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Throughout His Writing Career, Nelson Algren Was Fascinated by Criminality

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Throughout His Writing Career, Nelson Algren Was Fascinated by Criminality RAGGED FIGURES: THE LUMPENPROLETARIAT IN NELSON ALGREN AND RALPH ELLISON by Nathaniel F. Mills A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in The University of Michigan 2011 Doctoral Committee: Professor Alan M. Wald, Chair Professor Marjorie Levinson Professor Patricia Smith Yaeger Associate Professor Megan L. Sweeney For graduate students on the left ii Acknowledgements Indebtedness is the overriding condition of scholarly production and my case is no exception. I‘d like to thank first John Callahan, Donn Zaretsky, and The Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust for permission to quote from Ralph Ellison‘s archival material, and Donadio and Olson, Inc. for permission to quote from Nelson Algren‘s archive. Alan Wald‘s enthusiasm for the study of the American left made this project possible, and I have been guided at all turns by his knowledge of this area and his unlimited support for scholars trying, in their writing and in their professional lives, to negotiate scholarship with political commitment. Since my first semester in the Ph.D. program at Michigan, Marjorie Levinson has shaped my thinking about critical theory, Marxism, literature, and the basic protocols of literary criticism while providing me with the conceptual resources to develop my own academic identity. To Patricia Yaeger I owe above all the lesson that one can (and should) be conceptually rigorous without being opaque, and that the construction of one‘s sentences can complement the content of those sentences in productive ways. I see her own characteristic synthesis of stylistic and conceptual fluidity as a benchmark of criticism and theory and as inspiring example of conceptual creativity. Megan Sweeney, despite joining my committee at a later date, has been invaluable as a teacher and professional mentor whose critical rigor and expertise are matched only by her enthusiasm for working with beginning scholars. I hope that my dissertation reflects the diverse influences, priorities, and investments of my dissertation committee, a committee that it‘s been nothing short of an intellectual pleasure to work with. In my time as a graduate student at Michigan I‘ve also benefitted from conversations with Sara Blair, Gregg Crane, Linda Gregerson, June Howard, Steven Mullaney, Eric Rabkin, Vivasvan Soni, and Theresa Tinkle. Portions of my dissertation were helpfully workshopped by the participants of the 2010 Mellon Humanities Dissertation Seminar at Michigan. George Bornstein has been an invaluable mentor and good friend since I began my Ph.D. work. Finally, I owe a lasting debt to Harvey Teres, iii who first introduced me to the possibilities available in working on the encounter between American literature and leftist politics in the twentieth century. My friends in the graduate program in the English Department at Michigan, and those I‘ve met through my fellow graduate students, have been both helpful critics and close friends. I would have been at a loss in multiple ways if I had never known Meg Ahern, Sarah Allison, Chris Barnes, Ben Beckett, Alex Beringer, Geremy Carnes, Alison Carr, Manan Desai, Sarah Ehlers, Andromeda Hartwick, Molly Hatcher, Korey Jackson, Konstantina Karageorgos, Chung-Hao Ku, Megan Levad, Sarah Linwick, Asynith Malecki, Brian Matzke, Karen McConnell, Danny Mintz, Rebecca Porte, James Reichert, Mikey Rinaldo, Casey Shelton, and Mike Tondre. I‘m also grateful for productive conversations with graduate students at the Ohio State University, particularly Tiffany Anderson, Brad Freeman, Anne Langendorfer, and Brian McAllister. I‘ve had the pleasure of being both friends and colleagues with former graduate students from Syracuse University, including Rachel Collins, Michael Dwyer, Brigitte Fielder, Lindsay Metzker, Mike O‘Connor, and Jonathan Senchyne. My work on the dissertation was further strengthened by insights, suggestions, and challenges gleaned from conversations with Geoff Eley, Barbara Foley, Christine Guilfoyle, Bryan Palmer, and Joseph Ramsey. Patrick Lucey helped me grasp some of the finer points involved in translating Marx‘s German. One of the pleasures of writing this dissertation was the opportunity to work with skilled and always helpful archival specialists like Dr. Alice Lotvin Birney at the Library of Congress, Moira Fitzgerald at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and Rebecca Jewett at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at the Ohio State University. The staff of the English Department at the University of Michigan regularly go out of their way to assist graduate students, and I‘m very grateful for the myriad