tradition that impels her. As Helbing writes, “Bona’s ambivalence, the attitudes of others, and Paul’s ambivalence as to his racial identity contribute to the tensions he experiences. Paul, however, responds to rather than avoids, the racial emotions that Bona chooses to deny” (140). But how does Paul respond and what is the narrator’s role in this response? These questions are most fully addressed in part four of “Bona and Paul” in which the narrator begins with the pronominal proclamation, “So one feels” (76). He then links Paul’s feelings to the “one” pronoun (the pronoun the narrator normally uses when addressing a broad inclusive narratee), suggesting that such feelings could be common to both Paul and the narratee: A strange thing happened to Paul. Suddenly he knew that he was apart from the people around him. Apart from the pain which they had unconsciously caused. Suddenly he knew that people saw, not attractiveness in his dark skin, but difference. Their stares, giving him to himself, filled something long empty within him, and were like green blades sprouting in his consciousness. There was fullness, and strength and peace about it all. (77)

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Green blades not only bring Paul to an artistic (re)envisioning of the south and make him “cool like the dusk, and like the dusk, detached” (75), but signal his own self-conscious presence in the text. From such moments, the narrator takes us to Paul’s futile attempt to create a racial, communal harmony, to gather the “petals of roses” and “petals of dusk” (80). 21 In the closing moments of “Bona and Paul,” after addressing the black doorman as “brother” (80), Paul takes on the role of the narrator and in his narratorial capacity refers to the narratee as “brother” (80). Typically like Cane’s narrator, Paul, in the closing paragraphs, while unable to effect his desired harmony, personalizes his relationship with the narratee and actual reader.

Racial Reexaminations An emblem of the last geographical movement in Cane, “Kabnis” signals the narrator’s return to rural Georgia from the urban environments of Washington, DC and Chicago, and thus the novel comes full circle. Unlike the narratees in the preceding parts, the narratee in Part Three is not represented by a character, nor is he mentioned explicitly by the narrator. Instead, the emphasis shifts: the intervening narrator and the character Kabnis point to the autobiographical Toomer: “Toomer places himself at the center of ‘Kabnis’” (McKay 84); the narrator tells his “story.” But for both the narrator and Kabnis, their desires, their subjectivities, cannot be satisfactorily articulated until they find a means with which to mediate them. Paralleling Kabnis’s struggles to do so, the narrator commingles the private with the public in “Kabnis,” using a self-addressed and autobiographical “you” and a tone of voice that runs the gamut from the stridency of the orator to the tenderness of the poet: “Shadows of pines are dreams the sun shakes from its eyes” (117). He can be nurturing: “Dead blind father of a muted folk who feel their way upward to a life that crushes or absorbs them. (speak, Father!)” (106). He can be sardonic: “[Hanby] is well dressed, smooth, rich, black-skinned Negro who thinks there is no one quite so suave and polished as himself” (95), and he can be merely a neutral describer of actions: “He stands by the hearth, rocking backward and forward. He stretches his hands out to the fire” (100).22 On one hand, “Kabnis” renders a kind of individual and communal tragic subjectivity in which the narrator dramatizes the forces destroying the folk culture and causing racial oppression. On the other, “Kabnis” is as

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much about the narrator’s self-exploration (and Toomer’s own) as it is a portrayal of communal subjectivities and experience. “Kabnis” brings a new shaping of subjectivities, most notably those of the narrator and Kabnis. The narrator integrates into Kabnis’s strong undercurrents of irony, parody, and the burlesque, and casts the story into a kind of mock-epic form. Unlike Carma, Fern, and Karintha whose minds the narrator cannot penetrate, the narrator does know the mind of Kabnis. Yet the subjectivity the narrator produces (his own and Kabnis’s) creates a mysterious and elusive atmosphere, particularly in the context of Kabnis’s many roles: as a protagonist in the drama, as an educated outsider, as a poet who wants to become the “lips of the south,” as “a ridiculous pathetic figure in his showy robe” (110). The first section in the drama portrays Kabnis’s isolated subjectivity, which is countered in the following sections when Kabnis comes into contact with the community. With communal contact, mostly among Sempter’s black men, Kabnis searches for the security of self, and the identity of a racial self, in others. But he fails to find this self and to integrate into the community of “peace” (86). Instead, he feels “suspended a few feet above the soil whose touch would resurrect him” (98). And although he dreams of giving words to the South, he can neither reconcile the cultures of North and South nor, even in moments of heightened self-consciousness, face his racial past. Indeed, Lewis confronts Kabnis with the memory of the past he can either deny and let “die an impotent and meaningless death, or use . . . to become a sustaining, spiritual force behind a reawakened sense of race consciousness” (Lieber 192): Lewis: The old man as symbol, flesh, and spirit of the past, what do you think he would say if he could see you? You look at him, Kabnis. Kabnis: Just like any done-up preacher is what he looks like t me. Jam some false teeth in his mouth and crank him, an youd have God Almighty spit in torrents all around th floor. Oh, hell, an he reminds me of that black cockroach over yonder. An besides, he aint my past. My ancestors were Southern blue-bloods . . . Lewis: And black. Kabnis: Aint much difference between blue and black. Lewis: Enough to draw a denial from you. Can’t hold them, can you? Master; slave. Soil; and the overarching heavens. Dusk; dawn. They fight and bastardize you. The sun tint of your cheeks, flame of the great season’s multi-colored leaves, tarnished, burned, Split, shredded; easily burned. No use . . . (108–109) 23

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Despite such denials, Kabnis, from a certain perspective, represents the narrator of the first two sections who tries to become integrated into the community and must humble himself and suffer humility in his attempt to do so. Kabnis’s intense loneliness, his consuming selfcenteredness, and his various “denials,” elations, and disintegrations are parts that the narrator later tries to bring together into a “soft circle” (117), a spirit of individual and communal consciousness. In addressing the community and the narratee, the participantnarrator resorts to an invocatory, imperative form: “Night winds fare the breathing of the unborn child whose calm throbbing in the belly of a Negress sets them somnolently singing. Hear their song” (105). “The night winds in Georgia,” the narrator urges, “are vagrant poets whispering,” and the “weird chill of their song” (a song that serves as a refrain for “Kabnis”) must be listened to: White-man’s land Niggers sing. burn, bear black children till poor rivers glory In Camp Ground. (83)

Moreover, as in Parts One and Two, lyricism, “White paint on the wealthier houses has the chill blue glitter of distant stars” (105), interfuses with speculation and uncertainty to dominate the descriptions: “it seems huge, limitless in the candle light” (105); “Someone is coming down the stairs” (115). The narrator, as part of his selfexamination, struggles to discover and interrogate reality, and at times casts doubt not only on his own declarations and predispositions but on the literal reality of his characters’ perceptions. This doubt spreads to the narrator’s reliance on the narratee’s assent and approval. The narrator’s earlier confidential attitudes toward the “you,” which “encourage actual readers to see themselves reflected in that pronoun” (Warhol, “Toward a Theory” 814) are in this section conspicuously absent. What replaces this particular narrator–you relationship is Toomer’s use of a self-addressed you. Kabnis directs his inner thoughts to “God Almighty, Dear God, Dear Jesus,” then to a self-reflective self, “Get up you damn fool. Look around. What’s beautiful there?” (85) before addressing his own feelings, “Oh no, I won’t let that emotion come up in me. Stay down, I tell you” (85). He later returns to a remonstrative self, “Come, Ralph, old man, pull yourself together” (85). In this section, the comments of an omniscient narrator (“Kabnis’ mind

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clears” (85) alternate with Kabnis’s various addresses to Jesus, “Jesus how still everything is” (86), and to himself, “Come, Ralph, pull yourself together . . . You know, Ralph, old man, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see a ghost” (86). Hence the text accommodates a variety of “you’s” as it earlier accommodated a variety of “I’s.” But Kabnis’s “you” is self-directed, revealing, insofar as a character-speaker emerges in the text, Kabnis’s solipsism and his failure to resolve his differences with the community.

Conclusion Toomer wished to create “a new idiom which could introduce a greater diversity of perspective and voices, and elements that his lyrical narrative, his poetical or realistic descriptions could not include” (Fabre 71). But stylistic diversity is, to say the least, everywhere in Cane. The narrator, wishing to engage the “you” and to establish a relation between the narratee and actual reader in Part One, can use the “you’s” to substitute or disguise a self-referential “I” in Part Two. The narrator in this section, though less reflective than in the first section, continues to foster sympathy for real-world sufferers and continues to assume that his narratees are in perfect sympathy with him. The narrator in Part Three works against the grain of the protagonist’s discourse, providing it with a meaning that, though not explicitly articulated, is (silently) conveyed to the reader behind the protagonist’s back. Through such narrative interventions and a posturing of the “you,” the narrator emphasizes the fact that the author exists, in all his ambiguities, complexities, and failures, and is very much in the text. What is the purpose of Cane’s diverse narrative stances and strategies? As Toomer said of Cane, “There is nothing about these pieces of the buoyant expression of a new race” and the stories emphasize that socially one’s “position here is transient” (Jean Toomer to Waldo Frank, undated, TP, Folder 83). But paralleling Toomer’s “spiritualization of experience,” there is a social configuration, evoked by the narrator, which includes a consciousness that the stories, poems, and dramatic form of the text involve the reader in acts of judgment, call for social transactions, and create spaces in which racial and class meanings are renegotiated. Cane’s poems can be seen in this light, in which direct address and invocatory voices take the form of a spiritual, “Cotton song”: “Shackles fall upon the Judgement Day/ But lets not wait for it” (11), an imagistic lyric, “Her Lips Are Copper

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Wire”: “and press your lips to mine/ till they fare incandescent” (57), or a communal hymn, as in “Harvest Song”: O my brothers, I beat my palms, still soft, against the stubble of my harvesting. (You beat your soft palms, too.) My pain is sweet. Sweeter than the oats or wheat or corn. It will not bring me knowledge of my hunger. (71)

Hence there is a constant tension between conflicting strategies: between the narrator’s self-reflectiveness, whereby the story draws attention to its status as art, and forms of narrative, whereby the story is concerned with its informational, thematic contents. Cane can be seen to reveal, as Foley has noted, that “Toomer’s class politics were as contradictory as his racial politics” (“Washington” 313). But self-reflectiveness as a mode of exercising narrative authority has the signal advantage that it cannot be deceptive: the artistic “folk song” being laid claim to cannot be mistaken for anything but what it is. So, it is significant that the mode adopted by the narrator of Cane, for which he takes responsibility, is self-reflectiveness, which profoundly shapes his awareness of class—not only as a wide array of subject positions but also as sets of social relations that take the reader through each of the three sections. It remains for the narrator to incorporate into his own art of narration the advantages of artistic indirection with the certainty of effects. Finally, unlike the storytelling in many modernist texts, Cane does not drive the teller out of the tale.24 Rather, as part of Toomer’s “intimate connection of things” (James, “Preface” 38), the narrator is an essential element in mediating between his self-designation, his own spiritual life and survival, and that of his fictional communities, narratee, and readers. To this end, class interdependence and its racial implications in Cane, even if non-transcendent and derived from “a knowledge of [Toomer’s] futility to check solution,” become the heart of a “great design” (Jean Toomer to Waldo Frank, undated, TP, Folder 83).

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CH A P T ER

5

Meridel Le Sueur’s Salute to Spring: “A Movement Up Which All Are Moving” The Silence seems terrific like a great form moving of itself. This is a real movement issuing from the close reality of mass feeling. This is the first real rhythmic movement I have ever seen. My heart hammers terrifically. My hands are swollen and hot. No one is producing this movement. It is a movement up which all are moving softly, rhythmically, terribly. (“I Was Marching,” Salute to Spring, 188)

A belief shared by all of the writers examined thus far is the notion that the lower- and working classes could not adequately represent themselves and therefore required representation. Especially with Whitman, Davis, London, and Toomer, this representation is crucial because the class they had in mind was as yet inchoate and unformed: a class of the future, in varying degrees and categories, egalitarian, democratic, transracial, spiritually renewed and rescued. Representation, these writers believed, conduced to class formation and definition—not as Adorno might have it, in the form of a “politics migrat[ing] into autonomous art” (32) when the moment for “political art” abates, but rather in an open-ended reader–narrator relationship. The poet in Leaves and the first-person narrators in Cane, Abyss, and Life all held that language, the representation of an event, encounter, or incident is just as significant as its experience. Whitman, Davis, London, and Toomer all insist that the relationship between the reader and the laboring and poor masses must be other than one of mere witnessing. Particularly in their narratively performative forms, they all emphasized the need for blurring the divisions between the self and the other; they all insisted on class transactions, on changing one world for another throughout. It is in this kind of

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ideology of artful exchange that perspectives on class can appear at their most revealing. One of the most talented writers of the 1930s, Meridel Le Sueur (1900–1996) was famous in American Left literary circles for her “proletarian” writings, her evocation of the “real rhythmic movement of the masses,” and for her first-person narrators who also insist on changing worlds and discovering new forms of class knowledge. Through reportage and fiction, Le Sueur was the biographer of ordinary, “anonymous” men and women and a spokesperson for the economically destitute. She produced over two dozen pieces of reportage; thirty short stories, a novel, and during the 1930s published regularly in Scribner’s, Yale Review, Pagany, and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as in such Communist Party publications as the New Masses and the Sunday Worker. The publication in 1940 of Salute to Spring, a collection of Le Sueur’s politically engaged prose poetry, marked the high point in her career when it was praised by critic Alfred Kazin and such prominent writers as Sinclair Lewis, Nelson Algren, and Carl Sandburg. Until the mid-forties Le Sueur continued to find ready publication for her work. Yet for twenty-five years following World War II, she was blacklisted from most publishing outlets, hounded by the FBI, and underwent her own economic hardships, what she has called her “dark time” (Coiner, Better Red 82).1 This chapter focuses on the issues of class and women’s political identity in Le Sueur’s writing but also questions the division between the “aesthetic” and the “political,” particularly as this distinction continues to be used against politically engaged writing.2 To better understand Le Sueur’s creative achievements, we need to carefully consider the cultural dialogue she engaged in with the thirties’ left and how the meaning of her voice is amplified by its involvement in the complex class discourses of this period. Le Sueur’s achievement in Salute to Spring (1940) not only shares the revolutionary content of proletarian fiction (it is formalistically designed to disrupt and replace bourgeois norms) but the collection becomes most engaged and effective via its formal properties. What this chapter addresses, then, are the features Le Sueur uses to “create” class—features based on the tropes of movement and stasis, features that personalize the political while portraying a working-class culture as natural and organic. The stories in Salute to Spring (1940), the analytical focus of this chapter, utilize such tropes along with those of journey and domesticity to reveal the alternative meanings of the representations of travelers and workers in the 1930s. Her representations often go up against the dominant cultural construction of movement as a masculine, exploitive activity and interplay stasis and movement to represent

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the complexities of a new political-cultural position.3 These tropes are particularly important given the fact that the issue of class took center stage in public discourse in the 1930s, a time of economic crisis and radical cultural reevaluations.4 The chapter then adds to this inquiry the importance of (narrative) setting in Le Sueur’s literary journalism with the argument that only by recording and recreating actual settings could Le Sueur hope to realize her goal of authenticating history. The trope of movement, both spatial and socioeconomic, plays a crucial role in forming and being formed by what I term Le Sueur’s “cultured sense of language.” This language is rooted in her class vision of an all-inclusive people’s culture and her view of the need to build from the working class a “native language” (“Proletarian” 205). The emphasis must be on an “American Language” conveyed, for example, by the “Midwestern mind [in] finding a place, [in] sensing a new and vigorous interrelation between himself and others, which at last will give him the free association from the factual bourgeois and decaying reality to the true subjective image of the communal artist” (“Proletarian” 206–207). Based on her conception of a “Midwestern” culture, the language represents, as Le Sueur describes it in “Proletarian Literature and the Middle West” (1935), “the slow beginning of a culture, the slow and wonderful accumulation of an experience that has hitherto been unspoken, that has been a gigantic movement of labor, the swingdown of the pick ax, the ax that made no sound but is now being heard” (205). Le Sueur’s language penetrates the inner and outer world of her characters “without falsifying it by attributing to them a revolutionary Marxist or feminist outlook they do not have” (Shulman 48). A radical political consciousness is produced and guided most strongly by a figurative, “non-political” use of language in which Le Sueur constructs her hopeful vision of the return of the oppressed (women and the working class) to the public domain of social and economic power. Le Sueur gets at the core issues of her working-class fiction not through an imbedded or declared didacticism, or through a reliance on essentialized realistic forms, but rather by deploying a language that relies on a politics of personal relationships5 and does not try to pass itself off as merely the literature of a class.

Le Sueur and the Left in the s Le Sueur became a member of the Communist Party (CP) in the early twenties and continued an active involvement in the radical cultural politics of the Midwest well into the eighties. Deeply committed to

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the Party and the proletariat, she was an active participant in the CP-sponsored John Reed Clubs and contributed to such left magazines as John Conroy’s Anvil. In the thirties Le Sueur produced a voluminous amount of fiction and journalism that contained accounts of what she directly witnessed and experienced: unemployment, labor unrest, strikes of the period, mining conditions, and droughts. Her relationship to 1930s literary radicalism, however, took the form of a dichotomous nature. As Deborah Rosenfelt has argued in reference to radical women writers of the thirties: The Left was a profoundly masculinist world in many of its human relationships, in the orientation of its literature, and even in the language used to articulate its cultural criticism; simultaneously, the Left gave serious attention on women’s issues, valued women’s contributions to public as well as private life, and generated an important body of theory on the Woman Question. (381)

While remaining committed to the communal vision espoused by the CP, Le Sueur became a chronicler of the ordinary. Many of her characters appear as anonymous, and almost all are linked by some kind of economic oppression tied to the dominant capitalist culture. But she also became a chronicler of an alternative kind of workingclass fiction in which she attempted to dissolve the artificial barriers “between public and private, between Party line and personal experience, between political consciousness and emotional need” (Coiner, Better Red 229). Le Sueur revised the genre of the proletarian novel. The kind of culture that Le Sueur describes in Salute to Spring not only supplied a counter to the CP’s masculinist world, it served to advance her belief that “all cultures come from the oppressed . . . the oppressed are the only repository of culture in monopoly capitalism” (“Interview” 12). Le Sueur, like many radical women writers of the thirties, put forth the conviction that “All lyricism, poetry, symbols, archetypes, [come] from the working class” (Schleuning 129). To be clear, Le Sueur counterposes the negativism of such “lost generation” writers as Hemingway and the positions of many of the prominent women writers of her generation, including Mary McCarthy, Dorothy Parker, Josephine Herbst, and Martha Gellhorn, who, as Nora Roberts argues, “deliberately set out to compose ‘like men’ in a sentence pared down and packed with irony” (53). Postulating a feminine essence as occupying the center of culture, Le Sueur counterpoints any socially constructed individualism. Against the negativism of the

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“lost generation” modernists, her organicism renders a positive vision spinning out of agrarianism and a communal social consciousness. The vision, though, is never politically chained. Le Sueur never gave up her personal narratives—founded on actual contact and exchange with her subject matter, and what she called her “lyricism”—to any political directive or party. Along with such writers as Muriel Rukeyser, John Dos Passos, and James T. Farrell, Le Sueur powerfully criticized middle-class values, probed relatively unexplored areas of literary rendition, including the political implications of motherhood and childbirth, and actively experimented with reportage and various prose–poem forms. It was foremost through such forms that Le Sueur was able to render a vision of human dignity, the threats to it, and the unsuspected ways ordinary people sustain a sense of selfworth.

Cultured Sense of Language Language, for Le Sueur, provides the base for women to speak, but to do so in multiple voices that run counter to the more monologic, masculinist style of male Proletarian realism, as practiced, for example, by Mike Gold, Nelson Algren, and Jack Conroy. This multivocality, for example, is at the heart of such Salute to Spring stories as “Biography of My Daughter,” in which Rhoda’s suffering and eventual death from tuberculosis is articulated by the voices of three women: the narrator, joined by Rhoda’s mother, and Rhoda’s sister, Marie. When Marie claims that while in the sanitarium Rachel died from “starvation,” the women react in unison: “It was as if the flesh of each one of us shrank a little forever” (106). The female characters in “Biography,” including the first-person female narrator, are all given an opportunity to voice their views and to implore others, including the reader, to “LISTEN” (110). Similarly, the narrator in “I Was Marching,” a story based on a 1934 truckers’ strike in Minneapolis, incorporates the multiple voices of the striking women to draw attention to their “needed action” (189) and movement: “The wide dilated eyes of the women were like my own. No one seemed to be answering questions now. They simply spoke, cried out, moved together now” (188–189). Le Sueur’s intention here is to recover lost and oppressed working-class “voices”—particularly those (mostly female) that stress testimony and experience—and to put such voices into history. Concomitantly, Le Sueur bases her language on a moving, living, communal human spirit. In this way she rejects what she considers to

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be the fetishized individualism of the middle class that denies that the individual is a “cellular part” of a “living whole” (“Fetish” 200). Le Sueur’s cultured sense of language rejects “neutrality and disinterestedness” while it seeks to create a future “image,” a future action that exists in the present even vaguely or only whispered, or only in a raised arm, or a word dropped in the dark but from these, because of full belief, [the writer] will produce a movement, even a miraculous form that has not hitherto existed. (“Fetish” 202)

Such a statement, made by Le Sueur in 1935, certainly points to her version of Marxist individualism anchored in American feminist sources. Its purpose equally speaks to, as Robert Shulman points out, a special combination “[that] brings together Marxism, American organicism, feminism, and a Lawrencian commitment to the dark and passional” (52). But what I want to emphasize is how such a purpose, going far beyond the obvious political connotations, can also be interpreted formalistically. Le Sueur deploys a language that is founded on forms that have not yet existed—forms that reside in spontaneous tropes of rhythm and movement that, among many other things, serve to enhance the humanity of the characters in the collection. Le Sueur’s cultured sense of language plays not only a role of commonality but also that of synthesis. The narrator not only synthesizes the forms of a 1930s reportage with a fusion of biography, regional history, essay, social criticism, and fiction, but she also initiates a dialogue with the old America, with the pre-World War II Kansas heartland she grew up in: What does an American think about the land, what dreams come from the sight of it, what painful dreaming? Are they only money dreams, power dreams? Is that why the land lied desolate like a loved woman who has been forgotten? Has she been misused through dreams of power and conquest? (10–11)

The narrator suggests that an individual’s alternative relationship with the land can be used to dismantle traditional views of bourgeois individualism. But she does so, as do all of Le Sueur’s first-person narrators in Salute to Spring, under the belief that “the only individuality is the good of all and that life is not aggressive and that growth is not concerned with itself ” (“Formal” 209). In “Corn Village” the narrator

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links such a belief with a synthesis of myth and symbol: The symbols of this country are winter, the departure of the year, the “death of all sweet things.” It is the symbol of man’s foreboding and his birth and his death. Life is not embodied. It is either just dying or being born. Who can tell? All our Americans have had this anxiety of life at low ebb. (9)

The reader experiences this synthesis (or the described action, movement, event) of the phenomenal world and the mediation of consciousness itself. There is nothing left but the tension of a feeling that cannot unburden itself: “You look and look and you cannot see life anywhere apparent, only in bitterness, and spareness sold out for that neat, hygienic and sterile success that we all must have” (17). The use of the second-person voice here evokes the process by which Le Sueur presents an individual (i.e., in this case the implied reader) who embodies qualities shared by many others. At the end of the story, addressing the land (Kansas) in a secondperson form, the narrator adopts a position contrasting European American culture with Native American. That is, the narrator seeks to establish the identities of the people she describes, and her own, “through an act of homing” and, as is usual in Le Sueur, she moves toward a transpersonal and communal, rather than an individualistic, sense of self: “Not going to Paris or Morocco or Venice, instead staying with you, trying to be in love with you, bent upon understanding you, bringing you to life. For your life is my life and your death is my death” (25). “Corn Village” signals a movement found throughout Salute to Spring: there is a coming-to-presence (i.e., including bringing the reader to the “present” moment), which requires (historical) cognition, followed by a coming-to-consciousness, class consciousness, which requires a communal and/or individual recognition. The narrator brings this process to a climax at the close of the story, a technique replicated in “The Girl,” “Tonight is Part of the Struggle,” and “I Was Marching.”

A Particularistic Vision Le Sueur’s narrators in Salute to Spring invite the reader to participate in a very different world from that of the male proletarian writers of her time. Indeed, Le Sueur’s focus is less on the familiar literary prototype of the male proletarian hero and urban environments than it is on rural settings, economies, and agrarian dissent

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movements. All of Le Sueur’s first-person narrators in Salute to Spring are women and respond to the richness of their natural environments, be it ironically (“A Hungry Intellectual”), wistfully and romantically (“Annunciation”), or in moments of misapprehension, anger, or despair (“Biography of my Daughter”). In providing a distinctly socialized, gendered view of class, Le Sueur links a kind of agrarian pastoral vision with consciousness to make her case for social agitation. In another contrast to the 1930s male proletarian literature, Le Sueur’s narrators sometimes combine a multivocality with a recurrent symbolic situation of a pregnant woman, as in “Tonight is Part of the Struggle” in which the pregnant Leah attends her first mass meeting with her unemployed husband Jock: She hears only some of the words, the ones that her body’s experience repeated to her, the class struggle, militant workers, the broad masses. They were like words in the first primer, gigantic, meaningless, but she leaned over with the others, to see, to hear, to touch, make real, make the lips on them. (138)

The cacophony of noises that Le Sueur provides in these stories embodies a potentially democratizing force—Leah eventually feels that she has become an equal “part” and participant in the struggle. The drama of multiple voices, experienced through Leah’s perceptions, and combined with the narrator’s personal, poetic language, renders Leah’s experience of communal connection: She looked down on the great black sea of bodies, head like black wheat growing in the same soil, the same wind. Something seemed to enter her and congeal. I am part, she wanted to say. (138)

This technique, of course, raises other questions about Le Sueur— namely, the importance of gender to Le Sueur’s particularistic vision and to the understanding of power itself. Using gender as a uniting force—Leah welcomes the new birth that stirs her body into a connection with the world—Le Sueur constantly evokes the subjective. The (female) narrator-protagonist in “Annunciation,” for example, stresses the fact that there are certain female experiences and feelings that she has never read or heard about: I’ve never heard anything about how a woman feels who is going to have a child, or about how a pear tree feels bearing its fruit. I would

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like to read these things many years from now, when I am barren and no longer trembling like this. . . . (94).

She asks what political possibilities might result from a radical critique of the categories of identity. What new shapes of politics emerge when identity as a common ground and a communal goal is no longer constrained? And to what extent does the effort to locate an individual identity as the foundation for a working-class politics preclude a radical inquiry into the cultural construction and regulation of identity itself? In some very important senses Salute to Spring can be viewed as private and extrahistorical, providing a particularistic vision in contrast to the more universalized stance taken by many of Le Sueur’s male contemporaries. Adapting the conventions of realism and the innovations of modernism, Salute to Spring reveals how gendered narratives relate to and inform class relations in America. For Le Sueur’s characters, categories of class operate not only as an organizing principle that enable access to and limitations on social movement and interaction but are also reproduced on intimate, concrete levels. Thus, Le Sueur’s fiction addressed such issues as women’s physiological and sexual experiences—sexual initiation, pregnancy, rape, sterilization, miscarriage, physical abuse—at a time when such topics rarely appeared in literature, working-class or otherwise. Such a focus has direct political implications. As Coiner has remarked, [Le Sueur] implicitly questioned Marxism’s primacy-of-production theory, which defines production as the distinctively human activity. This theory encodes activities carried out in the home, to which women have historically been disproportionately consigned, as less valuable than men’s activities outside it. (“Literature” 163)

Le Sueur’s particularistic vision is constructed around narratives of female desire in which the subjectivity of working-class women is brought to the fore.

Text and Body For Le Sueur, much like for Whitman and London, class is corporeal. Indeed, as she has claimed, her politics “was written in the book of flesh.” As her working-class narrators (all female) attest, the body of the woman and her texts will lead us inevitably from one to the other. The text and bodies, desire and labors in Salute to Spring must be

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read not only as gendered and classed elaborations of each other, but also, as Paula Rabinowitz points out, as constructions “whose textual elaboration develops from the (maternal) body of the (fraternal) working class” (5). The action of so many of Le Sueur’s stories tends to promote the importance of biological creation, partly as a revolutionary force but also as a filter through which only the most essential ideas and “words” can pass. Such is the case of the pregnant Leah when she attends the “mass meeting” in “Tonight is Part of the Struggle”: I am a producer, she thought with her hand on the protruding belly of the baby, but not from hand and brain . . . She heard only some of the words, the ones that her body’s experience repeated to her, the class struggle, militant workers, the broad masses. They were like words in the first primer, gigantic, meaningless, but she leaned over with the others, to see, to hear, to touch, make real, make the lips form on them. (138)

The only way for Leah to know “class,” the narrator suggests, is through the intuitive and natural rethinking and renarrating of it, either literally or metaphorically, by and through the body. Le Sueur locates the source of class consciousness within the pregnant body of the working-class woman. But in more specifically gendered terms, Le Sueur situates “female working-class historicity in women’s reproductive bodies rather than in the marking of labor on male bodies” (Rabinowitz, Labor 97). Indeed, for Le Sueur, male labor cannot be valued over, nor should it be separated from, a woman’s childbirth labor: it is simply a different kind of class labor. And even though Le Sueur romanticizes the maternal and maternity, maternity is not an end in itself. Rather, as the first-person narrator suggests in “Annunciation,” her pregnancy, momentarily taking her body from the state of being constantly liable to commodification, inspires her to “writ[e] things down on . . . little scraps of paper” (81). Pregnancy extends the narrator’s vision not only to create a language that would adequately convey her experience of maternity but also to “preserve” this experience: . . . I had got the habit of carrying slips of paper around with me and writing on them, as I am doing now. I had a feeling then that something was happening to me of some kind of loveliness I would want to preserve in some way. (87)

Maternity alters the body (and so the discourse) of the workingclass woman producing a story whose form speaks for the value of improvisation and spontaneity—suggested by the scraps of paper.

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The narrator, however, hopes to memorize on her body the connections between the ripening pear tree, the child ripening within her, and “[e]verything” that “seems to be moving along a curve of creation” (91). Although intimate and private (“There wasn’t a person I could have told it to, that I was going to have a child” 89), maternity appears not so much as a universal equivalent for women, as it does a female experience that both rejects and produces alienation. As such, maternity is a state that best receives a communal and political message while it can also serve to (temporarily) create it: Yet I am excited. The many houses have become like an orchard blooming soundlessly. The many people have become like fruits to me, the young girl in the room alone before her mirror, the young man sleeping, the mother, all are shaking with their inward blossoming, shaken by the windy blooming, moving along a future curve. (92)

As evidenced here, in Le Sueur women often experience childbirth as a form of transformation. And this transformation can have the most profound collective implications. The knowledge that results from such implications, from such historicity, is “embodied,” producing a standpoint that is situated as a material entity among other material entities. But that “childbirth is the biological basis for Le Sueur’s faith in a revolutionary new world” (Shulman 59) is only part of the story. The language that results from the narrator’s changing body is not of linear progression, but of stops and starts, repetitions, curves, and movements: “Far inside the vertical stem there must be a movement, a river of sap rising from below and radiating outward in many directions clear to the tips of the leaves” (96). Significantly, “Annunciation,” in order to stress the interrelation between the narrator, her body, and language, ends with a reference to the narrator’s writing process: “I am writing on a piece of wrapping paper now. It is about ten o’clock” (97). Significantly also, the story ends with the symbolically resonant pear tree “standing motionless” (97), which foregrounds the obligations that the narrator feels to herself and her community—her in-progress adoption of an active, communally connected self. Le Sueur grounds such a self in the interrelations between text and body. For her the working-class body is no brute biological or material entity. Rather it is a culturally mediated form. She does not separate an “intelligible body” from a “useful body,” for they often mirror and support each other, as does Leah’s body in “Tonight is Part of the Struggle” (138). Or, as in the case of the hungry and starving bodies

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in “Annunciation” and “Biography of My Daughter.” In effect, Le Sueur’s bodies must not be understood simply as a demonstration of political agency but as an affirmation of the ability to speak the “subject” of the body, to express the body in language, to hold that basic knowledge is made known through the senses and that such a knowledge is directly accessible to a community. Suggesting that bodily sensation has a place in “true aesthetic” and political interaction, Le Sueur advocated “organic sensation” as one of the most positive virtues of the sensitive reader (to which she makes a direct appeal in “Biography”: “LISTEN” (98, 108, 109, 110)), a new sign of the authentic.

