THE LACK OF A FUTURE: UTOPIAN ABSENCE AND LONGING IN TWENTIETH- AND TWENTY-FIRST- CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION

A dissertation submitted

to Kent State University in partial

fulfillment of the requirements for the

degree of Doctor of Philosophy

by

Geoffrey Moses

May, 2013 Dissertation written by

Geoffrey Moses

Ph.D., Kent State University, USA, 2013

M.A., Carnegie Mellon University, USA, 2005

B.A., Sarah Lawrence College, USA, 2002

Approved by

Kevin Floyd, Associate Professor of English, Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee

Tammy Clewell, Professor of English, Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee

Robert Trogdon, Professor of English, Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee

Kenneth Bindas, Professor of History, Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee

Richard Serpe, Professor of Sociology, Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee

Accepted by

Robert W. Trogdon, Chair, Department of Computer Science

Raymond A. Craig, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

UPTON SINCLAIR'S ANTI-UTOPIAN METHODS...... 33

CHAPTER 2

TOTALITY, POTENTIALITY, AND HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS IN DOS

PASSOS' U.S.A...... 75

CHAPTER 3

ROBERT COOVER, RICHARD NIXON, AND THE SEARCH FOR AN

APOLITICAL UTOPIA...... 115

CHAPTER 4 THOMAS PYNCHON, AGAINST THE DAY, AND UTOPIAN POTENTIALITY...... 155 CODA...... 201

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 206

iii DEDICATION

To my parents, without whom, for better or worse, I would never have accomplished this.

iv Introduction

This dissertation is about utopia. Specifically, it is about utopia as conceptualized in twentieth-century American literature. I first became interested in this topic when I saw that Thomas Pynchon's novel Against the Day was covering much the same time period and thus much of the same political terrain as Upton Sinclair's advocacy novels from the first several decades of the century. Naturally, the tone and general philosophy of Pynchon's novel is worlds apart from Sinclair's work, but I became interested in the way the two represent different ways of thinking about both politics and utopia. How does a novel's sociopolitical milieu determine the terms in which it is possible to conceptualize utopia? How do purely personal ideals and political aspiration interact in utopian terms? For that matter, is “political utopia” even possible?

To try to answer these questions, I have chosen four texts to examine. The first is a pair of novels by Upton Sinclair, King Coal (1917) and The Coal War (1976; published posthumously). These represent an earnest effort to expose the exploitive living conditions of miners and agitate for a redress of the situation. The second is John Dos

Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, consisting of the novels The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and

The Big Money (1936). Dos Passos' politics in these books are similar to those of

Sinclair, but the tone is considerably more pessimistic. They could easily be read as a rebuttal to the latter's work. Jumping forty years forward, the third book is Robert

Coover's novel The Public Burning (1977), about the days in June 1953 leading up to the

1 2

executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. This novel is part of a postmodern milieu, and therefore qualitatively different than either of the examples to come before it. From it, we can see that the relationship between the political and utopian has become radically altered, as indeed has the meaning of both of those terms. Finally, there is Against the

Day (2006) itself—a novel that, while identifiably in the same postmodern tradition as

The Public Burning, is distinct from it—as, indeed, distinct from Pynchon's own previous work—in that it conceptualizes utopia in a different, somewhat more optimistic way.

The central point of commonality between these novels is that their approaches to utopia all consist of elaborate mechanisms that, explicitly or implicitly, show that the strains of utopia that they are fumbling towards are in fact impossible. The only one to insist otherwise—to present utopia as anything other than a brief, transient moment, present only to ultimately emphasize its absence—is Against the Day, and as I show, that novel does so in a completely different vein than any of the others under consideration.

What I am most interested in as regards utopia, then, is not so much the thing itself as it is the utopia-shaped absence that we see in these works, an absence which informs them all in different ways. It is often taken for granted that utopia has become difficult or impossible to achieve in a postmodern milieu, due to various factors having to do with the fragmentation of historical continuities and a general loss of any teleological context in which to frame them. But in this dissertation, I go beyond this conventional wisdom to consider more specifically the factors that lead to this state of affairs. In that 3

sense, my work here is a narrative, explicating the specific mechanisms that seem to make utopia so difficult, and not just in a postmodern era.

The Personal and the Political

Another important aspect of this work is the question of how the political and personal interact. When I refer to the “personal,” I am talking about the pursuit of relationships, romantic or otherwise, that do not, in and of themselves, appear to contribute to political goals. The personal can be utopian in its own right, but it has to contend with of whether, if political utopia cannot be achieved, this other version is actually valuable, or whether it is nothing more than a hollow consolation.

All of the writers I investigate here are concerned, in one way or another, with the question of the political and personal. As will become apparent, another part of the argument I am making here is that there is a problem, which is that these two factors are out of balance in these novels. The authors do have the idea that there is some connection between the two; that the political cannot be very effective if people are not able to form substantial relationships with one another—but they do not as a rule pursue this analysis further. In the first and second chapters, neither Sinclair nor Dos Passos ask whether there is any way that relationships could, even if they do not seem to be providing any concrete political advantage, be useful nonetheless; for them, the answer 4

would obviously be that there is not. In the third and fourth chapters, there is a sense in both Coover and Pynchon that politics as it exists is so divorced from actual socioeconomic reality that the only viable option is to pursue personal utopias—though this, as I argue, proves highly problematic in its own right, as it is not so easy, or necessarily desirable, to try to separate personal and political.

Taxonomies of Utopia

Fredric Jameson suggests that the essential problem with the notion of “utopia” in a postmodern setting comes from the idea that “postmodernism is . . . at one with the definitive 'end of ideologies,” and that “'ideology in this sense meant Marxism, and its

'end' went hand-in-hand with the end of Utopia” (Postmodernism 159). Jameson disputes the idea that this is a wholly accurate summation, but argues that it's true inasmuch as the nature of utopia has changed:

The utopian impulses of the sixties did not . . . coalesce in that way [the

way typified by earlier works like Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward],

but rather produced a vital range of micropolitical movements . . . whose

common denominator is the resurgent problematic of nature in a variety of

(often anticapitalist) forms. (160). 5

In other words, “utopia” becomes a synchronic, or spatial form; rather than a diachronic, or temporal one: it thinks in terms of structures or geographies rather than histories or teleologies. This is a mixed blessing: on the one hand, “it may take away . . . the capacity to think time and History;” on the other, it “also opens a door onto a whole new domain for libidinal investment of the Utopian and even the protopolitical type” (160). I do not dispute the validity of this narrative, but I want to suggest another. Utopia of a certain sort—i.e., that which can be a synonym for Marxism or, more broadly, any radical leftist reconfiguring of society—was, for writers like Sinclair and Dos Passos, highly problematic well before postmodernity became ascendent. However, the move to postmodernity does affect the ways in which we can think about utopia or its absence, and I wish to build upon the disappointment that it can engender and ask: if the idea of a temporal utopia is dead in postmodern terms, then in what ways do we register its absence? What strategies do writers and characters use to attempt to enact it in spite of everything? I do not think it is adequate to simply accept that this type of utopia simply vanishes. As I argue, it was always felt more by its absence than its presence, which means that when it seems to be absent in a different way, we should consider this way, rather than assuming that it has simply become an irrelevant consideration.

Each of the books I discuss can be read as a particular reaction to the impossibility of utopia, and these reactions are highly revealing of the landscapes in which they were written. King Coal is agitating for utopia, and even believes to some degree that this utopia is possible, but as I argue, it is actually, however consciously, a self-defeating argument: the novel is constructed such that actual utopia is precluded. 6

U.S.A. has definitively decided that utopia is impossible, and shows in quite some detail why this is the case. I, however, show that, while Dos Passos makes a compelling case, his devotion to a particular sort of utopia blinds him to other possibilities; that is, to the possibility of a utopia that does not accord with the sort that he is searching for. The

Public Burning, on the other hand, does recognize the potential of a utopia outside of politics; it has to, as the political has precluded itself as a source of utopian possibility.

However, this presents its own problems; as I show, it is not so easy to disentangle the political and the personal, and the result is as unhelpful for utopia as ever. Finally,

Against the Day follows in the same vein as The Public Burning, but instead of despairing, offers a different version of utopia, one based on potentiality rather than mere possibility and wishful thinking. I will rehearse my arguments for each of these chapters in greater detail shortly.

What is Utopia?

What, for the purposes of this dissertation, does the concept of utopia entail?

Clearly, it means different things to the different authors under consideration here. In the most general sense, utopia as I use it here is political, in the sense that it attempts to envision a world in which what is perceived as the suffering and oppression inflicted on people by governments, as well as business interests aided and abetted by governments, 7

disappear. As I have noted, however, there is also a strong personal element, whether because it is felt that the personal is a necessary complement to the political, or because the political seems to have definitively failed.

This definition does more to describe what a utopia is not than what it is. That this is so should be unsurprising; after all, given that utopia is not a real possibility in these books, the question of what specifically this utopia would look like tends to take on a lower priority. All of these writers have implicit assumptions, but these never amount to any specific enumeration of what utopia looks like.

In “The Politics of Utopia,” Jameson splits utopian aspiration into two categories,

“which can be designated respectively as the causal and the institutional, or perhaps even the diachronic and the synchronic” (35). These are the same categories noted above. The first of these is devoted to answering the question of why we can't have utopia now; what specific, deeply ingrained aspects of human nature itself—what “root of all evil,” as

Jameson calls it—would need to be eliminated to make utopia a reality. Jameson points to both Plato and Thomas More himself as examples of thinkers considering utopia in these terms.

The second kind of utopia is a more Marxist conception; as Jameson argues,

“what is crucial in Marx is that his perspective does not include a concept of human nature.” This renders the “root of evil” idea of utopia moot. “Human nature” is not one monolithic entity; it is historically determined, and as such, if society is properly 8

structured, it will not be an obstacle because it will naturally come to fit itself in with this society.

But which of these definitions represents a more appropriate definition of what the novels under consideration are trying to do? This is a complicated question. The

Sinclair and Dos Passos novels are clearly more concerned with the way human nature determines political obstacles, whereas the Coover and Pynchon novels are more interested in showing how the ordering of society hinders individual utopian aspirations.

These are two different things, and yet there are also substantial similarities between the two of them, in that neither is doing anything in terms of analyzing what an ideal society would look like—this because they are preoccupied with utopia's negation more than they are its possible presence. The difference is more a matter of emphasis than it is of anything qualitative: there is, after all, an extent to which Sinclair and Dos Passos are writing about broken political systems, and in Coover and Pynchon, there are certainly individual characters who serve as stand-ins for said systems as a whole.

However, the differences remain distinct. This, I argue, is a natural progression: for Sinclair and Dos Passos, resisting an oppressive political system is a matter of individual will. The people agitating for a more just state of affairs are fighting against what is perceived as people who either have malign intent (in Sinclair) or who, regardless of conscious intent, are behaving in a manner that is counterproductive to any possible change in the status quo (in Dos Passos). This may be a losing battle, but its parameters are clear. Whereas for Coover and Pynchon, the problem is no longer in any sense one of 9

individuals, but rather of entire, self-perpetuating systems, in the face of which individual will proves itself impotent. This is how we slip from one kind of utopia to another. In either case, however, the question is the same: what is preventing the utopia from being realized? That is the central problem here, and the answer, as I have noted above, has to do with a difficulty with reconciling political and personal strivings and aspirations.

I would argue that the fact that this dissertation is about a negation more than anything else mitigates, without entirely eliminating, what might be a central criticism of this project; i.e., that all of the authors under consideration are white, heterosexual males.

All of these qualities and many more offer their own possible valences of utopia; endless different directions from which to approach the subject, that could provide fodder for many fruitful studies, but these are not vectors that I intend to pursue here.

Now, it is certainly the case that a writer who falls outside these categories would have a different perspective on the precise nature of the central problems to be overcome in order to reach utopia, and the priority that should be placed on any given one of them.

And the structure of her utopia would undoubtedly be even more markedly different.

However, if we assume that her interests lie in the impossibility of achieving that utopia

—which is, after all, the subject of this dissertation—then there is bound to be a substantial degree of commonality with the authors I have chosen. “A world in which the suffering and oppression inflicted on people by governments and business has disappeared” is a very general goal, and one that leftists of every stripe would likely 10

agree upon, even if they questioned some of the details, and the nature of the difficulty in getting there would therefore likely be very similar.

I do not wish to claim that the distinctions between people with drastically different life experiences are irrelevant; however, I think that, given the nature of this project, these experiences are not so radically divergent as to substantially alter my general conclusions. Perhaps in the future, I can build on this work in order to create a more finely-tuned barometer of utopian values.

Totality

For this project, I draw heavily on the work of Georg Lukács, because I am interested in the idea of “totality” as it relates to utopia. Lukács' rather puritanical view of literature is controversial, but the more I have read, the more I have realized that, in fact, the presence or absence of totality—its success or failure, and how different writers try to make sense of it—is also at the heart of their utopian imaginings. The concept has a great deal of explanatory power in terms of the failures of utopia. Since totality and utopian fantasy both are concerned with trying to understand society as a prelude to trying to change it, the two relate to each other in utopian literature in important ways.

One of Lukács' most central concerns is the idea that capitalism corrupts relations:

The essence of the commodity-structure has often been pointed out. Its 11

basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and

thus acquires a “phantom objectivity,” an autonomy that seems so strictly

rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental

nature: the relation between people. (History and Class Consciousness 83)

In other words, the entirety of social relations, and not just issues of economics per se, are reified, or reduced to the level of quantifiable commodities, and this state of affairs becomes so normalized that people come to understand it as simply the natural, unalterable state of the world. Practically speaking, this situation is able to come to pass when “a man's own activity, his own labour, becomes something objective and independent of him, something that controls him by virtue of an autonomy alien to man”

(87). Labor becomes alienated, in the sense that workers have no sense of their efforts as reflecting the nature of society. Instead, “the worker loses contact with the finished product and his work is reduced to the mechanical repetition of a specialized set of actions” (88). He or she does not understand the world as a totality, in which the individual building blocks of society all connect to one another in rational ways, but rather as a set of isolated objects, without apprehending the connections among them all.

Workers in these circumstances are unable to accurately apprehend the nature of capitalist society and so simply assume that it is the fundamental nature of the world, and that therefore there is nothing that anyone could do to try to combat it.

