UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Militarized Desires: Consumerism in American Literature, 1939-1955 DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English by Rachel Lou Mykkanen Dissertation Committee: Professor Michael Szalay, Chair Professor Richard Godden Professor Jonathan Alexander 2014 © 2014 Rachel Lou Mykkanen DEDICATION To my brother, who taught me my ABC's, my mother, who let me read at the table, and my father, who told the best stories. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv CURRICULUM VITAE v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vi INTRODUCTION 1 The Postwar Tomorrow 18 CHAPTER 1: “You dirty...dirty no-account”: Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man and Consumer Desires 33 CHAPTER 2: “No more emotion to spend” : A Family at War in Jim Thompson’s Now and On Earth 71 CHAPTER 3: “Looks like this man has had a war”: Chester Himes and the Los Angeles ‘homefront’ 116 CHAPTER 4: Bloody Mamas on the Barbary Shore: Norman Mailer and Perpetual War 164 WORKS CITED 216 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many thanks to my committee chair, Professor Michael Szalay, whose consistently practical advice has been essential throughout my graduate career. I would like to thank my committee members, Professor Richard Godden, whose work provides an inimitable model of historical engagement , and whose feedback was always generous. I learned more as his TA than during any other quarter, partially due to irrational fears that students would expect me to duplicate his extensive knowledge of everything; and Professor Jonathan Alexander, whose energy and flexibility truly inspires. In addition, a thank you to my indispensable colleagues: Ameeth Vijay, for his tomatoes; Victoria Hsieh, for her sighs; Mark Pangilinan, for his orbit; George Zhu, for his knowledge of cool; and Daniel Matlock, for everything including breakfast. Thanks to my winsomes, Gautham and Erin, for encouraging me from afar. Thanks to Yvonne Pawlikowski, for listening to my ramblings. I am extraordinarily grateful to my entire family for their generous spirits. And a special additional thanks to Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr., without whose inspiring words I would not have finished this project. Financial support for research and writing was provided by the University of California, Irvine. iv CURRICULUM VITAE Rachel Lou Mykkanen 2004 B.A. in English, St. Olaf College 2008 M.A. in English, University of California, Irvine 2007-14 Teaching Assistant, Department of English University of California, Irvine 2012-13 Teaching Assistant, School of Humanities University of California, Irvine 2014 Ph.D. in English, University of California, Irvine FIELD OF STUDY Twentieth-Century American Literature v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Militarized Desires: Consumerism in American Literature, 1939-1955 By Rachel Lou Mykkanen Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Irvine, 2014 Professor Michael Szalay, Chair My dissertation investigates the American WWII homefront and its commitment both to war production and leisure consumerism. A look at literature of the period shows that rationing did not produce a straightforward repression of desires; wartime restrictions and price controls resulted instead in multiplying forms of desire, and an increase in societal and individual attention paid to consumption choices. Since the war economy rests upon production for destruction, violence irrupts throughout the novels I examine. As more women entered industry, more energy was invested into maintaining an image of the consumer as inherently female. Meanwhile, the underlying social scripts for the eventual redirection of desires toward more traditional and coherent categories were established. I argue that postwar ‘reconversion’ signals broader sociocultural changes rather than relatively limited industrial shifts. Wartime advertisements marketed bright futurity, promoting faith in the idea that hardship now would be transformed into peace and prosperity later, both for you and your progeny. I contend that skepticism toward such highly publicized myths emerges in tropes of childlessness or perverse children, which I examine in each of the novels here. vi In my chapter on Saul Bellow's first novel Dangling Man (1944), I argue that his protagonist should be viewed not as an existential hero but as a lens on the homefront economy and its psychic repercussions. As Joseph's life begins to revolve around consumption and frustration, he projects blame outward with violent results. Next I turn to two authors who worked for the WPA in the 1930s and defense plants in the 1940s, before becoming hard-boiled crime fiction writers in the 1950s. Chester Himes and Jim Thompson engage directly with the war economy through their early semi-autobiographical novels, contributing essential voices of dissent in an enforced atmosphere of consensus. Yet both displace industrial violence onto the women in their lives. Finally, Norman Mailer's political allegory of the postwar period critiques the amnesia involved in maintaing an economy based on war. In 'The Postwar Tomorrow', I contend that the wartime shift toward nondurable commodities had significant ramifications for the specific forms of American consumerism appearing in subsequent decades. vii INTRODUCTION "When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don't see heaven, or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and human tragedy." Joseph Heller, Catch-22. Thanks to the work of a variety of historians, a revisionist dismantling of the WWII “good war” myth has been underway for decades. The American effort to wage a just battle bolstered by technological prowess and undergirded by societal consensus amounts to an idealized construct, where the reality remained marred by racism, sexism, injustice, and ever- growing corporatism. A more ambivalent reality existed. My project seeks to examine the role literary productions played in the discourse of the times―embedded as they were, to what extent do they themselves reflect a darker side to the good war? Although trenchant critiques have dismantled many aspects of the dominant self-congratulatory mythos of wartime, a coherent sense of the lived reality is still difficult to find; consequently, the literary turn seems appropriate. A full account of literary responses to the war provides a field too broad for the scope of this project, so I will constrain my examination to fictionalized accounts of commodities and of consumerism. Marshalling all available resources toward a common goal, the American war machine did not merely produce physical military material, weapons and warplanes, but also produced ideological effects, a kind of war-mindedness that has had reverberating consequences for American culture, and American consumerism.1 I am interested in considering not only how 1 “Relations of production are first reproduced by the materiality of the processes of production and circulation. But it should not be forgotten that ideological relations are immediately present in these same processes.” Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1970), 141. 1 commodities have shaped American consumer culture through historical developments in their incarnations, but also in tracing the ways in which literature responds to the commodity in its colonization of human desires. The 1940s saw a shift in the American economy describable as a turn to Keynesian-Fordism, or the combination of a permanent arms economy with mass consumerism. I seek to demonstrate that novelists of the period attempt to portray clearly, or to otherwise make sense of, the more unacknowledged aspects of such a system. While accounts of the war's overall economic importance appear widely in histories of the period, fewer narratives address how the WWII years were crucial to the development of American consumer culture. Mass consumption as societal principle was concocted alongside Fordism in the 1920s to smooth out differences between the laboring masses and capital. Promises of alliance made early in the century were undercut by the consistent devaluation of the worker who was made increasingly flexible and superfluous. The 1930s saw a series of compromises regarding state control of the economy; compromise triggered vocal divergence, even as a wartime consensus seemed to form. New Deal reformers lobbied for the early expansion necessary for war mobilization, but then found themselves defanged and pushed out by the military-industry alliance that they had helped to birth. The degree of collusion between industrial and military forces in the United States was nearly unique among the Allied belligerents, but commonly seen as unavoidable. Civilian munition ministries were not feasible in the U.S. because of the lack of a higher civil service. Apart from the inevitable conflicts of interest, civilian agencies did not possess sufficient disposable personnel. Placing military buying in civilian hands, though a nice ideal, was considered impracticable in the American political economy. “Practically every other industrialized nation during World Wars I and II relied on some variation of war production council,” writes economic historian Paul Koistinen. 2 He adds, “Without such a system, the World War II American military assume levels of power that were unusual, and unwise, in a democratic country”.2 By 1942, the ties between industry and the military were sufficiently strong to resist laterally any political attempts to share or limit their power (using high-level councils, for