Movement Stories of crisis and community in Salute to Spring are first of all stories of movement: stories of becoming that invariably focus on change. Salute to Spring often combines narratives with physical and figurative displacements (e.g., “I Was Marching,” “The Girl”). Indeed, motion in Le Sueur emphasizes that striving and desire is more important than any stable realization; and that a sense of one’s place in a community takes precedence over any revolutionary fulfillment. As evidenced in “I Was Marching,” she combines these effects with her interests in a distinctly American quest for movement and in American tragedies of displacement. The female narrator-protagonist in “I Was Marching,” a “middle-class” outsider, becomes part of a communal movement that is both terrifying and beautiful, a movement that adds up to a “mass feeling” that can only be described as something organic, natural, and necessary: I excelled in competing with others and I knew instantly that these people were NOT competing at all, that they were acting in a strange, powerful trance of movement together. (179)

Even though the narrator feels “afraid” of “losing herself” and of becoming “unknown and lost” (178), she is drawn toward a movement that “stands for an important psychic change” (178): . . . I knew my feelings to be those belonging to disruption, chaos, and disintegration and I felt that direct and awful movement, mute and powerful, drawing them into a close and glowing cohesion like a powerful conflagration in the midst of the city. (179)

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The narrator uses such kinetic words as “gleaming,” “mixing,” “drawing,” and “breaking” not only to express her fascination with movement and its connections to class consciousness and change but also to formulate a self-conscious meta-discourse. Indeed, movement (action) can become the discourse that supersedes such hollow words as “Humanity,” “Truth,” and “The Golden Rule” (177): “Now in a crisis the word falls away and the skeleton of that action shows in terrific movement” (178). “I Was Marching” chronicles the state from wasted, ineffectual, sterile movement to a movement of decision and purpose, a converted movement. And the reader is allowed to view this motion from a removed locus, and this facilitates perspective. And yet, as signaled in the narrator’s position in “I Was Marching,” Le Sueur’s female narrators, rather than embracing relocation, seek to establish their identities through their acts of joining a community and move toward a transpersonal as opposed to an individualistic sense of self. Le Sueur’s women narrators, under their various stratagems of and quests for movement, not only attempt to come to terms with their environment, but wish to locate themselves in that environment. Thus “I Was Marching,” like the first frame story “Corn Village,” ends with the contentment to be exactly where the narrator is: “moving with direction, of thousands of feet, and my own breath with the gigantic breath” (191). Once again text becomes body and, far from being a minor motif, movement becomes the story’s key structuring and animating element, and one of the key ways that Le Sueur builds up pressure to a breaking point. Although movement in “I Was Marching” can be expansive and freeing, it can also express the narrator’s anxiety not only about her precarious situation in a hostile terrain but also about the changing sense of self that results from a movement into an unknown future. Generally speaking, movement in Salute to Spring occurs along borders that are sometimes geographic and sometimes cultural or epistemological. For Le Sueur, the act of the mind seeks always a correlative in an act of the body. Physical motion may not be progress, it may even be an illusion, but it remains the medium of which she must make the most—a medium that best expresses the working-class struggle: This is real movement issuing from the close reality of mass feeling. This is the first real rhythmic movement I have ever seen. My heart hammers terrifically. My hands are swollen and hot. No one is producing this movement. It is a movement up which all are moving softly, rhythmically, terribly. (188)

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As such, in Le Sueur’s model for the revolutionary new society, movement is predicated on spontaneous action, without the need for a clearly defined leadership, or cadre of leaders, or Party directives. Rather, Le Sueur, in treating intimacy and personal contact as fundamentally political, emphasizes concrete experiences and the “hard practical substance of effective and continuing relationship” (Williams, Marxism 212). To be clear, a woman’s ideal location can best be derived from the patterns that underlie her actual and continual motion. This motion implies an ethics and a politics. In “Women on the Breadlines” (1932), for example, written during the period in which Le Sueur composed Salute to Spring, language is dependent upon direct statements of physical acts and personal feelings. But unlike “I Was Marching,” “Women on the Breadlines” illustrates the terrible consequences of forced stasis: “It is appalling to think that these women sitting so listless in the room may work as hard as it is possible for a human being to work, may labor night and day . . .” (142–143). Similarly, “The suffering of endless labor” (143) amidst “the brutality of hunger and cold” (142), the narrator goes on to argue, is equally unacceptable: It’s not the suffering of birth, death, love that the young reject, but the suffering of endless labor without dream, eating the spare bread in bitterness, being a slave without the security of a slave. (143)

The narrator’s feelings move among these women, who seem so unusual in their visibility (“It’s one of the great mysteries of the city where women go when they are out of work and hungry. There are not many women in the bread line” (140–141)). In the narrator’s interpretation of their political response to this invisibility, these women “arm themselves alone” (142); they are the debris of movement. Movement is the agency in which Le Sueur condenses the various experiences into the almost archetypal experiences of her characters. For example, in “The Girl,” the tropes of movement and stasis, journey and domesticity, function within the broader arenas of class. The “Girl” (i.e., the not-so-young woman), the narrator tells us at the beginning of the story, wants “nothing” to change, and on her car trip through the Tehachapi mountains, she is happy to be her “real lone self” (65). But the road, replete with an “intense September heat,” “fierce mountains of sand,” and “bare gleaming rock faces” (65), tires her and slows her down. At this early point in the story the woman seems to be much more interested in reading the natural past

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(“These mountains . . . are thousands of years old” 72) than any kind of political future. It is only after she meets the unemployed “boy” (i.e., the young man) and they begin to drive through the mountains together that movement appears to suggest the possibility of a sensual encounter and, later, the tragedy of “never chang[ing]” (80): They rose on that vast naked curve into the blue blue sky, and dropped into the crevasse and rose again on the same curve. Lines and angles, and barer earth curves, tawny and rolling in the heat. (72–73)

The Girl’s obsession with her personal possessions—car, coin purse, keys—are put into question by the movement of the car, the elemental nature that surrounds the two travelers, and the young man’s relaxed, unhurried, sensual nature. The teacher, however, refuses change, which has both relational and political ramifications: the Girl does not become part of the ripening natural world that the unemployed worker represents, nor does she choose to experience his problems and working-class world. The moment of unity passes and with it the opportunity to see oneself as part of a larger group—for Le Sueur, the necessary understanding for a humane and ethical life. The archetypal experience in “The Girl” ultimately takes the form of an aborted image. The Girl’s movement, which could have resulted in an irrevocable change, takes her instead into stasis, back to her former life. There is not, in Le Sueur’s words, some kind of extremity and willingness to act blind that comes in any creation of a new and unseen thing, some kind of final last step that has to be taken with full intellectual understanding . . . the creation of a future “image,” a future action that exists in the present even vaguely or only whispered, or only in a raised arm, or a word dropped in the dark but from these . . . a movement, even a miraculous form that has not hitherto existed. (“Fetish” 202)

The Girl does not move into the “dark, chaotic, passional world of another class, the proletariat” (“Fetish” 202). Rather, for Le Sueur she has denied her “complete body,” she is unwilling to embrace a “full belief” and go into “that darkness” (Fetish 202). Narrators in Salute to Spring can both emphasize the ambivalent significance of movement within the mythography of the United States (ending of “The Girl”) and the importance of movement over place in a kind of “politics of relocation,” which recognizes the risks of relocation but also the possibility that the individual (woman) may

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experience movement as expansive and liberating. Through such tropes of movement Le Sueur constantly tries to articulate experiences whose meaning lies outside of the discourse of mainstream American culture. This movement must always be “outward,” however, toward the “body politic”: In all these little houses there are people—you would hardly know it. They have no or little contact. . . . In each of these little houses there is a man—or a woman, almost isolated. You can tell by the way they look that they feel lost and isolated. . . . They walk along the road with every line of their body showing where they have been wrenched off the body politic. Their bodies do not flow easily—do not move easily— they move as if they [are] wound inward and not outward. (qtd. in Coiner 128)

Le Sueur constantly reminds us that her working-class fiction is created and experienced in group situations, that “organic knowledge” (“Formal” 208) is more important than theoretical knowledge and that “spurious individualism . . . means only chaos and death” (“My Town” 198). Opposing this knowledge to an individualistic, capitalistic culture in her assessment of the economic problems of the 1930s, Le Sueur tried to arrive at an alternative to the dominant structures of class. To present such an alternative, “A Hungry Intellectual” contrasts movement to stasis. The movement of Hobbes, the “intellectual,” is toward stasis, words without action, and “all sorts of great highsounding phrases he must have remembered from school” (54). Although advocating “struggle” and “progress,” Hobbes’s phrases are incommensurate with his actions: “And yet he seemed neither to struggle nor to make any progress” (54). Unlike Hobbes who believes that “[change] must come from the intellect with understanding and non-violence, non-resistance,” the narrator, “[f]rom her experience of having a baby,” holds that [“change] comes out violently” (55). When the narrator sees her husband and others moving toward the Capitol for the Hunger March, she describes—imperatively, defiantly—a map of movements that delineates a series of forward steps: “. . . they all looked like the same man, loose dirty clothes, angry pressing-forward faces, and all lean as a soup bone, but they came in a thick swift cloud, black and angry, bearing banners . . .” (61). Contrary to Hobbes’s movements (e.g., “stepping back away” 51), which are usually those of one who sees himself somehow apart from the situation he is caught in, and whose meanings have “nothing

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natural and outright” (57), the narrator’s movements are natural and non-defeatist: “A woman has always got faith and hope certainly” (62). And contrary to Hobbes’s language, in which “the say is everything” (56), the narrator’s language is “actual,” “natural,” based on an “[u]nderstanding [that] comes in the stomach” (55). The movements of Le Sueur’s resisting female characters are both inside and outside, both the advent of something “far” and “other,” and the outburst of something irrepressible, to be judged no more negatively (or positively) than a natural event would be.

Concluding Connections Some critics have identified Le Sueur’s evocation of feminism as a form of essentialism. Paula Rabinowitz criticizes Le Sueur’s portrayal of maternity for “verg[ing] on essentialism because it invokes women’s biological capacity to bear children without interrogating the cultural platitudes surrounding motherhood,” and because it “suggest[s] that women’s maternity determines female political consciousness” (Rabinowitz, “Maternity” 545–546). “Le Sueur forecloses the possibility of creating an egalitarian working-class community,” Anthony Dawahare writes, “since men are prevented ‘biologically’ from acquiring the requisite knowledge of, and therefore belonging to, ‘the whole earth’” (417). Constance Coiner in her comments on Le Sueur’s, The Girl, concludes, “[t]o the extent that The Girl promotes biologism, binary logic, and woman as myth, the novel supports the very system it seeks to destroy” (121). Laura Hapke faults “I Was Marching” for containing “the message that women are at their best as reserve troops in labor skirmishes” and for “reiteratively suggest[ing] that men teach women to be militant” (91). Le Sueur’s work certainly opens itself to such criticisms as does her proclivity to idealize the working class and her “metaphysic of nature” based on a longing for a simpler, preindustrial existence. Nonetheless, against such charges, Le Sueur’s position on women and class, if anchored in the broader context of the American 1930s, reveals a cultural program of its own, however rife with simplifications and irresolutions. Le Sueur was part of the political and mass-cultural current of the 1930s that, even in its most fantastic and escapist forms, was about movement toward genuine freedom and emancipation. This obsession with movement, brought on by the expressive culture of the 1930s, was at the base of much of the dance, architecture, the new sound films, and documentaries of the period.6 The characters and narrator-protagonists in Salute to Spring are filled with feelings

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that can only be articulated in movement; the stories focus on tracing associations between a collective ideal, founded on mobility, and a more general idiom of dislocation and estrangement. Consequently, I would suggest that interpretations of Le Sueur’s fiction need to be based on new aesthetic principles of their own—closely considering the formal properties of her work—rather than simply attempting to adhere to the principles of a “realistic,” or “proletarian,” or “bourgeois” aesthetic. To map her cultural terrain, Le Sueur employs, as I’ve tried to argue here, a cultured sense of language, which depends on the authority of experiential reality linked directly to a formal integration of feeling and knowledge. Only through such a language can she express the protean and sometimes elusive concept of class. Le Sueur believed that she would be able to articulate her radical demands and programs more successfully within a rich, multifarious American idiom of national and popular protest. In this way, her “working-class” fiction names a relationship between readers and texts, a relationship whose specificity is defined by the effects it produces. The effects of Le Sueur’s language in Salute to Spring center on physical and figurative motion as a mechanism of coming to terms with America’s own cultural crisis. Both the male and female characters in the collection are depicted in terms of their relationship to Le Sueur’s forms and vision of “movement.” The women are divided between those who have no relation to movement, or Le Sueur’s “natural life,” and those whose lives demonstrate the many faces of it. Salute to Spring, then, shows the ways in which Le Sueur institutes an alternative cultural practice, a historicity in her extremely self-conscious narrators, and a set of coded cultural norms. Le Sueur’s narrators produce accounts in which the self exists in a disharmonious relation with its culture, history, and language, and in the process Salute to Spring develops its own (alternative) cultured sense of language. The changes that Le Sueur suggest cannot be sought in some utopian fantasy of the future or in a nostalgic rural past; rather, they will be found in the material and symbolic practices that have been marginalized by the cultural work of dominant institutions, social practices, and even academic criticism.

Le Sueur’s Literary Journalism: Writing Dark Times The settings of Salute to Spring are essential to Le Sueur’s discourses of physical acts, personal feelings, and what might be called her “historiography”: who is entitled to make truth claims about American

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history and how can these claims be rendered most effectively? What is often missing from so many of the histories on literary journalism and the developing cultural and literary criticism on it, however, is the importance of setting in narrative.7 Conventionally defined, “the setting of a narrative or dramatic work is the general locale, historical time, and social circumstances in which its action occurs; the setting of an episode or scene within a work is the particular physical location in which it takes place” (Abrams 172). Pierre Bourdieu complicates this definition, suggesting the need to objectify and analyze the relationship between the analyzer and his or her object of analysis. Failure to do so, Bourdieu suggests, frequently results in the analyzer assuming a privileged position (always self-attributed) vis-à-vis setting and effacing relations of power that may be inherent in the relationship.8 Most concerned with Bourdieu’s sense of self-referentiality as it applies to “social circumstances,” this section will examine setting in relation to the writers who left their habitual surroundings in order to create unhabitual settings for themselves and their readers. It will also attempt to make the oversized subject of setting more manageable by examining its uses in Le Sueur’s literary journalism. My contention is that the narratives that grew out of her settings were instrumental in allowing her to enter into the thirties’ current of displacing the novel as the most prestigious form of literary expression. Le Sueur’s settings dispute the independence of political action while reflecting an uneasiness about telling an individual’s story when environment threatens to render the very notion of “individualism” increasingly problematic. Here are a few questions this section and the next two chapters will explore: Are there stylistic commonalities among those writers from the thirties, like Agnes Smedley, Meridel Le Sueur, and James Agee that can be deduced from the fact that their aesthetics depended largely on the settings in which they wrote? I mean their actual settings before they converted them to narrative settings on which they make their truth claims—claims, of course, imbued with inconsistency, indeterminacy, and the ways in which culture contributes to domination and to the process of social reproduction. Literary journalism—at least the kind I’m most interested in—usually has a class or cultural setting that not only influences the form of the writing but can provide, as in the examples of Le Sueur and Agnes Smedley, blueprints for various categories of narrative that have generally escaped literary classification and theory. Colorado silver mines, Minneapolis strike scenes, New York City jails—the settings of Le Sueur and Smedley—not only present the problem of

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fictional texts that take the guise of nonfictional discourse but illustrate as well an inseparability of setting from these authors narrating their social and class positions.9 Smedley and Le Sueur counter what writer Jonathan Raban has said about documentary: “documentary usually deals with other people, classes, subcultures—‘other’ than the people, class, and subcultures inhabited by the documentarian” (1). Although Le Sueur’s background is middle class, she became radically and permanently committed to “inhabiting” the workingclass worlds she experienced. Smedley came from the lower- and working classes to become a middle-class writer who returned to the settings of her former working-class environments to practice her literary journalism. This section and chapter 6 will explore, respectively, Le Sueur’s and Smedley’s creations of setting in the context of their immersion narratives that rely on a presumed relationship to real experience for its effect and that seek to persuade its readers of urgent political truths.

Immersions for More than a Day What I mean by immersion is not a temporary immersion in subjects (and I certainly do not wish to deny the importance of this category) in the sense, for example, of a John McPhee, who for a time obsessively centered on such subjects as geology, canoeing, oranges, and bear hunting, or a Tracy Kidder who spent several months working for a computer company before producing The Soul of a New Machine, or Mark Kramer who observed surgeons for two years before writing Invasive Procedures.10 What I mean instead is a different kind of immersion, what I call an insistence immersion, which includes the following features: (1) the writer/protagonist/narrator immerses himself or herself in or is unwillingly immersed by a prescribed environment that he or she wishes to change; (2) the immersed subject locates himself or herself near the border between factual discourse and fictional discourse but does not propose an elimination of that border; (3) the immersed subject usually charges the middle class with an ethical mission to alleviate social suffering. Following in such traditions as London’s Abyss and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), Depression-era examples would include Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited (1933), Clara Weatherwax’s Marching! Marching! (1935), Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money (1930), Meridel Le Sueur’s first-person narrations in Salute to Spring, and Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth. It was in the context of giving distinct impressions of objective and direct perceptions of reality that such writers turned to the genres of documentary, ethnography, and

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journalism to communicate their preoccupations with “objectivity,” often eliding into their particular versions of immersion and setting. These thirties’ works, often termed “proletarian fiction,” embody a very distinctive kind of cultural capital in the American left of the 1930s, one that depended on, as Lawrence Hanley has argued, “the conversion of subaltern experience into cultural authority” as opposed to another kind of cultural capital, “represented by defectors from the middle class like John Dos Passos, Granville Hicks, and Kenneth Burke, that secured its cultural authority in the familiar traditional currencies of education, social networks, and credentialed expertise” (“Smashing Cantatas” 132). Although this distinction is helpful historically, I would prefer to complicate it by emphasizing another category: one that differentiates first-person narratives of the period that deploy insistence immersions from those that don’t (Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed, 1934; Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, 1939). In this way, we might better understand how such writers as Le Sueur—and in the next chapter, Smedley—with their “zero social capital” (Hanley, “Smashing Cantatas” 132), could gain access to a literary system on the basis of authentic firsthand experience and its representations.

Settings, Immersions, Circumstances Aspiring to a kind of reportorial realism, Le Sueur, too, insisted on “circumstances” in her efforts to strive for a mass comprehensibility. As evidenced in Salute to Spring, she wished to render, while counterpointing any socially constructed individualism, a positive vision spinning out of agrarianism and a communal self-consciousness. The relationship of setting to circumstance is not, as I see it, that of a background for a central object of attention. Instead, in Salute to Spring, it is the focus for all the first-person narratives. I would prefer to see this relationship as one of mutual decoding or demystification. Setting and immersion mutually reinforce, inform, and explain each other and can shed additional light on how the 1930s was “the last time in our country’s history that the left focused to such a degree on reclaiming the nation’s past and present, when it was possible to be both radical and patriotic” (Browder 174). The form of Le Sueur’s fiction/nonfiction discourse—a form upon which she makes her true claims of widespread suffering— incorporates the real voices of living subjects as her authoritative sources. It is designed to shock her middle-class readership. Because of space restrictions, I’ll limit my analysis to Le Sueur’s “Evening in a Lumber Town” (New Masses, 1926), “What Happens in A Strike” (American

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Mercury, 1934), “Women Are Hungry” (American Mercury, 1934), and then briefly return to “I Was Marching.” First, though, some historical background. In the 1930s, the American Communist Party (ACP) actively promoted “reportage,” what the classic anthology of proletarian writing, Proletarian Literature in the U.S. (1935) (edited by, among others, Michael Gold, Granville Hicks, and Isodore Schneider), termed “three-dimensional reporting” (211), which rejected the expected “objectivity” of traditional journalism and was intended to make the reader “experience” the event. Its most important task was to detail Depression suffering and deprivation and, in Le Sueur’s case, especially the suffering of unemployed urban women. Some of its most important practitioners from the period included John Dos Passos, Myra Page, John L. Spivak, Tillie Olsen, Agnes Smedley, and Meridel Le Sueur. Reportage, going far beyond simply depicting the facts, wished to present connections, disclose causes, and suggest solutions.11 Linked specifically to this historical period, it was a particularly important form for women writers. As Nancy Roberts has argued in her work on Dorothy Day, it “represented one of the few socially acceptable ways for women in radical movements to function as activists” (179). Le Sueur, like many of her contemporaries, conceived of her reportage/journalism as a catalyst for social change, bringing her readers the direct experience of injustice, poverty, and oppression. Yet, like Day, Le Sueur also believed that the most compelling way to get her political ideas across was to use fictional techniques. Thus, she deployed scene setting, “lyricism,” characterization, juxtaposition of contrasting images, tropic language, and reportorial realism in ways and degrees rarely found in conventional journalism. Consider the somber setting of Le Sueur’s “Evening in a Lumber Town,” a piece she wrote for the New Masses in 1926. Spatially, the narrator/subject is the static center of the tale witnessing, observing, and telling what she sees on this evening in a lumber town. But in a way reminiscent of the narrator in Life in the Iron Mills (both inside and outside the described events), she also expresses an intimate knowledge of the poor laborers: “Their sharp faces have a senseless look, the senseless look that endless labor breathes into the faces of women” (163). Oblivious to the narrator’s presence, the “night shift men leave the houses and in a steady, living stream move toward the mills” (163). Movement is all around her—“swarming children” run and flutter past her (163), “a man walks with his lean stark face thrust forward” (164), “Very small children run like rats through the dusk” (163), “A young girl with an orange scarf around her neck sidles by”

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(164)—but the center of her attention becomes an inverse movement, the day-shift men leaving the mills for home: Six of them come down the street now close together, moving together like a pack, swiftly and silently, all in black hanging clothes, heavy with perspiration, dark faces under low caps, walking side by side, slouching all alike; all with small pails, sullen faces, their eyes like the eyes of beaten animals. They come swiftly and darkly down the narrow street from the mill. (164)

Instead of any kind of affirmative, communal movement (e.g., as in “I Was Marching” or “Tonight is Part of the Struggle”), the movement here is sullen, despairing, futile; but this time it asserts more than Le Sueur’s belief that “capitalism isolates and destroys us, cutting us away from the communal identity that can save the soul as well as society” (Pratt xxviii). In the middle of this “dark stream of men” (164), the narrator, immersed in an environment she knows must change, is baffled by what appears to be their collective “acceptance” and “their giving up to death” (165): “[The working men] do not celebrate their being. They adhere so closely to the terrible, natural things that they are impersonalized, nullified . . . No excess consciousness, only the blindness of necessity” (165). The narrator would like to believe that the laborers have found some kind of satisfaction in their resignation, but her doubts persist: “They must shuffle into death much as they shuffle to work. They must have a living satisfaction in dying together in mines and factories because in life they are always so close together in this herd” (165). One of the peculiarities of the sketch is that, unlike, for example, “Women on the Breadlines” or “Beer Town” (1933), no one speaks; none of the subjects are identified by name, no kind of solution is proposed to their “raw hunger” (164), other than clearly suggesting the problems—most importantly, the “exigencies of poverty” (164) that take grotesque, humiliating, tragic, forms, amidst the “half-mad background of a Goya” (163) and “the terrible comedy” of a Chaplin (164). Throughout the piece, the narrator constantly blurs the distinction between factual and fictional discourse, abruptly shifting from lyrical, figurative descriptions (“there is a terrible kind of beauty in his face, the spare tragic beauty that is molded by the terror and horror of necessity” (164)) to staccato-like, imperative editorial pronouncements (“Poverty is grotesque. It is violent and abnormal” 163). What Le Sueur has said about the relationship between her

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“lyricism” and “social reality” in reference to I Hear Men Talking (1983) encapsulates the technique of “Evening in a Lumber Town”: I think the lyricism of the writing here begins to function as part of the action, as part of the subjective feelings of the people and above all in the interaction between their feelings and despair and the events of their lives and the life of the town. . . . The lyrical is used as a reaction to the deathly action of the economics and history of the town. There is more of a social action, and research into the social reality of their lives and their hurts from it. (150)

On one level, Le Sueur, like many of the other writers discussed in the chapters that follow, stood in a place of tension between the aesthetic and the political, or the lyrical and the reportorial. But perhaps on a deeper level she struggled against any uses of reportorial language that were ineffective in moving an audience. “Evening in a Lumber Town” ends with a solemn lyrical description of the “dying” working men, their movement culminating in stasis and silence: I have seen the faces of men, stiff and proud, already glistening like minerals, dying together as they work, swiftly, huddled against each other and silent. (165)

In “What Happens in a Strike,” Le Sueur fuses her journalistic experience and her knowledge of literary technique to document the infamous 1934 truckers’ strike in Minneapolis. Once again her setting combines with the narrator’s insistence immersion (“We are all swung into the most intense and natural organization I have ever seen. These men are on the spot, acting on their own, visible and known within the city, acting outwardly and militantly for all, and they know it” (189)) to contravene the possibility of any effective political action involving only individuals. Capitalist middle-class discourse, coming from “liberal doctors and lawyers” in office buildings towering above the strike headquarters, is portrayed as misinformed and disconnected from the strikers’ needs: “Nothing will happen,” they say to each other, but there is expectation in their eyes. “Nothing can happen. This will all be settled square and above board. Why, this is the twentieth century! This is the civilized city! This will all be settled over the table.” (185–186)

Similarly, the words of the middle-class employers, in the context of union negotiations and labor-board conferences, appear

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incomprehensible to the working masses. As the president of the union exclaims, “I can’t understand a word of any of these elegant negotiations. Speak in terms of bread and butter. I’m through listening to words” (186). Importantly, the words that Le Sueur uses to articulate workingclass protest and to condemn the middle-class worlds of the sketch (e.g., “Three blocks away business was moving thickly, women were shopping” (190)) are couched in a figurative language that signals the organic, natural realization of worker solidarity and her all-important patterns of movement. In these instances, she defies forms of literal representation: This is the organization that comes naturally from the event, of thousands of men conducting themselves as one man, disciplining themselves out of innate and peculiar responsibility. Pickets continue to pour into the market area. Hundreds of men are poured out of the building and hundreds pour in filling the ranks as fast they are emptied . . . You cannot see men any more, only the forward-going body, the face marked by one emotion. (189)

The narrator is only able to come to such realizations and conclusions because of her immersed position in the action of the strike: unlike those who “wai[t] at home” and “get nervous” and are unable “to hear what is going on,” she “can feel the continual drain of men from the hall” (189). Only as an immersed advocate-participant can she both report the literal facts (“What happened was this . . .” (189)) and (figuratively) interpret and depict their significance: “The design moved toward a crisis, clotted in centrifugal movement congealed, twisted together with horrific fury. When this movement was over every person within one hundred miles would be changed, the shape and substance of everything different” (190). For the narrator, truth can only exist in a place of tension between the reportorial objectivity of an event and the aesthetic rendering of it. Like Agnes Smedley, Josephine Herbst, Tillie Olsen, and other female militants of the time, Le Sueur sought alternatives to “words like ghouls to cover an old viciousness” (185) and the official words of “the newspapers” (185). She was directly engaged with how best to articulate the relationship between words and reality, to “rewrite” the texts of working-class people’s suffering, while showing that all forms of language, figurative and nonfigurative alike, have material consequences. Extending the subtext of Le Sueur’s literary journalism, “Women Are Hungry” (American Mercury, 1934) makes truth claims about

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the depicted realities, self-consciously pushes readers to understand another kind of history, one not written by those unjustly empowered, and attempts to alert (middle-class) readers’ minds about social conditions. Again Le Sueur foregrounds the personal integrity of a narrator, places her in an environment she can readily identify with and wishes to change, but, contrary to the other pieces discussed in this section, refrains from rendering her conclusions in figural or “lyrical” terms. Instead, after a brief assessment of how poverty affects men and women differently, alternating between an “official party voice” and an “unofficial critique” of male behavior (Coiner, Better Red 169), she resorts to a case-study approach of “hungry women” (“Anna,” “Mrs. Rose,” 145–148; “Bernice,” 148–149; “Mabel,” 149–150; “Nancy Sanderson,” 151–154; “Ethel” and “Fran,” 154–157). The women are without “a radical political consciousness” and, reminiscent of the men in “Evening in a Lumber Town,” they too belong to “defeated communities” (Hapke 91) in which “everyone is bright and ready for living and then cannot live” (148). “Woman are Hungry” is another example of how Le Sueur both authenticates and authorizes her claim, through this insistence immersion, that readers should care about the lives of the poor. Interestingly, though, while displaying some of the significant problems communists of the thirties had with gender politics (e.g., “The men are gone away from the family; the family is disintegrating; the women try to hold it together, because women have most to do with the vivid life of procreation, food, and shelter” (144)), “Woman Are Hungry,” in such sections as “Old and Young Mothers” and “Moon Burns” suggests how the narrator literally penetrates into these communities and sees them from within: We went up three flights of stairs and down a crooked corridor flanked by shut doors. There was not a sound. It was early afternoon. In that house there were about twenty families, and often four lived in one or two rooms. . . . (“Old and Young Mothers,” 145) I went down past the jungle, down into the thicket, across the tracks to the cliff side where they are hollowed out below the small caves . . . I stopped down and crawled in. [Ethel and Fran] were leaning over a small fire of smoking twigs. (“Moon Burns” 154)

In both cases the narrator refers to specific facts, not figural renditions of them, to describe their plight: “Anna, who lives on the top floor, is a cook and supports four people, her mother, sister, and two sons, on her $45 a month” (145); “[Anna’s mother] had seven

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children, and her man was killed on the docks in Duluth while she was raising her children on the sand bar” (146). The women look at each other and their children in fear and silence (146–145), followed by the narrator offering this justification for her presence: Nobody knows what the poor suffer just for bread and burial. Nobody knows about it. Nobody has told about it. Nobody can know about how it feels unless you have been in it. . . . (147)