What is to be done about this state of affairs? Lukács believes that if workers could be made to understand the true nature of society and its socioeconomic relations, 12

then the trend could be reversed, and it would be possible to usher in a socialist society.

But how is this to be accomplished? As his literary criticism makes clear, he believes that literature can play a key role here, by laying out an accurate vision of this totality, allowing readers, hopefully, to understand it. If we understand how high the stakes are for him—the possibility for the very reordering of society—then we can perhaps understand why his literary opinions are couched as vehemently as they are.

Obviously, no single work of literature can literally display every single aspect of society as a whole. But what it can do is be selective in what it does depict and the emphasis that it places on those things it does, so as to help readers to understand how the different pieces of society fit together. In “Narrate or Describe?” Lukács makes a sharp distinction between writers who do this and those who do not. Of Balzac, he writes approvingly:

But what is represented in these battles and conflicts [in Lost Illusions]—

all directly or indirectly related to the theatre? The state of the theater

under capitalism; the absolute dependence of the theatre upon capital and

upon the press (itself dependent upon capital); the relationship of the

theatre to literature and of journalism to literature; the capitalistic basis for

the connection between the life of an actress and open and covert

prostitution. (113)

By cannily illuminating just one corner of society, light is shed on a great variety of social mechanisms. Lukács contrasts this to Zola's Nana, which treats of the same 13

themes but in a non-dynamic way; i.e., for Zola, all this is “simply described as social facts, as results, as caput mortuum of a social process” (114). That is, it simply asserts that society is as it is, without demonstrating the mechanisms of why. Zola can have a character declare “don't say theatre, say bordello” (114), but simply asserting this, without allowing readers to understand the connections between the theater and prostitution, and how this relates to capitalist society as a whole, does not allow for any kind of totalizing thinking. The reason for this is that Zola does not establish any sort of hierarchy by which we can judge what is more important and what less so, and why. He is an extremely meticulous writer who presents vivid descriptions of material objects, but there is no sense of what is significant and what is not and why.

Lukács' objections to “modern” literature are similar, in that, by privileging self- consciously “artistic” stylistic tools, it allows these tools to determine its characters and form, rather than putting the tools in service of the characters. Of the stream-of- consciousness passages in Ulysses, he asserts that “with Joyce the stream-of- consciousness technique is no mere stylistic device; it is itself the formative principle governing the narrative pattern and the presentation of character” (“Ideology of

Modernism” 18). People are presented as isolated individuals, rather than parts of society. Society, therefore, cannot be understood in any adequate way.

Personally, I do not wholly subscribe to Lukács' ideas. The idea that Ulysses does not reveal the nature of society at a certain time and place seems to me incredible, and while I take the force of his critiques of Zola, I think that that writer's artistic techniques 14

can do far more than Lukács is willing to allow; L'Assommoir, demonstrates as effectively as I can imagine the interconnections between alcoholism, the individual, and society.

Nonetheless, it seems to me that totality is a valuable concept when thinking about literature and utopia. For Sinclair and Dos Passos, we can readily see its value: Sinclair wants, or thinks he wants, for his writing to change the world, whereas Dos Passos is convinced that this is not possible, but both of them have a vested interest in depicting the world as it is, in order better to show why and how it can or cannot be altered. Otherwise, the Lukácsian argument goes, the books are mute; they don't actually tell us anything. As for Coover and Pynchon, the arguments that their novels make are predicated on the notion that totality is dead and buried; that we cannot understand the world in a holistic, coherent way. This lack of totality is what motivates them, and it is important to understand why totality fails, and what this tells us about utopia and what sort of hope for it there might yet be.

Potentiality

And yet, it seems to me that there is a way of apprehending society that does not totalize, in the sense of necessarily laying bare the full nature of capitalism, but that is nonetheless valuable in and of itself. It is certainly the case that, in the latter half of this dissertation, I will be looking at novels by writers who, as I will show, take it as a given 15

that totality is no longer an operative concept: that, in a postmodern milieu, we simply cannot accurately understand the full nature of capitalist society. And yet, these writers have not simply given up. Instead, they must make a reckoning of what has been lost, and try—however successfully or unsuccessfully—to find other ways to apprehend the world and its possible futures.

In order to show one approach that can be taken in this regard, I make use of themes developed in José Esteban Muñoz's book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. What is “queer futurity?” Esteban posits that

Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we

are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the

warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never

been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled

from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness's

domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that

allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. (1)

For my purposes, this potentiality does not have to be explicitly associated with transgressive sexual performance, although, as I will show in the fourth chapter, that is certainly a part of it. More broadly, I use it to encompass all personal relations that dare to signify in some way a world in which they are able to flourish unconstrained or distorted by the exigencies of capital. 16

Potentiality is that which serves as an exemplar remaining just outside of reach.

“Unlike a possibility,” Muñoz explains, “a thing that simply might happen, a potentiality is a certain mode of nonbeing that is eminent, a thing that is present but not actually existing in the present tense.” As an example of this, he points to Frank O'Hara's poem

“Having a Coke with You,” and asserts that in it he “see[s] a certain potentiality, which at that point [the 1960s] had not been fully manifested, a relational field where men could love each other outside the institutions of heterosexuality and share a world through the act of drinking a beverage with each other” (9). There may seem to be a certain irony in the fact that this potentiality involves such a quintessentially capitalistic product as Coca-

Cola, but that too is part of the point: Coke is very much a part of contemporary, capitalist society, and yet, in the right context, it is nonetheless able to signify worlds that are not part of the official present. Even in what seem to be everyday, quotidian activities, we can see these worlds enacted.

This, to me, is a profound dimension that the concept of totality, however useful it is, has no place for. Totality demands that we understand how the different pieces of society fit together, and asserts that only when this is done correctly can we have any hope to see a future qualitatively different from the present. The problem with potentiality in that regard is that it is explicitly not a manual; there is no indication of how, in O'Hara's poem, the “relational field” that Muñoz sees could come to be the norm.

For this reason, it makes sense that it should be a factor that writers concerned with radical utopianism would disregard: it is not about to usher in a socialist world order, so what is it good for? 17

However, potentiality has other values: it is true that it does not attempt to comprehensively map out a future: it is a vision, not a plan. It provides us with the opportunity to enact and rehearse utopian futures right here, right now. This is particularly the case in my fourth chapter, in which I use it to resolve the question of why, in spite of the Against the Day's view of the state of the world being overwhelmingly negative, Pynchon is nonetheless able to mine some hope out of the situation. It's not because he has a secret plan for fixing the world that has eluded his predecessors: it's simply because he is willing to allow that these visions of futures-in-the-present can be valuable. Anyone could allow this, but the other writers I explore are, justifiably, so preoccupied with questions of why politics aren't working that they don't ever think about the question in this way.

Outside of the fourth chapter, potentiality is notable for its absence: in the U.S.A. chapter, I argue that it is indeed present; it's just that Dos Passos disregards it, and in the

Public Burning chapter, I show what can happen when it is taken as a given that totality is the only important element, and that element is gone. It is only in Pynchon that we see anyone attempt to revive it, and the fact that Against the Day is the only twenty-first- century novel under consideration lends to this a nice resonance: it symbolizes that very, elusive future-in-the-present.

Repression 18

For the first chapter of this dissertation in particular, I make use of the Freudian concept of repression as filtered through Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization.

Repression is the social force that, as Marcuse explains it, prevents us from

striv[ing] for nothing but for “gaining pleasure; from any operation which

might arouse unpleasantness ('pain') mental activity draws back.” But the

unrestrained pleasure principle comes into conflict with the natural and

human environment. The individual comes to the traumatic realization

that full and painless gratification of his needs is impossible. And after

this experience of disappointment, a new principle of mental

functioning gains ascendancy. The reality principle supersedes the

pleasure principle: man learns to give up momentary, uncertain, and

destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but “assured” pleasure. (13)

If this repressive mechanism were not in place, we and society would cease to function.

Marcuse, however, posits that this may not be inevitable; that it might be possible for this repression to be sloughed off. As our technological and civilizational structures advance and improve, we find ourselves more and more operating under “surplus-repression,” or

“the restrictions necessitated by domination” (35), as opposed simply to the perpetuation of society. That is to say, repression comes to be less about ensuring our very survival 19

and more about reinforcing the norms and structures of society, whether or not there is any rational reason that they should be reinforced. To emphasize that the reality principle is not an immutable thing, Marcuse coins the term “performance principle,” which is the principle as it manifests itself in any given society, and posits, even, that it might eventually be abolished. This would lead to the achievement a kind of utopia, although it should be strongly emphasized that it's not at all clear how this would be achieved or what this utopia would look like. It is an extremely theoretical question.

Achieving utopia, in theory, is likely to involve becoming as unrepressed as possible (though, again, since we are primarily discussing utopia as an absence, it is difficult to state this as an absolute). This also relates back to the question of the political as opposed to the personal, as the fact that people—due in part to repression in the

Freudian sense—are unable to form effective personal bonds means that they are likewise unable to effect real political change. I touch in the next section on what repression means for Sinclair's novels.

King Coal/The Coal War

Unlike the other books under consideration here, Sinclair's texts are advocacy novels, explicitly attempting to encourage social reform. However, the phrase “explicitly attempting to encourage social reform” raises far more questions than it answers 20

regarding the nature of the books. What does this attempt entail? What does

“encourage” mean? And, of course, what does “social reform” mean?

In this chapter, I attempt to answer these questions. A vital aspect of totality, for

Lukács, is that it should allow readers to infer both a past and a likely future from literature: if we can see in a work of literature how society came to be as it is and how it functions on a day to day basis, we can not only understand what we would have to do to change it, but we can infer a probable future. We can see, then, that the concept is highly relevant for a writer like Sinclair, who, after all, is in theory extremely future-oriented, always imagining a better society, and thus very utopian.

First, I analyze the novels for signs of totality. In doing so, I determine that, as predicted, they are extremely problematic, specifically in this regard: Sinclair may consciously want to bring about a certain kind of political order, but the way he depicts his characters indicates that, on some level, he considers the possibility of this actually happening extremely unlikely. Lukács argues that “when men are portrayed through the descriptive method, they become mere still lives” (“Narrate or Describe?” 138); that is to say, “a character appears as a 'finished' product perhaps composed of varied social and natural elements” (139). As I will show, this is precisely the problem with Sinclair's characters. If we could see how they became who they are and how they might become otherwise, we could understand them and their conditions. But we cannot: they are not dynamic people. This is unsurprising; the real question is, how can we conceptualize 21

what the novel lacks—understand the mechanisms which prevent it from being more effective in achieving its goals?

It is here that I bring in the concept of repression in order to explain what I believe is happening in the novel. I argue that repressive forces are acting upon the miners, preventing them from even attempting to achieve pleasure and happiness, and that by understanding the ways that the novels do and do not attempt to push back against these forces, we can understand what the novels are doing. If regulations were changed, the miners would obviously not abruptly become unrepressed, but the stripping away of their repression is a symbolic, implicit goal of their activism behavior. The problem, that renders the novels self-defeating, is that Sinclair does not actually want them to become unrepressed. He has his own deeply internalized set of values, and these values are quite conservative and opposed to overly radical or outre behavior, both in people's political and personal lives. Thus, he denigrates the personal to the extent that he thinks it is not relevant to his political purposes. This, of course, is quite problematic for someone agitating for radical political change.

Here, I argue, we see tension between utopian desire and desire to maintain symbolic structures, as described by Jameson in his essay “Reification and Utopia in

Mass Culture.” This essay posits a dialectic between, on the one hand, radical impulses and desires for the fulfillment of utopian fantasies; and on the other, a regressive impulse meant to put a check on such fantasy, which fantasy, if left unimpeded, could inflict widespread damage on the psyche by obliterating its symbolic structure. As I argue, this 22

conception has a great deal of explanatory power, and it influences the ways in which totalities are or are not felt in the novels under consideration. Sinclair wants a utopian workers' paradise, but the fact that he systematically rules out real radical behavior means that there is no way to understand how to truly get from here to there; thus, the pressure is lessened, and the threat is gone. We see, then, that radical intentions are no guarantee of radical/utopian results, and indeed, that the force of these intentions can obscure the fact that they prove ultimately to be self-defeating.

U.S.A.

The politics of U.S.A. are not unlike those of Sinclair's novels, the difference being that for Dos Passos, the fight for a world in which the fight for social justice reigns is over, and those in favor of it have lost. U.S.A. chronicles this loss. Where, then, do we go from here? If we have decided that the struggle for social justice is futile, then what is left except sheer quietism? I argue that to answer this question, we have to look beyond

Dos Passos' intentions. A loss of one type of utopia is the same, for him, as the loss of all types. The trilogy consciously conveys this message; I argue, however, that there are other potentially valuable versions of utopia present that thereby get lost, which loss paves the way for a world in which the very idea of utopia has no meaning. 23

In this chapter, I go into much more detail about utopia, and the different forms it can take. Following on a concept of Jameson's, I break utopia into two categories,

“totalizing” and “non-totalizing.” The former would represent the large-scale, complete transformation of society into something else; something that many left critics would simply define as “socialism;” whereas the latter can consist of small-scale political and personal actions that imply the potentiality of something more.

Indeed, I argue that “non-totalizing utopia” is a concept very much akin to the notion of potentiality. There are distinctions that we could make between potentiality and non-totalizing utopia, but the concept of a future being fragmentarily revealed in small moments and glimpses that transgress currently-accepted norms is very familiar from Muñoz. The difference, if difference there be, is that potentiality is more concerned with the personal and less with explicit policy issues. In this sense, it fits in quite well in

U.S.A.

Personal and political are very much intertwined with each other in U.S.A.

