Scrap Modernism: Appropriation, Assemblage, and the Politics of Representation in Depression-Era America
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Scrap Modernism: Appropriation, Assemblage, and the Politics of Representation in Depression-era America Kristin Elizabeth Gilger El Paso, Texas B.A., University of Texas at Austin, 2003 A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Language and Literature University of Virginia August 2014 Acknowledgments I am especially grateful for the support, encouragement, and advice that so many have given me as I completed this project. I would like to first thank my committee: Rita Felski, whose thoughtful comments on early drafts strengthened both my writing and the project’s argument; Victoria Olwell, who supported me most when my project was stalled and gave me the confidence to embrace a new direction; and Jennifer Wicke, who joined the committee at a late stage and who has since been an invaluable mentor and director. I am also grateful for the teaching and professional advice of many others in the English department and at UVA, especially Michael Levenson, Jon D’Errico, Greg Colomb, Karlin Luedtke, Sharon Davies, and Rachel Most. A special thank you to Sarah Corse, who I was fortunate to have at my dissertation defense and whose thoughtful responses will inform my work in the future. I could not have seen this project through to the end without the support of my friends and family. I’m so very grateful for the friendship of Melissa White, Drew Scheler, Will Rhodes, Anna Ioanes, Tim Duffy, Phil Maciak, Michael Lewis, Carolyn Tate, Michael Pickard, Dorothy Couchman, and Eric Rettberg. I’d like to give special thanks to Camilla Ammirati—whose kindness, generosity, and unbelievable talent I greatly admire and who I was lucky enough to meet on the first day of graduate school—and to Jason Eversman, who read every page of this dissertation and whose keen editorial eye made me accountable for every word I wrote. Thanks for making me read Marx and for being a true pal and confidante. My family has offered unerring encouragement and support throughout my education. I am grateful for my sisters Stephanie, Janet, and Amy, whose humor and love have kept me grounded, and for their beautiful families, who always remind me of what’s most important. My mom, Lynn Meyers, deserves special notice. I am incredibly thankful for her unwavering love, support, and patience during the most trying times of this experience. I quite literally could not have done it without her and dedicate this work to her. And to Ryan Filkil—thank you for believing in me when I couldn’t, for reading these pages before anyone else, for making me laugh, and for inspiring me to be and do so much more. Table of Contents Introduction: Some Re-assembly Required 1 Chapter One: Clipped from the Headlines—Documentary Collage as Political Protest in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. and Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead 24 Chapter Two: Otherwise Lost or Forgotten—Collecting Black History in Zora Neale Hurston’s Federal Folklore and L.S. Alexander Gumby’s “Negroana” Scrapbooks 75 Chapter Three: Waste, Wastrels, and the Politics of Seeing Poverty—Mina Loy’s Bowery Poems and Trash Constructions 138 Coda: Scrap Aesthetics and Waste Management in the Twenty-first Century 186 Notes 194 Works Cited 215 That is how the past exists, phantasmagoric weskits, stray words, random things recorded. The imagination augments, metabolizes, feeding on all it has to feed on, such scraps. – Hugh Kenner1 Introduction: Some Re-assembly Required In the preamble to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a documentary work that has achieved near-iconic status as a record of the Great Depression in America, James Agee explains: If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. (10) Unable to do so in any form fit to be published or mass produced, Agee instead combines his impressionistic narrative of the impoverished lives of three rural tenant families in the South with Walker Evans’s black-and-white photographs into an experimental piece of reportage designed to represent what he called the “truth as a whole” (8). What his list of objects, sounds, and smells does articulate, however, is a desire to radically represent the “truth” in the form of the tangible; to let the physical materiality of poverty and suffering speak for itself. Agee suggests that this unadorned collection, including everything from scraps to shit, might subordinate his intervening role as author (and curator) to the coarse reality of economic hardship.2 This passage also envisions the ideal form of representation as collage, a composite form that brings together a number of ready-made materials removed from their original contexts and juxtaposed to create a new, paradoxically fragmented whole. Writing about the sharecroppers, Agee does not literally paste in waste nor does he “do no writing