Only by being both of and in the environment she describes can the narrator seek her authority, make her claim to “objectivity,” and affirm alternatives to what she sees. Switching from one narrative strategy to another, she, not unlike Toomer in Cane, uses direct address to take us even further into these communities and to emphasize an on-site, step-by-step process. Typically, as in this section, Le Sueur is careful not to provide characterization of the narratee or of the narrator, thereby making the reader more willing to comply with the imputed identification. As part of this “persuasive” narration, she relies on a subjunctive “you” narration: To get any relief work, if you are a teacher, and haven’t had any work for a couple of years and have spent all your savings and let your insurance go and pawned everything you own, you have to go to the Board that is handling the relief work for teachers and prove to them that you are destitute. (151) You can hear your own heart like a trip hammer. You can hear your own blood in your ears like a cataract and you can’t hear anything else. You are separated by your tremendous hunger from the ordinary world as if by a tragedy. You can’t see what is happening. You can’t hear what is being said. (153)

The section then quickly shifts back to a third-person narration to chronicle the demise and death of Nancy Sanderson, though the piece is a multi-personed narrative (providing further validity for the nomenclature, literary journalism) with passages in the first, third, and second person alternating erratically. The narrator’s speaking situation is not fixed, reflecting the fact that the proliferation of alternative voices threatens to destabilize any version of a non-experiential history. Not just in its message, then, but also in its method, “Woman Are Hungry” expresses Le Sueur’s overarching concerns of the thirties: women are suffering and collective political action is urgently needed. Ultimately, in the last section, she returns to the collective “we” pronoun (“We [Ethel, Fran, the narrator] ran out into the cold wind. The ground

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shook more. The blackness before us seemed to gather and mount” (157)) before shifting back to the first-person narration through which the narrator-participant witnesses the vanishing women: “I didn’t see them any more. I shall never see them any more” (157). Strikingly, like these pieces, “I Was Marching” thoroughly epitomizes an insistence immersion in a verifiable setting. Like many of Le Sueur’s female narrators, the narrator of “I Was Marching” not only wishes to understand her cultural positioning toward her setting—July 20, 1934, the central market area of Minneapolis and the Teamster’s Headquarters—but also wishes to make sense of her own self-consciousness. When you are in the event, you are likely to have a distinctly individualistic attitude, to be only partly there, and to care more for the happening afterwards than when it is happening. That is why it is hard for a person like myself and others to be in a strike. (177)

Yet being totally immersed in the event while simultaneously being separated from it and rendered anonymous by others and by herself aids her in guarding her “objectivity.” At the same time, the setting of the strike serves as a catalyst for not only de-individualizing the narrator but for removing her from its particular historical context. This is why the story is more emotional, intuitive, instinctive—qualities that, in Le Sueur’s terms, belong more to the working class as opposed to the more analytical, more rational middle class (Ellis 152). An immersion allows the narrator to internalize her setting, turning it into something placed entirely within her own self-consciousness. And this is why the strikers rarely speak and the narrator never explains the causes of the strike or what is at stake for the strikers and their families, or why she joined the strike in the first place. In so doing, the narrator insists, to herself and to her readers, that she has been transformed into a working-class figure struggling to find peace with her setting and her purpose. In the tradition of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and other insistence immersions, she has created an intensely self-reflective text that encourages the reader to reformulate his or her conventionalized notions about the relationship between representation and real experience.12

The Need to Rehistoricize It is crucial to rehistoricize the cultural contributions of Le Sueur in relation to her insistence immersions and settings. Structuring the

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terms of class difference, she aimed to persuade readers that historical setting was an arena of struggle and that the written word played a powerful role in shaping that reality. Setting for Le Sueur was not a fixed or fixable site but a translative movement that defies nomination in an effort to elude the kinds of categorizations by which it conventionally proceeds. Social circumstance and what Bourdieu calls the “conscious strategy . . . which observation brings to light” (72) is interpreted and presented unconventionally. At the same time, Le Sueur’s documentary fiction (e.g., Salute to Spring) attests to the partialness of all documentary narrative: the way any and all perspectives are partial, both in the sense of being incomplete and in the sense of making a stance. Of considerable historical importance, Le Sueur’s representations of poverty in the midst of plenty (or at least a former plenty)13 created opportunities to exercise ethical impulses in the public sphere, as their representation of the poor created new material for Le Sueur the journalist, and served the purpose of heroicizing the act of representation itself. And finally, the need to rehistoricize might be seen more clearly if put in a contemporary comparative framework. I’m thinking specifically of Robert Boynton’s argument about what he calls the “new new journalism” in The New New Journalism: Conversations on Craft With America’s Best Nonfiction Writers (2005), and the literary journalism of the thirties. In a recent article, “Drilling Into the Bedrock of Ordinary Experience,” which outlines the argument of his book, Boynton claims that this new movement, “[r]igorously reported, psychologically astute, sociologically sophisticated, and politically aware . . . may well be the most popular and influential development in the history of American literary nonfiction” (B10). Citing such names as Ted Conover, William Finnegan, Nicole LeBlanc, Susan Orlean, and others, Boynton argues that this “new generation of journalists deepe[n] their involvement with characters to the point that the public–private divide essentially disappear[s]. The New New Journalists become part of their lives” (B10). Contrasting this reportorial movement to the preceding New Journalism and to Tom Wolfe’s influential 1973 introduction to The New Journalism, Boynton asserts, “[t] hey consider class and race, not just Wolfe’s ‘status’ (how one dresses, where one lives), to be primary indices of social hierarchy. They view ethnic and ideological subcultures (‘terra incognita,’ as Wolfe called them) as different in degree, not in kind, from the rest of American culture” (B10). “Quietly securing a place at the very center of contemporary American literature for reportorially based, narrative-driven, long-form nonfiction” (B10), this new group, according to Boynton,

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has created a new literature of the “everyday” (B10), which generally specializes in a “close-to-the-skin” reporting (B10), is devoted to “artfully told narratives about subjects of concern to ordinary people,” and expertly infuses journalism “with the passion, style, and techniques of great fiction” (B11). I find it ironic that this new reportorial movement, if indeed it can be called “new,” appears to be exploring the very territory that Smedley, Le Sueur, Agee, Yesierska, Conroy, and other writers of the thirties specialized in. Le Sueur (and as we shall see, Smedley and Agee) did so most forcefully through her insistence immersions, producing pleas for a dramatically altered system of social relations, and through her elaborations of setting. Except for the notable difference that the New New Journalists have produced “enormous best sellers . . . raising the tradition of American literary journalism to a more popular and commercial level than either its 19th- or late-20thcentury predecessors ever imagined” (B11), there appears to be little new about the New New Journalism. What Boynton excludes in his history is revealing. Although he argues that the New New Journalists are indebted to Wolfe’s experimentation and style and cites as their most important predecessors Lincoln Steffens, Jacob Riis, and Stephen Crane, he says nothing about the American writers of the thirties. And yet, these exact same writers fill out the features for his touted new reportorial movement, often adding the dynamics of a deeper, socially committed immersion— becoming more than temporary parts of the lives they chronicle; commitment to social change—making cases for mixtures of social consciousness, personal narrative, and collective action; and a history of social settings—offering a composite homage to Depressionera suffering. Perhaps most important, especially in relation to our present time, is that literary journalists such as Le Sueur refused to separate history from fiction or to privilege one over the other, and resisted the temptation to view life as objectively determined yet subjectively free.

CH A P T ER

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Class, Work, and New Races: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth “Work that is limitless in its scope and significance, is not this enough to weigh against love?” Agnes Smedley, Daughter of Earth

Meridel Le Sueur’s principal attention in Salute to Spring and in her literary journalism is on the everyday, blended into distinctive attitudes or forms of consciousness. For Le Sueur the experiences of the everyday, particularly those of the American underclass and workers in the 1930s, can offer a form of resistance to dominant political strategies of power. Metaphors of the everyday in Le Sueur’s fiction and literary journalism predominantly involve women—her representative markers and victims of daily existence. Women are symbolic of dulling domestic repetitions, the targets of violence, abuse, neglect— the figures who most strongly convey the life-destroying routines of capitalism. But in Le Sueur, women as laborers (and all are in some form) resist the polarization of the “feminine” repetitive everyday to the “masculine” rupture and revolution—one of Le Sueur’s ways of taking to task “proletarian works” that elide the experience of women workers by demoting their work and refusing to recognize it as “wage labor.” Le Sueur, as we’ve seen, constantly brings to the reader’s mind the relations of work to mobility versus the insufficiency of the middleclass imaginary to interpret such mobility. Paralleling in their texts many of Le Sueur’s concerns, Agnes Smedley and Zora Neale Hurston give work a new representative twist and, in so doing, provide us with exemplary models for articulating the relations of gender to class.

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Most literary critics today are not used to encountering and responding to representations of work in fiction, and especially, as Agnes Smedley writes, to “work that is limitless in its scope and significance” (8). Smedley saw her work as central to engendering a new self, one that would be at once collective and autonomous, and allow her to deal with her affective attachments. This chapter examines the ways in which Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1939) and Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth (1929) represent and deal with work and, more important, the way their concern with work influences their own artistic practices and shapes these two texts.1 In their own powerful ways, Hurston and Smedley inaugurated and combined twentieth-century American women’s fiction with their highly eclectic forms of working-class fiction. From their respective rural folk traditions, Hurston and Smedley emblematize the feminine inner life of the 1920s and 1930s in which their principal concerns were the subjects of reflection and self-development intermingled with their distinctive work ontologies. Seeking to discover a formalistic response to the work, class, and racial debates of their times, both writers point to new avenues of female expression and emancipation. Their Eyes Were Watching God and Daughter of Earth develop a kind of work unconsciousness, as well as a work ethic and didactic. Like many women writers of the thirties (e.g., Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, Anzia Yezierska), Hurston and Smedley suggest that art and culture are not the opposite of labor but are forms of labor and that the unity and division between mental and manual labor is a starting point for their fictional representations.2 My objective in this chapter is twofold. On one hand, I want to explore the work epistemologies of Hurston and Smedley in light of the subversive potential of both texts, particularly in the way class, race, and gender interact and draw out a language of identity. On the other, I want to suggest how Hurston and Smedley “rewrite” race, in light of the effects of work, to include the highly individualistic social experiences and visions of their protagonists. In both texts, narrative identity is constructed not only through and in relation to social goals and aims but, among much else, via the author’s respective representations of self and work. To parse the language of work—the principal aim of this chapter—is to argue for the value of a nuanced and historically informed use of work as a category of literary analysis.3 Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God demonstrates how work becomes both a force and conduit through which the novel’s protagonist, Janie, moves to define her own success ethic, an ethic in which emotion is truth’s medium and individual identity is set

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against an emotional landscape. Like Daughter, Their Eyes reflects a dialectic progression that diffuses and fragments working-class identity into multifluous configurations of race, gender, and sexual experience. Expressed through a kind of contestational viewpoint that Janie adopts, the many meanings of work in Their Eyes propel Janie’s story and underlie the ways in which Hurston embodies her distinctive narrative modes. One of the most important tropes in both works, work develops into a personalized epistemology that elucidates, among much else, the relationship between work and the affective life of the novels’ protagonists. This chapter will end with a brief examination of Agnes Smedley’s early literary journalism as it relates to her settings and her narrators’ immersions in them. What this journalism suggests, most importantly, is that while “challeng[ing] the dominant vision of woman as nurturer in the home and workplace” (Hapke 109), Smedley tried to find in social reform a set of strategies for managing the relations among her writing, her readers, and the world she lived in.

Frame Narratives As frame narratives, Their Eyes and Daughter are told retrospectively. Their Eyes begins and ends with Janie’s return to Eatonville following the death of Tea Cake and her own exoneration regarding his death. Daughter begins with an image of “no horizon” in which Marie is fleeing the United States for the unknown land of Denmark. Both texts adopt recursive forms in which the narrative sets up a tension between the necessary closure of its form and the openness of its subject matter: love, romance, international politics, personal development, work. Both novels make the reader experience the narrated time as a moving present and place him or her as an imaginative witness to events. The many (embedded) stories in both texts stress the personal quest for romance, political well-being, and communal placement within which there is a specific historical distribution of the “real” and the “symbolic.” Work functions on both of these levels. The beginning frame of Daughter, for example, stresses the fact that Marie “write[s] of the earth” (7), a metonym throughout the novel of hard manual labor, a longing to belong to and escape from a working-class tradition, and a real description of her rural origins. The opening frame of Their Eyes focuses on the fact that the “sitters” on the porch in Eatonville are now free from the “[m]ules and other brutes [that] had occupied their skins” (10)—literally and symbolically—and because “the sun and bossman [are] gone” (10) they can now sit in judgment of the

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prodigal Janie. The reality of a hard working day, the kind of day that Janie will eventually reappropriate and transform for her own purposes, prefaces this judgment. The end of Janie’s adventures with Tea Cake, her third husband, and her return home to Eatonville forms the opening frame of Their Eyes. Janie wears blue jeans, a symbol of her new status of worker, a status, however, that she associates with Tea Cake and his labors for her, founded on mutual love: “Tea Cake got me into wearing ‘emfollowing behind him” (18). At the same time, the blue jeans represent a rejection of any rigid codification of work or class. This blue-jean metaphor is crucial because work for Janie must involve an affective, emotional attachment, which suggests why, at the beginning of the novel, with Tea Cake no longer there, Janie wishes to soak the work of the “muck”—tiredness and dirt—off her feet (14). Throughout much of her story, Janie wishes to find a satisfying definitional and ontological alternative to alienating (manual) work—particularly because of the emotional and spiritually oppressing features of work she experiences under the dominance of her first two husbands. Daughter of Earth’s opening frame begins with the work metaphor of patching together a quilt: Marie wishes to “gather up these fragments of [her] life and make a crazy quilt of them” (8) just as Janie, at the end of Their Eyes, wishes, in Hurston’s work metaphor, to “pul[l] in her horizon like a great fish net . . . with so much life in its meshes” (286). Marie then proceeds to retrospectively contemplate “the ruins of a life” prefacing her analysis with an image of “weighing” her devotion to her work against her struggle to love and be loved: “I now have the knowledge that comes from experience; work that is limitless in its scope and significance. Is not this enough to weigh against love?” (8). Marie then quickly distances herself from those who belong to “beauty” and to political noninvolvement, and she begins the long pattern of associating herself and her philosophy of a “limitless work” with a collective “struggle of earth”: . . . I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty. I belong to those who die from other causes—exhausted by poverty, victims of wealth and power, fighters in a great cause. A few of us die, desperate from the pain of disillusionment of love, but for most of us “the earthquake but discloseth new fountains.” For we are of the earth and our struggle is the struggle of earth. (8)

And yet, like Janie, Marie too wishes to find a way out of the destructive forces of exploitive work but, unlike Janie, she wants to

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apply herself to the “emancipation of a people [which] can come only by the great masses organizing and fighting for it” (280). Marie constantly returns to the idea that those “of the earth,” who demand recognition and cultural justice, are not simply the expression of some preexisting identity; their unities and divisions are the mediated products of their forms of labor—childbirth, silver mining, sweatshop, assembly line, prostitution—to which they have been subjected. Work with or without consciousness is the thread of Daughter, a thread that affects all of Marie’s relationships. The beginning of both novels is governed by the modeling of causality, centering on, among other things, the nascent work epistemologies of both protagonists, while the ends of both narratives stress newly defined perspectives, goals, or resolutions, however tinged with regret and sadness. The frames in these two novels serve as thematic markers and guides, but also as a kind of “meta-signal” that suggests a metaphorical and literal composite and a composite of structure and situation. That is, the frames of both works reinforce distinctive positions on the organization of family, marriage, sexuality, and the division (or subversion of such divisions) of labor by gender. While desperately seeking her own capability of “thought and feeling” (406) at the end of Daughter, Marie rejects all forms of domesticity, maternity, marriage, and conventional racial and political divisions. By the end of Their Eyes, Janie, in her own ideological negotiation with her romance and self-development, comes to new conclusions about her place in the world as a woman and as a worker. Both novels, while highlighting tensions between love and quest, contravene the endings of marriage and death that are their cultural legacy from much of the fiction by women in the nineteenth century.4 Both works offer a different set of choices. Furthermore, because neither narrative ends with what Nancy Miller terms a “euphoric” pole, with a heterosexual marriage and successful integration into society, nor a “dysphoric” pole (151), with a death and some kind of betrayal by male aggression or authority, Smedley and Hurston, as they question the gendered definitions of vocations and social roles, write far beyond the romantic ending. Marie chooses to end her relationship with her Indian husband, a direct consequence of her rape, which severs her ties with the Indian nationalist movement to which she had devoted so much of her work. Janie, by the book’s end, is left by herself and appears to find her fulfillment there—alone to pursue her life and her life’s work. The different sets of choices Janie and Marie center on conjoin other needs with romance. In Their Eyes work and class differences

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enable romance (Janie and Tea Cake) just as in Daughter Marie’s conception of race and education are enabling factors in establishing the possibility of romance. Janie is attracted to Tea Cake, in part, because he comes from another world, represents “no business proposition,” “no race after titles,” (171) and does not want to “class” her off. Marie is drawn to Anand because he embodies her belief that “Love is not only a personal thing . . . It is like a thought—it sweeps in every direction and affects the actions of people” (374). In both works romance recedes to the protagonists’ quests for individual forms of quest and knowledge and satisfaction in their “work” pursuits. And yet both Janie and Marie are confronted with the fact that knowledge is significantly gendered by their communities. In the points of their lives as “working-class woman” (either by choice or necessity), Marie and Janie cannot be fully feminine because they work, and they cannot also be “workers” because they do women’s work (Rabinowitz, Red Coat196). Caught in such a configuration of gender, class, and this particular knowledge, it is significant that both women reject the traditional duality of labor as productivity and labor as reproduction (both are childless) and thus work toward their own divisions that constitute knowledge. Daughter, for example, creates its own interpretive division of education and labor. Using her own working-class community as an example, Marie retrospectively examines the “darkness of not-knowing,” and wishes to transcend such debilitating depths: The darkness of not-knowing—who can realize what that means unless he has lived through it! Those who speak of “deserving people” are the most ignorant of all. Because the world of knowledge was far removed from us, we in our canyon reacted instead of thinking. (120)

Marie recognizes the burden of overworked uneducated women, how women emerge as the primary victims of violent behaviors, and how they inadvertently reinforce class hierarchy and capitalist hegemony. Through her own story she provides a counter to the virtue of the middle-class focus on individual self-making in the fluid social universe generated by the market economy. At the end of Their Eyes, in reference to the Eatonville community, Janie stresses the importance of independent thought and feeling to her confidante, Phoeby. Significantly, while doing so, Janie foregrounds the importance of her own sexuality: Ah done been tuh de horizon and back and now Ah kin set heah in mah house and live by comparisons. Dis house ain’t so absent of things

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lak it used tuh be befo’ Tea Cake come along. It’s full uh thoughts, ‘specially dat bedroom. (284)

Janie stresses the relationship of sexuality to personal conviction away and apart from the community, hence suggesting the notion that her class emancipation (she does not want to stay in her own “class,” 10) is both a premise to and a product of personal liberation. Such efforts point to what both protagonists work toward—a different set of choices—a middle point between what working-class women can accomplish, expect, and act like, and what their middleclass counterparts (not coincidentally, Janie and Marie eventually become such counterparts) can only attempt to replicate, imagine, or witness.

Form, Work, Fragmentation of Self Their Eyes and Daughter offer many aesthetic models and a multiplicity of discourse and generic registers. Smedley and Hurston resort to a freewheeling digressiveness, sacrificing narrative consistency to patchwork, piecemeal writing, generic mutations, anecdotal fragments, and porousness. Hurston’s responsiveness to the vernacular and her willingness to write across stylistic registers follow patterns close to improvisation, fissure, radical shifts in tempo and tone. Smedley’s documentary, testimonial fiction, stretches the boundaries of proletarian, didactic fiction by heavily relying on hard undercurrents of poeticism and psychoanalytic metaphor. Furthermore, Daughter advances on a stylistic level a heterogeneous and divided variety of voices rather than a homogeneous discourse. The novel is part autobiography, melded, amalgamated fiction, intermittently polemical, and a travel journal as well. The formal fragmentation and disintegration of these texts contribute to representing an eruption of work differences, an explosion of social and interpersonal conflict that threatens to overwhelm both protagonists. In this way, the forms of both novels mitigate against any narrative in which ideology takes the center stage and in which collective identity and unity dominate. In Their Eyes, work initially contributes to producing, either directly or indirectly, a fragmentation of personality and a separation between what Janie calls an “inside” and “outside” (112). The outside is emblematized in Nanny’s claim that black women are the “mules” of the world (29)—a claim she tries to impose on Janie—based on her belief that for a woman to accept

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this status and to be dreamless—to have no inside—is one of the “hold-backs of slavery” (31): So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so far as Ah can see. (29)

Nanny’s interpenetration of her personal history and work and her belief that only property (i.e., in its most telling forms: the control of one’s labor and that of others) enables expression is imposed on Janie. Consequently, Janie’s first marriage, arranged by Granny, shatters Janie’s aspirations for an inside, symbolized in the “pear-tree” (25), while reinforcing the fact that her first husband, Logan Killicks, demands backbreaking work from her. Killicks buys a second mule in order to have Janie work both in the field and in the kitchen (46). “You ain’t got no particular place,” he tells her. “It’s wherever I need yuh” (52). By forcing Janie into the role of a mule, Logan destroys her imaginary identification—he desecrates the pear tree. When Janie leaves Killicks she takes off her work clothes, discarding her apron and “com[es] back to her old thoughts” (54) of relating her inside to her outside world. But before reaching this point, Janie must respond to several questions regarding her identity, questions that hover around the issue of work. Before the first year passes in her marriage to Logan, Janie engages in this confrontation with him: So Janie had told him. “Ah’m just as stiff as you is stout. If you can stand not to chop and tote wood Ah reckon you can stand not to git dinner. ‘Scuse mah freezolity, Mist’Killicks, but Ah don’t mean to chop de first chip.” (45)

It is worth noting that Janie is occupied in a form of manual work, peeling potatoes, when Joe Stark appears. Because springtime had “reached” (46) her, though, she moves her work “to a place in the yard where she could see the road” (47). And thus the pattern (of oppressive work, romantic escape) continues in which “[t]he familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off” (44). She refuses to be mastered by her work but she has not yet found a way to bring it under control, to establish a satisfying alternative or counter to it.

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This fragmentation and suppression continues with Janie’s second husband, Joe Starks, resulting in an alienation that becomes her foundation of revolt and despair. Work plays a pivotal role in both. The epitome of misguided individual and communal work, Starks quickly becomes the controlling center of his newly adopted town, Eatonville. He effectively establishes himself in the community as a replacement for the capitalistic philosophies of his former white employers. Turning Janie into a commodity—taking “the bloom” off things (70)—Joe doesn’t allow her to speak for herself and confines her to her home. It is only when Starks is near death that Janie reconnects with her voice, criticizing Joe for having concern only for himself and his work: You done lived with me for twenty years and you don’t half know me atall. And you could have but you was so busy worshippin’ de works of yo’ own hands, and cuffin’ folks around in their minds till you didn’t see uh whole heap uh things yuh could have. (132–133)

Upon Joe’s death, Janie begins to shed Joe’s obsession with work and its influence on her when she tears off the “kerchief from her head and let[s] down her plentiful hair” (135); she later burns up every one of her head rags (137), further separating herself from Starks and his worshipful associations with work. Such is Janie’s necessary preliminary preparation to regaining some kind of wholeness and to shedding Joe’s work ethic and his position on women and work: Daughter too inclines toward a fragmentation of self often connected to work and work relationships. Marie’s early experiences with work play a complex foundational role in her later politics and feelings about herself and her family. The lessons of work come early, for as a child Marie learns about her own class status through the “kitchen help” she is hired to perform for a neighbor woman: I was the first “help” she ever had and she wanted to make no mistake about the difference in our positions. I still remember how I tried to love her, and how cold her response was. It was a very difficult thing to learn that I was not a child, but just a “hired girl.” (70)

Work fragments and alienates the child Marie, tears apart her mother and father, subsumes her personal intimacy, and typecasts her as inferior. However, work is both the perilous possibility of casting Marie’s

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life into “ruins” and the potential script that can save her. Marie witnesses the destructive effects of manual work on her mother, a woman who, as a laundress, housekeeper, boarding house manager, and abused spouse, toils into exhaustion and early death. Marie similarly observes the toll ignorance and exploitive labor takes on her father whose experiences in life directly counters the belief “that those who work the hardest earn the most” (62). As in Their Eyes, work in Daughter plays a constant mediating and destabilizing role in the construction of the protagonist’s conception of herself. Marie reveals herself as a working subject by continuously casting work as her subject and as a principal identifier vis-à-vis her own character and interpersonal conflicts. Thus as a child she expresses immense respect for her Aunt Helen—Marie wishes to emulate her—who clearly demarcates her own value and independence in relation to “hiring” herself out as a laundress as opposed to working as a domestic servant: [Aunt Helen] considered what work was worthy of her—for she knew her value . . . My mother and father urged her to go out again as a hired girl, for girls in the laundry “went bad.” She was not afraid of hard work, but she could take care of herself anywhere! (48)

Work is not only the principal definer and determinant of Helen’s character but also serves as a potential equalizer between Helen and Marie’s father: . . . for years it was her money—earned in one way or another—that furnished us with most of the colorful and good clothing we had. When Helen began to draw weekly wages she took an equal place with my father in our home. She was as valuable and she was as respected as he. (49)

But work is never a predictable, stable entity in Daughter. Rather, it has the power of stealing human dignity, exploiting human weaknesses, conserving ignorance, and causing one’s social downfall. Helen, for example, is forced to resort to prostitution to support herself and the Rogers family. Marie’s mother dies tragically young, physically exhausted by her work, emblematized through the recurring images of her hands: . . . the hands so big-veined and worn that they were almost black, and then to the wistful, tired face lit up by the beautiful blue-black

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eyes. The eyes were young—but the hands might have belonged to a scrubwoman of fifty. (51)

For Marie, work based on self-sacrifice, as an indicator of maternal love, work that does not aim to create commodities or anything durable, work that emblematizes the human body writ large, can only end in misery and disaster. Work does not simply occur in its own separate sphere but is dialectically embedded in, and mediated through, its multiple connections to others. Like the human consequences of work in Daughter, working conditions are almost always described in negative terms and through the destructive influence they have on Marie’s family and community. For example, when Marie describes the disgruntled miners from the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in Part 3: They met on the front porch of the saloon and before the Company store, speaking in many different languages—Polish, Czechish, German mingled with English. The atmosphere was a cloud of stif ling discontent and hatred, filled with curses about the weigh boss, the long hours, the bad pay, the dangerous conditions in the mines. (101)

So often in Daughter work emerges from and comes back to the body or bodily forms—Aunt Helen’s “beauty,” the working hands of Marie’s mother, the aching body of Marie’s father, the working-class body that must expose itself to daily danger: When a man took his pick and shovel and disappeared into the blackness of the mine, neither he nor his family knew if he would come out dead or alive. All native American working men feared the mines. When my father contemplated martyrdom because my mother, as he said, treated him badly, he threatened to become a miner. My mother’s silence would drive him into the mines yet, he let us all know. I came to fear the mines and all American working men feared that one day they would be in such desperate straits that they would have to put on a cap with an open lamp and take their places on the cars that hauled the miners into the darkness. (103)

Marie’s strategy here—a strategy deployed throughout Daughter—is to describe working conditions at the periphery in order to cast a critical eye on the national center in a critique of working conditions that links region and nation. Thus the working conditions of a Colorado mine resemble those of a New York City office, or “the silence of a

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kitchen” (85), and all become measures through which Marie makes her cultural commentary.

Labor Control Methods: Work Must Be Free The conceptual trajectory of Hurston’s meditations on work is that work must be free if it is to be regarded as a lens through which humans most truly are and become themselves. In all cases, work that contains within itself no element of freedom is not “work” but something similar to slavery. Thus the trope of free work underlies many of Janie’s meditations. For example, she declares to Phoeby that her work must be linked to “no business proposition, and no race after property and titles” but, exactly in its freedom, it must parallel “the love game” (171). Significantly, when Janie tells Phoeby about her relationship with Tea Cake, she uses her Grandmother as an example not to follow: “Ah done lived Grandma’s way, now Ah means to live mine” (171). Janie wants to break out of her Grandmother’s slave-work mentality, begin the new thoughts and say the new words (172) in which no alienation exists between one’s affective life and one’s work life. To be truly free one must completely control and apprehend one’s “work”: for Janie this is both a starting point and an end result of her “love game.” In her focus on the relational and individual, Hurston blurs the distinction between work and play, or, more pointedly, grounds the distinction in Janie’s relational experiences and interpretations. Having returned to the community she once rejected, Janie’s position of interiority is intensified, represented in part by her separation from her past, from her first three relationships with men, and from the work roles these men encouraged or imposed. These relationships become increasingly problematic and self-negating, complex matters that Hurston renders through an inverse relationship between character of consciousness on one hand and, among much else, work on the other. It is through Janie’s relationship with Tea Cake, however, that Hurston articulates her most compelling ontological and spiritual conception of work. Unlike Logan and Joe, Tea Cake is so thoroughly immune to the influence of white American society that he does not desire this society’s external manifestations of power, money, and the fruits of labor. His immunity prevents him from “classing Janie off.” To put this another way, Janie’s relationship with Tea Cake is based not upon power or domination but upon play. It is not insignificant that

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Tea Cake’s first gesture toward Janie is to invite her to play checkers, an invitation that profoundly affects Janie (146). The novel emphasizes that “He was always laughing and full of fun” (197), which is why he responds to almost every situation in which he is involved as play, but a play that is comparatively egalitarian. Tea Cake teaches Janie to play checkers and hunt and encourages her to come to work with him (as opposed to for him). Tea Cake’s work-play (emblematized as well by his gambling and guitar playing) is contagious for Janie—evidenced when she goes to work with him on “the muck”: So the very next morning Janie got ready to pick beans along with Tea Cake. There was a suppressed murmur when she picked up a basket and went to work. She was already getting to be a special case on the muck. It was generally assumed that she thought herself too good to work like the rest of the women and that Tea Cake “pomped her up tuh dat.” But all day long the romping and playing they carried on behind the boss’s back made her popular right away. It got the whole field to playing off and on. (199)

Janie is converted by Tea Cake’s work ontology. She is free, especially after Tea Cake’s death, to begin to formulate her own conceptions of work and play as ways of knowing the world: work as an activity defined by the relation of mind to body, work as constituting and constituted by gender and class identity, work as inseparable from emotional implication. Daughter equally underscores that work must be free, consciously understood, and socially satisfying. When, for example, Marie mourns the fate of her brothers, she concludes that their work oppressed them and eventually contributed to their deaths: “The memory of my brothers returned to me—they should have lived as did this man [Talvar]. But they were working men and could never take their noses from the earth” (286). Marie regrets the fact that her brothers “work[ed] for a lifetime and in the end g[ot] nothing for it but death” (274). She then goes on to contrast her brothers’s tragic lives by commenting on the work epistemology of her fellow freedom fighter for the Indian nationalist movement, Talvar: Talvar was not a working man. He had studied and had chosen freely and consciously this way that might even mean death. It seemed to me very beautiful to live and work like that. (286)

Work cannot be separated from a self-conscious knowledge and purpose. Marie, during her New York period, chastises herself for not

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being learned enough and lacking direction in her work and study. She envies (while also suspecting) her privileged socialist friends: I wondered if I should ever be so learned as they—if I could ever discuss with such authority the difference between left wings and right wings. It would perhaps never be; for I was but a worker, while they had time to study theory. It was not they were less sincere than I—they belonged to another world. (260)

Daughter dramatizes the tensions between the work epistemologies of working-class mentalities and bourgeois institutions of acculturation and political control (even those ostensibly committed to liberating the working class). Through her education, Marie hopes to procure a sense of purpose and agency in a world that is hostile to her aspirations, which is why work and learning dominate Daughter while Marie’s amorous relationships serve mostly as background. Both Marie and Janie belong to worlds that exclude them as women and workers. Thus, not coincidentally, labor control methods function at the heart of Their Eyes and Daughter. For Hurston, these methods involve not only the immediate effects of the Jim Crow laws, resulting in separate and unequal work for blacks, but they also conduce toward rigid class and gender distinctions. The black female characters from Phoeby to Mrs. Turner, from Nunkie to Janie, are the constant targets of physical abuse as well as racial, class, and gender discrimination from within and outside of their communities. At one point, Janie, in speaking to Mrs. Turner, insists that the poorness of the black folk community—as opposed to its race—is the primary detriment to racial integration (210). Blacks, and particularly black women, are constantly imaged as the mules of the world: few blacks are portrayed as other than working or servant class with tightly restricted work environments. Perhaps the most dramatic example of such an environment in Their Eyes, however, is when, following the devastating flood in the Florida Everglades, Tea Cake is forced to become “part of a small army that had been pressed into service to clear the wreckage in public places and bury the dead” (252). These labor control methods counter black working-class experience and the distinctive imperatives of their working-class values and, in Tea Cake’s case, dismiss the beauty buried in his working-class life.