Whereas Sinclair's Coal novels awkwardly try to keep the two separate, in U.S.A. the connection is the whole point. As I note in some detail, U.S.A.'s central issue is one of words; the idea is that language has become corrupted in such a way that it no longer allows people to have relationships that are based on an accurate understanding of the socioeconomic underpinnings of the world. Therefore, what relationships they do form are inevitably superficial and fragile, and this means that they are unable to achieve the solidarity necessary for effective political action. 24

I, however, argue that, in making this point, Dos Passos is missing something: he has one particular utopian vision, and the manifest failure of this vision to ever come to pass (as symbolized at the end of The Big Money by the failure to prevent Sacco and

Vanzetti's executions) causes him to despair, and devalue the very personal connectedness that he believes is necessary in such situations. To this end, I look at some instances of non-totalizing utopia in the novels, and in particular I extensively analyze the character of

Margo Dowling—Dos Passos' aspiring Hollywood actress in The Big Money—and note that in spite of being totally apolitical and in many ways quite selfish, her character actually demonstrates that, the rest of the trilogy notwithstanding, “clean” language is in fact not necessary to form real, sustaining human bonds—the two don't correlate. As a matter of fact, I argue, these bonds are apparently unrelated to language itself, and this part of the novel is valuable inasmuch as it shows how the personal, even when it isn't helping people to understand the nature of a system and thus rebel against this system, can nonetheless be valuable. There is potentiality here, and that is something that Dos

Passos himself does not take into account.

And yet, how does this work? If such a thing is possible—if, pace Lukács, we potentially don't need a good understanding of the nature of society in order to form strong bonds—then what does this say about utopia, and what sorts of utopias may or may not be closed off in different milieus? This, I argue, is where the idea of potentiality comes in. And this, however imperfectly, is what we can see in the character of Margo, and specifically in her relationship with her mother-in-law, Agnes: a possibility that, notwithstanding the oppression of words, bonds can exist nonetheless. These bonds may 25

not seem to have direct political import, but, I argue, they do inasmuch as they show how personal relationships can be valuable on a level that Dos Passos believes they cannot, and how this lends them to potentializing thinking. If he was aware of this dynamic,

U.S.A. could be a more optimistic work. However, this is not a point that critics have made, for the very good reason that the entire rest of the novels militate against such a reading. It is not a large part of the trilogy, and it is inconsistent and imperfect; thus, it gets lost, and the idea of potentiality as a useful concept does not achieve literary prominence. It is, however, present, and I use it to deconstruct, to a large extent, the novels' central conception.

The Public Burning

We can see the following progression from Sinclair to Dos Passos to Robert

Coover: in Sinclair, a utopian society based on social justice is an ideal to be pursued

(regardless of how efficacious this pursuit is). In Dos Passos, this utopia is recognized as a desirable goal, but is held to be an impossibility. Coover, then, is representative of what we would call the move to a postmodern milieu: if in Dos Passos, the relevant question was one of what we should do when politics has failed altogether, Coover answers that question: in The Public Burning, we have moved far beyond the point at which we are even able to recognize what a political, utopian goal would even look like. We can see 26

this in action in the character of Richard Nixon, who is surely the most complex figure in any of the books under consideration here, and really allows us to see the fate of radical aspiration in a world that seems designed to block said aspiration off.

The Public Burning narrates the days in June of 1953 leading up to the executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The nature of the reaction to these executions represents a marked contrast with the reaction to the Sacco and Vanzetti executions in U.S.A. In the case of the earlier case, as portrayed by Dos Passos, there was a sense that, symbolically, it represented a watershed moment: whether or not activists managed to get the sentence commuted would serve as an indication of whether or not left politics had any chance of being effectual in the milieu in question. Of course, the executions took place, and for

Dos Passos, this was the final moment of despair.

However, for Dos Passos, all of this took place in a more or less comprehensible context. Dos Passos' larger argument is that this sort of injustice is caused by the inability of the people to band together effectively, and they are unable to do this because they are unable to form relationships based on an accurate understanding of the socioeconomic nature of society. This viewpoint is not optimistic, but it is coherent, and it represents a valid way to understand the relationship between the political and personal.

By contrast, in The Public Burning, the relationship between the two is obscured, and impossible to understand in any useful way. The novel takes place in a postmodern milieu in which the true nature of things, in a Lukácsian sense, is impossible for people to understand. This is why international relations are understood as a cartoonish battle 27

between good and evil, and the Rosenberg executions take on huge, unearned significance as a symbol of the outsized evils of Communism and, more generally, what is considered “Unamericanism.” Politics has become entirely theatrical in nature: it does not address the Lukácsian substance of things; rather, it acts in a theatrical, ritualistic manner, in which surface appearance is everything, and there is no interrogation of the deeper reasons things happen as they do on the national and international stages. In these circumstances, nobody in The Public Burning can understand the Rosenberg case in the same way that characters in U.S.A. were able to understand the Sacco and Vanzetti case: the earlier case certainly had symbolic significance, but the characters in The Public

Burning see the executions of the Rosenbergs as literally striking a massive blow against mysterious, evil forces and propitiating God to come to America's aid.

We see how this new way of conceptualizing politics relates to the personal as we consider the character of Richard Nixon, the Vice President who serves as narrator of about half the novel. We also see how ways of conceiving both political and personal come together in the character in such a way that utopia becomes a different, and more difficult, proposition.

There is a great deal of dialectical tension in the character, which ultimately comes down to this: he is very much a political creature, in the sense that I detailed above. He has achieved the position of Vice President by knowing how to appeal to prevailing political opinion. He does, however, possess inchoate utopian aspirations, as the novel shows on a number of occasions. He cannot fantasize based on these 28

aspirations, however, as the idea of a utopia achieved through political means is unthinkable in this milieu, thanks to the lack, in Lukács' sense, of a sense of totality. This leaves only apolitical paths open; paths that explicitly avoid political engagedness. But such things are even more anathema to Nixon. He is fully invested in a political worldview, even if that world is hollowed out, and in any case, even if he wanted to imagine something “beyond” the political, his imagination is not sufficient to that task.

So, I argue, his attempts to reconcile these two conflicting impulses, the political and personal, result in a tension that, once again, can be understood by means of

Jameson's “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture:” Nixon needs his utopian fantasies to be political, but this they cannot be, so he takes political structures and tries to drain them of their political significance, so that he can fantasize and simultaneously maintain a sense of plausible deniability; a sense that, in spite of what he on some level knows is true, the political can still be said to exist therein. Of course, these mental contortions do not ultimately work, because, as noted above, he cannot really think outside the realm which shapes his political understanding. But we can see them as an exemplar of what a striving for postmodern utopia looks like, and the problems that it faces.

Against the Day 29

Pynchon's 2006 novel is of interest because it continues Coover's theoretical concerns while at the same time attempting to find new ways to work through these concerns. In this chapter I concentrate on two plot strands in the novel, the first involving the group of Boy Adventurers the Chums of Chance; and the second involving a group of self-identified anarchists and in particular a specific three-way romantic relationship that speaks in various ways to utopian ideals.

The Chums are characters who, within the novel, are posited at least partially as fictional characters. They fly around in an airship having adventures of the sort that would be typical of the kind of books featuring characters like this. This is a utopian existence inasmuch as they have unquestioned confidence that they be able to will live in this way forever and that their material needs will always be provided for. However, over the course of the novel, Pynchon thoroughly interrogates the nature of their existence and asks whether utopias of this sort really make sense.

I argue that, although they are obviously very different characters, the dilemma that the Chums face is substantially similar to the one confronting Nixon in The Public

Burning. Pynchon is no more optimistic than Coover is about the milieu that his novel takes place in. There is a clear argument that the events that happen in the novel, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, lay the groundwork for all of the exploitation, atrocity, and regressive politics that would mark the century. The Chums, then, have to determine how best to maintain a utopian existence in these circumstances. They try to do this by eschewing “earthly” politics altogether, both literally and symbolically flying 30

above the world and thereby remaining serenely unimplicated in anything going on below them.

However, I argue, this state of affairs proves untenable: the Chums owe their existences to the fact that people read about them in the boys' novels that some invisible narrator writes about them, and this ties them in some sense to the world below: their lives are sustained by the people reading about them. They actually cannot simply flee the world entirely, because if they did, and nobody was reading about them, their lives would no longer have meaning. This world is unthinkable, just as, for Nixon, a world in which he entirely eschews the political as he knows it is unthinkable.

And yet, the Chums clearly can't just return to Earth and exist on the same level as regular people. If they did that, they would likewise lose their privileged status, and they wouldn't be able to avoid politics as they want to. Ultimately, then, they are trapped in this dialectic: they can't continue their upward trajectory, yet they can't just land either.

They must attempt to navigate a space in between these two, which seems like an impossible proposition, as indeed it was for Nixon.

Oddly enough, however, Pynchon's novel is by far the most optimistic work in this dissertation, and the Chums' narrative in particular ends in about the most upbeat fashion imaginable. This, I argue, is because Pynchon embraces the concept of potentiality in a way that the other writers whose work I analyze do not: I argue that this concept allows for the enactment of hope, even in a scenario in which it could plausibly be argued that all is lost. This does not mean that a utopian future of a totalizing sort is 31

magically going to come into being, but it does indicate potential—that the atmospheric conditions (as it were) for such a thing are present, and that it can be in an intangible way felt, allowing us to “feel” utopia.

I also turn my attention to the more “grounded” characters in the novel, and particularly Pynchon's heroes. These are generally anarchists, pushing back against encroaching government and corporate control, and as such engaging in utopian striving

—but, as various characters point out, this is an extremely difficult thing to do, given a global sociopolitical situation that is becoming ever-more the province of oppressive government and corporate interests. And there are still other problems, having to do with totality; the novel may be more optimistic than the others in this dissertation, but this does not mean that the characters are really any more successful than anyone else when it comes to thinking in totalizing terms. Nobody seems to really be thinking systemically: both “good” and “bad” characters imagine that the real problem is individual people that are opposing them, and thus that by individual acts of violence against these people, they can meaningfully act against the system that they oppose, whether it be corporate oligarchies or labor unions. The novel shows quite clearly that this is a misapprehension, however; that the real problems are the systems themselves, which nobody seems equipped to combat. It appears, then, that there is no good solution here for anyone.

However, the novel finds a way to combat such problems by strongly associating political radicalism with personal radicalism, and insisting that even when the former is rendered problematic by the aforementioned issues, the latter can provide a kind of 32

effectiveness that otherwise has no place to manifest itself—an effectiveness that, again, revolves around ideas of potentiality. We see this at its most explicit and sustained in a segment involving a menage à trois in which three characters, in transgressing sexual norms and their own established sexual identities, seem also to be directly challenging the same forces that are so intent on exploiting people and making their lives as limiting as possible. Thus, even when it becomes clear that the enemy—what Pynchon at one point refers to as “the capitalist/Christer gridwork” (1075)—is not to be stopped at any point in the foreseeable future, the novel can nonetheless maintain an optimistic tone, because the characters have established the potentiality for a world in which this milieu does not have to be all-encompassing. As I argue in the chapter, this is an important evolution in ways of thinking about utopia and its possibility or lack thereof. This is not to say that

Pynchon's novel “solves” everything, but it does provide a way of looking at the world which the notion of totality does not take into account, and, I argue, if we really want to be utopian, this kind of thinking is necessary—and, indeed, may suggest the necessity of revising the whole notion of totality to encompass more of the personal. CHAPTER 1

Upton Sinclair's Anti-Utopian Methods

Introduction

Upton Sinclair's novels—in this case, King Coal and The Coal War—are unique in this dissertation, inasmuch as they are explicitly advocacy novels. Sinclair felt that encouraging social reform should be the central purpose of literature, and this is readily apparent in these books. However, as I will show in some detail throughout this chapter, that is hardly an unproblematic statement. What are the novels actually doing? What strategies are they using to encourage this putative social reform, and how well do they work? Furthermore, what sort of reform are we actually talking about here, in concrete terms? These are questions that I take up in this chapter.

In large part, my analysis will revolve around questions of totality. For Georg

Lukács, totality is valuable not just for what it shows about the present, but also for the ways in which it allows us to understand the past and probable futures. Since Sinclair is extremely concerned with the future, and how a better one can be ushered in, the concept of totality has a great deal of relevance here.

33 34

Whether or not totality is always important, it certainly is so for Sinclair, and as I show, it is extremely problematic in these novels. Sinclair's desire to change the status quo is continually undermined by a depiction of characters as singular, isolated creatures without the sort of coherent connections to other people and aspects of society that would be necessary to realistically show the full nature of their plights. This is partially because of a lack of facility on Sinclair's part, but it also has to do with his temperamental conservatism: in spite of his stated desires, there is an ingrained sense in which these books don't want to depict the kind of radical change for which they seem to be agitating: in spite of his conscious intent, Sinclair's sensibilities are quite timid.

In this chapter, I analyze the failures of totality in these novels: what they consist of, and how they affect Sinclair's ability to effectively agitate for workers' rights. I argue that these failures were not inevitable, and that in fact they are the result of engrained attitudes on Sinclair's part that militate against the kind of radical activism that he is putatively encouraging. They make their presence felt in terms of his depiction of characters and his delineations of what are and are not acceptable demands and sets of behavior for strikers. The books are essentially arguing against themselves, which is clearly self-defeating; I argue, however, that this self-defeating aspect is actually on some level the point: that Sinclair, in creating a world in which his putatively desired utopia is impossible, is thereby protecting himself from what would be a serious challenge both to his own deeply internalized sensibilities and to the world itself, which would end up experiencing large, disruptive alterations which are beyond his ability to conceptualize.

Thus, in Sinclair we can see how many of the obstacles to real utopianism function. 35

Firstly, I am going to pursue the question of totality, particularly as it applies to the characters in the novels. For totality to be a meaningful factor, it is important that readers of the novels be able to look at the characters and understand their relationships to the world around them: both to other characters, and to the socioeconomic conditions that determine their lives. If we cannot understand these things, then we cannot even hope to begin to imagine what steps we could possibly take to ameliorate their conditions. I argue that this is very problematic: the workers in Sinclair's world suffer, but there is a very strong sense that the problems with their lives are not, at root, causally related to the oppression that they experience: that they would essentially be the same as they are now regardless of whether or not they were being oppressed by outside forces.

This, I should note, applies to the protagonist, Hal Warner, as much as it does to the miners. By setting Hal up as a singular force, capable of coming in and single-handedly solving many of the miners' problems by fiat, Sinclair builds into the character the same sort of isolation of character that the less-privileged characters experience. He does not, as we might reasonably expect he would, provide a bridge by which we might come to better understand the relationship between labor and capital. Instead, he serves as a sort of demiurge, exerting his force on the world from outside it. Hence, he simply reinforces the idea that we cannot understand the world in an integrated way.

