A Thesis Presented to Th

THE SOUND OF EVERYTHING: REPRESENTING JUSTICE IN THE FAMILY NOVEL ____________________________________ A Thesis Presented to The Honors Tutorial College Ohio University _______________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English ______________________________________ by Daniel J. Kington April 2018 Table of Contents Introduction: Representing Justice in the Family Novel…………………………………. 3 The Sound of Everything…………………………………………………………………38 Kington 2 Representing Justice in the Family Novel Introduction When Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906, exposing the dark side of the American meatpacking industry, the novel provoked immense public outrage and horror. The Jungle sold thousands of copies upon its release and was translated into 17 languages within a matter of months (Younge). The public reaction to Sinclair’s subject matter forced President Theodore Roosevelt to create a commission to investigate the abuses Sinclair documented, resulting in the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, which, in turn, led to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration (Younge). Novelist and Trotskyist activist James T. Farrell later argued that The Jungle made “a lasting contribution to the struggle of the American worker for social justice and emancipation from wage slavery” and that “it introduced the ideas and aspirations of socialism into the main body of American literature.” Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a novel that has had such a dramatic impact on American popular consciousness and politics as The Jungle. Sinclair gained such influence that President Roosevelt reportedly advised The Jungle’s publisher to “Tell Mr Sinclair to go home and let me run the country for a while” (Younge). The impact of Sinclair’s novel politically was entirely independent of its merits artistically, however. As Farrell notes, the novel’s protagonist, Jurgis, “serves as a major illustration of the case which Sinclair builds against the System,” but that case “is more interesting than [Sinclair’s] characters.” For example, when Jurgis is released from the jail in which he has long been cooped up, he is initially thrilled: “he could hardly believe that it was true,—that the sky was above him again and the open street before him; that Kington 3 he was a free man” (Sinclair 52). However, upon his release, he must walk twenty miles through the sleet and rain because he has no money to pay for transportation, and, when he finally arrives home, he discovers that his family has been forced to move, as they were unable to pay rent. When he at last locates his family, his wife is in premature labor with no doctor present, as she cannot afford one. This situation leads Jurgis to proclaim, in the midst of an extended, polemical monologue, that “the law was against them, the whole machinery of society was at their oppressors' command! If Jurgis so much as raised a hand against them, back he would go into that wild-beast pen from which he had just escaped!” (54). Jurgis’s tirade against the economic and political system stands in obvious juxtaposition with his earlier joy at being released from jail. The society he lives in, the text rather overtly suggests, is itself, for the workers, no better than a jail. Jurgis is not a complete automaton; he has real human emotion, and is a genuinely sympathetic character. For instance, he clearly cares for his family in a tender and intimate way, as illustrated by his sincere panic when he discovers they have been forced to move (Sinclair 54). However, Sinclair’s “characters possess few distinctive traits” and the novel’s only real drama is explicitly social and political (Farrell). Characters “are only occasionally found in relationship with one another in scenes in which there is any personal tension, and only then, when such scenes will further build up Sinclair’s thesis in a literal manner” (Farrell). It is therefore no surprise that the novel concludes with Jurgis’s conversion to a socialist ideology. Although he is critical of the novel’s art, Farrell defends the The Jungle’s explicit politics. He argues that because “The novel is a most flexible literary form,” it may “either be propagandistic or non-propagandistic,” and that because of The Jungle’s Kington 4 political merits, it “has already justified itself.” However, the argument that the novel is “a most flexible literary form” is a bit of a straw man, in that Farrell does not engage in a serious defense of the text as a novel. He would likely be hard-pressed to do so since, “Thanks to its polemical style, formulaic narrative and, at times, propagandistic language, [The Jungle] has more currency as a work of literary journalism than of great fiction” (Younge). The political success of Sinclair’s novel, then, reveals more about the transformative possibilities of journalism than those of literary fiction. Further, while Farrell judges The Jungle primarily according to its political merits, literary fiction, as the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky argued, “should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art” (150). For the fiction writer who wants to engage with the sociopolitical, this raises a number of questions, from what the ‘law of art’ even means to whether political fiction can be, in any instance, a viable project. It is these questions with which the remainder of this essay engages. To begin, I review existent scholarship on the theory of the political novel, focusing on the way in which the contradictions between ideological abstraction and the rootedness of fiction in personal experience, taken together, serve as the driving engine of the political novel. I then analyze various traditions of the political novel, including socialist realism, dystopian political fiction, and post-New Left, U.S. political fiction. This comparative analysis reveals the common obstacles that the political novel encounters, the most prominent of which are didacticism and the failure to join social critique with a vision for a political alternative. This analysis also identifies the ways in which the traditions examined overcome, or fail to overcome, those obstacles. I then contrast these traditions with the approach taken by Arundhati Roy in her realist, political novel, The God of Kington 5 Small Things, which, largely through the personal and political tensions it creates by casting a family as its protagonist, successfully avoids didacticism while also joining critique with vision. To conclude, I draw upon the novels and theories thus far examined in a discussion of my own novel, The Sound of Everything, as both a literary and political project. Theories of the political novel: when the political becomes personal If literature should indeed be judged by ‘its own law,’ as Trotsky argues, then the politics of the novel must not infringe upon its art. Otherwise, the political novel is at risk of becoming a caricature of itself, something of a genre novel. And, just as genre novels “depend upon the management of mannequin characterization and reassuringly recognizable type from whom the complexity of humanity and all questions related to the soul have conveniently leaked out,” the novel that is primarily concerned with the promotion of a given political message, and only secondarily concerned with its own art, “is almost on the point of becoming useless,” since “In ideology nothing changes; everything is ineffably tangent” (Baxter 18, Morel 177-178). Indeed, “when the armored columns of ideology troop in en masse, they do imperil a novel’s life and liveliness” (Howe 20). The rigidity of ideology is, in fact, in fundamental conflict with the genre of the novel itself, since “the novel tries to confront experience in its immediacy and closeness, while ideology is by its nature general and inclusive” (Howe 20). This poses an obvious problem for the political novel. However, the contributions of Irving Howe and Anna Kornbluh on the theory of the political novel, particularly when synthesized with contemporary literary theory and critique, help not to resolve the contradiction Kington 6 between ideology and the novel form but to demonstrate how this contradiction can be usefully employed. The novel is in constant motion and contradiction. For Charles Baxter, the novel traces the arc(s) of “mobilized fear or desire,” and for John Gardner the novel is a product of “Certain forces, within and outside the character” that “press him toward a certain course of action, while other forces, both within and outside, must exert strong pressure against that course of action” (Baxter 61, Gardner 187). Rather than standing in any sort of fundamental contradiction with the novel as social critique, the novel’s “dynamic plurivocity of aesthetic thought in motion” that Baxter and Gardner describe makes possible the novel as critique, which, in the Marxist view, should itself be constituted through the study of motion and contradiction (Kornbluh 401). As it arises in the novel, social critique, constantly contesting what is for what could be, must mirror the novel’s own dynamism and constant motion. After all, literature, as opposed to polemic, is not an “object-of-knowledge” but a “mode of knowing” (Kornbluh 399). To the extent that literature is political, then, it must be political not as an object but as a mode. Therefore the political ideas represented in the novel form must themselves be in motion, which requires the moving force of contradiction. This means that the writer must allow “opposition… in his book against his own predispositions and yearnings and fantasies,” which represents a constant danger, as it requires that the writer “allow for those rocks against which [the writer’s] intentions may smash” (Howe 23).

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