Work and Race Work becomes an ethical instrument that Marie links most forcefully to race. “Marie,” as Nancy Hoffman argues, “questions her identity, not

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just on its own terms, but as it appears to non-western people of color” (407). For Marie, race is nothing but a “new world order being born” and “that order is neither eastern or western” (281). Work, in Daughter, plays a constant, active, mediating, and destabilizing role in the construction of race and racial hierarchies. As an activist for the Indian movement and as a socialist writer, Marie constantly defines the ultimate consequences of her own work to be the abolition of color. “Color” is the signal that the many calls to revolution in the text propose: . . . difference of race, color, and creed are as shadows on the face of a stream, each lending a beauty of its own; that subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man, and that the highest joy is to fight by the side of those who for any reason of their own making or ours, are unable to develop to full human stature. (279)

Marie emphasizes, behind her work ontology, a “new race,” international and postnational in scope, that disrupts essentialized racial categories. Work and race conflate in Marie’s social emancipatory vision, affirming the racial openness of the future. Hurston does not portray the characters in Their Eyes as humiliated victims defeated by racial oppression. While many black intellectuals in the twenties adopted a rhetoric of racial affirmation, Hurston celebrated the art of “the Negro furthest down.” Like Smedley, Hurston sees race as a falsely universalizing category. In her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road, Hurston remarks, “Light came to me when I realized that I did not have to consider any racial group as a whole” (235). As Rachel Blau Duplessis notes, “Hurston sees her race as a determinant that itself could be overruled by class and economic self-interest” (99). Further, for Hurston, standard conceptions of race must be transcended. As Hurston puts it, “It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between. It has never happened with anybody else, so why with us? No, we will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual. If you haven’t got it, you can’t show it. If you have got it you can’t hide it” (Dust 237). In Their Eyes, Hurston offers this theory as a counter to the outside forces of racial prejudice and economic injustice. Labor, for Janie, becomes a memorial and a symbol for individual continuance.

Work and Being Both texts demonstrate a dialectical interdependence between personality and work occupations. In degree, Smedley focuses more on

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social, not solitary work experience while Hurston targets the individual. Labor becomes living for Marie and the start of all possibilities. For Janie, she tries to turn unalienated labor into lyrical, figurative, performative beauty. And yet both protagonists do not find ultimate value in manual labor itself. Skilled labor (with the notable exception of farming) significantly plays little part in their narratives. Rather, both find alternatives to manual and manually skilled labor, for work is transformed into a condition to be transcended, into a state in which introspection and self-analysis can flourish. 5 Daughter concludes with the image of emptiness and dispiritedness: coffee cooling and Marie packing for her voyage to Denmark. Marie suddenly finds herself alone to protect her work vision: I am not working for individuals. I am working for the idea of liberty . . . for myself also because this is the way I find happiness and expression. It may be that I am a “nut,”—every person who works for an idea that is not right under his nose and from which he gets no money is perhaps a “nut.” (355)

Work remains at the center of Marie’s quest through which she creates, as opposed to discovers, her selfhood. Work, the foundation on which the novel proposes its revolutionary conception of collective and communal identity, serves as Marie’s trope of political idealism. Like Hurston, Smedley defines work not as an intrinsic quality, or an a priori essence, but as a series of conscious choices made by her protagonist, choices that result from direct experience and result in traits that mark a yet-to-be defined potential. With work as a determinant trope, Daughter becomes a chronicle of a former working-class woman gaining control of her own narrative in which the emerging comprehension of freedom and literacy hinge on the relationship of her work to her rhetorical and historical self. Along the way, Smedley disassembles a culture that does not sufficiently honor manual labor and the worker. At the conclusion of Their Eyes, Janie, newly returned from the muck and her trial, dresses in a “faded shirt and muddy overalls,” a signal that she has broken away from the binary class and work codes of her community. As a middle-class widow she should not have associated with the itinerant Tea Cake (“why she don’t stay in her class?” (10)). But her new status, wrongly interpreted by the community she returns to, is grounds for speculation that she will “fall to their level someday” (11). This is the context that determines Janie’s refusal to tell her story directly to the community, a refusal that

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distinguishes her story from the directly told and shared folktale. A crucial determining force in this decision is Janie’s recently discovered and newly applied ontology of work, a conception that points precisely toward a shifting and variable state between working and not working, entwining both these states, which suggests in turn a transformed work and a transformed leisure as well. She responds to the questions the text constantly poses about work by translating it into a language of affect and desire: Janie relegates work to the domain of the private. Work is thus a realm of personal freedom and of necessity all at once; it is the central mediation that grounds her relationship to Tea Cake. The question of work is thus at one with a question of agency and, not surprisingly, it forms the novel’s concluding image—Janie’s final “act” of labor (wrapped in biblical analogy): Janie “pulled in the horizon like a great fish net” (286). This act speaks to the spiritual and emotional consequences of work, which are inseparable from self-discovery and the need to arrive at such a discovery through relational steps. The representation of work is a key to understanding why Janie and Marie repudiate assimilation into their respective communities. While suffering from various forms of gender, racial, and class exploitation, both actively construct their own alienation. They do so, though, for distinctly progressive, even radical ends. Their Eyes and Daughter leave us with figurations of the highly alienated subject in order at once to engage a discourse that questions cultural, political, and racial adaptations and to construct within that discourse an alternative to the conventional ideas on the value and sociality of work.

Smedley’s Literary Journalism: Battles for Separateness While Their Eyes and Daughter diverge widely in their focuses on narrator and protagonist interactions with lovers, employers, families, and friends, they never eclipse the presence of the “woman working.” The final triumph of Janie has as much to do with her mastery of work than it does with that of conventional marriage and her escape from it. Marie’s quest for justice is inseparable from revealing how, in Cindy Weinstein’s words, the “ennobling potential of labor” vanishes “as it becomes the mechanism for turning people into things” (240). In this section, I will first examine Smedley’s obsessions with the woman working in light of Daughter’s insistence immersion to further suggest how a working-class woman becomes radicalized. Secondly, I will argue how the immersion emblematizes the troubled

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relationship between representations of setting and class realities and their mutual inextricability. Within a shorter projectory, I will then analyze three pieces Smedley wrote for Call Magazine in 1920 based on her experiences in Manhattan’s Tomb prison. Foregrounding her concern with class, the style of these pieces, collectively entitled “Cell Mates,” anticipates the language of bitterness and lyricism found in Daughter while serving as an exemplary example of Smedley’s literary journalism. To be sure, unlike other writers discussed in this study, Smedley was more of a journalist than a novelist, but, arguably, more of a fervent humanist/activist than an “objective reporter” or “creative writer.”6 Her talents were in combining autobiographical experience with literary forms and descriptive nonfiction, a characteristic Depression-era mode of representing the plight of the disempowered. During the first four decades of the twentieth century, Smedley wrote countless articles on India, deportation cases, birth control, the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, and American imperialism, published in such socialist and progressive newspapers as The Call, The Liberator, New Masses, Birth Control Review, and Modern Review. Throughout the thirties, in addition to her six books on China, she composed numerous pieces on the Chinese revolutionary movement, adding to her considerable reputation as an advocate journalist. One direct result of her advocacy, under the guise of blending fictional, nonfictional, and documentary discourses, is found in Daughter. Like Tillie Olsen, she too obsessed about how “circumstances shape people” and about the tragedies of realizing “what possibilities could have been” (qtd. in Staub 130). Daughter becomes a narrative about the uses of setting that helps readers, through its emblematic scenes of crisis, understand and interpret the nature of the problems faced by the United States in the twenties and thirties. As with Salute to Spring, Smedley’s book insists on a heightened commitment from its readers, one extending beyond an appreciation for poetic language, poignant moments, and sweeping lyricism. Rather than assert the necessity for objectivity or resent its loss, Smedley continually and self-reflexively foregrounds the way settings can be rewritten to best represent lost or neglected voices, including her own. To this end, settings intervene rapidly in the narrative, articulating radical anger, voicing agony and despair, and advancing political arguments. Paralleling the intent of several of the settings in Salute to Spring, those in Daughter emphasize, in Rita Barnard’s words, “the plight of the proletariat and the virtues of simple regional cultures . . . revealed as engaged in somewhat residual, even nostalgic, cultural endeavor” (9).7

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Daughter of Earth charts the settings that the novel’s protagonist Marie Rogers traverses: beginning with her childhood on a poor farm in northern Missouri and then later to the squalid mining camps in Trinidad, Colorado, to the places of her underpaid, exploited employments as a factory worker, stenographer, domestic worker, low-level teacher in New Mexico, Arizona, and California, to her growth as a radical journalist in New York City. The deepest imperatives of the protagonist’s life, as of Smedley’s own, was to overcome the oppressive conditions of her settings and to flee from them. Yet unlike Le Sueur, Smedley desacralizes the working class, and as a (former) member of this class is at once critical of it and self-critical, which reflects, for example, her 1927 complaint against the ACP for its “simplistic glorifications of the working class as full of selfless idealism” (MacKinnon and MacKinnon, Life and Times 121).8 Marie, again in contrast to Le Sueur, through questioning her American identity and “living on the borders between the unknowing silence of the working classes and the glib articulateness of leftist circles” (Hoffman 407) is at home in no setting. It is not incidental, therefore, that at the beginning of Daughter, Marie is on a ship bound for Denmark, fleeing her unhappy settings of America, a voyage re-presented in the novel’s closing pages. The idealized settings of Marie’s childhood, that world of “sunflecked meadows” “that stretched for some two hundred miles across northern Missouri” (9) are short-lived, though she continues to evoke her wished for organic connection to the earth. What William Empson has called a “covert pastoral” (6), in reference to his description of proletarian fiction, can be seen in Smedley’s version of nostalgic agrarianism, also at work in Salute to Spring. Like the more traditional pastoral, Daughter’s rural, mountain, and desert settings represent ways of life that were shaped in earlier historical periods, though Marie would like to think that they are still active in the cultural processes that oppose capitalism and the perpetuation of poverty. She thought of the drastic change she hoped to accomplish as rooted in native soil. Thus we have both tragic and endearing characters like Big Buck, Marie’s Aunt Helen, and Marie’s father, all inseparable from their respective settings—the deserts of Arizona; Denver, Colorado; and the farmlands of Missouri—all representing at the same Marie’s wished for but not quite realized worlds and environments that force her to leave. The settings of Daughter serve as stepping stones in Marie’s transformation from a worker to a middle-class writer and radical activist. She is driven from one setting (e.g., the farm in Missouri) to another

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(e.g., the mining camps of Trinidad, Colorado) by “poverty and uncertainty” (46), what she calls life’s only “certainties” (46). The exterior settings Marie describes—the flooding of the Purgatory River when her family loses all of their possessions and in which “the elemental voices spea[k] in a voice of finality” (59), the isolation of a two-room school house in Tercio, New Mexico (124), the Arizona desert that “came closer to [her] spirit than has any place [she has] ever known” (179)—are all linked by repeated images from her unconscious world depicted in standard psychoanalytic language: dreams, symbols such as earth, fire, flood, darkness, curtain, and horizon (Hoffman 411). But she can only interpret these settings retrospectively, after having left them and gained the knowledge she has worked so hard for. At the same time her strategies are directed toward expressing and exploring the inadequacy of “words,” even for a highly educated journalist, in the incommunicability of lived suffering and defiance: I do not write mere words. I write of human flesh and blood. There is a hatred and a bitterness with roots in experience and conviction. Words cannot erase that experience. (256)

Marie’s constant shifting from past to present settings, beginning with the novel’s opening frame, is a reminder, as Paula Rabinowitz has argued, that “the now-educated, politically active, psychoanalyzed writer can reflect back on her deprived and brutal past” (Labor 11). Constant comparisons (figurative and literal) are made between the setting of a present narrative moment and Marie’s past life: The sea is gray and colorless today, and the sun is hidden behind these cold northern mists. So was my life in those long years that followed: gray, colorless, groping, unachieving. With many things begun and none finished; or if finished, failures. (46)

The sea and the earth are apt metaphors for Marie’s insistence immersions, for in varying degrees both indicate return and departure. Marie is a “daughter of earth,” as she tells us insistently in the narrative. The earth is the residual force she wants to keep within her while at the same time she is forced to admit that there is “no horizon—as in my life” (7), that she is condemned to “watching the sea—and writing this story of a human life” (7). She is never, though, a mere witness or observer of the settings she describes but is always deeply entangled in them, always insisting on the lessons learned from them.

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For example, in her reflections on the mining camps of Trinidad and on her relationship with her father: Had it not been for the wanderlust in my blood—my father’s gift to me—and had I not inherited his refusal to accept my lot as ordained by a God, I might have remained in the mining towns all my life, married some working man, borne him a dozen children to wander the face of the earth, and died in my early thirties . . . But settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. (123)

As an insistence immersion, Daughter covers the usual gamut of issues that appear in the work of Smedley’s contemporaries, the leftist women writers of the twenties and thirties—among them, Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed (1934), Josephine Herbst’s Rope of Gold (1939), and Grace Lumpkin’s A Sign for Cain (1935). But in Smedley, themes such as class conflict, gender relations, racial prejudice, sexuality, and childbearing are intrinsically linked to the settings Marie experiences. Significantly, as her settings widen from the familial and personal to sites of national and international political struggle, her realizations follow accordingly: the abuse, suffering, and domination she sees in the relationship between her mother and father, or between her sister Annie and her husband, she discerns in contemporary class and gender relations; the economic struggles she undergoes, she applies to larger political frameworks: Japanese imperialism, World War I, women gaining the right to vote, the Indian liberation movement. Put another way, Daughter suggests that a kind of discursive tug-of-war over appealing settings is being waged (not necessarily consciously or by design) between the dominant and the would-be alternative culture. Marie wishes to change each setting she experiences while also exposing the problems embedded in U.S. radicalism. Important prefigurations of Daughter, the “Cell Mate” pieces, most especially, raise significant questions about class relations that inevitably shape a text derived from real encounters with living subjects.9 As Jan MacKinnon and Steven MacKinnon have argued, “‘Cell Mates’ was Smedley’s first work in the style of social realism that she developed so powerfully in later writings” (“Cell Mates” 531). But in the three pieces I discuss (“My Cell Mate: No[s]., 2, 3 ,4”), Smedley mixes her social realism with an autobiographical form that depends on a sophisticated use of characterization, voice, and form more common to literary texts than to journalistic writing and more in line with Dorothy Day’s “feel of the facts” than with “objective”-seeming

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data (qtd. in Roberts, “Day” 180). These pieces also provide an example of an insistence immersion in which the narrator is unwillingly immersed in a prescribed environment she rejects in a political system she wishes to change. The awareness of her own and the living subject’s “truth,” “their realities,” compete with and go up against the empowered forces that have imprisoned the women. The three pieces involve little of the narrator’s self-consciousness about her role as interpreter and interrogator. She slides easily into the position of representing the identities of her subjects and telling their stories, similar to the role Marie Rogers, as an activist reporter, plays in Daughter, but without Marie’s explicit advocacy.10 All three sketches follow the pattern of introducing the subject (May, Mollie Steiner, Kitty Marion) in the first sentence of the narrative, describing the reasons for their incarceration (forgery, distribution of political pamphlets, dissemination of birth control information) and then adopt the perspectives of the described subjects. All three pieces end with a description of what the future holds for the prisoner (i.e., “[May] was given the ‘Indefinite,’ which means anything from three months to three years in the penitentiary” (534); “[Mollie] will be taken after her jail term is finished to Jefferson City prison, where she is sentenced to spend 15 years of her life at hard labor” (537); Kitty will continue to militate for birth control and “the right of personal liberty” for women (538)). These are stories within the story of the narrator herself who, in these three encounters, reveals nothing about why she has been arrested (she was indicted for attempting to foment rebellion against the British rule in India, falsely representing herself as a diplomat, and violating a birth control ordinance) and provides only one detail, in “Cell Mate No.: 2,” about her case: her bail was set at $10,000 (533). The participating self narrator is not the central character but provides both immediate reporting and retrospective commentary on her subjects. All three sketches focus on the work histories of these women, limiting the narrator’s account to what her subjects could possibly know. The narrator shows how they “incarnate ideas” and make them “live” for the reader. Having passed from “the factory to the stage” (533), May’s work options leave her the dire choices of “scrubbing floors,” taking in washing, “hustling” or returning to her “private business” (534) of forgery. “Mollie had labored for many years,” the narrator recounts, “had longed for, but never enjoyed, the beautiful things of life . . . About her in the factory she had seen thousands like herself pouring out their lives for crumbs, suffering, and then dying, poor and wretched. The class struggle to her became a grim reality” (536).

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Kitty, the lifelong “militant,” “had been imprisoned time without number and had had her throat ruined by forcible feeding” (538). “The matrons were glad when her term was finished” (539). The narrator suggests the (tragic) naiveness and suffering of these women in unsentimental, nonjudgmental terms; she emphasizes their perseverance and “unchangeability” in a system that attempts to forcefully change them. With the exception of May, the “crimes” for which the women are convicted are political, not criminal, as in Smedley’s case. Undaunted, Mollie, a revolutionary and acolyte of Emma Goldman, and Kitty, a British suffragist and birth control advocate, appear to be strengthened by their imprisonment to continue their efforts for radical social change. These sketches represent versions of Smedley’s social documentary— what I choose to call her literary journalism—in which she focuses on some of the most deprived and powerless subjects in American society, makes vivid their unimagined existence (in Whitman’s sense, provides “ultimate vivification to facts”), and gives them a voice by speaking for them (May) or by letting them speak for themselves (Mollie, Kitty). Smedley avoids ennobling, romanticizing, and simplifying her subjects—conventional documentary techniques—and instead dramatizes the actual facts of their lives in ways that make them credible, if sometimes tragically “heroic.” Anticipating Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men on at least two counts, Smedley uses case-study methods in these pieces not to create types but to speak to larger social injustices, and she does not “curry favor” with the reader in the ways that documentary writing usually does.11 As Daughter and these three pieces attest, Smedley asked nothing less than that women be portrayed as living subjects in the fiction and journalism of the time, whether it be mainstream, right, or left. Like other novelists of her day, she was part of an effort to define not only a new “proletarian community” but how the feminine working class should radicalize and confront “the nature of womanhood itself” (Hapke 109).

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CH A P T ER

7

Class “Truths” in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

The answer is that I feel that experience hasn’t yet gone to the deepest place it can go. Susan Sontag1 Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling, and what is the use of truth? How do we use feeling? How do we use truth?2 Muriel Rukeyser

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) stands between James Agee’s “best perceptions” and “best intentions” and a “performance” (Praise 30) that is deeply earnest and highly political. An admixture of stylized sermonettes, lyrical meditations, straightforward journalism, confession, ethnographic field studies, newspaper clippings, and invective, Famous Men challenges Jan Mieszkowski’s doubting assertion that “[Literature] is the site where systems of ethics and politics fail to reconcile themselves to a common aesthetic paradigm in which a representational model of language would also serve as a model of human praxis” (111). The crucial point is that Agee confronts a number of quandaries concerning the relations between representation, expression, self-determination, and social “truths” in moments that go up against the “dormancy, idleness, or irrelevance” of the work’s “poetic spirit” and its struggle “to establish itself as a wholly reliable medium or means to an external end” (Mieszkowski, “Breaking” 111).3 Indeed, constantly seeking out, in Sontag’s words, his “deepest places” and in Rukeyser’s, his “use of truth,” he claimed to find

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them in Praise but only when his most intimate writing and his most personal experiences came together. One of the most interesting works to come out of the American 1930s, Famous Men is Agee’s response to the period’s prevailing concern with linking social commitment to aesthetic forms and one of the most eloquent portrayals of “classed subjects” ever produced by an American writer. Not incidentally, the work proposes its own modernist solutions to telling the “truth,” a telling that, it can be argued, is at the heart of theorizing and practicing documentary fiction, but particularly applicable to the 1930s, a period that demanded social reevaluations and change, a period in which American writers, more than ever before or since, linked their craft consciousness to their class consciousness.4 Agee is no exception to this, for he makes his portrayals of class and craft as transparent to the reader as he possibly can. But in doing so, he defines a version of modernism that develops from American pragmatism rather than from a European avant-garde tradition. Power in fact emerges as one of Agee’s great links of modernism to his agenda of pragmatism.5 “[The pragmatist],” William James writes in Pragmatism (1907), “is one who turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power” (qtd. in Bentley 265). Indeed, as Michael Staub has argued, “Agee was especially preoccupied with the power relations between his subjects and his readers—and between his subjects and himself” (21). As arbitrator and judge, Agee places himself (despite his fears of being inadequate for the task he has set) against the prevailing 1930s notions about rural poverty, documentary fiction, radical politics, and cultural practice, which especially concern the underclasses and working classes. On a narrative level, he also shares with the pragmatists what critic Ross Posnak argues pragmatism shares with the “historical avant-garde”: the commitments to replacing “theory with practice, the a priori with contingency, clarity with shock, [and] information with immersion” (10). It thus goes without saying that, following through with such commitments (made explicit in Famous Men), Agee’s work offers us a much less elitist perspective on modernism than do works of many of his prominent predecessors and their critics. Put differently, Famous Men suggests a kind of polytheism in that Agee holds that there are many ways for describing verifiable truths. My objective in this chapter is to examine Agee’s pragmatic inquiry as a literary strategy informed (and uninformed) by class considerations of the thirties; to identify his class-inflected trope of sleep as a key to what might be called his perception ethic; and, tied to Famous Men, to explore the (largely unexplored) class inflections of his literary-journalistic writing. For

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this purpose, I will examine two of Agee’s pieces from the thirties, “Saratoga” (Fortune, 1935) and “Havana Cruise” (Fortune, 1937).

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: All Manners of Atmosphere, Made-up Pages Agee’s Famous Men, composed of photographs by Walker Evans and Agee’s narrative, began as a straightforward documentary for Fortune’s “Life and Circumstances” series on the daily existence of “blue- and white-collar families during the depression” (Lowe, The Creative Process 76) but soon evolved into a meditation on what Agee defines as “the nominal subject”: “North American cotton tenantry as examined in the daily living of three representative white tenant families” (Praise 8). More specifically, as T. V. Reed has argued, “Agee and Evan’s work can illuminate the problem of representing ‘disadvantaged’ others, a problem played out between the danger of appropriation and reduction through representation on the one hand and the equal danger on the other hand of leaving those ‘others’ unrepresented or represented less scrupulously and less justly” (157).6 Agee’s stated ideal for his documentary was “to recognize the stature of a portion of unimagined existence, and to contrive techniques proper to its recording, communication, analysis, and defense. More essentially, this is an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity” (Praise 8). Agee begins with a conception of experience as the arena for truth testing—his version of documentary fiction—that culminates in democratic, ethical, and political formulations and activities that cannot be specified in advance or imposed on others. For him there are no final truths, but those proposed must invariably be put into a fruitful contact with reality, mediated by a consciousness that perceives and represents it. Through a process of inquiry into actual socioeconomic fact, Agee’s narrative methods provide a testing ground for his ideas and doubts within a semiotic system involving writer and reader. This is why it is so important to consider the 1930s, the period in which he wrote his finest documentary fiction. Namely, what indicated cultural power in the 1930s was not so much a work’s “universal” or “idealized” literary merit as it was a work’s localized and contentious interpretive truth, and the work’s possibilities for intervening in, and shaping, the opinions of the masses.7 The economic crisis of the early 1930s challenged writers and intellectuals, in Lawrence Hanley’s words, “to reconnect the value and meaning of their work to new

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constituencies and new goals” (“Popular Culture” 253) and, in ways never attempted before, to explore and “struggle over different versions of ‘national life’” (Hanley, “Popular Culture” 244). In perfect stride with this thirties’ ethos, Famous Men was Agee’s “unfinished project of humanizing and democratizing U.S. culture” (Wald 27)— but it was a project he made on his own terms. Ultimately, Agee supports his claims to giving a “true account” of his subjects and places by presenting information that, in concrete practice, cannot be denied while relying on fictional devices that serve to disturb fixed assumptions and to augment his propositional claims. I’m most interested, though, in testing out Agee’s “truth” claims— how he defended his use of fiction devices in his nonfiction because, among much else, he believed it enhanced the respective “truths” of his tale. Agee embraced a new revolutionary mode of chronicling cultural malaise not only by departing from the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century forms of the universal artist or intellectual and embodying the local and specific; he also pitted his truths against the discourses of orthodox Marxism and bourgeois humanism while at times inclining toward, in a typically erratic, unsystematic Agee fashion, an “intelligent ‘communism.’”8 A major part of his political agenda in Famous Men: Agee denies the need for personal expression except when expressing the “identity” of others. As Jeanne Follansbee Quinn has argued, Agee criticized both liberal and Marxist politics for what he saw as misguided and dangerous commitment to identity . . . His dramatization of kinship with the tenant families attempted to represent a “brotherhood” indebted to communist ideas, but in emptying it of working-class identity politics. (339–340).

And yet while refusing to align himself directly with the “Communist Party U.S.A., with the New Deal agricultural policies, or with movements such as the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union” (Follansbee Quinn 340), Agee did formulate an alternative sensation of exchange (“kinship”) between the sharecroppers and a middle-class audience—an alternative collective identity—based on the underlying precept of “human equality”: That all human beings are in almost all essential ways equal—i.e. Human, alive, for not long, and compounded of a great and in many ways inextricable mixture of elements and tendencies more or less possible to call good, and evil; and that all human beings are essentially

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equal in their mortal need; and that they all bear, God knows in various and unequal degrees, the same equality in the potentiality of each, or its self-defeat, or its frustration from outside;—this is poorly expressed and inaccurate, but I would feel or believe that it is true. It seems at the basis of Christian understanding and quite aside from that, elementary to human understanding; a basis of equality which none of the inequalities of temperament or endowment, all of which should be recognized, can touch. If this be true, then I would believe that which supports it to be “right,” and that which opposes it to be “wrong.” (Letters 145)

How to formulate the “truths” that comprise such an equality is the central dilemma of Famous Men. How does Agee articulate his class truths while being skeptical of categories like class? How does he try to abrogate the limits of identification by making the sharecroppers experience “so real to you who read of it, that it will stand and stay in you as the deepest and most iron anguish and guilt of your existence”? (Praise 276). How does Agee wish to demonstrate an aesthetic that might supplement an alternative politics of reform? How does Famous Men work to create an alternative (not straightforward) documentary that expressly tries to reach middle-class readers and spur them to social change? These are some of the questions that this chapter will consider by attempting to contemplate truth not as a stable attribute but as an ongoing attribution; that is, not as an inherent property but rather as a dynamic process resulting from the collisions and combinations of cultural “truth values” and fictional claims to truth.