Secondly, I will ask the important question of what, in fact, the novels' putative politics are—that is, what they espouse and hope to achieve. I argue that in fact, the novels' political goals are limited in a way that matches up with their lack of totalizing thinking: in spite of occasional bits of fiery rhetoric, nothing that they argue for is 36

actually qualitatively different than the current status quo. All Sinclair is really demanding is a world in which the industrialists are somewhat restricted in their ability to exert their will on the workers. In this sense, the lack of a totalizing sense of society may not exactly hinder the novel's goals, but only because these goals are so modest.

Thirdly, in order to answer the question of why they are so limited, I bring in

Herbert Marcuse's re-conception of the Freudian notion of repression: that force which prevents us from pursuing pleasure and happiness in an unrestricted way, in the name of maintaining a functioning society. Repression may be inevitable, but for an activist like

Sinclair, the goal, even if it's only a symbolic, theoretical goal, is to eliminate as much of it as possible, so that workers can pursue the best lives possible. The problem, which causes a great deal of confusion in any reading of the novels, is that, at bottom, Sinclair does not want to strip away anyone's repression. And this is where the lack of a sense of totality, intentional or not, is valuable to him: if the workers were depicted as fully- realized human beings with a complex set of desires, then it would not be possible simply to isolate one aspect of their development from another; to say—as Sinclair, in effect, does—that they should be pursuing social justice, but that any seemingly non-productive and possibly (in Sinclair's mind) morally questionable pleasures that might also go along with this justice should be eschewed.

Fourthly, in order to conceptualize the mechanisms of this repression, I call on

Fredric Jameson, whose essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” provides us with a useful dialectic by which to understand seemingly contradictory impulses like the one 37

between Sinclair's conscious intent and his results. As I have noted, this essay distinguishes between radical, utopian impulses and regressive impulses that are meant to hold back the radical ones so as not to severely disrupt the symbolic structure of the psyche. If Sinclair accurately sketched out a model of capitalism, presented a seemingly plausible means by which its exigencies could be overcome, and left it at that, his fundamentally conservative sensibilities would surely be badly shaken. In light of this, the novels' failure to depict people who have in them the potential to effect radical change comes to appear as part of an unconscious strategy: a failure to totalize, combined with a cultivation of repression, leads to a world in which it is “safe” to talk about radical, utopian moves, because these moves have so obviously been structurally precluded that they present no danger to anyone's sense of self. I also point out that the one really utopian scenario that the novels depict reinforces this by, indeed, being far outside the realm of the plausible.

The Context of the Novels

The genesis of King Coal came when, following the Ludlow Massacre, the

Colorado Strike Committee sent a delegation to New York to publicize the incident, which was being downplayed in the press. The massacre had occurred on April 20, 1914 in Ludlow, Colorado, when guards from John D. Rockefeller's Colorado Fuel & Iron 38

Company opened fire on striking workers, killing between twenty and twenty-five and burning hundreds of workers' tents to the ground. This was merely the climax of months and years of mounting tensions and maltreatment of workers.

Hearing about this, Sinclair was naturally outraged; he organized protests, did several days of symbolic jail time, and visited Denver to discover the facts on the ground, but to little effect.1 Naturally, his involvement with the strikers dictated that he should write a novel on the topic, but lack of funding delayed work until 1915, when he first conceived of King Coal, which was to be “a big novel dealing with the Colorado strike and the solution of the labor problem along the lines of syndicalism” (quoted in Graham lxxvi). However, he met with editorial resistance which substantially altered the novel.

In its original form, it was to be a very long novel indeed, including the events of both

King Coal and what eventually became The Coal War. The problem that publishers had with this was that the result was too much a (very thinly-fictionalized) documentary account of the events of the strike and too little a novel—it being presumed, no doubt correctly, that the latter would sell substantially better than the former. However,

Sinclair's primary interest was in publicizing the depredations of the mining industry; he did not want to add a great deal in the way of (fictionalized) human interest, so as not to dilute the facts of the situation. His publishers' dictates seemed to be such that writing a novel at all would be, from his perspective, pointless.

1For a full account of Sinclair's actions at this time, as well as an exhaustive summary of the CF&IC's behavior, see John Graham's introduction to The Coal War (Colorado Associated University Press, 1976). 39

Ultimately, he hit on a solution: he would revise the first, more “novelistic” section of the book, which Macmillan would ultimately publish under the title of King

Coal. The second half—detailing the events leading up to a fictionalized version of the massacre itself—he would then assemble as The Coal War, which would be published, presumably, based on the hoped-for success of the first volume.

This plan, however, did not work out. King Coal's publication was pushed back until 1917 due to war conditions. It sold adequately but not spectacularly, and, combined with the the fact that whatever public interest in mining conditions had existed had by this point evaporated due to greater concerns about the European war, The Coal War disappeared into a limbo state until its posthumous publication in 1976—by which point, of course, such interest as there was was almost exclusively academic in nature.

The Story of the Novels

King Coal is the story of Hal Warner, college student and scion of a coal-mining empire, who, skeptical of the bromides he has grown up with regarding the nature of the industry, decides to go incognito (under the name of “Joe Smith”) and see for himself what the situation is. He ultimately gets a job taking care of mules, from which position he can observe daily life in the camp and the injustices that come with it: corrupt overseers willing and eager to accept bribes and throw out anyone who expresses the 40

mildest pro-union sympathies, safety regulations unenforced, miners regularly cheated out of the money that they have earned, and so on. He also makes friends with various people in the camp, most notably his pseudo-love interest, a stock “fiery Irish lass” type who thirsts for justice and longs to escape the oppressive coal mines.2 Very mildly and cautiously, he encourages the miners to insist on their rights, starting by demanding that the bosses allow them to appoint a checkweighman—somebody to monitor loads of coal and determine that they were not under-weighed, as so often happened (miners were paid by the ton of coal). Having such a person was the miners' legal right, but this right was never permitted, let alone enforced.

Predictably, this request is not taken well by the bosses, who imprison Hal and try to frame him for accepting a bribe to sell out his new companions, so as to be able to throw him out of the colony. He is able to fight back effectively only by revealing his true identity; however, his triumph does not last long, as there is a mine explosion (due to systematic failure to sprinkle the mines with water—as, theoretically, required—to keep explosive dust down); the shaft is closed to allow the fire to burn itself out, and the rest of the balance of the book consists of Hal dashing hither and yon, pulling every string he can to get it reopened so that trapped miners can be rescued, at which task he finally succeeds. His situation with regard to Mary remains unresolved at book's end; his divided loyalties between her and his fiancée from his own class (Jessie Arthur) is, in theory, representative of his being torn between his birthright and his newly-discovered

2Here we see Sinclair's lack of interest in character; Mary is here to provide token human interest, but she is only detailed to the extent that she is because of his wife's insistence; as he relates in his Autobiography, when she asked him for details about her, she “sought in vain . . . because [he] didn't know” (212). 41

interest in social justice (to what extent this division is effectively portrayed is a question that will be addressed later).

The Coal War takes up more or less where King Coal leaves off, but the differences between the two are notable. Hal is still fighting for the miners' rights, but it would be very difficult to provide a coherent summary of the book, because it is essentially plotless: it consists primarily of a long series of slightly-fictionalized vignettes of outrages visited upon the miners, culminating in the massacre itself. Sinclair read many articles and thousands of pages of court testimony in researching these books, and as such the incidents in question are historically grounded, but one could, with minimal editing, shuffle most of them in any order with no loss of narrative coherence. As far as

Hal's personal life is concerned, he makes further overtures to Mary, but ultimately, when

Jessie proves willing to compromise her privilege for him, the two of them marry. This is another significant fact that will be discussed in greater detail later.

For convenience's sake, throughout this chapter I am going to refer to these two novels collectively as the singular Coal, only differentiating when it is is necessary to specify one or the other.

Totality in Sinclair's World 42

Unlike some of the other novels that will be investigated here, it is not difficult to discern a purpose behind Coal, or indeed any of Sinclair's political novels. For Sinclair, art is indistinguishable from propaganda.3 He wants works of fiction to draw attention to social injustices so that people notice these injustices and remedy them. His motivations are, at a basic level, very similar to those that Lukács prescribes for effective literature: to draw an accurate picture of the world from which people can better understand the social and economic privations going on around them. If these conditions are invisible, there is no effective way to rebel against them.

However, Lukács is thinking specifically about Sinclair and writers like him when he criticizes those authors who reject “all theories specifically referring to art itself . . . plac[ing] literature directly in the service of political and social propaganda.” Such writers, he charges, are “incapable, despite their honourable intentions, of achieving any effective response among the broad public” (“Writer & Critic” 193). This last charge seems to be substantiated by the largely indifferent response to Sinclair's fiction. In spite of the furor it raised, the new food safety regulations that The Jungle instigated were, for

Sinclair, not the point, which was to instigate public outrage regarding the treatment of workers. In that regard, in spite of its historical importance, the novel was not a success.

3Sinclair extensively lays out his ideas of aesthetics in his 1925 book Mammonart. See also his Autobiography (Harcourt Brace, 1962): “To me, literature was a weapon in the class struggle—of the master class to hold its servants down, and of the working class to break its bonds. In other words, I studied literature from the socialist point of view.” (235) 43

Lukács develops the idea of totality in History and Class Consciousness. He argues that, under capitalism, workers become increasingly reified and alienated from their work.

At every single stage of its development, the ceaselessly revolutionary

techniques of modern production turn a rigid and immobile face towards

the individual producer. Whereas the relatively stable, traditional craft

production preserves in the minds of its individual practitioners the

appearance of something flexible, something constantly renewing itself,

something produced by the producers. (97)

Labor no longer functions as individual, skilled work, in which a given person would be involved in all stages of production. The exact mechanics of assembly-line work may change, but the feeling—of work as something static, in which the relationship between workers and their work is not the relationship between people and the larger world, but rather only a relationship between people and one small, ruthlessly segmented part of this world—remains the same. Individual workers become interchangeable pieces in a machine, never having a clear sense of a totality, of what their work actually means.

If we understand this, we can get a better sense of the shape of Lukács' literary criticism in which, likewise, work that he believes does not provide a sense of totality is deplored. We can also understand why he believes that it isn't useful for a text to consist simply of as widely-ranging a catalogue of “things” as possible—because if this is the case, the work falls right back into reification: the different components of society are 44

present, but there's no effort made to piece them together in a way which reflects society.

Instead, they're all just so many disconnected building blocks. Furthermore—and this is a key point—fiction about a given sociopolitical milieu that does not provide an adequate sense of totality—of the world as it really is—cannot present any convincing or even coherent idea of where that milieu comes from, or how its future could be anything but a qualitatively similar continuation of itself.

First, I want to think about the question of how Sinclair's coal novels relate to totality. Showing how they fail from a Lukácsian perspective is not a difficult task, but my goal is to illustrate why Sinclair falls short, and what this indicates about his radical aspirations. This is not simply a matter of trying to match them up with Lukács' criticisms and pass a judgment; rather, the goal is to use his work as a frame to conceptualize the novels' failings in terms of their view of the world and their lack of vision.

Workers and Agency

One notable tension within Coal is the question of agency—to what extent characters are responsible or to blame for their situations in life. This is a relevant question because, to a large extent, Lukácsian judgments about modern literature hinge on it. Lukács responds to the idea that, if modern literature is less dynamic than that of 45

previous eras, that is only logical, since, after all, it is representative of a less dynamic era in which capitalism is in full bloom by asserting that the fact that the sociopolitical milieu is impoverished does not mean that the literature of said milieu should be similarly so.

Indeed, if this is the case, the depredations of capitalism are being substantially short- changed, since if we are just examining characters who are “pre-deadened,” we are not actually seeing the effects that it has on people.

In the course of the novel [modern writers] do not recount how a stunted

individual had been gradually adjusted to the capitalist order; instead, they

present a character who at the very outset reveals traits that should have

emerged only as a result of the entire process. . . . We do not watch a man

whom we have come to know and love being spiritually murdered by

capitalism in the course of the novel, but follow a corpse in passage

through still lives becoming increasingly aware of being dead. (“Narrate

or Describe?” 146)

As I will show in this section, this critique very strongly applies to Coal. While the characters' situations appear to be the result of exploitive capitalist depredations, when we look closely, we will see that, in fact, there is a great deal of evidence that their fundamental states are unrelated to capitalism: that they simply are and always have been who they are. This makes the novels very problematic in terms of demonstrating a grasp of totality, as totality should show how the nature of the socioeconomic conditions that they labor under have led to them becoming the people that they are. If, rather, it appears 46

that they have always been as they are, the criticism of capitalism becomes very weak, because it becomes unclear what capitalism is doing that's so awful, exactly.

Sinclair's goals are not exactly the same as those of Lukács' hypothetical critic of capitalism. While Sinclair is mounting a critique of capitalism by showing the effects that it can have on people, for him, simply showing isn't enough; the real goal, in theory, is to directly lift people up out of their impoverished circumstances. Of course, this does not make him exempt from Lukács' criticism. Whether or not his characters are

“corpses,” the question of whether or not they are in any sense—even just potentially—a part of a larger society and capable of development and change, is relevant. In order to adequately depict characters who have been destroyed by capitalism, according to

Lukács, a writer must concretely situate these characters within society, so that all of the factors behind their destruction, and the ways in which these factors interact with their own individual traits, can be made clear. This is how you can approach totality. And certainly, this critique does not only apply in situations in which a writer is trying to harshly critique a system: any character must be so depicted in order to be adequately defined. So in order to understand how these novels relate to the totality, we must first think about their characters' dynamism or lack thereof.

My goal is not to vindicate or condemn Sinclair from a literary standpoint; rather, it is to think about how he conceived of characters and to see how this conception works in utopian terms. To that end, I am not demanding finely-tuned character portraits from

Sinclair; I am merely asking to what degree the characters appear to be integrated into the 47

world around them, and therefore capable of both affecting and being affected by this world. This is, it seems to me, the central question that the reader should think about with regard to this novel, and its answer is highly relevant here.

The nature of the workers' identities is largely determined by the circumstances of their births and upbringings, of course, but to what extent are these things subject to change, and to what extent are they immutable? In other words, is there an implicit argument that although they seem to be the sum product of their environments, in fact they are what they are due to something innate, which nothing can be done to change? I assert that, indeed, there is such an implicit argument. As Sinclair is agitating for social change, he naturally does not want to create the impression that nothing can be done to change the victims of oppression. However, the extent to which he succeeds at avoiding this is very doubtful.

