The Labor of the Avant-Garde: Experimental Form and the Politics of Work in Post-War American Poetry and Fiction

The Labor of the Avant-Garde: Experimental Form and the Politics of Work in Post-War American Poetry and Fiction Aaron W. Winslow Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 © 2015 Aaron Winslow All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Labor of the Avant-Garde: Experimental Form and the Politics of Work in Post-War American Poetry and Fiction Aaron W. Winslow While literary critics have explored the politics of labor in pre-war modernist literature, the post-45 avant-garde has continued to be framed as a depoliticized repetition of previous avant-garde styles. Examining American avant-garde literature in its relation to the political and economic shifts from the 1960s through the late 1980s, my dissertation corrects this narrative to show that labor and labor politics were central categories in post-war experimental poetry and fiction. I argue that writers as disparate as Charles Olson, William S. Burroughs, Samuel R. Delany, and Susan Howe reworked disjunctive modernist forms to cognitively map emergent economic tendencies in the US. Parataxis, collage, surrealist imagery, aleatory compositional methods, non-linear plotting, and metafictional narrative conceits all constitute the stylistic techniques of an avant-garde engaged in an extended dialogue about work and the politics of work. The canon of experimental literature functioned as a counter-discourse that contested and reshaped discourses of labor by considering it alongside categories of race, gender, and sexuality. By using labor as an entry point into the avant-garde, my dissertation reconsiders the post-war literary canon, revealing an avant-garde that includes writers working across modes and genres. The adaptation of experimental techniques in genre writing turned the avant-garde into a popular literary mode. My dissertation particularly focuses on science fiction (SF), where the adaptation of experimental style played a crucial role in the development of the genre. Beginning with the 1960s British and American New Wave movement, SF writers turned to the experimental novel—often by way of modernist poetics—as a way to challenge the reified form of mainstream science fiction novels. I argue that this critique of the novel also functioned as a covert critique of the labor practices of the literary market place that guided the production of genre fiction. In this way, I contest traditional accounts that see post-war and contemporary experimental literature as increasingly marginal and self-reflective by tracking the avant-garde’s concern with depicting quotidian work, and representing themselves as workers, to critique institutions of intellectual and artistic production. Table of Contents List of Images…………………………………………………………………………………....ii Dedication………………………………………………………………………………………iii Introduction…………………………………………………………………………........…..….1 Chapter 1: Olson’s Old Mole: Postmodern Poetry and the Decline of New Deal Labor Radicalism in The Maximus Poems…………………………………...………………………..35 Chapter 2: “just a bit of science fiction”: William S. Burroughs’ Nova Trilogy and the Queer New Wave…………………………...……………….……………………………..………….84 Chapter 3: “I suspect the whole thing is science fiction”: Overproduction and Science Fiction Reading Protocols in Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren .……………………..…….…………...147 Chapter 4: “Black Genius Prophets of the Planet”: Afrofuturism and the Archive of Black Radicalism in Amiri Baraka’s In OurTerribleness…………………………..……..….……...198 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………….……..251 i List of Images Image 1, “Flight (The Glory of Hip)”, Fundi (Billy Abernathy)……...………………………..249 Image 2, “Toothpick Industry Smiles,” Fundi (Billy Abernathy).……………………………..250 ii For Judith and Brian Winslow. iii Introduction This dissertation explores the intersection of the avant-garde and science fiction (SF) literature in the Sixties and early Seventies, a convergence largely unexplored by literary scholars, yet which has long been apparent. We have only to look to some of the founding documents of avant-garde modernism to get a sense of its affinity for science fiction. F.T. Marinetti’s “The Futurist Manifesto” displays a properly science fictional technofetishism of the automobile and the “beauty of speed,” an affinity also found in his closing call to “launch once again our insolent challenge to the stars!” (17). Even more striking is Mina Loy’s cyborg- feminism in her manifesto “Aphorisms on Futurism” or the poem “Human Cylinders.” Loy and Marinetti, along with the other first-generation modernists, were of course prior to—or immediately concurrent with—SF’s emergence as a full-fledged and defined genre. It was only a later generation of avant-garde writers who would turn to SF as a literary space for the continued application of disjunctive techniques. Although we might prefer our literary histories be pat, developing linearly and within the boundaries of previously-defined genres, modes, and styles, the real history of literature moves in starts and fits in a contingent and aleatory process of literary experimentation, often looking to past forms, styles, movements, and writers to give shape to the present modes. This is especially, and ironically, true of the avant-garde and science fiction, two genres fixated—by their very definition—on the future. We speak of an avant-garde tradition, despite its premise of a radical break from such tradition; and the predictions and prophecies of science fiction are not only 1 invariably wrong, but guided and shaped by the expectations and demands of a genre policed not only by writers but readers and a mass market paperback publishing industry. The emergence of a SF avant-garde in the post-war period, in its relationship to the modernist avant-garde and pulp SF, resonates with Marx’s claim, in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that new generations “in periods of revolutionary crisis…anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language” (15). The post-war SF avant-garde dons the apparel of both an earlier modernist avant-garde and the genre tropes and trappings of science fiction as it springs from soil of these two modernist forms, borrowing the disjunctive forms and narrative conventions of each. This dissertation provides a history of the development of the science fiction avant-garde from its period of emergence into its maturity. To track this major yet largely covert history, my study thus takes as its object a constellation of divergent forms, authors, and periods, moving from the transitional modernism of Charles Olson—the emergent figure of the science fiction avant-garde; to the pulp avant-gardism of William S. Burroughs’ The Nova Trilogy and Samuel Delany’s experimental SF epic Dhalgren, two figures who helped the science fiction avant-garde to doff the “time-honoured disguise” of the modernist avant-garde; and, finally, we return to our Olsonian and poetic roots (now “all changed, changed utterly”) in the form of Amiri Baraka’s In Our Terribleness, whose innovative and jarring merging of Afrofuturism and experimental multi-media form makes it clear that the science fiction avant-garde had properly “assimilated the spirit of the new language.” 2 The SF avant-garde is what Raymond Williams, in Marxism and Literature, calls as “new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships,” distinguishing between “those which are really elements of some new phase of the dominant culture…and those which are substantially alternative or oppositional to it: emergent in the strict sense, rather than merely novel” (123). Williams’ distinction between the “alternative or oppositional” and the “merely novel” is particularly useful for clarifying the stakes of post-war or postmodern avant-gardism, which always threatens to lose the oppositional edge of the historic avant-garde and lapse into the novelty of intensified commodity production. At the same time, Williams’ reminds us that in the “complex process [of emergence] there is indeed regular confusion between the locally residual (as a form of resistance to incorporation) and the generally emergent,” helping us to tease out the dynamic interaction between older forms of both science fiction and the avant-garde and what I would consider their “generally emergent” iteration in the context of their convergence (125). Moreover, Williams ties emergent culture to its material foundation, arguing the necessity of considering these forms “in relation to the emergence and growing strength of a class” (Ibid.). So it is with the SF avant-garde, the establishment of which must be seen in the context of the profound shifts and ruptures of the world system in the Sixties and Seventies, a transformation that gave rise to a variety of new radical social formations. The SF avant-garde, then, must be situated alongside, and in dialogue with, the emergence of revolutionary black nationalist, queer, feminist, and workerist movements and, as such, considered a revolutionary literature for the period of post-Fordist capitalist transformation. Before delving more into its political economic 3 foundations, I want to lay the basis for the SF avant-garde’s genre formation by looking at two of its major, though not often connected, antecedents: Charles Olson and Alfred Bester. Part 1: SF Avant-Garde Origins: Charles Olson,

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