Narrative Method: The Aesthetics of Identification In Famous Men, the narrational methods of Agee resemble pragmatic inquiry 9: “. . . the knower,” William James wrote in 1878, is not simply a mirror floating with no foot-hold anywhere, and passively reflecting an order that he comes upon and finds simply existing. The knower is an actor and coefficient of the truth on one side, whilst on the other he registers the truth which he helps to create. Mental interests hypotheses, postulates, so far as they are bases for human action—action which to a great extent transforms the world—help to make the truth which they declare.” (Essential, Preface)

As a mode of inquiry, pragmatism centers on experience and on evaluating the consequences of such experience. Knowledge, particularly

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for the earlier pragmatists, Pierce, James, and Dewey, is transient, and being so was another aspect of the universe of change of which the attitude of inquiry was, in itself, the most trusted single guide. As David A. Hollinger has argued, The pragmatists were more concerned than were many of their contemporaries with the integrity and durability of inquiry, on the one hand, and the tentativeness, fallibility, and incompleteness of knowledge on the other. (93)

James’s pragmatism was to reorient philosophy from its traditional perspective, as “essentially the vision of things from above,” to a radically down to earth one—lying “flat on its belly . . . in the very thick of its sand and gravel” (Pluralistic 125). What James invokes as “the pragmatist’s test for truth,” I will argue, can be helpful in understanding Agee’s documentary quest for “truth” and for identifying his phenomenological truths. Immediate experience, as James and John Dewey conceived of it, is always relational (it never exists in the abstract or in isolation from a world containing both other persons and concrete realities), creative (it never merely registers sense data), and imbued with historically specific cultural values (it is never “human” or universal, but always personal and particular) (Kloppenburg 102). Like the early pragmatists, Agee distrusted all forms of foundationalism, all attempts to establish a life philosophy on unchanging a priori postulates. Or, as James would have it, “The notion of a reality independent of . . . us, taken from ordinary social experience, lies at the base of the pragmatist definition of truth” (Meaning of Truth 117). Rather than grounding values in the bedrock of timeless absolutes, Agee urged us to evaluate all of our beliefs—philosophical, scientific, religious, ethical, and political—before the test he considered the most demanding of all: our experience as social and historical beings. In Famous Men, life experiences become the document on which his fiction is built. Crossing verse and reportage, eyewitness testimony and the problems of government mediations (e.g., the WPA program), modernism’s cosmopolitanism and America’s local and liminal cultural spaces, his efforts are in “human actuality,” in which, in Agee’s words, “the reader is no less centrally involved than the authors and those of whom they tell” (Praise, 9). In Famous Men, Agee brings together language and experience in his conception of a pragmatist inquiry, an inquiry that presents itself as an alternative to Marxism and traditional liberal humanism, and to a modernism that cuts itself away from sociopolitical actualities and

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everyday, commonplace events, particularly, as in Agee’s case, those involving the rural poor and working classes. Walker Evans and Agee insisted that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was an antidote to Erskine Caldwell’s and Margeret Bourke-White’s documentary book, You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), arguably, the thirties’ “most influential protest against farm tenancy” (Stott 216). Agee and Evans wished to counter what they saw in their rivals’ naïve sentimentalism, liberal claims of identity, and the unmitigated descriptions of sharecroppers as “piteous creatures.” This moralistic sensationalism is perhaps best demonstrated in the captions of the Bourke-White photographs that accompany the text, in which Bourke-White and Caldwell quote people saying things they never said. For example, a male sharecropper, sad-faced and with watering eyes, wearily exclaims, “A man learns not to expect much after he’s farmed cotton all his life.” One woman, in a plaintive and despairing pose, is made to say, “Sometimes I tell my husband we couldn’t be worse off if we tried.” Another woman concludes the final section of the book with this fake quotation: “I’ve done the best I knew how all my life, but it didn’t amount to much in the end” (qtd. in Stott 221). Agee and Evans were outraged at what they considered to be Caldwell and Bourke-White’s propaganda and profit-making motives and the general untruths of their enterprise. Agee’s truth was of a very different kind. Investing the sharecroppers with imagination and agency in their own lives, as well as at times attributing to them a “class” representativeness, Agee subverts Bourke-White/Caldwell’s descriptions of them as passive victims. For Agee, the liberal claims of common humanity were “obscene and thoroughly terrifying” (Praise 23) for they merely contributed to shunting readers out of the experiences of the tenant families and of emphasizing differences between the sharecroppers’ lives and their own. Agee’s strategy, alternatively, was to infuse a radically private aesthetic response into the actual conditions of the tenant families as the most “truthful” means “to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is”: For him in the immediate world, everything is to be discerned, for him who can discern it, and centrally and simply, without either dissection into science, or digestion into art, but with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands . . . (Praise, 26)

Agee’s “truth,” in a pragmatic spirit of inquiry, is rooted in consequentialist actions (e.g., “everything is to be discerned”) rather than empiricist procedures (“dissection into science”) or idealist abstractions

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(“digestions into art”). He appears to concur, for example, with James’s interpretation of pragmatism: that “truth” is a “good” or moral utility that the mind constructs in harmony with sensory data. Famous Men is not, Agee argues, “a work of art or of entertainment, nor will I assume the obligations of the artist or entertainer, but is a human effort which must require human co-operation” (107). In The Meanings of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (1904), James writes: Truth we conceive to mean everywhere, not duplication, but addition; not the constructing of inner copies of already complete realities, but rather the collaborating with realities so as to bring about a clearer result. (Essential 264)

Eschewing any doctrine or ideology, Agee’s intensive collaborations with the “daily living” (Praise 59) of the three Southern tenant families in Famous Men creates an open-ended epistemological method, similar to James’s process of truth “collaborations,” with the reader at its collaborative center. The reader is indeed asked not only to participate in Agee’s onsite tours of domestic details, his explorations of devotion, his selfabandonment and expropriations, but also, paralleling the narrator’s justification for writing the book and his residency at his subjects’ houses, to justify his/her reasons for reading it: “. . . Who are you who will read these words and study these photographs, and through what cause, by what chance, and for what purpose, and by what right do you qualify to, and what will you do about it . . .” (Praise 24). Agee, at least initially, criticizes the reader for passively accepting “poverty viewed at a distance” (Praise 29) and for not immediately recognizing that his book is “non-‘artistic’” in intention, wishing “to suspend or destroy imagination” and that, like his characters, he too exists “not as a work of fiction, but as a human being” (Praise 27). Through these terms—and only through such terms—Agee addresses his readers.10 While constantly placing himself between his subject and the reader, Agee struggles with problems of representing his realities and truths and obsesses about the questions of what can be known and what can be written. As he states in the preface: Actually the effort is to recognize the stature of a portion of unimagined existence, and to contrive techniques proper to its recording, communication, analysis, and defense. More essentially, this is an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity. (8)

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As seen in the preface and in other sections in which Agee attempts to explain his inquiry (e.g., “Colon,” 97–107; “Notes,” 179–186; “Education,” 251–272), he transforms James’s pragmatism into a narrational method. Although the form of Famous Men, as critic Alan Spiegel has stated, is “impossible to determine,” and any classificatory efforts are hampered by its “forest of literary apparatuses . . . , eccentric proportions, and treacherous chronological displacements” (47), Agee does believe in the truths derived from the realities he observes and the possibility, however difficult, of documenting some portion of these truths. “For one who set himself to look at all earnestly, an all in purpose toward truth, into the living eyes of a human life” (Praise 97, my emphasis). Agee’s inquiry produces moments when the observed families and objects defy him, challenge him, and, in the process, generate unexpected forms of consciousness and truth. For example, just prior to Emma Gudger’s departure for Cookstown and her new life with “that man” (Praise 67), Agee interprets his own moment-by-moment realizations of her effects on him: What’s the use trying to say what I felt. It took her a long time to say what she wanted so much to say, and it was hard for her, but there she stood looking straight into my eyes, and I straight into hers, longer than you’d think it would be possible to stand it. I would have done anything in the world for her . . . and all I could do, the very most, for this girl who was so soon going on out of my existence into so hopeless a one of hers, the very most I could do was not show all I cared for her and for what she was saying, and not to even try to do, or to indicate the good I wished I might do her and was utterly helpless to do. (Praise 70)

In James’s pragmatist vision, questions or doubts occasion thoughts that seek termination in a new idea or belief upon which one may act. As James suggests in The Meanings of Truth (1909), “Experience is a process that continually gives us new material to digest. We handle this intellectually by the mass of beliefs of which we find ourselves already possessed, assimilating, rejecting, or rearranging in different degrees” (Essential 264). This incident illustrates how Agee’s beliefs inevitably lead him to new questions and doubts, and thus the process of inquiry continues. Agee’s inquiry, most importantly, centers on chronicling the daily existence of the tenant families. Working against the grain of such avant-garde modernists as the surrealists or vorticists, with their focus on the moment of defamiliarization or shock, Agee’s stress is on the

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moments of illumination and transfiguration that he relates to the most mundane tasks and activities. In Part One, “A Country Letter,” for example, he typically describes the ritual evening habits of the women at the Gudger house: and when the women are through, they may or may not come out too, with their dresses wet in front with the dishwashing and their hard hands softened and seamed as if withered with water, and sit a little while with the an or the men: and if they do, it is not for long, for everyone is much too tiered, and has been awake and at work since daylight whitened a little behind the trees on the hill . . . (Praise 74).

Above all else, Famous Men is a steady reorganization and recontextualization of the daily habits of the tenant families, embracing them in a newly thoughtful way. As Dewey claims in Human Nature and Conduct (1922), there is no alternative to “habit”; habit permeates our existence, protecting us from “irritation and confused hesitation” (72) in our daily lives. Habit in James and Dewey is never merely a “problem to overcome, a failure of imagination,” or a series of mindless repetitions. Rather, it consists of the elemental parts into which “thought and behavior can be broken down, and through which they are built back up” (Schoenbach 245). Agee puts his accumulated and frequently unconscious data at the center of experience; the “actualities” he witnesses he claims as a link between collective and private existences. An essential part of this process is Agee’s constant psychological introspection in which he explores the depths of his own world through the surface worlds of the tenant families. His discussions of money, shelter, clothing, education, work, and cotton constantly turn to himself and to his intentions: “And it is in these terms I would tell you, at all leisure, and in all detail, whatever there is to tell: of where I am; of what I perceive” (Praise 60). James’s pragmatism is rooted in an introspective psychology, evidenced perhaps most widely, in the claims he makes throughout The Principles of Psychology (1890): “That theory will be most generally believed which, besides offering us objects able to account satisfactorily for our sensible experience, also offers us those which are most interesting, those which appeal most urgently to our aesthetic, emotional, and active needs” (940). Agee’s selections of objects and subjects reflect this maxim: “how am I to speak of you as ‘tenant’ farmers, as representative of your ‘class,’ as social integers in a criminal economy, or as individuals, fathers, wives, sons, daughters, and as my friends, and as I ‘know’ you?” (Praise 98). His use of the first-person voice might be “not to tell us what to see,

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but how to see” (Jackson 6), but it constantly directs us to a construction of himself, a foundation from which and by which his intellectual, moral, and aesthetic priorities get developed. Constructing an inner center of convictions that allows a hierarchy of beliefs and values is, inevitably, an intensively introspective process. It allows Agee to make such claims as these: I believe that every human being is potentially capable, within his “limits,” of fully “realizing” his potentialities; that this, his being cheated and choked of it, is infinitely the ghastliest, commonest, and most inclusive of all the crimes of which the human world can accuse itself; and that the discovery and use of “consciousness,” which has always been and is our deadliest enemy and deceiver, is also the source and guide of all home and cure, and the only one. (Praise 266)

Agee’s social truth (i.e., “that all human beings are in almost all essential ways equal” Letters 145) is inseparable from his introspective process in which he wishes to create a world of pure experience.11 His record and analysis, he proclaims in the preface, is intended to be “exhaustive, with no detail, however trivial it may seem, left untouched, no relevancy avoided, which lies within the power of remembrance to maintain, of the intelligence to perceive, and of the spirit to persist in” (Praise 8). It is a book “only by necessity,” he tells us, for “[m] ore seriously, it is an effort in human actuality” (Praise 9). Indeed, Agee wishes to “sacralize both language and experience on the Altar of the Real” tracing out his processional through such section headings as “The Altar,” “The Tabernacle,” and “Recessional and Vortex” (Carton and Carton 2). Complementing the iconic silence of Evan’s photographs (“They and the text are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative” Praise 8) with his aurality and expansive prose, Agee makes “visible” the lives he describes by consistently pinpointing their “actuality”—one of Agee’s favorite words in the book. But he can only hope to sacralize and actualize by staying consistent with the “truth” of his findings from which he cannot separate himself: . . . I would do just as badly to simplify or eliminate myself from this picture as to simplify or invent character, places or atmospheres. A chain of truths did actually weave itself and run through: it is their texture that I want to represent, not betray, nor pretty up into art. (Praise 210)

In this view, Agee follows the ultimate aim of a pragmatist inquiry, corresponding to Charles Peirce’s and James’s point of view: a

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finished knowledge, however provisional. This knowledge, however, which is to be approached in the limit but never actually achieved, will have an “aesthetic quality” that will be a “free development of the agent’s own aesthetic quality” and will, at the same time, match “the aesthetic quality” of the “ultimate actions of experience upon him” (Peirce 5, 136). Aesthetic quality cannot be detached from experience: each shapes the other but Agee’s ultimate test is that his “communication” (Praise 25) be true to the “conditions” (Praise 25) of the tenant families: “Those matters [art and craft] . . . cannot be otherwise than true to their conditions, and I would not wish to conceal these conditions even if I could, for I am interested to speak as carefully and as truly as I am able” (Praise 26). To be sure, as James argues in The Principles of Psychology, the meaning of real things—their voluminousness, their overflowingness exceed any final knowledge of what they are: the world of “practical realities”— must be defined in a relative sense. In a relative sense, then, the sense in which we contrast reality with simple unreality, and in which one thing is said to have more reality than another, and to be more believed, reality means simply relation to our emotional and active life. This is the only sense which the word ever has in the mouths of practical men. (Essential 140)

Agee’s pragmatic inquiry reminds us that the reality he invents will always reflect a purposive bent, whether or not any “final conclusions” exist outside his inventions. Despite his acknowledgement of the relativity of truth (“Name me one truth within human range that is not relative and I will feel a shade more apologetic of that” Praise 210), his account of truth—the power of an idea to lead us into satisfactory relations with its objects—is advanced as an account of agreement or correspondence with his way of telling. Added to his laments over the elusiveness of his subjects and his own fears of lacking the “mastery” to render them (Praise 25), he hopes that, in his quest for a finished knowledge, his “manner of effort may at least less hopelessly approach clarity and truth” (Praise 26). Not incidentally, therefore, in constantly justifying his “business to show” (Praise 106), Agee locates truth outside the realms of both “Art” and journalism. In relation to his book, he writes, “Above all else, don’t think of it as Art” (Praise 29). Agee rejects anything that leads to an object without being in any proper sense about the object: “It means that anything set forth within an art form, ‘true’ as it may be in art terms, is hermetically sealed away from identification with

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everyday ‘reality’” (Praise 211). Journalism meets no better fate, for its form is inherently self-limiting, corrupt, and complacent: “This is not to accuse or despise journalism for anything beyond its own complacent delusion, and its enormous power to poison the public with the same delusion, that it is telling the truth even of what it tells of . . . The very blood and semen of journalism . . . is a broad and successful form of lying. Remove that form of lying and you no longer have journalism” (Praise 206). To gather his truths, Agee concentrates, alternatively, on immediate actualities, everyday objects, and on the opportunities that the ostensibly nondescript provides: Plain objects and atmospheres have a sufficient beauty and stature that it might be well if the describer became more rather than less shameless: if objects and atmospheres for the secret sake of which it is customary to write a story or poem, and which are chronically relegated to a menial level of decoration or at best illumination, were handled and presented on their own merits without either distortion or apology. (Praise 210)

Agee rejects the kind of art that cannot get at a “certain form of truth” about its subject. In justifying his description of George Gudger, for example, he proclaims: “The one deeply exciting thing about Gudger is that he is actual, he is living at this instant. He is not some artist’s or journalist’s or propagandist’s invention . . . and it is my business to reproduce him as the human being he is” (210). Agee believes in the primacy of his own intuitive, personal vision as opposed to the voices of “socalled art” (Praise 211) and journalism that cannot be accepted as “living, as telling of the living ‘truth’” (Praise 211). His commitment to representing “human beings,” to obliterating distances that are antithetical to human identification, is social, a way of seeing and feeling things, for they compose a social whole: The most I can do—the most I can hope to do—is to make a number of physical entities as plain and vivid as possible, and to make a few guesses, a few conjectures; and to leave to you much of the burden of realizing in each of them what I have wanted to make clear of them as a whole . . . (Praise 106)

Camera Eyes Agee’s pragmatic inquiry seeks an alternative—provided by the “camera.” The camera is a model for the kind of representation—appropriative, self-regarding, autoerotic—Agee wished for in his prose. The

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camera provides a compensatory response to truth: One reason I so deeply care for the camera is just this. So far as it goes (which is, in its own realm, as absolute anyhow as the traveling distance of words or sound), and handled cleanly and literally in its own terms, as an ice-cold, some ways limited, some ways more capable, eye, it is like the phonograph record and like scientific instruments and unlike any other leverage of art, incapable of recording anything but absolute, dry truth. (Praise 206, my emphasis)

“The true,” for James and Agee, is part of an entire process of verification, like the series of Evans’s uncaptioned photographs, or the series of Agee’s verbal portraits of people and objects. In the long run, according to James, this kind of verification—incidental, concretely factual, accretive—can “make” an idea true: The regulative notion of a potential better truth to be established later, possibly to be established absolutely, and having powers of retroactive legislation, turns its face, like all pragmatist notions, towards concreteness of fact, and towards the future. Like the half-truths, the absolute truth will have to be made, made as a relation incidental to the growth of a mass of verification experience, to which the half-true ideas are all along contributing their quota. (Pragmatism 106–107)

Although “the absolute truth” is constantly deferred, reflecting the general structure of the work as a prelude to itself, Agee’s collaborative conjunctions, his cumulative verifications, lie at the center of his pragmatist semiotics. The fact that he is “illimitably more interested in life than in art” (212) is not a philosophy but a method, one that calls to all, or at least all who are willing to immerse themselves in the “tangled, muddy” mess of “concrete, personal experience” (Pragmatism 17). Much of Agee’s method is derived from his ideas on photography. Put bluntly, he appears to respond to the question with which Walter Benjamin, in reference to the relationship between literature and the photographic image, concludes his “Short History of Photography” (1935): “Will not captions become the essential components of pictures?” The caption works to complete the image—and indeed Famous Men, as numerous critics have argued, can usefully be seen as a series of captions to Walter Evans’s sixtyone photographs. Or, put another way, the photographs can be conceptualized, to use one of Agee’s favorite words, as a “counterpoint” to the text. And yet, at the same time, despite his constant

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claim that the photograph is more effective than the word (“If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs” (Praise 28)), Agee also points to the “ease” of the camera as “becom[ing] the greatest danger against [its] good use” (Praise 208). While praising the camera’s power, Famous Men is a pointed response to that which has become the “central instrument of our time”: I feel such rage at its misuse: which has spread so nearly universal a corruption of sight that I know of less than a dozen alive whose eyes I can trust so much as my own. (26)

More specifically, Agee’s text constantly insists on a concern for the original and actual from which his flawed and inaccurate words have been derived while also warning us that photographic convention can persuade readers to accept representation as “real” and therefore to neglect searching for the actual reality. This explains why Agee’s subjects, like those of Evans’s camera, are not passive, mute or dead, although he might sometimes “rende[r] them as still and motionless” or as “subordinate appendages to the objects” (Ward 84–85). Exactly the contrary: one of the most disturbing qualities of Famous Men is how his subjects gaze back, as if to complete the “truth” the camera (the engenderer of “absolute dry truth” (206)) claims. Thus at so many points in the text, eyes are more penetrating than the camera gaze of the narrator (“I watched what would be trapped, possessed, fertilized, in the leisures and shyness which are a phase of all love for any object: searching out and registering in myself all its lines” (Praise 48)). “The young man’s eyes,” in “At the Forks,” for example, “[were] watching [the narrator] in a way that relaxed [him] to cold weakness of ignobility . . . whereas those of the young woman had each the splendor of a monstrance, and were brass” (44). Agee continues the description: There was in their eyes so quiet and ultimate a quality of hatred, and contempt, and anger, toward every creature in existence beyond themselves, and toward the damages they sustained, as shone scarcely short of a state of beatitude; nor did this at any time modify itself. (44)

The narrator cannot escape the eyes gazing back (47, 52, 70): “None of them relieved me for an instant of their eyes; at the intersection of those three tones of force I was transfixed as between spearheads as I talked” (45). Above all, his descriptions of eyes become a rhetorical

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device for sparking social consciousness: For one who sets himself to look at all earnestly, at all in purpose toward truth, into the living eyes of a human life: what is it he there beholds that so freezes and abashes his ambitious heart? What is it, profound behind the outward windows of each one of you . . . ? (97)

By writing himself as a flawed viewer into the text and by devising a host of strategies for representing the visual in all its variations, Agee struggled against conventional language and structures that did not do enough to implicate a reader or a viewer. If true objectivity must incorporate subjectivity, then his encounters with the medium of photography—in Famous Men and elsewhere—led him to reassess the possibilities and limitations of his own art.12 The camera thus became for Agee an ethical, spiritual, political, literary subject because in large part it seemed like a perspicuous metaphor for the work of writing.

Sleep, Speculation—toward a Perception Ethic Sleep as a textual trope in Famous Men promotes Agee’s belief of seeing “aesthetic reality” within the actual world while at the same time offering a vision that veers toward an admixture of death, primeval return, and a utopian egalitarian ethos. The most important tropes of sleep, placed at the beginning, middle, and end of the narrative in the chapters “(On the Porch: 1,” “(On the Porch : 2,” and “(On the Porch 3,” form a narrative frame. Significantly, the single parenthesis in each of the titles indicates a permanent suspension among the three parts of the unfolding narrative.13 Here’s how the first description of the (sleeping) Gudger house begins: The House and all that was in it had now descended deep beneath the gradual spiral it had sunk through; it lay formal under the order of silence. In the square pine room at the back the bodies of the man of thirty and of his wife and of their children lay on shallow mattresses on their iron bed and on the rigid floor, and they were sleeping, and the dog lay asleep in the hallway. (33)

In Agee’s art of sleep we immediately encounter the writer of realism—he is, after all, a “reporter” on assignment—disputing the prevalent standards of realism (“The House . . . had descended”), which he

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continues in his description of “this human family” (33): “Bone and bone, blood and blood, life and life disjointed and abandoned they lay graven in so final depth, that dreams attended them seemed not plausible” (33). The narrator, from this scene on, begins the process of reverence (at times voyeuristic) for sleeping figures and his literal and aesthetic responses to sleep.14 The section ends with the narrator taking on the ability not only to see and vicariously experience the sleep of others but to interpret its collective, primeval significance, as the house “descends” even further: On some ledge over-leaning that gulf which is more profound than the remembrance of imagination they had lain in sleep and at length the sand, that by degrees had crumpled and rifted, had broken from beneath them and they sank. There was now no further extreme, and they were sunken not singularly but companionate among the whole enchanted swarm of the living, into a region prior to the youngest cravings. (34)

As in this passage, the literal sleep of people who do not speak becomes like the mute and static objects Agee describes, the descriptions of which radically eliminate any other consciousness, any other motion or sound but that of the narrator. The universal nightly ritual of sleeping is itself, on one hand, restorative, “companionate,” collective, and at least temporarily provides relief from daily uncertainty. On the other, it represents Agee’s speculations of helplessness, finality, and death (“abandoned they lay graven in so final depth”). But most importantly, the trope becomes a rhetorical tactic for sparking a consciousness of affection and social caring in the narrator (and reader) while demonstrating some of the possibilities for reimagining social solidarity. At the same time, it is a fundamental part of his perception ethic, a “manner of effort [that] may at least less hopelessly approach clarity and truth” (Praise 26). And it reflects his pragmatic concern of deriving political and social consequences from aesthetic experiences. For example, in the chapter “A Country Letter,” when lying awake in a room next to the sleeping Gudgers, Agee describes Emma Gudger and the rest of her family: . . . and now she sleeps, here in this next room, among six others dear in their lives to me, and if I were but to section and lift away a part of this so thin shell and protection of wall, there they would be as in a surgery, or a medical drawing. (73)

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Here Agee follows “[h]is most characteristic approach at getting close to his subject without violating its sanctity” through his fascination with “idiosyncratic forms of analytic surgery and speculative lift-off” (Spiegel 123) and, I would add, aesthetic experiencing. Yet more pointedly, in the realm of his “extended senses,” Agee wants to derive a truth of this kind from the sleep he perceives: It was good to be doing the work we had come to do and to be seeing the things we cared most to see, and to be among the people we cared most to know, and to know these things not as a book looked into, a desk sat down to, a good show caught, but as a fact as large as the air; something absolute and true we were a part of and drew with every breath and added to with every glance of the eye. It was good even, to be doing the limited job we had been assigned. We lay thinking of the unprecedented and unrecorded beauty, and sorrow and honor in the existence of a child who lay sleeping in the room not far from us . . . (Praise 221)

In the identification he proposes, in this recurrent ritual of solidarity (Agee in one room imagining the sleeping figures in the next), Agee wants to feel part of what he depicts (“something absolute . . . we were a part of”), which in a pragmatist vein, he asserts, can be approximated through aesthetic experience and result in social consequences (“the limited job we had been assigned”). The very words “sleep,” “sleeping,” “asleep” (33, 199, 358) counterpointed with “awakened,” “awake,” “wakened” (87, 89) run through Famous Men as an insistent reminder that such states are provisional and that the “burden of being” (85) will always return: . . . . their legs heavy, their eyes quiet and sick, the weight of the day watching them quietly from the ceiling, in the sharpening room; they will lift; lift to the floor and the height of their bodies above their feet and the load above them, and let it settle upon the spine, and the width of the somewhat stooped shoulders, the weight that is not put by; and are drawn loose from their homes a million upon the land, beneath the quietly lifting light, to work. . . . (85)

One of the most poignant descriptions of an awakening in Famous Men concerns Annie Mae Gudger for whom sleep provides little sustenance or relief: Annie Mae watches up at the ceiling, and she is as sick with sleep as if she had lain the night beneath a just-supportable weight: and watching

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up into the dark, beside her husband, the ceiling becomes visible, and watching into her eyes, the weight of the day. She has not lacked in utter tiredness, like a load in her whole body, a day since she was a young girl, nor will she ever lack it again; and is of that tribe who by glandular arrangement seem to exhaust rather than renew themselves with sleep, and to whom the act of getting up is almost unendurably painful. (89)

Agee never takes us far from “the actuality of experience,” or when he does he brings us back quickly, or as here, follows a pattern that shifts from a metaphorical description (“weight of the day”) to its literal counterpart (“utter tiredness”) and then back again. After cataloguing the various awakenings—those of George Gudger and several members of the Woods family, Ivy, Pearl, Thomas, and Ellen, Agee turns to his own awakenings as a child in Tennessee: I used as a child in the innocence of faith to bring myself out of bed through the cold lucid water of the Cumberland morning and to serve at the altar at earliest lonely Mass, whose words were thrilling brooks of music and whose motions, a grave dance . . . and the morning was clangorous with the whole of a roused school where we were done, and out, and that was the peace of a day: and it is no beauty less that the gestures of a day here begin. . . . (90)

Here he not only reinforces the pragmatic notion that there is no “alternative to habit,” but as he reorganizes and recontextualizes the sleeping and waking habits of the tenant families he brings himself into the scene. In the process he creates an aesthetic model for approaching the tenant families, a model expressed in a 1936 letter to Father Flye: I can conceive of this: that a person who would wish to know and do good ‘realistically’ accept the human situation at the worst that it is and work within and in terms of its physique, with patience and understanding, and doubt of himself as well as of all else; but those who do this in the name of ‘realism’ seem invariably to capitulate, to shift their centre from absolutes to relatives, and in so doing to corrupt their own effort, inevitably, and usually without knowing it. (Letters 99)

Agee’s trope of sleep may well originate with his tendency to undermine realistic assumptions about the significance of sleep and ephemeral experiences in general. By contrast, unlike almost everything else in Famous Men, the sleep and awakenings of the tenant families are

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never treated ironically but always sentimentally, reverentially, and spiritually: “that each is a single, unrepeatedly, holy individual, by the two billion human creatures who are alive upon the planet today” (277). The visionary “last words of this book” (373) describe Ellen Woods, “at the edge of the front porch” (373) sleeping: “And Ellen where she rests, in the gigantic light: she, too, is completely at peace, this child, the arms squared back, the palms open loose against the floor, the floursack on her face . . . and her in this breathing and play of flame, a thing so strong, so valiant, so unvanquishable, it is without effort, without emotion, I know it shall at length outshine the sun” (374). Finally, in the last “On the Porch” section ((On the Porch: 3)—apparently part of the “Notes and Appendices”—Evans and Agee, as in each of the three porch chapters, are again lying on the front porch, both non-sleeping subjects, “thinking, analyzing, remembering, in the human and artist’s sense praying, chiefly over matters of the present and of that immediate past which was a part of the present” (399). But this time Agee, for the first and last time in the narrative, through a sympathy grounded in the intimacy produced by the phenomenological experience of “tiredness” and “the extreme clearness, and edge, and honor” (399) that he wants to render to the reader, joins the others in sleep.

Conclusion Agee’s modernism conflates with his pragmatist inquiry resulting in a new form for expostulating “truths.” The trope of sleep bolsters his inquiry while providing a crucial figurative dimension to his truth claims. As Richard H. King has argued, Agee sought to unite social radicalism and literary modernism in a “democratic high art” that was opposed to the conservative monumentalism of Eliot or Tate, a “counter-heroics” or “inverted monumentalism, the hallowing of the obscure and the ‘private’” (qtd. in Carton 5). But it was more than this. Agee’s modernism consisted of a self-conscious exploration of the private self through which he believed that the creation of meaning and coherence was the task of the writer, performed in opposition to false and damaging external impositions of order (e.g., for Agee, “journalism,” “Art” in his sense). In the modernist vein, he wanted Famous Men to challenge, unsettle, and shock readers. But Agee had no political program per se, other than attempting to help his readers understand other subjectivities and to reveal the face of common life that many modernist modes of art masked; his pragmatist inquiry, neither liberal nor Marxist but radically individual and

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antiauthoritarian, was anchored in a mistrust of what he termed in Famous Men as “all factions and all joiners”(106).15 In ultimately rejecting the two major aesthetic modes proferred in the 1930s, literary modernism and realism/naturalism, Agee rejected the pervasive thirties genre, the documentary book that claimed to give its readers “authentic” access to other worlds, particularly those of the poor and disprivileged. These dismissals and Agee’s numerous calls for skepticism in Famous Men resulted in an alternative documentary that insisted on the reality of the referent, on truths that come and go with the concrete beliefs that contain them, and on the individual persons who, through interactions with the world and each other, generate those beliefs. The form of Agee’s Famous Men can usefully be seen as a counter example to Marjorie Perloff’s fears about “creative nonfiction” and its insidiously persuasive presence in the American academy (4).16 But Agee goes far beyond such facile categories. In going against the “documentary’s tragic superficiality” (Denning 119), encapsulated in his rebuke of Caldwell and Bourke-White, in his concluding notes on Bourke-White’s photographs in Famous Men, and in his response to documentary realism in the work itself, Agee reminds us that truth can play an important role in the evaluation of literary themes without converting the practice of literature into the practice of philosophy. Although it can be argued that the “documentaries” of Agee—and others of the period: Agnes Smedley, John Steinbeck, Muriel Rukeyser, Meridel Le Sueur—are less a form of social realism than formal experiments, it can also be claimed that these writers based their work on correspondence to the true nature of experience. They all aspired to “tell the truth,” associating truth with claims of empirical validation. And although certainly there is nothing about literature that absolutely requires us to evaluate it in terms of truth, for considerations of truth certainly are not constitutive of the practice of literary evaluation, this does not mean that “truth” cannot play a central role in the evaluation of literature.17 It certainly can, for just as the literary stance and the nonfictive stance intersect, so aspects of the philosophical stance, as in Agee’s “truth-oriented” pragmatist inquiry, may legitimately intrude on its literary counterpart, and thereby add to and enrich it.

Agee’s Literary Journalism: “Continual Awareness,” Untold Stories Similar to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee’s literary journalism contains the hope of trying to invent a new transforming aesthetic practice in which, as Agee states in his masterwork, “the reader is

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no less centrally involved than the authors and those of whom they tell” (Praise 28). Phyllis Frus argues that literary journalism, due to its predominantly “non-fictional” form, is a kind of discourse where “true and false” are more important “distinctions” than in “literature” (9).18 This, though, I think, cannot be said of Agee, especially because of his highly self-conscious style, which blurs almost every distinction between literature and nonfiction, his undermining of the dichotomy between “literature” and “mass culture” (contravening the conventional belief that “literature is thought of as the realm where, even when a work represents the world, its truth or falsity is irrelevant,” Frus 8–9), and his conception of narrative “truth.” As he argues in Famous Men, “Journalism can within its own limits be ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ ‘true’ or ‘false,’ but it is not in the nature of journalism even to approach any less relative degree of truth” (206). Agee’s plea for a kind of journalism that would not “poison the public” (Praise 206) but would “perceive in full and . . . present immaculately what was the case” (Fitzgerald 29) has significant ramifications for his class representations in which a “reliable” and “percipient” (participant-) observer “must not be ignored” (Ashdown, “Visionary Journalism” 60). Above all, in his literary journalism, Agee sees himself foremost as a cultural and social critic. Thus while expediting his “great claims” (Ashdown, “James Agee” 197), he never abandons his point of view and his subjects rarely speak for themselves. Agee’s journalistic assignments for Fortune, Time, and the Nation in the 1930s and 1940s included stories on the Tennessee Valley Authority (a kind of conventional documentary counterpart to Famous Men), cockfighting, industrial pollution, a war-damaged Europe, the death of F.D.R., and the U.S. commercial orchid industry.19 For my purposes, though, the most important pieces are “Saratoga” (Fortune, 1935) and “Havana Cruise” (Fortune, 1937), neither of which has received the critical attention it deserves. Preceding the actual writing of Famous Men by less than a year, “Saratoga” anticipates the Agee narrator of the Alabama experience: prescient yet uncertain, observing himself as much as he observes others, getting close to his subjects by giving us their world as a substitute for themselves. “Havana Cruise,” published a year after Agee’s most famous work, extends many of the techniques of Famous Men, revealing, most notably, his subjects through the portrayal of objects while employing strategies of address that complicate the relationship between representation and real experience. Yet while trying to discover another form of class knowledge—this time that of the “middle-class,” Agee, inversing his intention in Famous Men, desacralizes his subjects, and, in so

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doing, condemns them for their non-defiance. Both articles attempt to portray people as something more than sociological entities and to discover some of the basic patterns of 1930s American culture. To be clear, Agee was part of the 1930s phenomenon to understand, in Warren Susman’s words, “the concept of culture and its implications” and the “forces operating to shape that culture into a heightened sensitivity of itself as a culture” (158).