Let us take a representative passage that clearly demonstrates Sinclair's ambivalence about his characters, especially where ethnicity is concerned. This section concerns children doing menial mine-work:

These urchins came from a score of nations of Southern Europe and Asia;

there were flat-faced Tartars and swarthy Greeks and shrewd-eyed little

Japanese. They spoke a compromise language, consisting mainly of

English curse words and obscenities; the filthiness which their minds had

spawned was incredible to one born and raised in the sunlight. They

alleged obscenities of their mothers and their grandmothers; also of the 48

Virgin Mary, the one mythological character they had heard of. Poor little

creatures of the dark, their souls grimed and smutted even more quickly

and irrevocably than their faces! (King Coal 20)

There are obvious indications here that we are not meant to take their situation as being inevitable; they are, after all, “grimed and smutted,” indicating a possibility that they could someday become clean. On the other hand, there remains something questionable here. For instance, the way that Sinclair uses physical adjectives (“flat-faced,” “swarthy,”

“shrewd-eyed”) to describe these people seems to imply that there's something about their characters that is causally related to their physiologies. Furthermore, note that “their minds had spawned” all this “filthiness,” rather than the other way around. The novel clearly wants to indicate that they are reduced to such squalid circumstances by their material conditions, but there is something visceral about Sinclair's horror at those conditions that seems to indicate at least the strong possibility that there is something immutable here. Finally, the idea that, regardless of what has caused these conditions to arise, they are tainted “irrevocably” seems to be a pessimistic outlook for a writer agitating for the improvement of their lot in life.

There are plenty of indications that part of this is descriptive of Hal's own prejudice—“his Anglo-Saxon pride”—and he tries to “find forgiveness for what was repulsive in these people.” However, it's clear that these things that he finds

“repulsive”—“their barbarous, jabbering speech, their vermin-ridden homes, their bare- bottomed babies”—are only very partially related to anything having to do with 49

exploitive mine work. The novel imagines this work as being part of a cruel industry that is eager to sacrifice all basic humanity in the name of profit, but then it uses this as an opportunity to pour all of its condescending, obliviously racist prejudices onto them, in the end making them into “creatures, subterranean gnomes” (25), whose conditions can only very questionably be blamed on the depredations of capitalism.

There is another aspect of this that I want to touch on, which has to do with the contradictory nature of the novels' conception, and which also relates to the question of the characters and their relation to their environment. Coal attempts—if not always successfully—to create the impression that the fact of the workers' degradation is down to the simple fact that they are kept in such conditions as to make anything else impossible, and deliberately so (“one can't blame the poor devils. They're ignorant—kept so deliberately” (King Coal 90)). In other words, it's possible to conceive of their conditions as being brought on by the malignant effect of capitalism. In the name of profit, the people are not permitted to be anything more than mindless, interchangeable cogs in a machine. This would be a reasonable point on its own; however, Sinclair also has the idea that racial animosity is as much to blame for this state of affairs as anything else, providing an elaborate racial hierarchy that predominates in the coal camps.4 While it is certainly the case that exploiting native animosity like this makes it easier for owners to prevent workers from organizing, emphasizing that fact has the effect of reinforcing the

4 “The Americans and English and Scotch looked down upon the Welsh and Irish; the Welsh and Irish looked down upon the Dagoes and Frenchies; the Dagos and Frenchies looked down upon Polacks and Hunkies, these in turn upon Greeks, Bulgarians, and "Montynegroes," and so on through a score of races of Eastern Europe, Lithuanians, Slovaks, and Croatians, Armenians, Romanians, Rumelians, Ruthenians-- ending up with Greasers, niggers, and last and lowest, Japs.” (King Coal 61) 50

idea that there is something immutable about the miners' condition: yes, it is exacerbated by capitalist owners, but it's also in essence the way things have always been, and, without any concrete indication of how the owners exploit these prejudices—it's simply asserted without any further detail—we get the very strong impression that things are as they ever were. There's no reason to expect that, even in the best of conditions, these people would be able to put aside their differences and work for their common good.

For Lukács, the central difference between pre-capitalist and capitalist labor in terms of its effect on people's existences is that in the latter, the oppressive conditions of the workplace are replicated in society as a whole, and therefore also in workers' personal lives.5 Oppression has always existed, but only with capitalism does it come to suffuse the whole of the social world. And this having become the case, alienation becomes naturalized and it becomes impossible to see anything outside of it. Whereas in Sinclair's novels, a careful reading reveals that, in spite of protestations to the contrary, there's nothing unique about capitalism per se; social systems have always been conducive to oppression. This contributes to what we can see is a strong sense of stasis in the novels, which is exemplary of Lukács' belief that non-objective writing does not allow for distinct past, present, and future:

Man is 'thrown-into-the-world:' meaninglessly, unfathomably. He does

not develop through contact with the world; he neither forms nor is formed

by it. The only 'development' in this literature is the gradual revelation of

5 From History and Class Consciousness: “The internal organization of a factory could not possibly have such an effect—even within the factory itself—were it not for the fact that it contained in concentrated form the whole structure of capitalist society.” (90) 51

the human condition. Man is now what he has always been and what he

always will be. (Meaning 21)

Since characters, and thus human societies, are entirely static, utopia becomes an impossible proposition.

Hal Warner and the Failure of Totality

The characterization of Hal himself is also problematic: rather than illustrating anything about the people on the other side of the capital/labor divide, his character seems to be just as preordained and isolated from his social conditions as the workers are.

As one born into money and power, he of course has substantial advantages over the mine workers in terms of leverage when trying to alter the social conditions that affect them.

However—due to the above-catalogued ignorance and filthiness of the mine workers themselves—the labor activism in the books, such as it is, is entirely his doing.

It is no exaggeration to say that, if the books are to be taken at face value, he serves as the primary catalyst for the whole of the 1913-14 Colorado coal strikes. There is an actual, working-class labor organizer, Tom Olsen, in the novels, but he is not seen practically to contribute anything to the cause. When he suggests that the workers should be organized, as they have a legal right to, Hal counters that “as a matter of tactics, it would be better 52

here in North Valley if you could choose some issues where there's less controversy” (95)

—in other words, the rich kid, rather than the man with years of organizational experience, is for some reason making these decisions.

When Olsen is murdered in The Coal War, his death is played for pathos, but it has no practical effect on anything—whereas if Hal were killed, the case would obviously be quite different. As LS Dembo accurately notes, “because he is 'educated' and

'American,' he is chosen as a leader and spokesman, and we are led to believe that he alone, acting on his own initiative, has the consciousness and capability to take effective action” (168). Note the emphasis on “American,” in contrast to the workers themselves.

Sinclair biographer Anthony Arthur asserts that the problem in part is that “the events and real-life characters involved seemed so vivid to Sinclair that he thought it unnecessary to expend much energy on creating a persuasively realistic protagonist” (167). This is no doubt part of the problem; Sinclair, after all, saw his goal as being simply to shine a light on events in order to demonstrate their injustice, so the less effort had to be put into embellishing the story, the better. However, that is only one aspect of what's going on here. To be sure, Hal agonizes over his privileged position, wonders what workers would do if there weren't someone like him around, and generally worries over the issue (“what about the mine-disasters and abortive strikes where there did not happen to be any

Haroun al-Raschid6 at hand?” (397)); however this only serves to emphasize the fact that he is an isolated figure rather than part of any larger culture.

6An eighth-century caliph of what is now Iraq; known as a just ruler who apocryphally, in the Arabian Nights, disguised himself as a commoner to go among his subjects to try to understand their lives. 53

To the extent that Sinclair does make any effort to show Hal as a connected person, it is through his relationships with his upper-class fiancée, Jessie Arthur; and the miner's daughter and incipient activist, Mary Burke: these two women are meant to be representative of the two sides of his life—the wealthy coal scion and the incipient activist—and his ambivalence in choosing between them is intended to illustrate the way his path is determined to some degree by social forces.

This does not really work in practice, however. Ultimately, he chooses, in The

Coal War, to marry Jessie, which could, in theory, be a powerful statement: that, in spite of his natural sympathies, Hal is unable to truly transcend his class, and that therefore, it is necessary for radical activism to come from within the labor side of the divide. In his introduction to The Coal War, John Graham argues this point, opining that this marriage is a result of him being “recaptured more by his class than by Jessie,” and that, “taken only as far as his background will realistically permit, Hal is more ambivalent reformer than committed radical” (xcii).

However, even if this reading is the one that Sinclair would prefer, it is not supported by the text itself: the marriage ultimately doesn't prove to mean anything, for either Hal or Jessie: as for the latter, “sobbing as she has learned to sob for her purposes”

(373), she makes her way back into her father's good graces, in spite of some token grumbling on his part7; whereas for the former, when the book ends uncertainly, with him continuing his work to no clear end, Jessie tags along with him, displaying “a proper

7Because, as an industrialist himself, he does not want his daughter to marry someone who opposes his business and makes him a laughingstock among his fellow-industrialist friends. 54

wifely sympathy with her husband's activities” (387). There is no indication that her presence or opinions actually attenuate his activities in any way. In other words, rather than doing anything to illuminate the nature of the relationship between labor and capital, this marriage instead reinforces the idea that none of this romantic wrangling actually has any relation at all to the labor conflicts raging in the background.

Ultimately, Sinclair's efforts to show the character being torn between two worlds fail in large part because he doesn't show any indication that he is able to imagine the two opposing groups in anything other than purely Manichean terms. The capitalists are, essentially, the personification of evil. He writes of one strikebreaker that he was “black- browed like a villain in a stage melodrama, dressed like a gentleman from the far South as he is imagined in romantic fiction” (Coal War 91). In spite of occasional efforts to claim otherwise, there is no real systemic thinking; no effort to conceptualize the forces of capital as anything other than individual Bad People, to understand why they are as they are, why they function as they do within the system,8 and the relationship between them and the people they are exploiting. Therefore, in spite of having some notion that, realistically, he should, it's only natural that the novels would be unable to imagine how

Hal could possibly identify with the capitalist world in which he has been brought up. He is not a Bad Person, so how could he? Again, we see totality failing here: if we are only able to think of him as being, fundamentally, a “good person,” without reference to any outside forces, we cannot understand how his upbringing and economic position have

8This recalls Theodor Adorno's critique of Brecht, that he is guilty of “thinking of fascism as an enterprise belonging to a band of criminals who have no real place in the social system and who can therefore be 'resisted' at will,” which “strip[s] it of its horror and diminish[es] its social significance” (“Reconciliation” 157). 55

made him who he is. Efforts to reconcile the two sides of him, the aristocrat and the activist, which could provide a useful degree of tension in the novel, fall flat because these two aspects, though alluded to, don't actually exist. While the character provides the illusion of a bridge between the two worlds—that of the owners and that of the workers—in reality, his flatness of character simply does not provide the kind of nuanced argument that Sinclair might wish he did, or that Graham argues he does.

The Politics of Coal

What exactly do the novels espouse? If a sense of totality were to be achieved in the novels, to what would it be in service? There is a fair amount of heated rhetoric about the need for unions, but to what ultimate end is all of this geared? This is not such an easy question to answer, as at no point in the novel does Sinclair ever provide a concrete portrait of the desired ends of his characters' activism. Graham quotes from an earlier draft of the novel (before it was split in two) in which Hal narrates to his father his political development: when he started his labor activism, he was “a nice, respectable socialist” (xc) who believed in engaging with the political system on its own terms; however, seeing that this was ultimately futile, he moved on to espousing a kind of anarcho-syndicalism influenced by the Industrial Workers of the World, in which the workers would seize the means of production and eliminate the stratified class system. 56

As a vision of the future, this is still quite hazy, but at least it does provide some idea of what it would look like.

This passage, however, was not included in the published books; as Graham notes, “by 1917 . . . both Hal and Sinclair saw little hope for the American syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World” (xci). The Coal War makes this explicit: “that beautifully simple formula of syndicalism which he had brought back from Europe did not fit the situation” (385). What this lack of hope seems to have led to, however, is a kind of, if not political quietism, then nonetheless a studious refusal to engage with the political to the extent of actually thinking about what all of this activism is actually meant to lead to. This, of course, was in large part prompted by grim political reality; World

War I served as the deathblow to radical politics as espoused by the IWW and other leftist groups. It is illuminating, however, to see how this defeatism manifests itself—without actually calling itself “defeatism,” or thinking of itself as such on any conscious level—in

Sinclair's writing.

At this point—regardless of the historical reasons—there is no effort being made to imagine a future. By definition, the absence of totality means that a qualitatively different future cannot be imagined (because totality is necessary to understand what the present even is, thus allowing us to understand how it could be changed), but the novels truly do not even make the effort. Near the end of The Coal War, after the Ludlow-

Massacre equivalent and the crushing of the strike, Hal reflects that “these great strikes came at regular periods of ten years” (385), and is dismayed at the prospect of having to 57

wait another decade for another chance at social justice. This clearly indicates a feeling that everything is cyclical, and that nothing will ever really change: it's just the same thing over and over again. If this is really the case, we can dramatically see how totality has failed: there is literally no notion of a future different from the present; instead, all that we have is the same futile labor struggles endlessly perpetuating themselves, always in essentially the same way. However, the reason for this may in large part be because of the narrative's essential conservatism. Now, it may be objected that this argument misses the point, as the books are essentially the story of Hal's growth: he goes from being more to less timid in his methods, until he's a full-fledged radical: at the end, he has

(reluctantly) killed several guards, as well as endorsed violence among the other strikers

(“we're not killing anybody that deserves to live!” (352)). The books may, then, according to this argument, be fatalistic, but that isn't the same thing as “conservative.”

This, however, seems to me to be giving the books more credit than is due. Coal features its share of fiery rhetoric; e.g., “You belong to the union! You stand by it no matter what happens . . . You teach it to the new men, and never let it die in your hearts!