at all.” The finished text is nevertheless a complex combination of memoir, factual descriptions, poetic sequences, 1 inventories, explanatory notes, and scissored fragments of newsprint. As a result, despite the text’s claim to documentary realism and mimesis, Agee both endorses and enacts the practices of formal abstraction, and his techniques call attention to a deliberate manipulation of documentary narrative by blurring the boundaries between journalistic reportage, social science, and novelistic representation. They also resist any kind of totalizing logic and demonstrate the ways in which perception is contingent upon framing, editing, and composition. Agee’s brief comment in the preamble thus offers a critical framework through which to read the text’s attempt to join the real to what Jeff Allred has called “plausible fictions of the real” (10) as well as its idea of collage as the aesthetic technique best suited to represent the disparity and diversity of social experience. This collage sensibility and interest in the material dimensions of representation is not unique to Agee’s documentary photo-text. Rather, its recognizably modernist logic extends across numerous literary genres—from documentary nonfiction, ethnography, and oral history to poetry and prose—as well as artistic media, including scrapbooks and visual art. Physical collages, such as scrapbooks and assemblage constructions like those of the Cubists, are composed of tangible objects that have been removed from their original contexts and rearranged into structures of juxtaposition. Verbal collage texts similarly incorporate found materials into a new whole, but do so primarily through processes of quotation and allusion to other, often nonliterary documents and texts. Literary collage and assemblage also splice together multiple styles, linguistic registers, and modes of address and experiment with the visual design of the printed page. As a result, language acquires both a spatial dimension and unique texture, and the collage construction, to an extent greater than other hybrid or mixed-mode forms, is embedded with the material culture of its particular historical moment. 2 Fittingly, Agee’s imaginary collection perceives representational value in the bits and pieces of everyday life that are left behind or willfully discarded. These scraps are ephemeral— the experiences and phenomena that usually elude documentation or representation—and preserving them becomes a recognizable form of memory making. Yet the scraps accrue additional meaning within the historical context of the thirties, insofar as the aesthetic economy of the scrap collection corresponds with the actual economic and social conditions of the Great Depression. During the Depression, Americans experienced high rates of unemployment, physical displacement and dislocation, and financial insecurity. During the worst years, nearly one-third of the population was out of work, and as suffering persisted the federal government faced greater demands to deal with threats of hunger and violence. Hard times called progressive narratives of American modernity into question, and as a result, the Depression produced a field of social wreckage in which scraps and other objects of refusal became emblematic of failure. At the same time, as Jani Scandura points out, trash became a valuable commodity during the Depression, and as such, contemporary newspapers and magazines commonly “proposed salvaging rubbish as a way to yield wealth” (19). In a 1937 article published in the Saturday Evening Post, one scrap-picker commented, “‘Junk’ is merely another word for ‘money’ or cash,” and the Post reporter further added that “rising prices have transmuted waste products, the junk, the scrap of an industrial civilization into a great essential world resource which is wanted very badly indeed.”3 This kind of recycling created value out of cheap, easily accessible materials and thus modeled the thrift and “make-do” logic that enabled many Americans to survive the crisis.4 James Davison Hunter and Joshua J. Yates explain that during the Depression, thrift was “taught in schools, exhorted from the pulpits, and encouraged by the government in the form of federally supported ‘thrift institutions’ like the building and loan 3 associations” (3). Thriftiness was therefore an obligatory social ethic and somewhat banal everyday practice that stressed the importance of saving more, spending less, and reusing what once embodied the abundant wealth of American consumer capitalism. The word “scrap” refers literally to a leftover or partial remainder; “to scrap” is to remove from service or use, or to regard as no longer necessary and useful.5 Contrary to these standard definitions that denote disposal, what I call “scrapping” is a recuperative and transformative practice, one that makes such refuse and the various processes of refusal visible, and at the same time, reinvests them with a new kind of significance.