efforts made on my behalf by Jan Burgess, Bonnie Campbell, Lisa Curtis, Linda Deitert, Beth Dethloff, Karena Huff, Donna Johnston, and Senia Vasquez. Finally, I owe debts I can never repay to Corinne Martin, whose love, support, patience, intellect, and critical acumen stand behind every page of this dissertation. My relationship with her is at once my greatest achievement and my most rewarding project. iv Table of Contents Dedication……………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………….iii Introduction: Figuring (Out) the Lumpenproletariat……………………………….....1 Chapter 1: Starting Out in the Thirties: Nelson Algren and the Depression Lumpenproletariat………………………………………………………44 2: Doing it the Hard Way: Nelson Algren, the Lumpenproletariat, World War II, and a New Internationalism………………………………………..111 3: The Addict‘s Revolt: The Postwar Anti-Capitalism of The Man with the Golden Arm………………………………..................................154 4: Ralph Ellison, the Lumpenproletariat, and Slick: The Development of an American Marxism…………………………………………………………...188 5: Lumpenproletarian Science, Lumpenproletarian Blues: Invisible Man and the Literary Practice of American Marxism……………………………...243 Conclusion: ―Yes, but…‖: Notes on the Form of Lumpenproletarian Marxism…...313 v 1 Introduction Figuring (Out) the Lumpenproletariat Paper Planes Straight From Hell Marxism has often struggled with the sociopolitical consequences of those who lack class identity, or social location of any kind, in capitalist society. The poor and the criminal, the desperate and the inventive who haunt the recesses of modern society have been epistemological and political challenges for Marxism and for anti-capitalist politics more expansively. In part, this is because Marx considered this group—which he named the lumpenproletariat, or ―ragged proletariat‖—irrelevant to the concerns of Marxism. But it‘s also because the fluid, diverse composition of the lumpenproletariat (Marx introduced the term to describe nearly everyone without an identifiable class position or a role in reproducing the main social arrangements of capitalism) and its underworlds reminds us of the internal complexity of modern society and its processes, a complexity that often resists explication by pre-formulated theoretical paradigms. The lumpen remind us that theory—particularly of a revolutionary kind—must take that complexity as its starting point. Furthermore, proper Marxist thought proceeds from real conditions understood in their internally-dynamic fluidity and multivalent composition. Paradoxically then, one of the most marginal categories in Marx is in fact central to the development and continued effectiveness of the various, ever-urgent epistemological and political tasks that go by the name of Marxism. Through an extended analysis of the lumpenproletariat in the mid-twentieth- century fiction of novelists Nelson Algren and Ralph Ellison, my dissertation introduces this concept of the lumpenproletariat to American literary studies. Reading for the social and conceptual places of the lumpenproletariat is my strategy for redefining the practice of Marxist writing, reevaluating the theoretical and formal experiments of the American literary left in the 1930s-1950s period, opening up new approaches to Algren and 2 Ellison‘s lives and work, and demonstrating the remarkable epistemological and political work of which literary form is capable. Before proceeding to a full exposition of this project in the introduction proper, however, I offer a tactile demonstration of the aesthetic, political, and theoretical energies of the lumpenproletariat as mobilized in a work of contemporary popular culture: the 2007 song ―Paper Planes,‖ by Sri Lankan-descended British hip-hop artist M.I.A. The song‘s portrait of social outsiders, and the theoretical project to which it subjects that portrait, demonstrate the specific stakes of Marx‘s concept. ―Paper Planes‖ foreshadows my dissertation‘s treatment of the more extensive literary implementations of the lumpen in Algren and Ellison‘s fiction, and it indicates why I insist on preserving Marx‘s term (in all its Germanic clunkiness) as the object of my study, rather than supplanting it with empirical descriptors like ―homeless‖ or ―outcasts.‖ M.I.A.‘s acclaimed song vividly demonstrates some of the theoretical intricacies of the lumpenproletariat. Its clever lyricism and self-conscious attempt to ―do theory‖ in a cultural text lead us straight to my dissertation‘s correlation of the formal and theoretical work performed by and through the ―ragged figures‖ of the lumpenproletariat. ―Paper Planes‖ describes, in rather romantic terms, the life of those who struggle to get by on the legal and material margins of globalized capitalist society: people denied full subjectivity and recognized citizenship in a post-national
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