In union there is strength, in union there is hope!” (King Coal 391). However, this coexists, without any apparent notion of any sort of contradiction, with a passage like this, which may be the essential indicator of the book's ambivalence towards real radicalism:

Hal called attention to the fact that every one of these demands was for a

right guaranteed by the laws of the state; this was a significant fact, and he 58

urged the men not to include other demands. After some argument they

voted down the proposition of the radicals, who wanted a ten per cent

increase in wages. Also they voted down the proposition of a syndicalist-

anarchist, who explained to them in a jumble of English and Italian that

the mines belonged to them, and that they should refuse all compromise

and turn the bosses out forthwith. (338)

Note first that Hal is very concerned that it be clear that all of their demands are perfectly legal: they aren't trying to do anything outside of the law. Then, note that when an actual radical tries to suggest something stronger, he is immediately dismissed. His argument is both literally incomprehensible, because spoken in bad English and therefore disconcertingly foreign; and figuratively so, because it represents a kind of politics that

Hal and the majority of the members of the nascent union are unable to reconcile—even something as relatively modest as a ten-percent wage increase—with their more timid demands. Given the dismissive tone (note, again, the condescending attitude towards foreigners as discussed above), and given the absence of anything in the book that would suggest otherwise, it seems reasonable to take this as being generally representative of the authorial voice. Labor historian David C. Duke's assertion that “despite his disgust with capitalist greed, Sinclair never abandoned his belief that all working groups needed responsible leadership with a middle-class outlook on the world” (72) seems justified here. Earlier in the novel, Hal had, supposedly, become radicalized, to the extent that “he suddenly became willing for the people of North Valley to have a union, and to be as tyrannical as they knew how” (155). However, this shows that there are distinct limits to 59

the sort of “tyrannical” behavior that he can countenance, and the very use of the word

“tyrannical” suggests a level of in-built reticence regarding truly radical behavior.

It will be noted that this passage represents, in a nutshell, the political journey that

Hal describes in the excised passage that Graham quotes: at first, determined to work inside the law; and then increasingly frustrated by the ineffectualness of this, willing to espouse positions very much like those of the Italian miner. Therefore, the argument would run, while perhaps there was a point when he was deeply concerned that his work always remain wholly within American law, he, and by extension Sinclair, became radicalized and more open to extreme methods.

In response to this, the first, most obvious point is that the passage in question was in fact excised from the novel, suggesting that Sinclair was not comfortable with making this evolution explicit. Second, it should be noted that the more radical material is all confined to The Coal War. As a stand-alone novel, there is nothing in King Coal that would cause anyone to question the idea that its advocacy is very limited in scope.

And while The Coal War shows that timidity does not work, it further shows, essentially, that nothing works: the strikers are crushed whatever activity they do or don't involve themselves in. Certainly, there is nothing in Sinclair himself to indicate that the second novel represents a major departure from the first, and plenty to show otherwise.9 If

9 For instance, In a 1927 letter to Mike Gold, quoted in RN Mookerjee's book Art for Social Justice: The Major Novels of Upton Sinclair (Scarecrow Press, 1988), Sinclair writes I can suggest a number of constitutional methods by which the workers might get control of industry. And it seems to me the part of wisdom to advocate these methods and try to apply them. . . . I think it a lot better to wait a while and use such freedom as we have freedom of propaganda to educate the workers. . . I am aware that that seems an old- foggyish [sic] idea to many impatient young comrades, but it is the way I feel. (29) 60

anything, it appears that such radicalization that Hal undergoes is at odds with authorial intent. This leaves open the question of what exactly the novel itself is advocating, and this is a big part of the problem: the novels don't really know what they want. Totality, then, becomes potentially dangerous: if Sinclair were to actively pursue the goal of laying bare the precise nature of the socioeconomic order, then solutions might suggest themselves, and these solutions might, like the Italian worker's ideas, be frighteningly destabilizing. I do not suggest that Sinclair is intentionally obfuscating to avoid having to confront ideas that he finds uncomfortable, but I am suggesting that his conservative tendencies naturally incline him to shy away from taking his analysis to areas that might indicate that something other than a cautious, incremental approach might be called for.

The Function of Repression

To think more specifically about Sinclair's conservatism, thus to better understand the way that the novels undermine their own radical aspirations, it is useful to think about

Marcuse's version of the Freudian concept of repression. The Lukácsian notion of totality, as it applies to Sinclair, is closely related to repression, in this way: the miners wish to achieve a greater level of emancipation. For this to be possible, the books would have to evince a more effective understanding of the totality of society. If they did this,

This rhetoric, indistinguishable from that used by Hal in King Coal, indicates a distinct lack of radicalization on Sinclair's part. 61

then the characters would have to be more realistic—that is, we would have to be able to understand them as people who have been shaped in relation to their real, material circumstances. And if we were able to understand them thus, then we would be able to understand their struggles as efforts to shake off some degree of repression—that is, of the forces that have conspired to make them who they are. However, none of this is the case; as I have shown, we cannot see them in relation to their circumstances in a totalizing way. Thus—that is, since they are not fully-realized characters in any case, and therefore questions of how repression works on them are rendered irrelevant—we see repression function, in a way that Sinclair implicitly endorses, to reinforce the current, highly repressive and poorly understood status quo.

In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse takes the Freudian notion of a reality principle

—i.e., a socially-imposed system of constraints that prevents us from following our innate desire to spend all our time seeking out pleasure, in the name of maintaining a functioning society—and suggests that, in fact, it is not necessarily the case that this principle is immutable, even if historically this has been the case, thus raising the possibility, in theory, of a genuinely unrepressed, utopian society. To make this point, he distinguishes between the reality principle and the “performance principle,” which is “the prevailing historical form of the reality principle” (35)—in other words, the reality principle as it manifests itself in society—thus, implicitly, making it theoretically subject to change. He also outlines the concept of “surplus repression,” which is repression that is not actually necessary for anyone's material needs but which is only in place in order to maintain a particular vision of society (whether or not this vision is worth maintaining). 62

As technology becomes more sophisticated, and more of our material needs are met, surplus repression must correspondingly increase in order to maintain an increasingly anachronistic social structure. It must be noted, however, that this unrepressed, utopian society is purely a theoretical notion; Marcuse never attempts to explain what it would look like, as there is never any question that it is an idea that would be achievable any time in the foreseeable future. Its practical value is as something to aspire to, which is why it has a particularly literary resonance, as literature can take on the task of mapping out such futures.

In “On Hedonism,” Marcuse notes that happiness—pleasure, satisfaction—is a fundamentally idiosyncratic thing; that is, there's no way to universally “mandate” happiness, because its conditions are different for everyone (there's also the point that what we “want” is heavily conditioned by society). This, necessarily, means that complete happiness implies complete freedom. But society cannot accommodate that, so it tries to define what “happiness” means in its own way, and marginalize, denigrate, or make taboo certain pleasures that it feels will undermine itself. I note this by way of noting that Sinclair himself is engaged in this marginalization and denigration: as I will show in this section, he is very concerned that his characters not engage in taboo activity that, in his opinion, is unproductive and not likely to lead to workers' social betterment.

As I also argue, however, this interferes with any totalizing idea: if Sinclair intentionally limits the set of behaviors that are “acceptable” for his characters, he is necessarily portraying them as less than fully-realized human beings, which, again, makes it difficult to imagine them engaging with the rest of the world in a totalizing way. 63

It is sensible that the thing topmost on the coal workers' minds would be achieving a greater level of justice; that “non-productive” pleasures would be secondary concerns at best—this, after all, would serve to increase their level of freedom and therefore their capacity for happiness. However, Sinclair's novels' inability to depict anything like a totality necessarily closes off possibilities. As I've argued, characters are not, in these books, constrained by social mechanisms; they're constrained largely as a result of who they ineluctably are. If we take this to be the case, then the very idea of repression becomes meaningless: characters may aspire to better material conditions, but since their basic personalities are set in stone, these aspirations can only differ in degree rather than in kind from the current situation. Envisioning, imagining, or hinting at a possible future in which characters are unrepressed—and, therefore, fundamentally changed from what they currently are—becomes inconceivable.

Yet it's more than just a matter of the books implicitly and un-self-consciously denying this utopian possibility by their rejection of totality. There is also, with regard to the topic of not just sexuality but of any sort of physical pleasure that can't be controlled or that threatens to destabilize the sociopolitical system as it stands, an explicit rejection of the factors that would need to be present in order for unrepressed utopianism to have any meaning.

This may not be particularly surprising from a writer like Sinclair, who, in spite of his political progressivism, could be quite puritanical about sex and other outre behavior that he perceived the younger generation engaging in.10 Regardless of his motives,

10From Sinclair's Autobiography: 64

however, sex is notable mainly by its absence, and when it is present, it is used mainly as a symbol of moral degeneracy; e.g., of “drunken militiamen carousing in the streets with their prostitutes” (Coal War 242). The attitude is best summed up in a passage from The

Coal War, in which Hal is trying to get his family's good-hearted yet myopic clergyman,

Will Wilmerding, to throw his influence behind the miners, and is getting nowhere until he mentions in passing that, when he had tried to get the support of the city's largest newspaper, the publisher had dismissed him, advising him to forget about it and “go and get himself a girl.” This is shocking to the man because, Hal realizes,

the clergyman was devoting his life's energies to combating “the sinful

lusts of the flesh”; the precise point on which he was keenest was that

young men should not get themselves “girls”! Hal saw his hands clench,

and his face grow ruddier than he had ever seen it before. Yes, there could

be no question about it, there was wickedness in high places in Western

City! (231)

Obviously, there is an extent to which the novel is lightly making fun of Wilmerding's skewed priorities; that evidence of widespread social injustices isn't enough to get him moving, but an off-hand mention of sex instantly convinces him of the depravity of the ruling class. However, given the extent to which this correlates with the way sex is used as an actual signifier of depravity in the novel, the mocking is clearly to a large extent

such depraved literature [as Maupassant and Gautier] has been poured in a flood over America, and our bright young intellectuals are thoroughly initiated; they have no shells of puritanism, but try fancy liquors and drugs, and play with the esoteric forms of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and commit suicide in the most elegant continental style. Those who prefer to remain alive are set down as old fogies. (63) 65

obfuscating the extent to which it's an accurate summation of the novels' larger outlook, which finds the idea of even implied casual sex so alarming as to only be able to be hinted at. The novel realizes that this is an untenable view of human nature to the extent that The Coal War awkwardly allows, of Hal and Mary, that “wise old Mother Nature will not permit two eager and healthy young people to be together all the time, and be nothing but comrades and fellow-workers in a cause” (184), but this tepid assertion is as far as it is willing to go, and there only tentatively.

This, however, is not merely a matter of sexual repression; it's part of a larger pattern that shows the extent of the novels' single-minded focus on activism to the exclusion of other human concerns. Now, it is entirely justifiable of Sinclair to note that alcohol abuse is a big problem in the mining camps; that it is an important contributor to workers' losing their money and ruining their health and that the owners, both to make money and to maintain control over them, are only too willing to make it readily available.11 However, there is a point at which this reasonable concern tilts into a feeling that alcohol is bad, not just because of its well-documented pernicious effects, but because it is a non-productive pleasure—it doesn't involve any sort of agitation for social justice. “What excuse had any striker for getting drunk on alcohol,” Sinclair asks rhetorically, in The Coal War, “when he might get drunk upon faith and hope and solidarity?” (160). And, again, this is more than just an idiosyncrasy of Sinclair's regarding alcohol. At one point, Hal's group of strikers meet up with a miner who had

11Sinclair's feelings in this regard are very highly colored by growing up with an alcoholic father, as well as watching friends and acquaintances (like Sinclair Lewis) ruined by the disease; see his book The Cup of Fury (1956) for his outspoken opinions on the matter. 66

struck out from the mine to join their group and gotten lost, such that when he finally finds them he had not eaten in two days. However, when Hal tries to give him money to get some food, he refuses, on the basis that “he had too much on his mind to think of food,” which Sinclair glosses by asserting that “it was not food and shelter that men wanted;” that “man does not live by bread alone” (97-98). The novels have idealized the miners to the point that they cannot really conceive of them as having the full range of human needs and desires. This goes along with the condescension and low-level racism that characterizes his attitude towards them—they are not conceived of as complete people.

From this, we can see how Lukács and Marcuse come together: the lack of a fully-realized totality in terms of the depiction of characters is related to the idea of repression in the sense that the characters are so limited that they are unable to evince normal human characteristics, and thus are entirely unable to do anything that would even hint at the potentiality of anything beyond the current performance principle. Utopia, then, becomes ever more remote: Sinclair has cleverly set up a number of barriers which preclude any serious consideration of a future.

The Future 67

I have made these arguments; however, the fact remains: in spite of the fact that it thwarts itself at every turn, there is a kind of radical energy in these novels; an impulse, however inchoate, to radical change and, indeed, to a better future. The fact that it is never really deployed in a coherent way, and that Sinclair constantly undermines himself in this regard, doesn't mean that it's not present, and neither do the conscious intentions of the novels or their author. It is necessary, therefore, to account for this in order to make sense of the novels, and also in order to see how they relate to utopianism of any sort, which, as we've seen, initially seems unlikely to appear in any strong way in Coal.

However, Sinclair was no stranger to the idea of utopia, having himself founded a short- lived utopian commune; not that this is necessarily relevant to the books themselves, but utopia is a large idea the influence of which, it will be seen, can be felt in all of the books under consideration in varying ways, even—or especially—when it appears that all real- world hope for large-scale radical movement has been quashed. For the purposes of this chapter particularly, what can we possibly mean by “utopia” when the idea is being applied to a pair of books that have little in the way of any sort of conscious sense of being utopian?

As I noted in the introduction, in his essay “The Politics of Utopia,” Fredric

Jameson distinguishes two basic ways to think about literary utopias. Which way one uses is in large part predicated upon the nature of the utopias themselves. First, we can think about them in a causal sense. What are the problems in the world that, it is felt, need to be eliminated in order to make it into an ideal place, and how does their removal affect people's lives? 68

Alternatively, we can think about them in a purely structural sense: what do we imagine that this or that utopia would actually look like? How would it be ordered, and how do the people living in it differ from people today? As Jameson notes, there's a substantial degree of anonymity in this way of looking at things: “the citizens of utopia are grasped as a statistical population: there are no individuals any longer, let alone any existential 'lived experience'” (39). Anybody designing a utopia along these lines is acting more as an urban planner than as a psychologist.

