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Radical Politics and the Novel in the USA by David Carlyle Aitchison A

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Radical Politics and the Novel in the USA by David Carlyle Aitchison A Form and Responsibility: Radical Politics and the Novel in the USA By David Carlyle Aitchison A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English) at the UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON 2012 Date of final oral examination: 12/12/12 The dissertation is approved by the following members of the final oral committee: Thomas Schaub, Professor, English David Zimmerman, Professor, English Caroline Levine, Professor, English Russ Castronovo, Professor, English Michael Bernard-Donals, Professor, Jewish Studies and English © Copyright David Carlyle Aitchison 2012 All Rights Reserved i Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Introduction 1 Chapter 1 15 Lost Causes, Affective Affinities: Radical Chronotope in the Age of Liberal Narrative Chapter 2 41 The One Versus the Many?— Minority Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Radical Novel Chapter 3 67 Place, Space, and Ecotage: The Radical Scene in the American Novel Chapter 4 101 Making Raids on Human Consciousness: Literary Commitment and the Late Cold-War Novel Works Cited 133 ii Acknowledgments For instruction, guidance, and friendship my thanks go out to my adviser Thomas Schaub and readers David Zimmerman, Caroline Levine, and Russ Castronovo in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, whose influences I am happy to recognize throughout this dissertation: never was a moment wasted with these rigorous thinkers who teach and mentor with inexhaustible generosity, energy, and delight. Similar thanks go to my external reader Michael Bernard-Donals, without whom my proposal and defense conferences would have been much less thought provoking. Though not directly involved, Sean Teuton and Susan Friedman also lent nuance to select lines of inquiry—as did Alan Nadel under the auspices of Dartmouth College’s Futures of American Studies summer institute. I am likewise indebted to Jennifer Berner, Emily Clark, and Sarah Harrison—friends, peers, and constant readers with a knack for encouragement and good advice. It was a privilege to present and discuss parts of this project at the Marxist Literary Group’s Institute on Culture and Society, What is Revolution?, held at the University of Illinois, Chicago (June 2011), the Norman Mailer Society’s Eighth International Conference at the University of South Florida, Sarasota (November 2010), and the Society for Utopian Studies’ 35th Annual Meeting on Civil Rights, Social Justice, and the Midwest at the University of Milwaukee, Milwaukee (October 2010). These and other trips were made possible with generous subsidies from UW’s English Department, Americanist Literature and Culture Research Circle, and Graduate School. Further thanks are owed the Graduate School for allowing me to complete this project as a Chancellor’s Fellow. iii My Ph.D., finally, would have been unthinkable without the many peers, mentors, helpers, and companions who have encouraged and inspired me throughout my graduate studies at Madison—who are, I am happy to say, far too many to mention: roommates, office mates, fellow writing center tutors and composition instructors, fellow Americanists, program directors and coordinators, librarians, secretaries, students, and slithy toves. I salute them all. 1 Introduction This dissertation examines the ways in which artists and critics have implicated the American novel in struggles for social revolution. The critical task is to inquire into the feasibility of “committed” literature in the Cold War and late-capitalist eras, and to understand why writers still assume the novel, of all possible forms, might compel us to rethink our social and political responsibilities. Radical Politics and the Novel My primary subject is the “radical novel”—a genre category familiar to literary studies since at least Walter B. Rideout’s mid-century survey, The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900- 1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society (1956). Rideout accounted for two waves of leftist fiction in the early to mid twentieth century, a first wave of socialist novels produced in the early decades, and a second that peaked in the 1930s with the proletarian novel. If by twenty- first century standards his archive has come to seem overly biased toward white, male, urban, East-coast writers, it nevertheless remains a significant artifact, an undertaking that daringly spoke for the achievements of the U.S. literary left when the fires lit during the McCarthy witch- hunts were still smoldering. The classic radical novel as Rideout defined it was “one which demonstrates, either explicitly or implicitly, that its author objects to the human suffering imposed by some socioeconomic system and advocates that the system be fundamentally changed” (12, emphasis in original). More precisely, it was “an attempt to express through the literary form of the novel a predominantly Marxist point