Rousing the Reader: Second-person Narration Published in Fortune in 1935, “Saratoga” depicts a slice of American 1930s horse-racing culture in which class judgments and distinctions predominate. Agee begins the piece by giving a brief history of the city of Saratoga Springs and then, comparing Saratoga to other American courses (Miami’s Hialeah, Los Angeles’s Santa Anita, Long Island’s Belmont), argues for its distinctiveness and the “special intensity” of its horse-racing seasons (Selected Journalism (SJ) 89). Agee then proceeds to catalogue “the sort of people who come [to Saratoga Springs] whose names you know and who are Turf and Field clubbers” (SJ 90): “Marshall Field,” “William du Pont,” “Charles Schwartz,” “Mrs. Margaret Emerson, and her son Alfred Bwynne Vanderbilt”; social relations among the wealthy regulars: “. . . the sportsman-politician William Ziegler who for years paid Edward Ashton $7,500 for the month’s use of his million-dollar turkey farm”; and “illustrious” others who “most likely have boxes at the track as they would have permanent pews if they were pillars of churches” (SJ 90). As a savvy parodic insider, the narrator then presents another side of the “crazy quilt” (SJ 91), which shows Saratoga’s “heterogeneous clientele” (SJ 99). These include famous gangsters (“Little Augie,” “Charlie (Lucky) Luciano,” “Dutch Schultz”), “some of Manhattan’s georgetted and hennaed madams,” gamblers, bookies, and “hopeless small-time owners . . . that together make up America’s strangest season” (SJ 91). Importantly, in 1935, Agee observed the results of a law that had been repealed the previous year, a law that prohibited the open soliciting of gambling at the race track (Ashdown, “Visionary Journalism” 69). As the narrator explains, “Bookies and betting managed to stay very much alive in the dark age between 1908 and 1934, when they were restored to semi-legality and the right to operate openly. But we take them up only with their definite public reappearance” (SJ 93). The 1935 season was indeed an animated one, which saw the increase of the bookies, gamblers, and

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prostitutes (Agee supplies names and exact occupations) on whom Agee focuses his exposé. Strikingly, though, the narrator never deploys a first-person pronoun but instead, in this first and only instance, relies on the “we” to invoke the immediacy of a narrator–reader alliance so as to create a shared (visible, palpable) experience. Through this introduction (“we take them up”), followed by his comprehensive chronicling of character, the narrator wishes to establish a direct reader–narrator confrontation with the lives of the “dark” figures, their excesses, wealth, and corruption. And yet, as in “The American Roadside” (Fortune 1934) and “Cockfighting” (Fortune 1934), “Saratoga” most often relies on second-person narration, anticipating Agee’s concern with reader involvement in Famous Men. The narrated “you” is a central aspect in the sequences of scenes that he presents—from his witnessing the “thoroughbreds . . . coming serenely awake” (“. . . as pure unadorned running as you’ll ever see” (SJ 93)) and methods of betting (“Speaking very broadly, there are two ways you can bet on a horse: by hand, and by (pari-mutuel) machine” (SJ 93)) to nightlife activities (SJ 99), the participation in a horse market (SJ 100) and casino gambling (“. . . you can go there for low as $5 a head for dinner and cocktails and they’ll send a carriage for you to boot” (SJ 101)). Contributing to this centrality (i.e., involving the “you” in much of what the narrator witnesses), the events and actions are usually specific as regards their setting and time. For example, when the narrator comments on what normally happens after the races of the day: “What you do after your supper or hot dog depends partly on who, socially and occupationally, you are, and partly on your money and day’s luck” (SJ 99). Or in his experiences at the “smart clubs”: “Almost any tout, by the by, is optimistic enough to bring a tux to town; and at those clubs you see some pleasantly inappropriate mugs looking over their whitewashed fences” (SJ 102). Agee’s second-person literary journalism, however, can be “open,” and even arbitrary, in reference to the relationship between narration and interior monologue: he can be seen as addressing himself as well as the reader.

Class Divisions, Social Disunity Crucially, however, most of Agee’s descriptions of Saratoga lifestyles and routines, while calling for various kinds of reader involvement, reflect a dichotomy of social and class divisions. These divisions not only apply to lodgings (“Far as living is concerned, they shake into position as a furnace shakes down: the dust at the bottom and the

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clinkers on top” (SJ 92)) but to several other descriptive categories. For example, the various kinds of entertainment: “. . . and by now those who can afford it are on their way to the fancy clubs out in the country” (SJ 99) as opposed to “the poorer end of the crowd” who once flocked to the dog racing at Ballston (SJ 100). In descriptions of “the routine dancing and drinking” (SJ 101), the narrator sets up a contrast between the “chronically rich” (SJ 101) who frequent the more exclusive clubs and the “least moneyed people” of “Saratoga’s imported Harlem on Congress Street” (SJ 102). Simultaneously, he preserves his point of view while never relinquishing the “you”: “. . . the brain-blinding racket you need, at this ebb of your vitality, to keep you happy the rest of the night” (SJ 102). Agee’s narration thereby retains a public character of interaction as it constantly pulls in the “you,” preventing his story from dropping into a monologue or falling into anonymity. Taken as a whole, “Saratoga” emphasizes, like much of the writing of the thirties, that culture is constitutive of relations of power that may become political, in the sense that they may become contested or opposed, or may be connected to the exercise of rule and authority. “Saratoga” illustrates, in Lawrence Hanley’s words, the class inequities of thirties America and the failure of this period “to contain and to manage agents of class difference who both provoke and, ultimately, subvert ‘official’ boundaries between inside and outside, self and other, and order and anarchy” (“Popular Culture” 243). The races provide, however temporarily, a false sense of social unity (facilitated by the power of commodity, risk, and the act of consumption) around and through which “Saratoga” negotiates its representations of “popular and elite, dominant and oppositional cultures” (Hanley, “Popular Culture” 244). It then suggests a version of (class and social) disunity and diffusion that characterizes “national life”: For about three hours each day, then, Saratoga’s whole heterogeneous clientele is coalesced and most intensely concentrated around one single point: the swiftness of the movement of horses. It is a concentration whose essential quality is best caught in the noise a few thousand people make when first they all become aware the horses are off . . . And then at length the last horse in the race . . . brings the day’s most beautiful and most serious business to a faintly ignominious close and, with the twilight and the evening and the depth of a night ahead, thirty thousand people, more or less, are disunified and scattered at large upon the resources of the town and of the surrounding countryside. (SJ 99)

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After commenting on “our easy twentieth-century upper-middle class promiscuity” and the profusion of prostitution during the racing season, the narrator takes himself (and the reader) far into the “one last night”: “as the ultimate parties blare and fritter toward their redeyed end, you hear throughout the streets of Saratoga the heavy and the deliberate steady rumble, as of an army in orderly retreat, of the departing lorries” (SJ 102). Agee’s typical visionary hope (e.g., as in A Death in the Family) is abandoned. As the narrative ends, all forms of social satire recede and descriptions of “lush elms” and “wild gables” give way to images of “the pitiable slums of this curious city” where “settles, delayed a little but by no means dispelled by Saratoga’s other season, the season of water, the chill and the very temper and the cold of death” (103). “Havana Cruise,” published in Fortune in 1937, the year after Agee completed Famous Men, relates his experience of a six-day cruise from New York to Cuba on the steamship Oriente. Although much shorter in scope, Agee intended it as a kind of inverse Famous Men. As suggested in his “Plans for Work: October 1937,” “Related to the Alabama technique, a technique was developed part way in Havana Cruise, mentioned among things I have had published. I should like to apply this to the behavior of a wealthier class . . . ” (161). Similar to “Saratoga,” “Havana Cruise” offers a panorama of class positions inflected by the narrator’s criticism of the commodity of leisure, but this time he focuses more on self-contented upper- and middle-class ideals, self-indulgence on a mass scale, and the selling of consumption. Although perhaps less obvious than in Famous Men and “Saratoga,” the narrator is concerned with how his text intersects with and acts upon his readers. Agee begins by plunging the reader into a soft portraiture of the guests aboard the Oriente and their “[f]orces of habit” (127), which he traces throughout the narrative. In fast order he introduces us to “Mr. and Mrs. B.,” “Mrs. C and her feeble sister,” “Mr. B” and “his gentle, pretty wife” (127) and then slowly starts his satirical fire: “For this short leisure among new faces [Miss Cox] had invested heavily in costume, in fear, in hope, and like her colleagues she searched among the men as for steamer smoke from an uncharted atoll” (SJ 128). A kind of male equivalent, though apparently fearless, is then forwarded: “A blond young man who resembled an Airedale sufficiently intelligent to count to ten, dance fox trots, and graduate from a gentleman’s university came briskly to the dining room . . . ” (SJ 128). In such a way, while taking us from one scene to another, the narrator’s invective increases: “His snobbishness rather flattered a

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number of the passengers”; “the pretentious menu”; “the hard, glassy sort of blond who should even sleep in jodhpurs, tinkered at [her] fruit and exchanged monosyllables as if they were forced bargains” (SJ 128). After a brief mention of the “average happily married couple,” “Mr. and Mrs. L,” Agee suggests that finding an “attachment” or pursuing “for one degree or another . . . a hell of a good time” (SJ 129) includes, most often, a certain selfishness and cruelty: The appraisal of clothes, of class, of race, of temperament, and of he opposed sexes met and crossed and flickered in a texture of glances as swift and keen as the leaping closures of electric arcs, and essentially as irrelevant to mercy. (SJ 128)

The rest of the piece is not, however, devoted to romantic or sexual encounters, but largely to analyzing the “creatures of a different order”: that is, “the representatives of the lower-middle to middle brackets of the American urban middle class” (SJ 128). Agee’s means of representing this class functions in at least four ways: first, through a social satire based largely on the behavior, beliefs, and language of his subjects; second, through the use of multiple strategies of address and points of view; third, through a kind of running commentary on the “self-deceit” of his subjects; and fourth, through images that suggest there will be no change in what he has critiqued but rather an “eternal sameness.”20 As it illuminates, among other things, the range of possibilities in the period regarding the successful combination of fiction and objective journalism, “Havana Cruise” takes a devastating look at the 1930s mass-mediated American culture.

Satire, Document to Text Foundational to his satirical objectives, Agee tells individual stories that are mockeries of the notion of individuality itself. The passengers and crew members he describes are of all types (e.g., “families of Cuban bourgeois on their way north for the summer” (SJ 139); the headwaiter, “a prim Arthur Treacher type” (SJ 128); the Cruise director, “a professionally cute character” (SJ 132); “the airedale and a duplicate” (131); “a gay plump woman in white shied rubber rings” (131)) but how they unconsciously conform to, exhibit, or promote class-based beliefs is their most important trait: Leisure, being no part of their natural lives, was precious to them; and they were aboard this ship because they were convinced that this was

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going to be as pleasurable a way of spending that leisure as they could afford or imagine. What they made of it, of course, and what they failed to make, they made in a beautifully logical image of themselves: of their lifelong environment, of their social and economic class . . . (SJ 129).

Just as the passengers are images of their leisure, so too they are analogues to their temporary ship environment: The T.E.L. Oriente is fashioned in the image of her clientele: a sound, young, pleasant, and somehow invincibly comic vessel, the seafaring analogy to a second-string summer resort, a low priced sedan, or the newest and best hotel in a provincial city. (129)

Some of Agee’s most acerbic satire, however, is aimed at the language of his class subjects whom he (exceptionally) grants the opportunity to speak. Intermixed with his serious “facts” (“It wasn’t a very expensive outing they were taking: most of them spent between $85 and $110 for the passage” (SJ 129); “Of the passenger traffic of all flags sailing from U.S. ports in 1935 the cruising passengers accounted for 10 per cent” (SJ 130)), the narrator continuously records this kind of indicative banter: A mean-eyed freckled young woman whose mahogany hair shone with black lights spoke to a new male acquaintance in the remarkable language of Arthur Kober: “I hate mountains; somehow they don’t cope with my life.” Mr. B. was saying that he and his wife both loved to see new places and try out new drinks, not really getting drunk of course but just seeing what they tasted like. It certainly was a lot of fun. Having Wonderful Time was saying “I don’t mind my freckles anymore but I used to be terribly sentimental about them; used to cry all the time when people teased me.” (SJ 133)

But as he presents such language as belonging to the urban middle class (and does so in the form of a pastiche of characterization, dialogue, and metaphorical description), the narrator sometimes adopts the point of view and idiom of his subjects: for example, “Between tours the Oriente served a goose dinner for those who mistrusted the dirty foreign food” (SJ 138); “The marble floors were absolutely beautiful. The trees were just exquisite. The music every bit as smooth as Wayne King and even the native Cubans that went there seemed an awfully nice, refined class of people” (SJ 139). He thereby smoothly blends reports on external features and quoted speech with his discourse about a character’s actions. The desires of the passengers are

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usually related from a single character’s perspective (e.g., “the ripe redhead” (SJ 140)) or from a group viewpoint (e.g, “the Vanity Fair foursome” (SJ 141)). By contrast, the narrator can shift from such limited omniscient perspectives to omniscient points of view. Existing primarily outside his story world, he freely informs the reader about the moods, worries, disappointments of a host of characters: for example, “On the shady side of the ship a torpid husband sat under five fathoms of the Sunday Times and stuffed in the state of the world without appetite” (SJ 132); “The girls knew now that none of them was going to find a husband or even an excitement to speak of” (SJ 139). The narrator knows that the “Ship’s Card, a roguish fellow of forty . . . [is] under the protection of parody” (SJ 134) just as he knows that “the passengers were assembling themselves toward consciousness” (SJ 135). In a related vein, Agee comments on responses that he believes to be representative of his class subjects. When a male passenger exclaims, “Well, I’m telling you. When you see the Statue of Liberty you’re going to say this is the country for me” (SJ 139), the narrator interjects: “The group nodded as one. Someone threw another Cuban penny in the sewage” (SJ 139). And yet most of his commentary springs from such direct and intense observation, accompanied by a profusion of evidence and detail, that his versions of facts seem perfectly valid, logical, even unquestionable. So when Agee claims (even under the guise of satire) that “the high point of gayety for the cruise was reached at the rough climax of the musical-chair game” (SJ 135), the reader is inclined to believe him. Directly connected to the narrator’s “omniscience” is his ability to know the most persistent problem facing the guests, “the strongest and most sorrowful trait” . . . “their talent for self-deceit” (SJ 129). Indeed, the narrative provides a running commentary on various forms of (class-based) self-deceit. This is why time aboard the ship, for example, is lived as a succession of discrete instants elapsing into activities, encounters, occasions that fail to fulfill any hoped-for possibility. Not incidentally, on the last evening of the cruise, “the passengers were depressed beyond even appetite, and a majority of them stayed below” (SJ 140). Those who partake in, appropriately, “the last supper” (SJ 140), have nothing “to lose and perhaps something to gain” (SJ 140) but despite the “tassled menus,” “signal flags,” “noisemakers” (SJ 140) and general levity, individual happiness is short lived or illusionary. The evening’s futility is emblematized thus: A wife and a husband sat in a dark corner talking intensely: two phrases kept re-emerging with almost liturgical monotony: keep your voice

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down, and god damn you. And god damn you too you god damned. Quite suddenly she struck her full glass of planter’s punch into his lap and they left the table walking stiffly, their whole bodies fists. (SJ 141)

The self-deceit traversing through, among much else, a forced merriment (“People who had thus far only nodded and smiled began to order each other drinks and to put hands on each other’s shoulders” SJ 140), troubled or irreconcilable relationships (e.g., that of the embattled “wife and husband” SJ 141), or aborted encounters (e.g., those involving the “photographer” and several of the drunken young women (SJ 140)), culminates in a hopeless stasis: The bar shut down. It was one o’clock. Everyone was troubled and frozen in the sudden silence. Life had warmed up a good deal during the evening but not enough to get on under its own steam. Tentative pacts had been hinted at but not strongly enough. The bafflement sank into embarrassment, the embarrassment into straight tiredness, and very soon nearly everyone, muted and obscurely disappointed, drained off to bed. (SJ 142)

The last images of the piece reinforce an atmosphere of locked-in uncontrollability and the impossibility of change. As if “it were lifted on a dream,” New York is “no foal of nature, nor intention of man, but one sublime organism, singular and uncreated” (SL 142). The Oriente becomes a ship of “ghostly movement” (SJ 142), immune to all other forces, following its allotted journey. Adrift, the fatigued middle-class voyagers cannot comprehend their own meanness and sterility; they cannot free themselves from the constraints of their own class identities but instead revert to silence and sleep. As Robert Fitzgerald noted, by 1937 Agee “had become grimmer about American middle-class ways and destinies and would become grimmer still” (40). And indeed “Havana Cruise” presents a deadly portrait of such varied thirties beliefs as mass exceptionality, the extolment of middle-class democratic virtues, and the need for moderate appetites.21 At the same time, Agee harshly evaluates the expanding cruise ship industry, a more elite form of thirties popular culture. But a 1937 letter from Agee to Father Flye reveals another intention: “I’m glad you liked the Cruise article for I feel sure you know its cruelty was used to inspire pity in readers who never feel it when it is asked in another’s behalf” (Letters 97). Agee comes back to what exemplifies so much of his literary journalism—an awareness to involve readers in what counts in his constructions of history, identity, reality, and objectivity. That he wished to inspire pity and compassion

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in his readers is an Agee hallmark. What is perhaps less obvious is that his narrative relies on the reader’s capacity to produce a sense of class completeness and actuality out of a finite set of references and descriptions. Most essentially, “Havana Cruise” encourages us to study how class, as Sally Robinson has convincingly argued for gender, might be “produced through narrative processes, not prior to them” (343).22 Beginning with “The Scar” (Exeter Monthly, 1926), Agee’s literary journalism, highlighted in such thirties’ pieces as “Tennessee Valley Authority” (Fortune 1933), “Roman Society” (Fortune, 1934), and “Smoke” (Fortune, 1937) was still going strong in the forties when he turned much of his attention to film criticism. Agee’s (self-referencing) journalism in “Saratoga” and “Havana Cruise,” however, was part of the thirties’ stream that Michael Denning has referred to as the “crisis” in “realist narrative,” in which the “documentary impulse was a particular modernist solution to this crisis” (119). Similar to such thirties writers who were also journalists (e.g., John Dos Passos, Tillie Olsen, John Steinbeck, Agnes Smedley), Agee evoked the problems in capturing the “real,” bringing American culture together in a comprehensible whole, and trying to make sense of this culture by telling stories about it. But, as numerous critics contend, Agee must be set apart from most other journalists of the period. W. H. Auden’s much cited 1944 letter to the editors of The Nation claims that Agee’s articles belong “in that very select class . . . of newspaper work which has permanent literary value” (Agee, Film Writing 3). Using “Havana Cruise” as one of his “literary journalism” examples, Thomas Connery suggests that Agee’s article “inform[s] at a level common to fiction or poetry rather than journalism” (6). “[F]ew modernist writers,” Paul Ashdown argues, “have been as earnestly prophetic as James Agee in so many forms of writing” (59)—prophetic qualities constituting what Ashdown calls Agee’s “forthspeaking journalism” (61). In my view, however, what most distinguishes Agee from his literary journalist peers is his ability to think through the physical object world: his “attempt to see or to convey even some little thing as nearly as possible as that thing is” (Praise 204). He is apart in the ways that his observations elide into a participation both engaged and “un-intimate” while, vis-à-vis his readers and subjects, wishing to keep transference and identification intact.

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Conclusion

Going Back to Class Conceiving of the term “class” as it works within the terrain of culture, this study has asserted its essentially discursive nature and how this term might be used to organize texts and to articulate the social relations between texts and readers. From Whitman’s incarnational epistemology to London’s and Le Sueur’s valorizations of real experience as the legitimating source of narrative authority, all of the writers in this book were concerned with the dilemma of finding a language for representing a reality lived by others in the face of readership often far from such realities. Yet while acknowledging that the term class refers to an objective set of material conditions (or relations) that can be observed in society, this study has emphasized that such an objectivity cannot be taken too far. Class, as John R. Hall has argued, can no longer “be conceived as a ‘structure’ in its own terms, constituted as either a historical subject—‘the’ engine of history—or a theoretical objective of ‘objective’ empirical dynamics” (2). Instead, as this study asserts, class is itself a dynamic, discursive product of history; it is, as E. P. Thompson emphasized in The Making of the English Working Class, “a relationship, not a thing” (10–11). To come to terms with the challenges of class representations, and with such issues as cross-class encounters and class mobility, we need to understand the function of literary theory that can make discussion of class possible and yet at the same time account for class in its historicity. My approach has been to conceptualize class as something other than a totalized structure while emphasizing the meaningful and discursive bases of class in terms of “narrative identities” and “relational” constructions and constituencies. Moreover, Narrating Class has modestly explored some of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century class contentions of literary journalism or its mirror sister, documentary fiction—both forms to be viewed as essential forces in American Literature.1 What seems less obvious, though, besides the critical neglect of literary journalism (to be clear, variously termed “creative nonfiction,” “narrative

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literary journalism,” “literary nonfiction,” “faction,” etc.), 2 and in some quarters fears about its present academic incarnations,3 are the crucial questions that literary journalism asks literary criticism. Among them: What are the consequences of documentary fiction and its claims of “truth” for literary studies? What are the questions raised for readers who might suddenly undergo what Richard Rorty calls a “gestalt switch” (371) as a result of “reading fiction” (and I would quickly add literary journalism)? What are the formal and political issues raised by literary journalism: namely, the problematics of capturing “realism,” the desire for the objectivity of “experience,” the dangers of manipulation and propaganda, the narrative problems inherent in the documentary synthesis of bringing together the culture in a comprehensible whole? Crane, London, Smedley, Le Sueur, and Agee all grappled with such questions while elevating the genre of reality-based writings through their own notions of writerly uniqueness. While much of class theory insists on one version of class, the literary journalism examined in this study tends to suggest plural readings. Narrating Class also asserts the essential importance of class in occupying an equally important place within the realms of race and gender. To varying degrees, all of the writers under discussion here were concerned with all three. Whitman, Davis, London, Le Sueur, and Smedley cast their social visions within a communitarian impulse with the idea of literature as social intervention imbued with a collective visionary purpose. None felt limited by the restrictions of class and its categorizations but all felt its aesthetic importance. In contrast, Crane, Toomer, Hurston, and Agee relied more on the individual and the meditative to convey their class visions but were not content with any kind of coherent ideology of aesthetic autonomy. These four writers point us to the “aesthetic language” of their texts as engagements and mediations between political, ethical, and historical dimensions. The aesthetic forms analyzed here portray how the effects of class extend to the deepest layers of culture, language, and subjectivity. Anne Janowitz, in her study on class and literature, puts it this way: [Aesthetic forms], and the concepts of the aesthetic associated with them, need to be conceived of and read as factors within a struggle whose outcome was determined, not only by the forces of ideology, but by the dynamic and experience of historical class agents, attempting to universalize their class-specific interests. (241)

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The point is to open up the category of class from objective analyses to class as a conception of a dynamic and to see not only how writers try to reify their class interests but how literary identities are built through and in relation to class goals and aims. What can be discovered is revealing: contingent class identities in literary representations constantly inflect seemingly innate racial, ethnic, and even gender identities. The aesthetic forms the writers in this study employ are never simple, always consistently provoked by cross-class encounters, always mediated, and frequently opaque. These aesthetic forms may occasion a repudiation of the conventional treatment of aesthetics as synonymous with formalism, of the aesthetic process as inherently conservative, and, in recent years, of the general abandonment of aesthetics to cultural studies. Indeed, aesthetics may be the most crucial site for locating and naming moments of class fullness and identification. Not only does aesthetics have the power to go beyond the limits of conventional “explications” of texts; it can be a key to formulating new individual subjects that, almost always, conduce to collective identities.4 To be sure, as the writers in this study remind us, aesthetic representation can be a mode of confrontational engagement. The novels of Hurston and Smedley, for example, put forth aesthetics on class and gender as an agency for making broader collective—and collaborative—identifications without tying them to hegemonic racial and class formations. Whitman, Davis, London, Toomer, and Agee aestheticize their respective uses of the you to defamiliarize and reactivate the social forces and political possibilities that become ends or horizons in themselves. Le Sueur attends to the material bases of political movements and actions that give rise to aesthetic experience, emphasizing the transient aesthetic moment (e.g., “I Was Marching”; “Tonight is Part of the Struggle”; “Farewell My Wife and Child and All My Friends”) and the imagined community it might foster. What remains largely implicit is how Le Sueur’s language—and that of Whitman, Davis, and Toomer as well—might constitute or be translated into a kind of practice, creating such like experiences among their readers. Given the fact that no text can adequately represent reality, the most pertinent challenge for these writers was to convince readers of their versions of reality, which always involved class consequences.

Vocabulary of Class The most immediate benefit in making class central to our reconstruction of how nineteenth- and twentieth-century American

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culture coped with material and epistemological transformations is to trace how class has been narratively created in these periods. To do so is to confront directly cross-class relations. The authors in this study (though some coming from the lower- or working classes— e.g., Whitman, London, Smedley) write from the broad position of middle-class observers and witnesses. Their narrative voices are often represented as being both in and above what they describe, able to shift back and forth between classes, languages, and experiences, and able (seemingly) to serve as guarantors of class mobility. And yet, the particularity of such writers as Crane, Agee, Le Sueur, and Smedley is that they write about people who are not, and have no desire to be, members of the middle class. While chronicling the links between class taxonomies and literary representations, the writers here thrive on encounters between members of different classes. The trans-class encounters they invoke suggest the important parts played by literature—if literature is understood to be not an independent discourse but as one attached to other discourses (e.g., oratories, slave narratives, sociological statistics, Negro spirituals) based in social reality. What Whitman, Davis, Crane, London, Toomer, Le Sueur, Hurston, Smedley, and Agee remind us is that literature is deeply imbricated in joining representations of imaginary relationships to real social realities.5 This is why class often appears in their work, not as a self-sufficient category and much less as a culturally obvious one, but rather as the most important vocabulary from which the language of identity is taken. The very vocabulary of class, while it would seem to offer a rich receptacle of study, seems instead to foster its near exclusion from considerations of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury American fiction. Instead of viewing the vocabulary of class as a starting point for building coalitions and communities across race and gender lines, most literary critics see it as either not worth knowing or unknowable. This is a terrible oversight. The relationship between language and class is paramount in determining both the quality and the possibility of the art of all of the writers examined here. It is essential—and perhaps the most essential component—in determining narrative identity. The elusiveness of the class outsider, as Michael Trask has recently noted in his study on class and sexuality, is “a central problem for modernist representation” (15). But it is also a central problem bearing directly on the language of the writers under discussion. Their language chronicles not only how, in Trask’s words, “class identity is visible in numerous codes and markers on the surface of the self” (13) but also how this identity in an officially classless society

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is embodied, though reducible neither to a discrete identity nor to a universal essence. The relation between language and class, for these authors, points to the more elastic notion of “desire,” which goes far beyond mere economics to include the desire for sex, social relations, the illicit, otherness, and assimilation. The desire to get outside of class or to somehow transcend it is problematic for all of the writers here. Being limited by class may be more “unforgiveable” than being bound by race or gender because class in America is supposed to be fluid, changeable, escapable.6 The writers in this study, through their formal negotiations of the complexities of class differences, problematize such a notion. Class and its consciousness are indeed more perverse and polymorphous than we have imagined them to be (Kaplan, “Millenial Class” 13). But undoubtedly, in dealing with the complexities of class, it is not a question of debating whether “literature” should be related to “class” or not: instead it is a question of different readings of class itself and of analyzing its many other areas. Amy Schrager Lang, in her recent study, The Syntax of Class, has suggested that however “real” the structure of class in America, Americans have no “native discourse” of class in which to render their experience of that structure. Lacking a vocabulary, as it were, in which to express the experience of class—its complacencies as well as its injuries and its struggles—and deeply committed, moreover, to liberal individualism and the promise of open mobility, Americans displace the reality of class into discourses of race, gender, ethnicity, and other similarly “locked-in” categories of individual identity. This displacement, in turn, distorts sexual and racial relationships by redistributing conflicts of class across these other domains. (6)

This study has argued that American writers, though perhaps not possessing a “‘native’ discourse of class,” had a class vocabulary to define America’s new social and economic relationships (6) and that America, from the earliest periods in its history, laid claim to class identities. And what is even more clear is that American writers wrote works imbued with the consequences and determinants of class, determinants that were at once reciprocally constitutive, innately fractured, and inseparable from aesthetics and aesthetic considerations.

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No tes

Introduction 1. Although I am aware that “literary journalism” is not the only terminology for designating the form, I prefer the term literary journalism over nonfiction because the works I assign to this literary form are not merely editorials, essays, or autobiographies, as conventionally defined. I also prefer it because much of the content of the works, say, by Whitman, London, Smedley, Le Sueur, and Agee comes from traditional means of news gathering or reporting. To be clear, this form, as practiced by the writers in this study, features the personal presence and involvement of a human witness, acknowledges its relationship to “fiction” while making a claim to reflecting the world of “fact,” and casts itself largely (but not exclusively) in a narrative mode. For a sample of various working definitions of the term, see Hartsock (1–13); Connery (1–5); and Yagoda (15–16). 2. Narrating Class will suggest how short essayistic and literary journalistic pieces by these writers are legible through their longer, more substantial work—and the contrary as well. 3. See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978); David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (New York: Knopf, 1967); Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History (New York: Knopf, 1976); Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1964). 4. See Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 25–46. 5. See for example Stuart Hall, “The Meaning of New Times,” in New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, ed. Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (London: Lawrence, 1989), 116–134; Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53–792; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class; and Raymond Williams, Culture (London: Fontana, 1981).

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6. For examples, see Fox, Lowe, Morrison, Ross, and Steedman. 7. See Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, tran. James Stevenson (New York: Routledge, 1994). 8. See Michael Staub’s Voices of Persuasion: Politics of Representation in 1930s America (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994). 9. Countering such generalizations—or better, often subsuming them— are the issues of class and domesticity, class and race, class and gender, and the increasing attention being paid to the middle class as a vital object of study. See, for example, Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fictions (New York: Oxford UP, 1987); David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (New York: Verso, 1994); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986); Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1989); and Christopher P. Wilson, White Collar Fictions (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1992). 1

Whitman’s  L E AV ES OF G R ASS : “Hard Work and Blood”

1. See Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991); Andrew Lawson, “‘Spending for Vast Returns’: Sex, Class, and Commerce in the First Leaves of Grass,” American Literature 75, 2 (June 2003): 335–365; and Jason Stacy, “Containing Multitudes: Whitman, the Working Class, and the Music of Reform,” Popular Culture Review 13, 2 (2002): 137–154. 2. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking, 1959), 48. Subsequent references will be cited in the text as Leaves. 3. For the meaning of class consciousness in the nineteenth century, see William H. Sewall, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980), 281–284. Sewall notes, “During the nineteenth century, class was increasingly used to designate groups in relations of superiority and inferiority, as in ‘dominant class,’ ‘bourgeois class,’ or ‘working class.’ But it also continued to be used for social categories of any kind, and workers frequently employed it as a synonym for ‘trade’ or ‘profession.’” (281). Whitman’s ontological and ethical vision in the 1855 Leaves reflects these designations, but Whitman also held that all classes in the production process equally contribute to the nation’s economic and social health. This nonhierarchical, egalitarian vision positions the poet in Leaves as a figure of liminality that fluidly crosses class boundaries and incarnates various class identities and statuses. At the same time, in the 1855 Leaves, Whitman’s poetics, rhetoric, and physical affinities identify most forcefully with the lower–middle class, laborers, and those furthest from the dominant class. In Leaves, Whitman implores us to incarnationally imagine our bodies in the

NOTES

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5.