If we wish to think about Sinclair's fiction in terms of utopia, where would we place it? Which of these ways of thinking about this phantasmic ideal world are of most importance in these novels? This is essentially a rhetorical question; all of the novels that

I am considering here consider utopia as much more causal than structural: at no point in

Coal is an ideal future laid out. The question of what exactly must be eliminated—bad bosses, unsafe workplace conditions—implies that the ideal future would look a certain way, but again, this is only a negation. It becomes clear that not only is this a purely causal utopia, but that the books are written such that these “causes” are futile. In order to understand this dynamic, instead of looking for concrete articulations of utopia, we must think about what the books imply.

In his essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Fredric Jameson, drawing on Norman Holland's Dynamics of Literary Response, develops a way for thinking about the contradictory impulses within works of art. Jameson mainly uses this to account for works of contemporary popular culture, but it applies well to Sinclair's work. The idea is 69

that, in a work of art, there are “two inconsistent and even incompatible features of aesthetic gratification—on the one hand, its wish-fulfilling function, but on the other the necessity that its symbolic structure protect the psyche against the frightening and potentially damaging eruption of powerful archaic desires and wish-material,” and that the goal of art is to “manage this raw material of the drives” (141).

This conception clearly makes sense as we think about Coal. If we think of this

“raw material of the drives” as energy that, in Marcuse's sense, is unrepressed, it is— inasmuch as we can take it as a given that we are also “repressed”—necessary to do something to militate against said energy. This is a problem that any novel is going to have to reckon with, but, given the essentially conservative nature of Coal that I have enumerated, the un-self-conscious wish to protect not only the symbolic structure of the novel, but also in large part, the literal structure of the coal industry remains ever-present, even or especially at the books' most extreme.

It probably goes without saying, however, that the presence of repression also indicates, that, in fact, radical impulses are present in the text, and thus must be tamped down. Jameson confirms that

works of mass culture cannot be ideological without at one and the same

time being implicitly or explicitly utopian as well: they cannot manipulate

unless they offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe to the

public about to be manipulated. (144) 70

Without this content, the work of culture—in this case, the text of Sinclair's novels— cannot function, because it has nothing to offer to anyone. Ideology demands that there be at least a hint of something beyond itself, even if it is simultaneously doing its best to distance its conscious intentions from that something. So how, we must ask, does Coal function within this framework? What is the text's double principle?

The second part of this equation—the novel's essential conservatism and cleavage to the existing power structure, in spite of a professed desire to alter that structure—I think I have already demonstrated. But what about the first part; that is, the “fantasy bribe?” It is not sufficient to merely identify it as, simply, the desire to be liberated from a repressive status quo; that much is a given. The question is, how does this desire manifest itself?

The answer is largely apolitical, which might be surprising, given the author's political commitment, and given that the book explicitly rejects the unregulated deployment of sex and other hedonistic, pleasurable pursuits as a way forward, considering them to be distractions from the real class struggle. On the other hand, maybe it isn't so surprising, given the extent to which Sinclair's politics are limited. The book's repression is a tool to avoid having to come to terms with either political or personal desires. What is the happiest scene in these books—one of the few moments of genuine happiness for the miners, in which it appears that the ethnic animosities that had been hindering them have been laid aside and we are able to see, however dimly, a future 71

in the present that is something other than the usual cycle of endlessly perpetuating, never-changing protest and violence?

The answer is a section in the tent colony of the newly-called general strike which opens the third section of The Coal War, and truly, the level of unalloyed happiness is striking for being substantially different in tone than anything else in the book.

Collectively, the strikers had the sense of power, of certainty for the future;

while individually they were happier than they had ever been in their lives

before. They had comfortable homes, they had enough to eat, and they

made their life one long celebration. (157)

This celebration entails singing, dancing, studying, and baseball. This latter is especially remarkable inasmuch as strikers and militiamen play together; nowhere else in the novel do we see this sort of harmony between the opposing forces. Additionally, they hunt and feast together. Although the novel had let a small amount of ambiguity in previously by having one of the militia leaders be Hal's not-so-evil cousin, this is the only time when we are shown regular troops being other than simple tools of oppression. Furthermore, as noted, racial animosities melt away. “Old Mrs. Rafferty, who in times past had been for

Irishmen only, was now heard to remark, 'I never knew them Greeks was such gentlemen!

Sure now, they're a fine lot, aren't they?” (159)

Against this backdrop, political content is present but muted. Revolutionary songs are sung and socialism and syndicalism are discussed (though no details are 72

provided of these discussions), but all of this is more part and parcel with the rest of the festivities rather than a specific consideration of the future of labor. There's even a certain magical element to it: when an agent provocateur infiltrates the camp to give a speech advocating violence, the evidence of this is happily intercepted by a union sympathizer before it can reach the papers. This may not be wholly implausible, but it is a very easy, smooth escape from the only, minimal, trouble encountered at this juncture.

In the context of the section, it is presented as just another example of the sort of effortless greatness that is the miners' situation.

This little utopia clearly serves to a substantial degree as a model of the sort of larger society that the novel would like to see implemented—and, as noted, there is very little here in terms of political content. Furthermore—obviously, given the historical record—it does not last for any great length of time. Before we know it, “there came a case of an indignity committed upon a woman by a militiaman,” which militiaman is immediately acquitted by a military tribunal, after which the soldiers are given to understand that they can do whatever they want, leading to “a reign of terror . . . worse than anything before” (181). It may seem odd that the militiamen—who had quite recently appeared to have achieved some sort of accord with the strikers—should abruptly immediately go back to committing rapes and other atrocities the moment it's convenient, but the mechanics of this are as irrelevant to the narrative as the question of how social justice is to be achieved. The real purpose of showing the militia living in harmony with the workers is simply to present an image of the ideal situation, and showing them as adversaries is to present the current state of affairs. The question of 73

whether and how the two alternative scenarios are permeable—i.e., how one might get from the stage of oppression to the stage of justice—is of minimal relevance.

This, then, is the books' central principle: social justice is desired. But the implications of that social justice are frightening, given that it cannot be realized in the world as it exists and therefore would require a great deal of social upheaval to bring about. This reluctance to pursue the implications of the novel's goals may not be entirely based in fear; it may also be related to an inability to face up to the nature of the present and therefore an equal inability to think about the future, stemming from the books' difficulty in presenting any kind of totality that it would then become possible to think beyond. In any case, it becomes easier and less fraught to imagine a utopian outcome if it is deemed unnecessary to outline how this outcome will be achieved with any specificity

—which lack of specificity can be achieved, in part, by draining from a supposedly political utopian situation almost all concrete political content.

Furthermore, the fact that there is so much repressive violence—that any effort to buck the system will inevitably be come down upon hard—means that a lot of the pressure is off, as it were: the novel can want a better political system or way of life, but as long as all of that remains necessarily remote, there's no need to get too upset by the fact that all this desired upheaval would also result in a fundamental restructuring of society that the book finds alarming. This also means that the large gulf between an idealized scenario with miners and guards harmoniously coexisting and the reality in which they are bitter enemies is useful, because it is so great: if this future seems 74

impossible to achieve, then the necessity of trying to achieve it decreases: since failure is inevitable, why bother?

To be clear, the argument here is not that any political novel in which leftist forces are defeated by a repressive status quo must in some unconscious way be grateful for that status quo. That would be an insupportable claim. However, in a novel as change-averse as this one is, repressiveness becomes, rather than an obstacle, a useful pretext. With this in mind, The Coal War's lack of structure makes more sense. As I've noted, the book primarily consists of a catalogue of outrages perpetrated against protesters. This has the obvious purpose of illustrating the general outrageousness of the situation, yes. But how convenient it also is, as a justification for stasis! Ordinarily, I would not argue that such a depiction is dispositive, but given that there is no context in the book (i.e., no sense of totality) that would allow the reader to see how things might be different, it's difficult to approach it as anything other than an entrenchment of the status quo.

In this chapter, I have outlined some ways in which utopia can fail: pitfalls that even a committed activist can fall into. These problems, I would argue, are representative in a more general way of radical political failure at large. But what happens when this failure is complete? When writers have reached the point of deciding that all of this activism is futile; things are never going to achieve anything like the utopian shape that we would like them to? To answer that question, I am next going to turn my attention to

John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy. CHAPTER 2

Totality, Potentiality, and Human Relationships in Dos Passos' U.S.A.

Introduction

The three volumes of John Dos Passos' extended novel U.S.A.—The 42nd Parallel

(1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936)—represent the author's efforts to conceptualize why the United States of America is as it is; more specifically, it is the story of why radical politics are consistently marginalized out of existence even when they're not violently crushed. The main reason for this, naturally enough, is posited to be the people themselves; to that end, the trilogy features twelve main characters for which sections of the book are named, as well as numerous recurring minor characters who flit in and out of the narrative. In spite of the fact that substantial corners of American life are largely disregarded, these characters are felt to be representative of the sociopolitical culture that Dos Passos was experiencing and observing. The novel is largely plotless, aiming to be a naturalistic12 document of an American age. Characters drift around, running into each other in largely random ways.

12For a discussion of Dos Passos that attempts to place him in the context of other American writers—like Crane, Norris, and Dreiser—widely classified as naturalists, see Charles C. Walcutt's American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream.

75 76

Dos Passos' work has similar politics as Sinclair's: as I have shown, Sinclair can be very self-defeating, but on a basic level, what he putatively wants—a world in which nobody is oppressed by government or business interests—is what Dos Passos wants, too.

Sinclair tries to push back against this oppressive social order, but, due to his failure to totalize and his endorsement of repression, his efforts prove not to be very effective. Dos

Passos, by contrast, has, by the end of U.S.A., come to the conclusion that the struggle is ultimately futile. So what is left? If Dos Passos simply gives up, then how can we ever hope to find any signs of life; that is, indications that a world other than our current world could ever come to be?

Naturally, this question necessitates thinking about other questions, of what exactly utopia means, and of how we conceptualize the concept. In this regard, I once again draw on the work of Fredric Jameson, who, in Archaeologies of the Future, sketches out a taxonomy that is highly relevant to U.S.A. He outlines a bifurcation in the way that utopian impulses manifest themselves that is especially useful in terms of thinking about U.S.A. and its connection to potentiality:

We would therefore . . . posit two distinct lines of descendency from

More's inaugural text: the one intent on the realization of the Utopian

program, the other an obscure yet omnipresent Utopian impulse finding its

way to the surface in a variety of covert expressions and practices. (3)

There are two ways of thinking about utopia: the first is, essentially, the one outlined above. This is a way that is in search of socialism or any other radical political change, 77

an impulse “intent on the realization of the Utopian program.” In other words, it is intent on enacting a belief system. We can call this totalizing thinking, inasmuch as it is seeking a utopian totality.

The second way of thinking about utopia, in Jameson's conception, is much more vague and less programmatic, manifesting itself in smaller glimpses that cannot be conceived of as representing a totality. This manifests itself in piecemeal ways, and can be present in small bits of social reform: it can't be claimed that this or that particular thing (say, enhanced safety regulations or the institution of a minimum wage) is, in itself, utopian, but it can be argued that it contains the seeds of utopianism—that is, that it contains in itself a utopian wish and potentiality: it is “allegorical of a wholesale transformation of social totality” (4).

The similarity between this and José Esteban Muñoz's notion of potentiality is striking. Muñoz, as I have noted, argues that, by means of the modeling in the present of small gestures that indicate potential futures, we can, as Muñoz argues, “not[e] what

Bloch has called the anticipatory illumination that radiates from certain works of art”

(99). This does not mean that utopia exists in the here and now; it doesn't even map out a concrete path by which we would get from where we are now to a utopian mode of living. But what it does do is insist on a world in which utopian futures are not precluded; in which the desired world is, as it were, around the corner: that is, it may not be here, but we can recognize it by the light it reflects into the present, thereby creating 78

anticipation for a future, as well as a positive sense that this future does, in fact, exist, even if we cannot see it as a totality.

Both potentiality and Jameson's non-totalizing utopia try to imagine a future, not by laying out specific plans, but rather by enacting, in a small way, a future in the present.

The central difference is that what Jameson is describing—what we can call “non- totalizing utopia”—is associated more with the realm of specific policy; i.e., if you enact

X reform, you are implying a more extensive future than that reform in itself would seem to indicate. Potentiality, by contrast, is focused on the ways that individual human interactions can indicate particular futures. However, the similarities are greater than the differences: both, by enacting pieces of the future in the present, are in a sense committing the revolutionary act of asserting a world order contradicting the one currently in place.

Very broadly, we can think of the distinction between totalizing and potentializing utopias as one between political and personal modes. The totalizing has a personal component, certainly, but it is concerned with relationships less for their own sake and more for the way that they are able to contribute to a better understanding of the world.

The potentializing, by contrast, is entirely personal: it has political ramifications, as I will argue, but these are not the entire goal, as they are with the totalizing.

Now, it should be apparent that, for Lukács, only the first of these modes of utopia

—the totalizing—is of any importance. The use of the word “totalizing” in the above description should very much be taken to refer to totality in a Lukácsian sense. As I have 79

shown, Lukács believes that literature can help readers to understand the totality of society and the way that its different strands fit together. A utopian mode that does not contribute to this goal is not useful. As I show in this chapter, this is also an important concern of Dos Passos; the difference is that Dos Passos, in U.S.A., argues essentially that, although a totality is valuable in theory, in practice it is an impossibility.

In the case of U.S.A., it is easy to sympathize with Lukács on the importance of totality: as I will show, the trilogy really does take great pains to show the ways in which both personal relationships and political activism are futile, which certainly could be read as a call for quietism. However, I argue that there is an aspect to these novels that is easy to miss, and that, indeed, Dos Passos himself seems to have missed, and that aspect has to do with potentiality.

I argue that, in fact, pace Lukács' objections, potentiality has a great deal of value from a utopian standpoint. It allows us to imagine futures even when the paths to such futures appear to have been closed off. Furthermore, I argue that we can indeed see indications of such potentialities in U.S.A. However, they don't register as they otherwise might, because the novels do not see them as positive indications of potential futures.

That is to say, Dos Passos himself seems unaware of the full implications of his narrative.