of view toward society” (3). Though we might take exception to this conflation of the radical and the revolutionary—to the extent that radical acts can thrive regardless of politics, let alone revolutionary politics, to guide them— 2 what Rideout called the radical novel was radical precisely to the extent it sanctioned social revolution. In this dissertation, I follow this loose but fundamental prescription. The desire for revolution and reform, of course, is hardly exclusive to the left. That is, there is no intrinsic dimension to what we mean by radicalism, no essential radical identity. It is, rather, an oppositional impulse, arising out of dissatisfaction with the order of things and a sense that intervention is both necessary and possible. As Rideout intimated, that literary radicalism in the twentieth-century USA coincided most popularly with the politics and aesthetics of the left was, in a sense, incidental—though by no means historically insignificant. Put another way, defining a subgenre of rightwing radical novels would be just as feasible and just as valuable an enterprise, though for different reasons: a genre coalescing around, say, Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905) and Andrew Macdonald’s The Turner Diaries (1980), along with more recent fictions by Martin Nakell (Two Fields that Face and Mirror Each Other 2001), Francine Prose (Changed man 2005) and Glen Beck (The Overton Window 2010) to name a few. But in this dissertation I am interested in novels of the left, primarily because leftist logics of self and society are sometimes so at odds with certain conventional elements of the novel—the ways, for example, fiction indulges so readily in private desires and internalist logics removed from collective concerns—that they lend themselves well, in their struggles to find viable solutions, to theorizing what it means for a novel to be political. I take my lead here from Rideout, who, in concluding his survey, remarked that the genre’s future was not only “precarious” but that it “probably lies almost wholly with the independent radical” (290)—a prediction ostensibly understandable in light of the mid-century collapse of the American left, but one that has nevertheless proven problematic for some scholars. Take M. Keith Booker, who in his own research guide to The Modern American Novel 3 of the Left (1999) otherwise acknowledges his debt to Rideout’s archive: as Booker sees it, Rideout’s conclusion entails “a rejection of communism in favor of a particularly enthusiastic endorsement of the individualist rhetoric of Americanism. It means, in short, a focus on individuals, rather than classes, as the agents of history, as if an isolated individual, alone, could ever determine the course of public events” (The Post-Utopian Imagination: American Culture in the Long 1950s 2002, 74). Booker’s chagrin, however, stems from an inattentive reading of Rideout’s real subject, which is not as Booker implies the Marxist novel but a more diverse body of work that happened to yield “a predominantly Marxist point of view.” Indeed, Rideout says explicitly that the archive could have represented novels engaging with other radicalisms, such as anarchism, though no such novels had been produced in the period: as he puts it, “[a]narchist literature was limited to the critical, the philosophical, and the polemical” (90). At odds with Booker, I take Rideout to speak soundly when he makes the point that the radical genre, after a half-century of coalescing around the revolutionary-Marxist paradigm, was changing—that it was beginning to engage with political logics that, if maddeningly for some, increasingly deviated from the classic Marxist paradigm. In the decades following the first publication of The Radical Novel in the United States (it received a second printing in 1966 and a third in 1992), the tendency seems to have been to discuss literary radicalism, whether in fiction, poetry, or criticism, according to a narrative of rise and decline: one that began with the Bohemians of Greenwich Village, peaked with the Communists of the 1930s, and faltered in the thick of postwar anti-Stalinist backlash. This, at least, is the story told by Daniel Aaron in Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (1961) and James Gilbert in Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America (1968). The tendency to figure the “red decade” of the 1930s as the hub 4 of American literary radicalism was concretized further with the renaissance in leftist studies beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, spearheaded by works such as Alan Wald’s The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left From the 1930s to the 1980s (1987), Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 (1989), Paula Rabinowitz’s Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America (1991), and Barbara Foley’s Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941 (1993). Wald, to be sure, often looks well beyond the 1930s in his historical biographies, but the thirties spirit typically provides the motive source for his inquiries.
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