Radical Politics and Literary Form in Twentieth-Century American Writing
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Radical Politics and Literary Form in 20th Century American Writing Simon Cooper Doctor of Philosophy School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University February 2013 Abstract This thesis focuses on the US literary left of the 1930s, tracing precursors in pre-WWI anarchism and the bohemian culture of 1920s Greenwich Village, and following the careers of key authors, beyond the Depression, into popular and mainstream culture post-WWII. The free verse of Michael Gold, the ‘proletarian’ novels and short fiction of Robert Cantwell, Tillie Olsen and Erskine Caldwell are read as instances of a kind of modernism from below. As such, they are held up for consideration alongside the more politically conservative modernisms of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and D. H. Lawrence, as well as the work of two writers also on the left but more securely situated in the official canon: Ralph Ellison and George Oppen. The emphasis throughout is on form, understood as fluid and subject to self- conscious experimentation: the politics of the works considered are in this sense embodied in the transformation of pre-existing forms and structures. For this reason a multidisciplinary approach is adopted, with attention being paid to contemporaneous production (with some overlap of personnel) in music and visual culture. There are considerable difficulties involved in the attempt to harness the techniques of ‘high’ cultural thinking to the needs of an organised left with close links to the labour movement: problems of intention; matters of tone; issues of distribution. These difficulties are worked through in order to answer two fundamental questions. First, how did this historical project, riven by contradiction from the outset, manage to achieve even the limited success that it did? Second, why should a place be maintained in contemporary criticism for its recovery? Ultimately, an argument is made for an inclusive critical practice sensitive to the traces of exclusion and absence as figured in the non-representational, whilst at the same time resisting the temptations of obscurantism, superficiality or idealization. i Contents Introduction 1 1. ‘Yes, but is it Art?’ The Revolutionary Transformations of Michael Gold 42 2. ‘A Moment of Ecstasy, a Lifetime of Regret’: the Limits of the Proletarian Grotesque 69 3. Crisis of Demand: Modernism Meets the New Deal 94 4. The Bastard as Art Object Bastardized: Erskine Caldwell’s Fine Art of Standing Still 122 5. Ralph Ellison and the Weight of the Real 150 Conclusion 210 Bibliography 221 ii Introduction But if we now seek what is possible before us – all that is possible, whether or not we might have wanted to, we who no longer have any need to construct rational thought, which is effortlessly arranged for us – we are again able to recognise the profound value of these lost modes of thought. Georges Bataille The texts examined in this thesis all come out of a specific—if complex—cultural formation. In both Carl Sandburg’s ‘Smoke and Steel’ (1920) and Michael Gold’s ‘The Strange Funeral in Braddock’ (1924) industrial workers are shown as dehumanised products of the labour process. In my readings of these texts I am drawn neither by doctrinal statements nor by logical propositions but instead by what I understand as the working out of a particular formal problem: namely, the representation of social class. In Robert Cantwell’s Land of Plenty (1934) class-consciousness can only take place – literally – in the dark, and Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio (1974), even more literally, spent some forty years buried in a drawer before eventually seeing the light of day. If it is not exactly content I am looking for, neither is it the symbolic or figurative. I do not take the eponymous strangeness of Gold’s prose poem, the manifest failures of Land of Plenty, or the gaps and elisions of Yonnondio as representative but rather as constitutive of a real aporia: that the immediacy of intersubjectivity—if such a thing could even be said to exist— remains untranslatable within the bounds of official discourse. This is no appeal to transcendence or to the mystical. Even the instances of the non- referential I am tracing here emerge within some kind of frame; this is the importance of form. When radical musicians in the 1930s gifted elevated notions of dissonant counterpoint to the cause of proletarian revolution, they were brought down to earth with a resounding bump; dialogue with working-class fractions led to the development of cultural forms urgently needing to look a lot less like showing off. The farcical implications of this collision of politics and aesthetics can be mapped directly onto literature. The humour of much of Erskine Caldwell’s work comes from the shock of what feels like melodrama fallen to the status of the utterly banal. Repetition