6.

7.

8.

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bodies and geographical places of these others: slaves, Native Americans, women, the laboring masses. See David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989); Jason Stacy, “Containing Multitudes: Whitman, the Working Class, and the Music of Moderate Reform,” Popular Cultural Review 13, 2 (2002): 137–154; Jerome Loving, “The Political Roots of Leaves of Grass,” 97–120; Richard B. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990); Peter S. Buckley, “Culture, Class, and Place in Antebellum New York,” in Power, Culture, and Place: Essays on New York City, ed. John Mollenkopf (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988), 38–42; and Andrew Lawson, “‘Spending for Vast Returns’: Sex, Class, and Commerce in the First Leaves of Grass,” American Literature 75, 2 (June 2003): 335–359. Lawson and Buckley provide the most nuanced reading of Whitman’s class locations, doing so without embracing a homogenous working-class consciousness, and in Lawson’s case, carefully tracing Whitman’s anxious adaptations from an agrarian artisanship to an urban market economy. Walt Whitman, “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1996), 668; further references to Poetry and Prose will be cited parenthetically in the text as PP. Whitman’s daguerreotype was done by Gabriel Harrison, a Brooklyn daguerreotypist who specialized in portraits of working-class men. See Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 705–711. See for example M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Whitman’s Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989); Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in “Leaves of Grass” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991); Terry Mulcaire, “Publishing Intimacy in Leaves of Grass,” ELH 60 (1993): 471–501; Byrne Fone, Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992); Tenny Nathansen, Whitman’s Presence: Body, Voice, and Writing in “Leaves of Grass” (New York: New York UP, 1992); and Gary Schmidgall, Walt Whitman: A Gay Life (New York: Dutton, 1997). Found throughout his nonpoetic writing, Whitman’s antislavery feelings were usually subordinated to his unqualified support of the (white) working class and its multiple manifestations—a support that developed into the keynote of the 1855 Leaves: Let them utter forth, then, in tones as massive as become their stupendous cause, that their calling shall not be sunk to the miserable level of what is little above brutishness—sunk to be like owned goods, and driven cattle! We call upon every mechanic of the North, East, and West—upon the carpenter, in his rolled up sleeves, the mason with his trowel, the stonecutter with his

228

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10.

11.

12.

brawny chest, the blacksmith with his sooty face, the brown fisted ship-builder, whose clicking strokes rattle so merrily in our dock yards—upon shoemakers, and cartmen, and drivers, and paviers . . . upon the honest sawyer and mortar-mixer too, whose sinews are their own—and every hard-working man—to speak in a voice whose great reverberations shall tell to all quarters that the workingmen of the free United States, and their business, are not willing to be put on the level of negro slaves, in territory which, if got at all, must be got by taxes sifted eventually through upon them, and by their hard work and blood. (Gathering, 1:210–11) On the level of fragmentation and movement, denying totality and wholeness, Leaves appears to anticipate Alain Touraine’s argument that class has lost its significance in the contemporary world. “The concept of class,” Touraine writes, “ . . . must be replaced, as a central category of analysis, by the concept of social movement . . . [Social movements] are more concerned with active intervention, rather than simply with breaking the links of dependence; and above all, the social actor who resists domination now appeals more and more directly to the values and creations of change, which in the past seemed to be monopolized by the ruling groups, whereas the dominated ones were more inclined to envisage a return to the past and to condemn historical evolution as a fall from a golden to an iron age” (89). The most crucial element that Leaves might ascribe to social movement is its self-constituting capacity, and Whitman in the 1850s would certainly have favored, in Zygmunt Bauman’s words, a “fluid, processual social setting with no clear cut distinctions between order and abnormality, consensus and conflict” (79). Each incarnational moment in Leaves is neither a necessary effect of the preceding moment nor a necessary indicator or adequate cause of the next one. The “Bowery boy” was a journeyman or an apprentice in one of the traditional trades in the America of the 1830s and 1840s. For an extensive discussion of Whitman’s Bowery boy identifications, see Andrew Lawson, “‘Spending for Vast Returns’ Sex, Class, and Commerce in the First Leaves of Grass,” American Literature 75, 2 (June 2003): 335–365. For the centrality of sexuality to citizenship, the public sphere, and the nation in nineteenth-century America, see Michael Millner, “The Fear Passing the Love of Women: Sodomy and Male Sentimental Citizenship in the Antebellum City,” Arizona Quarterly 58, 2 (Summer 2002): 19–52. See also on this subject, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 547–566. To be clear, I would attribute this use of language to Whitman’s incarnational stance, which supports Andrew Lawson’s recent claim

NOTES

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14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

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that “in order to understand Whitman’s class politics, we are going to have to come to grips with his use of different kinds of language” (xv). Our respective arguments about Whitman’s combining “the plebian ‘blab’ of the ‘pave’ and the upper-class ‘promenade’” (104), however, come to very different conclusions. See Lawson, Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 2007), xi–xxiv; 1– 28. Leaves contravenes Denise Riley’s point on the use of the future verb tense and its role in “gendering the social”: If “women” can be credited with having a tense, then it is a future tense. It is true that the trajectory of “man” in the nineteenth-century human sciences often winds him backward to the riddles of his origins, or alternatively, reels him out towards the double question of his ends, in the senses of his purposes and extinction. (225) Whitman, alternatively, groups men and women in the same teleology of the future, casting them as both agents and objects of reform in his program of spiritual social ascent. On the question of class and racial inferiority, Whitman wrote in one of his notebook entries of the 1850s: The learned think the unlearned an inferior race. The merchant thinks his bookkeepers and clerks and sundry degrees below him; they in turn think the porter and carmen common; and they the laborer that brings in coal, and the stevedores that haul the great burdens with them. (Daybooks 792) See Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999). The newspapers that Whitman wrote for or edited in the 1840–1850 period include the Aurora; the Evening Tattler; the Statesman; the New York Sun; the New York Mirror; the Brooklyn Evening Star; the New Orleans Daily; the Brooklyn Freeman, and the Brooklyn Daily Times. See a comprehensive, detailed survey of such critics in Whitman: The Journalism, vol. 1, ed. Henry Bergman, Douglas Noverr, and Edward Recchia. (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), xxv–xxvii. For a comprehensive argument about narrative form in historical writing and in history, see Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representations (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987). Sometimes prone to fleeting editorial judgments, in an 1858 editorial for the Brooklyn Daily Times, Whitman wrote, “The most valuable class in any community is the middle class, the men of moderate means living at the rate of a thousand dollars a year or thereabouts,” Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman, I Sit and Look Out: Editorial from the Brooklyn Daily Times, ed. Emory Holloway and Vernolian Schwarz (New York, 1932), 145.

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2

Class and the Performative in Rebecca Harding Davis’s L I FE I N THE I RON M I L LS , and Stephen Crane’s M AGGI E

1. See Lee Clark Mitchell, Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism (New York: Columbia UP, 1989), 32–36. 2. This is not to say that literary genres and movements must conclusively result from a particular cause; as June Howard notes, “the ontological status of an ideal generic typology must always remain questionable, must always to some degree rely on our acceptance of arbitrary, a priori categories” (5). Even if a work belongs to a generic order, every feature of the work is certainly not generically bound. Nor does a generic classification prescribe or proscribe particular interpretive procedures or negate the value of a work if it does not conform to specific generic norms. 3. The issue of performative meaning is capacious. I am indebted here to, among others, H.P. Grice, “Meaning,” Philosophical Review 66 (1957): 377–388; Randall Knoper, Acting Naturally; Elizabeth Freund, The Return of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism (London: Methuen, 1987); Steven Mailloux, Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982); Douglass Oliver, Poetry and Narrative in Performance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1986); and Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting. The meanings of the performative on which this chapter particularly draws include the notion that inaccessible realities can only be penetrated by staging them, by performing what is withheld. In Wolfgang Iser’s words, “what can never become present to ourselves and what eludes cognition and knowledge and is beyond experience can enter consciousness only through feigned representations” (“Do I Write,” 313). There is in this approach an interconnection of author, text, and reader to be conceived as an “ongoing process that produces something that had not existed before” (Iser, “Play,” 325). There is also a direct conflict with the traditional notion of representation, if representation is defined as a mimetic description of a presupposed reality. This nonmimetic theory of literature points to, as Winifried Fluck has argued, the special place of the literary text: “if literature is not to be justified by truthful representation, the source of its special potential must be derived from the fact that it is, by definition, different and thus ideally suited to counter dominant ways of world making” (197). Instead of operating as a mirroring instrument, literature, in this model, serves to disturb preconceived cultural constructions of identity, invoking what otherwise cannot become present. 4. Aesthetically, for Crane, changing perspectives are part of the phenomenon Randall Knoper describes:

NOTES

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6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

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[N]ineteenth-century theater and novels were imbued with each other, novelists in particular writing for an audience in tune with stage conventions, echoing theatrical values of melodrama, burlesque, variety, spectacle, ‘situation,’ and ‘effect,’ and rehearsing a preoccupation with performance and role-playing. (9) Although this is not the place to trace the rich social history of American forms of elite and popular “performance,” it is worth noting that Maggie certainly has roots in the nineteenth-century performative traditions—in such entertainments as Shakespearian plays, traveling shows, minstrelsy, and music halls. Crane frequently subordinated his skills of discovering and interrogating reality to those of show and spectacle, intermingling mimicry and mimesis, the performative and informative. They did not remain immune from all of these assumptions. As Eric Schocket has suggested, class in mid-nineteenth-century America was never far removed from its ethnic and racial familiars. See his “‘Discovering Some New Race’: Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills and the Literary Emergence of Working-Class Whiteness,” PMLA 115, 1 (January 2000): 46–59. On the issues of race, gender, and naturalism’s common association with class polarization, see as well Amy Schrager Lang, “Class and the Strategies of Sympathy,” 128–142; Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993); and Catherine Jurca, White Diaspora (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001). The performative meaning in Maggie and Life never constitutes the entire meaning. As Ellen Spolsky puts it, “[p]erformative meaning will never provide enough meaning to satisfy, will never make consultation of the context unnecessary. The consultation of the context will provide additional meaning; it will not, however, cancel performative meaning” (421). Performance and its effects in both works do not prevent the authors from realizing their investments in reference and essence. Stephen Crane, Prose and Poetry, 458. Subsequent references will be cited in the text as PP. See Barbara Babcock, “Introduction,” in The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1978). For one of the best accounts of the “sensationalism” of the 1890s, see Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economics of Play (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996). On the subjective quality of visual experience in nineteenth-century American culture, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).

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3 Body Tramping, Class, and Masculine Extremes: Jack London’s T HE P EOPL E OF THE A BYSS 1. On the conditions of nineteenth-century American cities and the urban poor, see Giorgio Mariani, Spectacular Narratives: Representations of Class and War in Stephen Crane and the American 1890s (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 7–67; June Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1985); Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1978); and Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experiences in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989). 2. There is an astonishing consistency in the intimate entanglement of masculinity, emotion, and nationhood in the history of American culture, of which Abyss is an important representation. For studies of the relations and homologies between conceptions of race, sexuality, and nationality, see Boys Don’t Cry? Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in the U.S., ed. Milette Shamir and Jennifer Travis (New York: Columbia UP, 2002); George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford UP, 1996); Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture, ed. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999); E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood; Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996); and Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West, ed. Matthew Basso, Dee Garceau, and Laura McCall (New York: Routledge, 2001). 3. As Abyss makes clear, class is differential in that it should always be measured against and within racial, ethnic, or gender designations. For issues on whiteness and class relevant to London, see Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill (New York: New York UP, 1997). 4. Jack London, The People of the Abyss, in Jack London: Novels and Social Writings, ed. Donald Pizer (New York: Library of America, 1982), 30. Further references to this work are given parenthetically. 5. Abyss furthered the early twentieth-century project of bringing the body and its senses more overtly into the ethical and social realm, what such critics as I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, and T. S. Eliot called “cultural health.” Even more importantly, London tried to imagine and render such health in the form of the body’s boundaries—alternately, as rigid, closed, and resistant to social appropriation, and as permeable, shifting, and open to fusion with the environment. Thus the emerging rhetoric of the body, as already evidenced in Abyss, was beginning to be used as a powerful tool

NOTES

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7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

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that had the potential both to reveal, disrupt, deny, and to bridge social hierarchies. For London’s creation of female characters and his position on the “New Woman,” see Andrew J. Furer, “Jack London’s New Woman”: 185–214 and Jeanne Campbell Reesman, “Jack London’s New Woman in a New World: Saxon Brown Roberts’ Journey into the Valley of the Moon,” American Literary Realism 24, 2 (Winter 1992): 40–54. See Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1986) for their ideological distinctions between the bourgeois and proletarian body and their views on the pervasiveness of the mind/body split and its political importance to the bourgeois culture. On London’s time (1870–1917) and the changing definitions of “civilization” and “progress,” see Peter Conn, The Divided Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), chapters 1–2, and pages 104–109. London, in a letter (August 25, 1902) to Anna Strunsky, directly links his physical condition to what he was witnessing on the East End: “So, no matter how inadequately I may state what I wish to say, and no matter how cold I may appear, please remember that I am worn out and exhausted, and that my nerves are blunted with what I have seen and the suffering it has cost me” (Letters 1: 307). See Peter T. Okun, “John Barleycorn’s Body,” Arizona Quarterly 52, 2 (Summer 1996): 63–84. Although without London’s nationalist overtones, the idea of the human body as a mirror of social identity (i.e., a victim of industrialization) and the fears this can entail, in a character or narrator, functions in a similar way in Life. When, for example, Mitchell enters the mill, Hugh “mark[s] acutely every smallest sign of [his] refinement” and then looks “back to himself, seeing as in a mirror his filthy body, his more stained soul” (30). Wolfe feels a fearful disgust for his “puny” (41) laboring body in contrast to Mitchell’s “delicate, sinewy limbs, in harmony with all he knew of beauty and truth.” Turn-of-the-century imperialism is discussed in Tony Smith, The Pattern of Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981); Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); Mira Wilkins, The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from the Colonial Era to 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1974); and David Healy, U.S. Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1970). The gender dynamic regarding social reform in the second half of the nineteenth century is instructive. “Unlike their male counterparts,” Schocket argues, “[the goal of Gilded-age female reformers] was to reform, not merely to pass through, the lives of the ‘unknown’

234

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16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

NOTES

class . . . Proving their status as New Women—as middle-class women who nonetheless worked outside the home—required them to articulate their identities as professional reformers within a traditional discourse of domestic ideology” (124). This rough female paradigm of “legitimacy through redemption,” while preserving class distinctions, served to create gender consciousness with the overlay of converting “‘working women’ into some semblance of middle-class morality” (123–124). London’s male paradigm, that of “regeneration through incorporation” (123) and his belief in the redemptive qualities of his own masculinity, problematizes such an engagement. For London’s concern with contamination by disease, the poor and disease, and class and contagion, see David Raney (390–400). For the varying positions on London and class in general, see the astute critiques of Male Call, 115–147; “Gazing at Royalty;” and Chris Gair, “‘The Beautiful and True and Good’: Culture, Race, and Nation in The People of the Abyss,” Symbiosis 3, 2 (October 1999): 131–142. See Raney (390–399), Kershaw (269–270), and Sinclair (150–152) for detailed accounts of London’s various afflictions and diseases. For a complete listing of London’s journalism, see James Williams, “Jack London’s Works by Date of Composition,” in The World of Jack London. http// www.jacklondons.net. Accessed November 26, 2007. It must be noted that, as David Minter has argued, “London wrote in a period of rapid, uneven economic recovery. Between 1900 and 1910 . . . [both] average per capita wealth and average persona income increased, as did the unevenness of distribution: in a period of strong economic expansion, the average real income of laborers fell. Investors, even those with modest capital to invest, were the winners, as both expansion and consolidation of industries pushed profits up . . . By 1910, the men in charge of the nation’s largest business firms possessed enormous political as well as economic power” (43). See Bourdieu’s Practical Reason, in which he defines the habitus as a “generative and unifying principle which retranslates the intrinsic and relational characteristics of a position into a unitary lifestyle, that is, a unitary set of choices of persons, goods, practices” (8). See as well his more qualified interpretations of this concept in Outline of a Theory of Practice (85). Where this can become problematic is in London assigning the working class a pure class conditioning, as in its functioning as a fixed point of reference to which other classes differentiate themselves. Their weight of necessity in London (Abyss, How I Became a Socialist, The Scab, and Revolution are good examples of this) appears to obviate any differentiation. The working class, for London, is more singularly unified and fixed than other classes. If read autobiographically, London is most likely referring to his recent Klondike experience (1897–1898) with his brother-in-law,

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Captain James Shepard. Alongside the general class questionings and trajectory of the narrator, a description of his clothes indicates as such: “A fur cap, soiled and singed by many camp-fires . . . My footgear was of walrus hide, cunningly blended with seal gut” (2). 22. See Carolyn Johnston, Jack London : An American Radical ? (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984). 23. For a fictional version of a Mexican “superior individual” fighting for “the people,” see London’s portrayal of the fighter Felipe Rivera in “The Mexican,” in The Night Born (New York: The Century Co., 1913).

4 “Always Your Heart”: Class Designs in Jean Toomer’s C A N E 1. The phrase “Always your heart” is taken from Toomer’s poem “Honey of Being” (Wayward 204). 2. For Foley’s “historical” placement of Toomer, see for example “‘In the Land of Cotton’: Economics and Violence in Jean Toomer’s Cane” in which she criticizes Toomer for “establish[ing] only a partial connection between racial violence and the configuration of Georgia’s political economy” (194). This is due, Foley notes, to Toomer’s “shortcomings as an economic analyst” (194). Similarly, in this same piece, she writes that “Cane also failed in Part III to assign full material causality to racial violence” and cites “Toomer’s limitations in relating Kabnis’s internal dilemmas to the larger social forces” (194). My counterpart to her objection: History is “what hurts” but a writer does not always reflect, nor should be expected to do so, its actual pain. 3. See Barbara Foley, “The New Negro and the Left,” in Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2003), 1–69. 4. Although I use the term “narrator” throughout this text, this is not to deny the possibility of Cane’s multiple narrators and narrative voices. In Cane first-, second- and third-person narrators and modalities freely alternate and conflate in fluid and interactive ways. 5. Toomer’s self-reflective or self-conscious moments are central to the structure and purpose of Cane. By the term “self-reflectiveness,” I mean the thought, consciousness, reflection, and awareness accompanying action. The self-reflective novel, in Alter’s words, is “a novel which systematically flaunts its own condition of artifice and by so doing probes into the problematic relationship between real-seeming artifice and reality” (x). 6. To be clear, the “you” in the text can sometimes function rhetorically— pointing to no person at all, the “you” simply being a term in a figure of speech—or signal various spoken idioms, but it most often does so as part of an ongoing “conversation” between narrator and narratee.

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7. This is a crucial distinction in Toomer’s “great design,” particularly given his concepts of “race” and “racialism.” Indeed, as George Hutchinson argues, Toomer should be reconsidered in terms of repudiating “essentialist assumptions that race is a natural category of identity” and for recognizing “the importance of racialization (the enculturation of identity along ‘racial’ lines enforced by racist domination) to American identity and thus to American writing” (vii). 8. Narratees in Cane may range from fictional characters to less obtrusive fictional addressees, but the various narratees generally shade into the textual reader. The discussion that follows reflects Genette’s definition of the “extradiegetic” narratee: “the extradiegetic narrator . . . can aim only at an extradiegetic narratee, who merges with the implied reader and with whom each real reader can identify” (186). 9. “Toomer forces us,” as Gates argues, “to abandon any definition of Afro-American literature that would posit the racial identity of an author as its principal criterion” (206). I would agree with Gates that in understanding Toomer’s racial position, particularly as it pertained to himself, one must consider that “the critical difference for Toomer was not so much his race . . . as what he sought to represent and how he represented it” (209). But to suggest that Toomer, in his struggle to find the language that would not distort the subject he tries to represent, can best be understood as “postmodern,” or as some kind of postmodern contemporary (Gates 209), does not cover Toomer’s creation of a new “I–you” subjectivity and the inter-relational and racial features of his design. 10. In a 1930 letter to James Weldon Johnson, for example, Toomer writes: “My poems are not Negro poems, nor are they Anglo-Saxon or white or English poems. My prose, likewise. . . . I take this opportunity of noting these things in order to clear up a misunderstanding of my position which has existed to some extent ever since the publishing of Cane” (qtd. in Helbing 130). 11. Rather, Toomer’s concern is with the “modernity” of ethnicity, which he believed could eventually lead to a “new race” (transethnic, polyethnic, and international) in which no “groups” exist, privileged or otherwise. 12. In this, he replicates Toomer’s ideas on narration, as argued in “The Psychology and Craft of Writing” (1930): To spiritualize is to digest, assimilate, upgrade, and form the materials of experience—in fine, to form oneself. It is the direct opposite of sensualization, and of mechanization. It has to do with intensifying and vivifying both the writer and the reader. (Craft 44) 13. As Todd Lieber has argued, “Cane is designed to function in both objective and subjective terms. In an objective sense it is a chronicle of what the ‘souls of slavery’ were. In a personal sense it is a description of ‘what they are to me’ and, by inference, what they can be to

NOTES

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15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

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any man who accepts them and the heritage they represent: the substance of spiritual life and survival” (182). “Seventh Street” is “an invocation of the contrast between ‘the white and whitewashed wood of Washington’ and black inhabited Seventh Street” (Innes 158), but it is also a celebration of Toomer’s modernism, a rejection of racial essentialism, and his prototypical “American” selfhood. In a letter (undated) to Waldo Frank, Toomer writes: When I come up to Seventh Street and Theatre, a wholly new life confronts me. . . . For it is jazzed, strident, modern. Seventh Street is the song of crude new life. Of a new people. Negro? Only in the boldness of expression. In its healthy freedom. American. (qtd. in North 167) This movement connects to Toomer’s visualization of Cane as a starting point that would contribute to initiating “the adjustments, the health, and art and joy and beauty that, expanding, will determine the tone and content of the entire country” (qtd. in Helbing 144). Toomer’s ideal, of course, is that the future should not be constricted to confining binaries of the past, but should be driven by the prospects of a reconstituted and integrated individual connected to a viable community, as represented, for example, in “The Hill” (1934): A man in his world. A world which has made, not found already made. No one group, no race, no nation could have built it for him. His function in life was not to fit into something that already existed but to create a new form by the force of his growth. (302) “Racial strains,” in America, Toomer wrote in 1934, “do not exist separately in a man but blend to form a new product. . . . They never understood that the real factors operating in the United States. . . . are creating a new people in this world, a people to whom all Americans, without exception, belong. . . . ” (Eldridge and Kerman 80–81). This ontology was internal to both Toomer’s narration and to his modernism. For the deep connection of modernism to race consciousness, see, for example, Baker, Doyle, and Gilroy. It must be noted that Toomer’s modernism, as Cane forcefully shows, goes against a racialized conception of culture and the grounding of difference in immutable notions of race and racial identity. This is a technique that begins in “Theatre” but that Toomer uses throughout the rest of the text. At the same time, the tension created among these (often conflicting) voices echoes Toomer’s own multiethnic biological makeup, his unease over his connection to black America (weighed against his strong sense of the communal in Cane), and his unrealizable efforts to reach his goals of thematic and social unification. On this subject Toomer writes, “There is no valid reason why an author should not project portions of himself into his characters. In fact there is a very definite artistic reason why he should. For this is the method of great creation” (“Holiday” 9).

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21. This attempt appears to anticipate Toomer’s later proclamation: “I stand for Mankind United. This perhaps is the largest and most significant single fact in my life” (Benson and Dillard 43). 22. All of this is consistent with the notion of Toomer’s divided racial self, and the need to sometimes keep the division hidden from himself. 23. Lewis and Kabnis function as sources for Toomer’s own racial reexamination and sense of integration. As Toomer stated in a 1923 letter to Horace Liverwright, Lewis possesses “the sense of direction and intelligent grip on things that Kabnis lacks, Kabnis . . . [has] the sensitivity and emotion Lewis does not have” (Jean Toomer to Horace Liverwright, March 1923, TP, Folder 6). 24. Nor does the narrator address readers as “undefined, anonymous, and conceived as responding in purely aesthetic terms” (Kroeber 99). 5

Meridel Le Sueur’s S A LU T E T O S PR I NG : “A Movement Up Which All Are Moving”

1. Le Sueur’s work has received well-deserved attention in recent years, especially in Paula Rabinowitz’s Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America (1991), Constance Coiner’s Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur (1995), and Robert Shulman’s The Power of Political Art: The 1930s Literary Left (2000). These studies perform the necessary and belated tasks of taking up neglected women writers of the left, documenting the conditions under which they produced their work, and locating Le Sueur’s fiction in the context of proletarian, “womanist” (Roberts, Three Radical 53), and women’s writing. 2. Much of the primary literature of the 1930s, including the writings of Le Sueur, Josephine Herbst, Richard Wright, Muriel Rukeyser, and Langston Hughes, continues to be pegged as “political” with negligible “aesthetic interest.” For challenges to this view, see Robert Shulman, The Power of Political Art (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000); Barbara Foley, Radical Representations (Durham: Duke UP, 1993); and James F. Murphy, The Proletarian Moment (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1991). 3. Based on psychological and emotional categories as “materialist,” Le Sueur’s political-cultural position, as I will argue here, tries to show and assert the importance of the social positionality of the individual, and how this comes through in problems of narrative texture and discursive idiom. Not coincidentally, all of the stories in Salute to Spring underscore the figurative or tropological determination of (class) consciousness. 4. See Bill Mullen and Sherry Lee Linkon, “Introduction: Rereading 1930s Culture,” in Radical Revisions: Rereading 1930s Culture, ed. Bill Mullen and Sherry Linkon (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1996), 1–12; Alan Wald, “Introduction,” in Writers on the Left:

NOTES

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

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Episodes in American Literary Communism by Daniel Aron (1961) (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), xiii–xxxi; and Laura Hapke, Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s (Athens and London: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1995). Le Sueur creates such a politics in Salute to Spring by focusing on mother–daughter relationships and by stressing the empowered communities of abandoned mothers and the value of women’s work. See Morris Dickstein, “Depression Culture: The Dream of Mobility,” in Radical Revision: Rereading 1930s Culture, ed. Bill Mullen and Sherry Linkon, (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1996), 224–242. See Fishkin, Connery, Lounsberry. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 161–175. On the question of the moveable boundary between fact and fiction, Suzanne Keen notes, “When narrative audiences [to which we belong when we are ‘suspending disbelief’ to accept the truth claims of fiction] know that a fictional text is not real and authorial audience [to which we belong when we know that a fictional text is not real] hold identical beliefs about the truth of a text that happens to be fictional, then all the formal qualities that are supposed to distinguish fiction from nonfiction have failed to be discerned” (131–132). Of course the reader can belong to both audiences, but this does not alter “calling into question the very project of cataloguing fiction’s ostensibly distinctive traits” (132). In response to this long-standing quandary, this essay will follow Barbara Foley’s argument in her work on the documentary novel (Telling the Truth, 1986) in which she argues that factual and fictional forms of writing are not “immutable essences” but should be understood instead as “historically varying types of writing, signaled by and embodied in, changing literary conventions and generated by the changing structures of the historically specific relations of production and intercourse” (27). The documentary effect generated by Salute to Spring and Daughter of Earth fall under, I will argue, Foley’s category: “to represent reality by means of agreed-upon conventions of fictionality, while grafting into [their] fictive pact some kind of additional claim to empirical validation” (25). See Norman Sim, The Literary Journalists (New York: Ballantine, 1984), 8–12. For more on 1930s reportage, see Constance Coiner, Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1998), 27–28; Robert Shulman, The Power of Political Art: The 1930s Literary Left (Chapel Hill and London: The Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000), 13, 27, 51, 67, 183; and John Hartsock, A History of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 241–242. While Le Sueur was certainly working out of the “reportage” tradition of the 1930s (as Robert

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Shulman puts it, she was the “Chekov of the form” 67), she also transcended this tradition , shaping her journalism into stories and sketches that incorporate narrative and rhetorical techniques generally attributed to fiction and not to reportage. As Elaine Hedges has remarked, “Many of Le Sueur’s pieces have been called both reportage and fiction” (10). For the Le Sueur works I discuss in this section, I favor the term “literary journalism,” following John Hartsock’s definition of the term, “in which it is understood that [the work] is written largely (but not exclusively) in a narrative mode” (11). 12. See Laura Hapke’s incisive comments on Le Sueur’s “party-line fiction” and female representation in Daughter’s of the Great Depression (Athens and London: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1995), 90–91. 13. See Warren I. Susman, Culture as History, xix–xxx. 6 Class, Work, and New R aces: Zora Neale Hurston’s T HEIR E Y ES W ER E WAT CH I NG G OD and Agnes Smedley’s D AUGH T ER OF E ARTH 1. Work is not, it must be noted, predicated on nor reducible to some universal fixity (racial or otherwise), or to some notion of a privileged historical subject. There is no security of a foundationalist epistemology. What I’m suggesting is that “work” can be a significant juncture from which to rethink concepts such as “identity,” “explanation,” and “determination” and romance. The category of work, then, is as much an instance of the “made-real” as an instance of “reality,” as much a theoretical enterprise as an empirical description of socioracial groups. 2. From Jean Toomer’s Cane and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Quest of Silver Fleece (1911) to Pauline Hopkin’s Contending Forces (1900) and Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods (1902)—these texts define themselves by the creation and employment of artistic representations of labor. Similarly, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), Mary Wilkins Freeman’s The Portion of Labor (1901), and Theodore Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt (1911) feature work as their primary concern. For these authors, as well as for Smedley and Hurston, work is a crucial mediatory concept. 3. For recent approaches to the relation of work and American culture and literature, see Nicholas K. Bromwell, By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America (Chicago and London: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993); David Sprague Herreshoff, Labor into Art: The Theme of Work in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 1991); Michele Birnbaum, Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003); and Cindy Weinstein, The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995). This chapter is indebted to these studies.