and stereotype in his writing were often mistaken for folklore, but in actuality these were new and unsettling distortions of existing forms. Caldwell’s innovations—precisely because they took on the appearance of the absence of innovation—meshed perfectly with the expansion of conformity into the total 1 fabric of everyday life post-WWII. By the time Ralph Ellison published Invisible Man (1952), dissent had been pushed so far to the margins that class-consciousness was supplanted by the dissociated sensibility of existentialist cool. Yet Ellison’s circular blues forms revisit key moments of American history in vituperative counterpoint to the mythos of the republic, at the same time as his backward glance to emergent classics of the American canon privileges passion over complacency, balances sufferance against suffering, as the objective spirit of democratic struggle. I read these various texts as moments in a putative avant-garde praxis through which aesthetic forms were employed to bring pressure to bear along the structural fault lines of a capitalism in deep crisis. There are two distinct though not unrelated senses, then, in which the notion of an artistic avant-garde needs to be understood as a thing of the past. First is its now broadly accepted definition as a historically situated—and limited—event. In Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), various European isms of the first part of the twentieth century are interpreted in terms of a collective onslaught against the institutions of high culture. Bürger is not overly concerned with the forms these interventions take, other than to note that each challenges in some fundamental way models of production and reception already in place, not the least important of which is the category of the ‘work’ itself. Thus Dadaist manifestations aim at the provocation of the public rather than the making of a unique aesthetic artefact, and when Marcel Duchamp submits his notorious urinal for exhibition he calls into question the relevance of the gallery system in an age of mass production, at the same time as inviting his audience to show their appreciation in the most scandalous of ways. Bürger’s formulation is explicitly political. Avant-gardism, as defined here, is the conviction that the struggle to innovate in the cultural field can not only co-exist with but also somehow enable a move towards radical social transformation. Art as bourgeois institution exhibits a form of social mesmerism. Breaking the illusion of the organic work serves to distract for a moment the disinterested gaze of the spectator, as polite society is transformed into an angry mob. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, as a force for systemic change the movement proves ineffectual. ‘It is a historical fact,’ Bürger states, ‘that the avant-garde movements did not put an end to the production of works of art, and that the social institution that is art proved resistant to the avant- 2 gardiste attack.’1 If these instrumental goals are unrealised, the formal gestures of the avant-garde have endured, and that they have been subsequently absorbed into an art ‘scene’ as such suggests only the basically affirmative function of all cultural production, no matter how oppositional it wants to be. Writing from the perspective of the early 1970s, Bürger sees the proliferation of ‘happenings’—what he terms the ‘neo-avant-garde’—as at best an exercise in style. Avant-garde practise has become institutionalised, and that it can be located within a tradition is proof, at least insofar as any claim to political efficacy is concerned, that it is over. To say that Bürger is sceptical as to the renewed possibility of an art that is both aesthetically and socially progressive would be to understate the case. For Bürger, so catastrophic is the failure of the historical avant-garde that the very possibility of progression itself has been irrevocably lost, ‘transformed into a simultaneity of the radically disparate’ (Bürger, p. 63). Nowadays, in other words, anything goes, but it can never go far enough. There is a second sense, though, in which the avant-garde can be understood as a thing of the past, one which suggests a less pessimistic conclusion than that of Bürger’s famous theorization, and which is concealed, moreover, within his own definition. Time and again, Bürger refers to the intention of removing art from its institutionalised autonomy and embedding it in the practice of everyday life as a return, as if the avant-garde attempts to bring down the institutions of art not by acts of destruction, but by somehow pre-empting the need for all those galleries and museums in the first place. This is the avant-garde’s Utopian vocation, and its role is to remind us that institution art is itself a historical formation with its own temporal and geopolitical limits. Entrusted with the task of awakening historical consciousness, avant-garde practise is liberated from its purely negative function.