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4. Motherhood is not an issue for Janie. Marie casts a cold eye on mothering and motherhood as an institution. Both protagonists ultimately insist on their preference for being unencumbered: both do so that they might find equality in their affective relationships and in love. For Marie, though, gender and class oppression result in a troubled sexuality, beginning from her early childhood. Sexual and marital relations quickly spill over into class relations: the brutality and dominance she witnesses in marriage is in turn witnessed by her in American imperialism and the exploitation of the working class. For both Janie and Marie, knowledge of oneself and one’s relationship to others comes foremost from day to day experiential knowledge. 5. According to Susan L. Mizruchi, “When major writers in the decades before and after the turn of the century wrote about women and work, they wrote invariably about the lower classes” (629). Although often eroding traditional understandings of work, Smedley and Hurston can be seen as following this tradition. 6. On her experience at the writers’ colony, Yaddo, Smedley wrote to Malcolm Cowley (November 12, 1947): “You see, I lack the proper approach to writing. Instead of a perfectly balanced sentence with or without commas or periods, I see armies of barefoot peasant in China and other parts of the world reaching for the stars of humanity but being shot to death for their endeavors” (qtd. in MacKinnon and MacKinnon, Life and Times 319). 7. As Salute to Spring and Daughter demonstrate, alternative and oppositional politics can often resort to the romantic and nostalgic. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 122–123. 8. In a June 29, 1927 letter, Smedley wrote, “I have joined an ‘Arbeitsgemeinschaft’ for the study of Marxism and Imperialism . . . Our leader is a well-known Marxian economist. Within my own opinions I remain nonpolitical insofar as the Communist Party is concerned, and could never join it. I am more and more interested in economic action alone” (qtd. in MacKinnon and MacKinnon, Life and Times 121). 9. For more biographical detail on Smedley’s arrest and these pieces, see Jan MacKinnon and Steve MacKinnon, “Agnes Smedley’s ‘Cell Mates’”: 531–533. Importantly, for Smedley’s aspirations to be a journalist, these portraits of fellow prisoners “won [her] the respect and future support of liberal editors at the Nation and the New Republic” (MacKinnon and MacKinnon 65). 10. Although she did not write for the mainstream press, Smedley is part of the tradition of the participatory metropolitan newspaper women, which came into force in the early twentieth century. As Jean Marie Lutes has argued, “More likely than her male counterparts to be pictured along with her stories, more likely to inspire controversy by her physical presence at an event, the newspaperwoman was a conspicuous anomaly, hard to ignore even by those who wished she

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would go away . . . For men, participatory journalism was a choice; for women, it was one of the few ways to break out of the women’s pages” (2). 11. See William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (Chicago and London : Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), 5–25. 7

Class “Truths” in James Agee’s L ET U S N OW P R A ISE F A MOUS M EN

1. Evans Chan, “Against Postmodernism, etcetera—A Conversation with Susan Sontag,” Postmodern Culture 12, 12 (2001): 8. 2. Muriel Rukeyser, A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, ed. Jan Heller Levi (New York: Norton, 1994), 121. 3. Of course, Agee had to subvert standard documentary forms to try to make Famous Men succeed in reaching such an end. This chapter will explore several ways in which he does so. On this issue, see the excellent work of Michael Staub, Voices of Persuasion: Politics of Representation in 1930s America (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 21–53. 4. See Alan Wald, “The 1930s Left in U.S. Literature Reconsidered,” in Radical Revisions: Rereading 1930s Culture, ed. Bill Mullen and Sherry Linkon (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1996), 13–28. 5. For “the American pragmatism that constituted the philosophical basis of literary proletarianism” and the U.S. literary radicals’ “antipathy to overt didacticism” and “an intense predilection for the real” as opposed to a materialist dialectic (143), see Barbara Foley’s Radical Representations, 142–160. 6. On some of the “dangers” in describing “social others,” see the incisive work of Paula Rabinowitz, “Voyeurism and Class Consciousness”: 143–170. 7. See, for example, these place-based works, all of which involved contemporaneous commentary on the veracity of their descriptions: John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth (1929), Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money (1930), Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl (1936), and Edward Anderson’s Hungry Men (1935). Agee’s and Rukeyser’s forays into American places (Praise’s Appalachia; and The Book’s Gauley, West Virginia) mirror Dixon Wexter’s observation on the sudden “rise of the region” in Depressionera culture, resulting, in part, from “the over 650, 000 miles of new road construction undertaken between 1935 and 1943 by the works Progress Administration (WPA)” and “the 378 books and pamphlets published in the American Guide Series of the Federal Writers’ Project focusing on local histories, cultures, and traditions” (qtd. in Kalaidjian 71).

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On art’s potential for influencing mass opinion, see James Agee, “Plans for Work: October, 1937,” in Collected Short Prose of James Agee, ed. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Ballantine, 1970), 160; most especially, the section, Conjectures on how to get “art” back on a plane of organic human necessity. 8. Virtually ignored by Agee critics is the 1939 Partisan Review questionnaire, entitled “Some Questions Which Face American Writers Today” and Agee’s responses to it that appear in the center of Famous Men. Although the Partisan Review refused to publish his sardonic replies, Agee featured them in the “Intermission” section. His answer to question five is particularly significant: 5. Do you find, in retrospect, that your writing reveals any allegiance to any group, class, organization, region, religion, or system of thought, or do you conceive of it as mainly the expression of yourself as an individual? [ . . . ] 5. “I find in retrospect,” that I have felt forms of allegiance or part-allegiance to catholicism and to the communist party. I felt less at ease with them and I am done with them . . . I am most certainly “for” an “intelligent” “communism”; no other form of theory of government seems to me conceivable; but even this is only a part of much more, and a means to an end: and in every concession to a means, the end is put in danger of all but certain death. I feel violent enmity and contempt toward all factions and all joiners. I “conceive of” my work as an effort to be faithful to my perceptions. I am not interested in “expressing” “myself” as an “individual” except when it is suggested that I “express” someone else. (305) Agee’s “‘intelligent’ ‘communism’” is neither a contemporaneous Marxist party-line position nor that of a standard liberal line of thought. Self-directed to be true to his “perceptions” and drawn to an “intense allegiance toward certain shapes of fact” (Praise 305), Agee wished to suggest in Famous Men possibilities for a “perceptual solidarity” to his subjects and middle-class readers while at the same time criticizing a bourgeois subjectivity. 9. Agee was conversant with the early pragmatists and their doctrines. Jean Follansbee Quinn has noted, “As a student at Harvard, Agee was galvanized by I. A. Richards’s conceptions of the emotive and instrumental qualities of language—ideas Richards drew from C.S. Peirce’s semiotics, William James’s psychology, and John Dewey’s philosophy. But Agee adopted those ideas—as Dewey did in the 1931 William James Lectures on aesthetics at Harvard—by considering the political and social consequences of aesthetic discourse” (6). In what follows, I’m most interested in Agee’s aesthetics on the

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10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

NOTES

nature of truth, especially in relation to the writings of William James and to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Richard Wright’s Twelve Million Black Voices (1941), a photo-documentary text, articulates a Marxist critique of the period’s characteristic emphasis on collective identity while, in Jeff Allred’s words, “enact[ing] a drama in which the we that narrates has something to teach an implied white readership about blackness” (557). Like The Grapes of Wrath (book and film), Let us Now Praise Famous Men is disturbingly silent on race and the “viewing” of race and poverty. See Allred, “From Eye to We: Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, Documentary, and Pedagogy,” American Literature 78, 3 (September 2006): 549–583. See also Rabinowitz, “Voyeurism and Class Consciousness” 154–155. In a 1936 letter to his lifelong friend and correspondent, Father Flye, Agee writes: “I care mainly just about two things. Sometimes they seem identical or at least like binary stars, and sometimes they seem like a split which can completely destroy. They would be (1) getting as near truth and whole truth as is humanly possible, which means several sorts of ‘Truth’ maybe, but on the whole means spiritual life, integrity and growth; and (2) setting this (near-) truth out in the clearest and cleanest possible terms” (Letters 85). Walker Evans’s retrospective comments on his “independent” but mutually beneficial collaboration with Agee in Famous Men characterize, as Stuart Culver notes, how “Agee provided Evans with an atmosphere or medium in which images of the sharecroppers emerged in response to the writer’s efforts to represent them in language” (194): “I was really able to trail along and take advantage of an atmosphere that James Agee created with these people” (Evans 320). See Walker Evans, “Discussions with the Students of the University of Michigan,” in Photographic Essays and Images, ed. Beaumont Newhal (New York: Museum of Modern Art Press, 1980), 311–320. On the importance of the tropological function of language and a text’s symmetries, see Paul de Mann, “Introduction à la littérature allemande contemporaine,” in Wartime Journalism, 1939–1943, ed. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan. (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1988), 200–201. For some of the voyeuristic and sexual implications of sleep involving the narrator and female characters, see Linda Wagner Martin, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—and Women: Agee’s Absorption in the Sexual,” in James Agee: Reconsiderations, ed. Michael A. Lofaro. Tennessee Studies in Literature, vol. 33 (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1992), 44–58. See Agee’s tentative project for composing an “Anti-communist manifesto,” in James Agee, Plans for Work, 1937, James Agee: The Collected Short Prose, ed. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Ballantine, 1970), 157.

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16. See Perloff, “‘Creative Writing’ among the Disciplines,” MLA Newsletter 38, 1 (Spring, 2006): 3–4. Instead of assuming separate essences for fictional and factual discourse—as Perloff does—and this does not mean that fictional discourse and nonfictional discourse are indistinguishable—we would do well to scrutinize the correspondences between the two, the ontologies behind their respective truth claims, and the interdependent correlatives to their respective powers. 17. Paul de Man argues: “All philosophy is condemned, to the extent that it is dependent on figuration, to be literary and, as the depository of this very problem, all literature is to some extent philosophical” (50). See de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzij Warminski (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996), 34–50. 18. This chapter interrogates not only those distinctions, but Frus’s interpretations of the categories of “literature” and “nonfiction.” 19. See James Agee: Selected Journalism, ed. Paul Ashdown (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 2005). 20. See Theodore W. Adorno, “The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia UP, 1991), 30–36. 21. See Jon-Christian Suggs, “Marching! Marching! and the Idea of the Proletarian Novel,” in The Novel and the American Left: Critical Essays on Depression-Era Fiction, ed. Janet Galligani Casey (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 2004), 159–161. 22. For a feminist “focus on gender not as a predetermined condition of the production of texts, but as a textual effect,” see Robyn Warhol, “Guilty Cravings: What Feminist Narratology Can Do for Cultural Studies,” in Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, ed. David Herman (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1999), 342–348; and Sally Robinson, Engendering the Subject: Gender and SelfRepresentation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (New York: State Univ. of New York, 1991). Conclusion 1. See, for example, Barbara Foley, Telling the Truth; Paula Rabinowitz, They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (New York: Verso, 1994); William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford UP, 1973); and John Hartsock, A History of American Literary Journalism (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2000). 2. See John Hartsock, A History of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 1–20.

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3. See Marjorie Perloff, “‘Creative Writing’ among the Disciplines,” MLA Newsletter 38, 1 (Spring, 2006): 3–4. 4. For an astute discussion of the materiality of aesthetics and aesthetic practices, see Paul Gilmore, “Romantic Electricity, or the Materiality of Aesthetics,” American Literature 76, 3 (September 2004): 487–494. 5. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Critical Theory Since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee: Florida State UP, 1986), 240–252. 6. Presently there is no word or concept that is more off-limits to U. S. mass culture than class. By contrast, the U.S. society has rapidly progressed over several generations in developing a common language to talk about differences of gender, race, and sexuality. But in U.S. mass culture, class remains the stalled subject. Recently, however (May 2005), the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times ran front-page articles that launched major new series on class inequality and the disappearing American Dream. Class appears to be coming back, though, of course, it has always been with us.

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(Please note that page numbers appearing in italics indicate end notes.) Abrams, M.H., 151 Adorno, Theodore, 133 aesthetics Agee, James and, 2, 15, 187–188, 191, 193, 196–198, 202–205, 207 Bourdieu, Pierre and, 5 class and, 220–223 Crane, Stephen and, 45, 47, 56, 64, 69–71 Davis, Rebecca Harding and, 45, 48, 50–53, 69–71 Hurston, Zora Neale and, 169 Le Sueur, Meridel and, 13, 134, 144, 150, 151, 156–157 London, Jack and, 82, 87, 91, 96–97 Smedley, Agnes and, 2, 169 Toomer, Jean and, 2, 12, 108, 113 Whitman, Walt and, 27, 29, 36–37, 42 Agee, James, 187–217, 242–244 aesthetics and, 2, 15, 187–188, 191, 193, 196–198, 202–205, 207 atmosphere and, 189–191 camera in works of, 199–202 on class divisions, 210–213 “Havana Cruise”, 189, 208, 212–213, 216–217 language and, 14–15 Le Sueur, Meridel and, 160 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 14–15, 160, 185–217

literary journalism, 102, 207–209, 225 narrative method, 191–199, 220–222 rehistoricizing and, 162 “Saratoga”, 189, 208–212, 217 satire, 213–217 second-person narration, 209–210 settings and writings, 151 sleep in works of, 202–206 Smedley, Agnes and, 185 studies of, 2 Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 69 Algren, Nelson, 137 Allred, Jeff, 244 Alter, Robert, 235 American Literature and Culture Wars (Jay), 1 American Working Class Literature (Coles and Zandy), 3 Anderson, Sherwood, 12, 109 Ashdown, Paul, 208, 209, 217 At Emerson’s Tomb (Rowe), 1, 22 Auerbach, Jonathan, 80, 88, 93, 97 Babcock, Barbara, 69 “Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads, A” (Whitman). see Whitman, Walt Bakhtin, Mikhail, 79 Barnard, Rita, 180 Bauman, Zygmunt, 228 Baxter, Sylvester, 41 “Becky” (Toomer). see Toomer, Jean

264

INDEX

Bell, Michael, 64 Bellamy, Edward, 41 Benjamin, Walter, 200 Benson, Brian J., 238 Bentley, Nancy, 188 Beyond Equality (Montgomery), 4–5 “Blcood Burning Moon” (Toomer). see Toomer, Jean Blumin, Stuart, 7 Bourdieu, Pierre, 5, 93–94, 98, 151, 161 aesthetics and, 5 Boynton, Robert, 161–162 Brasher, Thomas, 35, 37 Bright, Edward, 64 Brooks, Peter, 84 Browder, Laura, 99, 153 Brown, Bill, 46, 66, 67, 68, 73, 76 Cain, William, 99, 101 Call of the Wild. see London, Jack Campbell Reesman, Jeanne, 99 Cane (Toomer). see Toomer, Jean “Carma” (Toomer). see Toomer, Jean Carnegie, Andrew, 39 Cassuto, Leonard, 99 Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class (Wilentz), 5 Civil War, 5, 40, 49 class critical history of, 4–6 fixed ideologies and, 6 language and, 1–4, 7–9, 219– 221, 222 vocabulary of, 221–223 Class and Its Others (GibsonGraham), 7 Coiner, Constance, 134, 136, 141, 148, 149, 158 Coles, Nicolas, 3 Colvert, James, 64

Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 15 Conlon, Stephen, 84 Connery, Thomas, 217 Conover, Ted, 161 Conroy, John, 136, 137, 152, 162 Coviello, Peter, 29–30 Crane, Stephen, 45–73 aesthetics and, 45, 47, 56, 64, 69–71 Boynton and, 162 class and, 2, 3, 75, 220, 222 “Experiment in Misery, An”, 54–55 grotesque in works, 61–62 “In the Depths of a Coal Mine”, 67, 69–70 Letters, 64 literary journalism, 65–73 London, Jack and, 97, 101, 102 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, 10–11, 46–48, 50, 52, 53–66, 75, 231 melodrama in works, 59–61 “Mexican Lower Classes, The”, 70, 71–72, 97, 101 narrative method, 10–12 “On the Boardwalk”, 66–67 “Parades and Entertainments”, 67 performative in works, 62–64 performative unreality and structure in works, 56–59 Prose and Poetry, 66–73 reality and, 230–231 as stylist of performance, 64 “When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers”, 69 critical history, class and, 4–6 Cruising Modernism (Trask), 1 Cunningham, Brent, 96 current criticism, class and, 6–16

INDEX

Daughter of Earth (Smedley). see Smedley, Agnes Davis, Rebecca Harding, 45–73 aesthetics and, 45, 48, 50–53, 69–71 class and, 2, 3, 10–11, 220–222 Le Sueur, Meridel and, 133 Life in the Iron Mills, 10–11, 46–47, 48–53, 154 London, Jack and, 75–76, 84 Dawahare, Anthony, 149 Deleuze, Gilles, 28 Democratic Vistas. see Whitman, Walt Denning, Michael, 207, 217 Dewey, John, 192, 196, 243 di Donato, Pietro, 153 “Dignity of Dollars, The” (London). see London, Jack Dillard, Mabel M., 238 Dimock, Wai Chee, 5 Distinction (Bourdieu), 5, 93–94, 98 Dos Passos, John, 137, 153, 154, 217 Dowling, Robert M., 61 Dreiser, Theodore, 55, 240 Duplessis, Rachel Blau, 177 Eason, David, 97 Eldridge, Richard, 237 Eliot, T.S., 51, 206, 232 Ellis, Jacqueline, 160 Emergence of the Middle Class, The (Blumin), 7 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 19–23, 42 “American Scholar, The”, 22 “Fate”, 22 Nature, 19–22 “Poet, The”, 20, 22 Empson, William, 181 Engels, Frederick, 15, 94 Erkkila, Betsy, 24 “Esther” (Toomer). see Toomer, Jean

265

“Evening in a Lumber Town” (Le Sueur). see Le Sueur, Meridel “Experiment in Misery, An” (Crane). see Crane, Stephen Fabre, Genevieve, 130 Fantasia, Rick, 4 Farrell, James T., 137 “Fate” (Emerson). see Emerson, Ralph Waldo Feied, Frederick, 77 feminism, 13, 15, 135, 138, 149, 245 “Fern” (Toomer). see Toomer, Jean Finnegan, William, 161 Fisher, Philip, 55, 66 Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, 35, 37, 97 Fitzgerald, Robert, 208, 216 Fluck, Winifried, 230 Foley, Barbara, 1, 105–106, 120, 131, 235, 239 Follansbee Quinn, Jeanne, 190, 243 Frus, Phyllis, 208 Furer, Andrew, 101 Gandall, Keith, 4, 62 Gates, Henry Louis, 236 Gellhorn, Martha, 136 gender Agee, James and, 217 class and, 1, 7, 8, 14, 17–18, 220–223 Davis, Rebecca Harding and, 49 Hurston, Zora Neale and, 163– 165, 168, 175–176, 179 Le Sueur, Meridel and, 140–142, 158 London, Jack and, 76, 79, 82, 91, 95 Smedley, Agnes and, 167, 183 Toomer, Jean and, 106, 108 Whitman, Walt and, 32–33, 39, 42 Genette, Gérard, 123, 236

266

INDEX

Gibson-Graham, J.K., 7 Gilmore, Michael T., 7 Girl, The (Le Sueur). see Le Sueur, Meridel Gliserman, Martin, 78 Gold, Michael, 137, 152, 154 “Golden Age” of American journalism, 96–97 Gould, Philip, 11 Gray, Richard, 97 Greenspan, Ezra, 40 Gusdorf, George, 96 Gutman, Herbert, 4 Hall, John R., 219 Hall, Stuart, 6 Halliburn, David, 57, 60 Hanley, Lawrence, 153, 189–190, 211 Hapke, Laura, 149, 158, 165, 185 Harris, Sharon M., 48 Harrison, Gabriel, 227 Hartsock, John, 11, 99, 240 “Havana Cruise” (Agee). see Agee, James Hedges, Elaine, 240 Helbing, Mark, 12, 109, 123, 126 Hendricks, King, 100 Herbst, Josephine, 136, 157, 183 Hicks, Granville, 153, 154 Hobsbawm, Eric, 4 Hoffman, Nancy, 176–177, 181, 182 Hollinger, David A., 192 “How I Became a Socialist” (London). see London, Jack Howard, June, 66, 71, 72, 230 Huntington, Collis P., 73 Hurston, Zora Neale, 2, 3, 14, 163–185, 220–222, 241 aesthetics and, 169 form, work, and fragmentation of self, 169–174 frame narratives and, 165–169 on labor, 174–176

Their Eyes Were Watching God, 14, 164–169, 172, 176–179 work and being, 177–179 work and race, 176–177 I Hear Men Talking (Le Sueur). see Le Sueur, Meridel “I Sing the Body Electric” (Whitman). see Whitman, Walt “I Was Marching” (Le Sueur). see Le Sueur, Meridel “Illusions” (Emerson), 21 immersion, 13, 89, 152–160, 162, 165, 179, 182–184, 188, 200 “In the Depths of a Coal Mine” (Crane). see Crane, Stephen incarnational classed body and, 25–28 gender and, 32–33 language and, 28–32 Innes, Catherine L., 237 Iron Heel, The (London), 11, 89 Iser, Wolfgang, 50, 52, 58, 230 Jackson, Bruce, 197 James, Henry, 131 James, William, 188, 191–192, 194–198, 200, 243–244 Jameson, Frederic, 6 Janowitz, Anne, 220 Jay, Gregory S., 1 John Barleycorn. see London, Jack Johnson, James Weldon, 236 Jones, Gareth Stedman, 5 Jones, Robert B., 125 “Kabnis” (Toomer). see Toomer, Jean Kalaidjian, Walter, 242 Kaplan, Amy, 99 Kaplan, Cora, 6, 46, 223 “Karintha” (Toomer). see Toomer, Jean Keen, Suzanne, 239 Kerman, Cynthia Earl, 237

INDEX

Kimmel, Michael, 79 Kloppenburg, James T., 192 Knoper, Randall, 230–231 Kreig, Joann, 41 Kroeber, Karl, 238 Labor, Earle, 99 Labor and Desire (Rabinowitz), 1 Lang, Amy Shrager, 1, 7–8, 56, 223 Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History (Jones), 5 Lawson, Andrew, 227, 228 Le Sueur, Meridel, 133–162 1930s Left and, 135–137 aesthetics and, 13, 134, 144, 150, 151, 156–157 Agee, James and, 207 class and, 2, 13, 219–222 critical commentary on, 149–150 “Evening in a Lumber Town”, 153, 154, 156–158 everyday experiences and, 163 Girl, The, 13, 139, 144, 146–147, 149 I Hear Men Talking, 13, 156 “I Was Marching”, 133, 137, 139, 144–146, 149, 154–155, 160, 221 immersion and, 152–153 language and, 137–139 literary journalism, 150–152, 225, 239–240 London, Jack and, 102 movement and, 144–149 narrative vision, 139–141 rehistoricizing of, 160–162 Salute to Spring, 13, 133–162, 163, 180–181, 238–239, 241 setting and, 13 settings, immersions, circumstances, 153–160 Smedley, Agnes and, 164, 181 studies of, 238

267

text and body, 141–144 “What Happens in a Strike”, 153, 156 “Women Are Hungry”, 154, 157–158 Leaves of Grass (Whitman). see Whitman, Walt LeBlanc, Nicole, 161 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee). see Agee, James Levenson, J.C., 54 Lewis, Sinclair, 134 Lieber, Todd, 128, 236 Life in the Iron Mills (Davis). see Davis, Rebecca Harding Lipsitz, George, 1, 3 literary journalism Agee, James and, 207–209 Crane, Stephen and, 65–73 Le Sueur, Meridel and, 150–152 London, Jack and, 96–103 Smedley, Agnes and, 179–185 Liverwright, Horace, 106, 238 London, Charmian-Kittredge, 77, 94 London, Jack, 75–103, 232–233, 234 aesthetics and, 82, 87, 91, 96–97 “Americanness” and, 90–93 autobiographical forms, 94–96 body narratives, 94–96 Call of the Wild, 11, 80 class and, 3, 11–12, 219–222 “Dignity of Dollars, The”, 12, 97–98 direct address and, 88–90 “How I Became a Socialist”, 11, 77–79 John Barleycorn, 11, 85, 96, 102 language and, 84–86 Le Sueur, Meridel and, 133, 141, 152 literary journalism, 96–103 “Mexico’s Army and Ours”, 12, 97, 99–102 narrative, 79–81

268

INDEX

London, Jack—continued People of the Abyss, 11–12, 75–103, 133, 152, 232–233 Road, The, 77, 85 on social hierarchy, 81–84 sociological writings, 77–79 solutions for alleviation of poverty, 93–94 tramp identity, 86–88 “What Life Means to Me”, 78–79 Lounsberry, Barbara, 9 Loving, Jerome, 18, 35 Lowe, James, 189 Lumpkin, Grace, 183 Lutes, Jean Marie, 241 MacKinnon, Janice, 181, 183, 241 MacKinnon, Stephen, 181, 183, 241 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Crane). see Crane, Stephen Markels, Julian, 6 Marxism Agee, James and, 15, 190, 192, 206, 243 class and, 5–6, 7 Le Sueur, Meridel and, 135, 138, 141 London, Jack and, 90 Smedley, Agnes on, 241 Wright, Richard and, 244 McCarthy, Mary, 136 McKay, Nellie Y., 124, 127 “Mexican Lower Classes, The” (Crane). see Crane, Stephen “Mexico’s Army and Ours” (London). see London, Jack Mieszkowski, Jan, 8, 187 Miller, Nancy, 167 Minding the Machine (Rice), 7 Minter, David, 234 Mizruchi, Susan L., 241 modernism, 2, 13, 15, 82, 95, 105, 131, 137, 141, 188, 192, 195, 206–207, 217, 222 Monster, The (Crane), 66 Montgomery, David, 4–5

Morton, Heather, 35 Myerson, Joel, 35 naturalism Agee, James and, 15, 207 class and, 2 Crane, Stephen and, 57, 59–61, 62, 64–65, 67, 71 Davis, Rebecca Harding and, 45–48 London, Jack and, 12, 87 Nature (Emerson). see Emerson, Ralph Waldo “Nebraska’s Bitter Fight for Life” (Crane), 70–71 New Journalism, 97, 161–162 Norris, Frank, 60, 65 North, Michael, 237 Olsen, Tillie, 154, 157, 164, 180, 217 “On the Boardwalk” (Crane). see Crane, Stephen Orlean, Susan, 161 Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu), 234 “Parades and Entertainments” (Crane). see Crane, Stephen Parisi, Peter, 98 Parker, Dorothy, 136 Peirce, Charles S., 197–198, 243 Peluso, Robert, 84, 85, 91 People of the Abyss (London). see London, Jack performative mystery, 53–56 performative unreality, 56–59 Perloff, Marjorie, 207, 245 Pfaelzer, Jean, 49–50 “Poet, The” (Emerson). see Emerson, Ralph Waldo Posnak, Ross, 188 Poverty and Progress (Thernstrom), 5 Practical Reason (Bourdieu), 234 Pratt, Linda, 155

INDEX

Raban, Jonathan, 152 Rabinowitz, Paula, 1, 49, 94, 142, 149, 168, 182 race class and, 1, 7, 9, 13–15, 220–223 Hurston, Zora Neale and, 164–165, 168, 174 London, Jack and, 81–82, 85, 91, 95, 101–102 New Journalism and, 161 Smedley, Agnes and, 164–165 Toomer, Jean and, 105–110, 112, 119, 128, 130 Whitman, Walt and, 27, 29, 36, 39, 41–42 work and, 176–177 Radical Representations (Foley), 1 Rainbow at Midnight (Lipsitz), 1 Raney, David, 234 realism Agee, James and, 15, 195, 202, 207, 217 class and, 2, 220 Crane, Stephen and, 47–48, 57, 64–65, 68, 73 Davis, Rebecca Harding and, 47–48 Le Sueur, Meridel and, 135, 137, 141, 150, 153–154 London, Jack and, 97, 98, 99 Smedley, Agnes and, 183 Toomer, Jean and, 116, 119, 130 Whitman, Walt and, 45 Red Badge of Courage, The (Crane), 66 Reed, T.V., 189 Rethinking Class (Dimock and Gilmore), 7 Reynolds, David S., 18, 35, 37, 39, 41 Rice, Stephen, 7–8, 9 Ricoeur, Paul, 108 Riley, Denise, 229 Roberts, Nancy, 154 Roberts, Nora, 136, 184 Robertson, Michael, 66, 70

269

Rockefeller, William D., 73 Roggenkamp, Karen, 37 Rorty, Richard, 220 Rosenfelt, Deborah, 136 Rotundo, Anthony, 79 Rowe, John Carlos, 1, 22 Rukeyser, Muriel, 137, 187, 207 Salute to Spring (Le Sueur). see Le Sueur, Meridel “Saratoga” (Agee). see Agee, James Schleuning, Neala, 136 Schneider, Isodore, 154 Schocket, Eric, 80, 83, 231, 233 Schoenbach, Lisi, 196 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 18 Seltzer, Mark, 53 Sequin, Robert, 4 Shulman, Robert, 135, 138, 143, 240 Siegle, Robert, 123 Sinclair, Upton, 152 Slesinger, Tess, 153, 183 Smedley, Agnes, 163–185 aesthetics and, 2, 169 Agee, James and, 207, 217 class and, 2, 3, 14, 220–222 Daughter of Earth, 14, 152, 163–169, 171–173, 175–181, 183–185, 239 Le Sueur, Meridel and, 152–154, 157, 162 literary journalism, 98, 179–185, 241 Spiegel, Alan, 195, 204 Spivak, Gayatri, 6 Spivak, John L., 154 Spolsky, Ellen, 231 Stacy, Jason, 18, 40 Staub, Michael, 180, 188 Steinbeck, John, 207, 217 Stephen Crane: Letters (Crane). see Crane, Stephen Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry. see Crane, Stephen Stott, Richard B., 18

270

INDEX

Stott, William, 193 Stutfield, H.M., 60 Symonds, John, 41 Syntax of Class, The (Shrager), 1, 7–8, 223 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston). see Hurston, Zora Neale Thernstrom, Stephen, 4–5 Thompson, E.P., 4, 6, 219 Tichi, Cecilia, 49 Toomer, Jean, 105–131, 235, 236, 237, 238 absolutions of seeing, 108–119 aesthetics and, 2, 12, 108, 113 “Becky”, 13, 110–115 “Blood Burning Moon”, 118– 119 Cane, 12–13, 105–131, 133, 159, 235–237 “Carma”, 13, 110–111, 113–115, 128 class and, 2, 3, 12–13, 220, 221, 222 “Esther”, 116–119 “Fern”, 13, 110–112, 114–117, 128 “Kabnis”, 107, 127–130 “Karintha”, 13, 110–117, 128 Le Sueur, Meridel and, 133, 159 Touraine, Alain, 228 Trask, Michael, 1, 222 Unpossessed, The (Slesinger), 153, 183 Walcott, Charles, 55 Wald, Alan, 190 Walker, Dale, 99 Ward, J.A., 201 Warhol, Robyn, 110, 129 Weinstein, Cindy, 179

“What Happens in a Strike” (Le Sueur). see Le Sueur, Meridel “What Life Means to Me” (London). see London, Jack “When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers” (Crane). see Crane, Stephen Whicher, Stephen, 22 Whitman, Walt, 17–43, 225, 226, 227, 228–229 aesthetics and, 27, 29, 36–37, 42 “Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads, A”, 10, 24 class and, 2, 3, 9–10, 220–222 class and mass, 33–34 class religion and common people, 23–25 Crane, Stephen and, 45, 46, 47, 66 Davis, Rebecca Harding and, 45, 46, 47 Democratic Vistas, 29, 40–41, 42 form and, 34–39 gender and, 32–33 “I Sing the Body Electric”, 25–27 incarnational and classed body, 25–28 language and incarnational, 28–32 Le Sueur, Meridel and, 133, 141 Leaves of Grass, 9–10, 17–43, 53 London, Jack and, 80 move from journalism to poetry, 34–39 secular faith and, 19–23 Smedley, Agnes and, 185 Toomer, Jean and, 125 Whitman: The Political Poet (Erkkila), 24 Wilentz, Sean, 5 Williams, James, 102 Williams, Raymond, 4, 6, 38–39, 146

INDEX

Wilson, Christopher P., 10 Wolfe, Tom, 161, 162 “Women Are Hungry” (Le Sueur). see Le Sueur, Meridel Wright, Richard, 238, 244

Yagoda, Ben, 225 Yesierska, Anzia, 162 Zandy, Janet, 3 Ziff, Larzer, 61 Zinn, Howard, 100

271