Moments of potentiality are only conceptualized as brief incidents that underscore the fact that achieving what Dos Passos would like to achieve—a totalizing utopia—is impossible. If we do think about them in terms of their potential, however, a different understanding of the novels becomes possible. 80

For Dos Passos, the question of totality is tied up with the question of language, and how it can help or hinder both interpersonal relationships and one's understanding of the world. If language were vital and energetic, then people would be able to both form strong relationships and understand the world, and these two abilities, combined, would allow them to effectively band together to challenge the status quo. However, U.S.A. indicates, time and time again, that language has become desiccated and cliché-ridden to such an extent that as a vehicle to achieve these goals, it has no value. Over and over,

Dos Passos shows his characters failing to connect with one another and failing to achieve whatever radical political aspirations they may have. From these books, then, readers do not gain a sense of totality; rather, they merely get a sense of why, for Dos

Passos, this totality is impossible.

I, however, contend that this is an inadequate way of understanding the world of

U.S.A. It is true that language in the novels is vitiated. It is further true that characters in the novels are unable to form strong relationships with one another. However, while these two facts are certainly causally related to one another to a degree, the central thrust of my argument is that this relation is not as absolute as Dos Passos thinks it is. For Dos

Passos, strong personal relationships and political effectiveness necessarily correlate, the former driving the latter, and this is where utopian possibilities must inhere. To generalize, it could be said that U.S.A. is essentially a novel about relationships, how they fail, and how these failures preclude said utopian possibilities. 81

However, it is possible for relationships to function on another level—a level that has no ability to facilitate the sort of totalizing utopia that Dos Passos envisions, but that does offer utopian hope on a potentializing level, something which is outside of his sphere of interest, and therefore invisible to him. Dos Passos believes that relationships can be evaluated entirely based on whether or not they are utopian in a totalizing way.

However, I argue that, in spite of his lack of interest in anything that could be called

“potentiality,” we can at several points in the novels see interpersonal relationships that do indeed possess potentializing power, and thus have value that is not apparent if we take them purely at face value as intended by the author.

In the first part of this chapter, I sketch out the relationship between U.S.A., language, and totality. For this section, I am substantially indebted to Seth Moglen, who, in his book Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American

Capitalism argues that

it is not merely the Hearst press that seeks to produce “an idiot lack of

memory”; it is not certain elites who manipulate the shibboleths of the Red

Scare; it is not some within the Left who speak entirely in “mindclosing

labels”: it is everyone in the fictional universe of U.S.A. who has lost

control of language and is doomed to self-trivialization. In this world,

everyone is part of the intellectually vacuous “subway-packing mass”—

and, as a result, political transformation is doomed to failure. (194) 82

I will note several examples of this. The central point is that language, for reasons that are never made entirely clear (was this state of affairs caused by capitalism, or is capitalism merely a symptom?), is not an effective vehicle for “political transformation.”

It is not just a matter of “political transformation” either: as noted above, personal and political relationships are very closely related to one another in U.S.A. I look at the ways that language is felt to be detrimental both to characters' personal relationships and their social and political understanding—which, for Dos Passos, are substantially interwoven. If people were able to use language effectively, they would be able both to have healthy, enduring relationships with one another and effectively agitate for radical political reform. But they can't, and that is the central problem, and the one that puts Dos

Passos at odds with Lukács: Dos Passos has essentially given up; decided that capitalism has rendered this impossible, and therefore the only thing to do is mourn its ascendency; whereas for Lukács, this ascendency is only all the more reason to continue to strive to depict society accurately.

I argue that, from a Lukácsian perspective, Dos Passos has done an impressively thorough job of closing off totalizing possibilities. In his book The Cultural Front: The

Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, Michael Denning argues that the problem with U.S.A.—the reason that the trilogy no longer seems to have the cultural resonance as the works of Dos Passos' peers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald—is that Dos

Passos' work is very much of its time and nothing beyond that time: it chronicles an eternal present. It is a “vision of the world as an endless and repetitive cocktail party” 83

(183). The novel, therefore, appears to be something of a cul-de-sac: since utopia in this sense is explicitly associated with futurity (because it requires a complete reordering of society, and therefore cannot exist in the here and now), and there is no future, it has systematically ruled out the possibility of utopia.

However, in the second part of the chapter, I argue that, by embracing the concept of potentiality, we can see a possible way to bypass this dead end that Dos Passos' novels so effectively depict. As outlined above, utopia is not absent in the novel: we can see a number of moments of the non-totalizing sort that Jameson identifies and that I have associated with potentiality. Dos Passos may not acknowledge them as possessing any larger significance, but they are present. What these have in common is that they avoid the problem of language. The characters involved in these moments are no “smarter” or more connected to society in a totalizing way than anyone else. What they, the moments, show, however, is that language may not be as vital as Dos Passos thinks it is—or, more precisely, there may be relationships and therefore utopian potentialities that need not be limned by language. For the novel itself, these moments appear merely to be wistful fantasies of a world that can never be. But to me, they stand out as real instances of potentiality; of futures within the present that, by Dos Passos' articulating them, come to presage a world in which all of these language problems have been rendered irrelevant.

In the final and longest part of the chapter, I focus on the character of Margo

Dowling. Margo is an aspiring movie starlet; she leads a rough life, and she is generally an amoral character. There is nothing about her in particular that would seem to presage 84

anything notably different than anyone else in the trilogy. I argue, however, that by looking at her, and in particular her relationship with her mother-in-law Agnes, we receive a glimpse of a world in which the suffocating limitations that language failures place on Dos Passos' characters are not lifted, but rendered irrelevant. This relationship is not one that totalizes in any way; it certainly is not one that Dos Passos sees as useful, or having any utopian value. To me, however, this is emblematic of a certain myopia on his part.

We see that, in point of fact, people are capable of enacting a future in the present, even if Dos Passos does not see this. It seems to me that Margo is a vital component of any argument that addresses questions of how language does not have to be the deciding factor in the trilogy. She is no more self-aware than anyone else, nor is she able to somehow “transcend” the bounds of language. However, she turns out to demonstrate a greater ability to relate to people than any of the other main characters in the novel—it's just that what this ability accomplishes is not anything that the novels see as valuable.

She has no political ideals or social awareness, but, in spite of her mercenary tendencies, she is able to see people as people in a way that nobody else can, and thereby relate to them in ways that are more than superficial, even if they do not offer any kind of chance to change the world in a totalizing way. Why this should be is a perplexing question, but the central fact remains that it is. This allows her to have a relationship with her mother- in-law that is more strong and lasting than any other parent/child relationship in the novel, and this is why she is able to be a success in her chosen career. The fact that this career—Hollywood star—is certainly not felt to be socially admirable is beside the point, 85

which is that in the character of Margo, we are able to see a vision of a world in which people do not have to be constrained by language. This is not because the problems of language vanish, but rather because, in spite of everything, human connections exist that this language is not able to crush. This is a powerful vision, and all the more so because it's clear that it doesn't even register to Dos Passos: in spite of all the author's efforts, somehow a vision of hope is able to make its way into his generally hopeless novels.

U.S.A. and Language

Central to Dos Passos' novel is the oft-noted13 idea that the country, and therefore the novel also, is defined by words. “Mostly U.S.A. Is the speech of the people,” he writes in his introduction. This is emphasized by the fact that many of the central characters therein do work involving language in some way: J. Ward Moorehouse and

Dick Savage are both poets manqués turned public relations men (i.e., people dedicated to the twisting of language for financial ends); on the other side of the spectrum, Mac and

Mary French are both involved in publishing radical journals. The problem is that language has become significantly degraded, as famously articulated near the end of The

Big Money: “our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language

13 In addition to Moglen, see, for example, Lydenburg, Gurko, Sartre, and Whipple. Millgate charges that this is a flaw; that the trilogy “displays the faults of colloquial speech,” resulting in “a certain lack of variety and tension” (130-131). 86

inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul” (371).

The question is, what does this “foulness” practically entail? The answer, I would argue, is substantially Lukácsian. “Clean words” are those that are able to correctly understand and paint an accurate picture of society's socioeconomic state—what Lukács praises Balzac (e.g.) for. “Foul” words, then, are those that obscure this state. On this point, Dos Passos and Lukács appear to be in agreement: for there to be any chance of a totalizing utopia, it is necessary to be able to understand the true nature of the world.

They differ inasmuch as Lukács firmly believes that it is important that literature always attempt to do this, whereas Dos Passos has decided that it is impossible and devotes his trilogy to making that point. It is no surprise, then that Lukács would not see Dos Passos as a writer of successful literature.

Another difference between the two is that, unlike Lukács, Dos Passos places a great deal of emphasis on personal as well as economic relations. As I have argued, for him, the two are inextricably linked: if people are not able to form relationships that are healthy—because they are based on a clear-eyed view of the world—then they cannot be expected to be able to effectively work towards any kind of totalizing utopia—and, again, from his perspective, this is the only kind of utopia that is of interest. By way of example, let us look at a few specific instances in the novel.

First, let us examine the following passage from The 42nd Parallel, which Moglen also points out as an example of language's failures. In it, Mac, the first of the trilogy's 87

viewpoint characters, has just met up with Ike, a fellow vagrant with an interest in socialism. They have the following dialogue:

“I read Bellamy's Looking Backward . . . that's what made me a socialist.”

“Tell me about it” . . . “It's about a galoot that goes to sleep an' wakes up

in the year two thousand and the social revolution's all happened and

everything's socialistic an' there's no jails or poverty and nobody works for

themselves an' there's no way anybody can get to be a rich bondholder or

capitalist and life's pretty slick for the working class.” “That's what I

always thought . . . It's the workers who create wealth and they ought to

have it instead of a lot of drones.” “If you could do away with the capital-

ist system and the big trusts and Wall Street things 'ud be like that.” (49)

Mac and Ike have similar outlooks, outlooks with which Dos Passos is certainly sympathetic. Therefore, this seems like a better-than-usual opportunity for two people to really connect—showing the relationship between the political and the personal and the way one can enhance the other. However, as Moglen notes,

the trivializing effect of this dialogue derives from its disturbing mixture

of sincerity and vacuity. Mac and Ike are expressing ideas that we know

to be responsive to their experiences and aspirations. But their speech is

comprised of mystifying tautologies and simplistic formulations. . . .

Communication founders, as Mac's language coagulates into cliché. . . .

Through hackneyed dialogue of this kind . . . Dos Passos insists that even 88

at the very moments of maximum sincerity and involvement, his

characters are incapable of substantive communication. (196)

There is no Lukácsian effort made to see how the different aspects of the system fit together. They suggest that this would be a world in which “there's no jails or poverty and nobody works for themselves an' there's no way anybody can get to be a rich bondholder or capitalist,” but this vision falls flat because it isn't founded on any kind of substantive analysis; it is composed only of vague, empty platitudes. There's no explanation for how this socialist utopia was achieved beyond the unhelpful “the social revolution's all happened,” and it doesn't inspire either character to consider what one might do if one believes in such ideals. In other words, the existence of people who believe similar things to the things that Dos Passos believes is not enough, if they're unable to conceptualize the meaning of what they believe. Mac and Ike may bond over their shared politics, but since these politics are superficial in the sense that they don't get to the core issues that theoretically undergird the characters' beliefs, they are unable to do so in any other than a similarly superficial way. Naturally, as we will see, this does not apply only to politics; relationships of any sort are always based on surface-level factors that are therefore unable to get at the way things really are.

For an example that limns the way that personal relationships are ruined by the words, let us look at the character of Richard Ellsworth Savage. Savage is, at the beginning of the novel, very much akin to the inhabitants of Dos Passos' earlier, less sophisticated novels. He immerses himself in an anachronistic romantic tradition that has 89

no real meaning in the modern world: “he and Ned . . . had tea and conversations about books and poets in the afternoons and lit the room with candles;” he also and involves himself, inchoately, with left-wing politics. He “found himself getting all worked up about the New Freedom, Too Proud to Fight, Neutrality in Mind and Deed, [and]

Industrial Harmony between capital and labor” (69), suggesting that these interests, such as they are, boil down to empty slogans with no genuine content behind them: ineffectual words. It would be necessary to clean the words if there were to be any chance of achieving a totalizing utopia, but what we see here with Savage is that it's not just that the battle was doomed from the start; in fact, there was no battle. Even when he comes out against the war or tries to engage with art, he's unable to do so in anything other than standard, empty language. Since this language is the central problem, if he cannot rid himself of that, even to a limited degree, there isn't much of anything that he can do other than gradually give way to the inevitability of being co-opted and used by the very system that he thought he was opposing.

There's a lot to be said for the idea of holding up Dick in particular as representative of the problems that prevent the characters in U.S.A. face from being anything but, as one critic puts it, “lifeless puppets manufactured for the sole purpose of being destroyed” (Aldridge 69), since we explicitly see him moving from inchoate protest against society to full co-optation by that same society. But I want to look specifically at his attitude and conduct regarding romance, since this gets to the core of the problem regarding human connections. Naturally, romantic love is represented in U.S.A. as something that, in the long term and usually in the short term as well, is unrealizable. 90

Moglen argues that the problem is that men want sex, but they “experience their physical

'need' as detached from any interest in individual women or from any desire for emotional connection” (205)—this, I would further argue, because they are only dealing in words, and, as we've seen, these words do not refer to the world as it really exists in any meaningful way. This means that they're always trying to find sex, but the only socially-sanctioned vehicle for this is marriage, which idea they fear both because, as noted, they don't feel the need for emotional connection, and also because society requires and encourages a kind of “mobility” to which marriage would prove an impediment.14 For their part, women generally resist sex, whether because they've internalized the same hypocritical standards as the men or because they realize the devastating consequences of unmarried pregnancy.

This is very much the situation in which Savage finds himself. He is brought up to believe that “he must avoid temptation and always serve God with a clean body and a clean mind, and keep himself pure for the lovely sweet girl he would some day marry”

(59), but the fact that this is nothing more than a meaningless, abstract ideal with no reference to actual, specific women means that it quickly goes by the wayside in the face of minor temptation. In a very general way, and in spite of its narrow, bourgeois nature, this advice tries to address an actual problem: the fact is, his exploitive and commerce- based sexual encounters are harmful to everyone involved; the “lovely sweet girl” formulation represents an inchoate attempt to counter this, but, mired as it is in banality, it is unable to do any such thing effectively.

14Leo Gurko thoroughly explicates this idea, arguing that travel is central to the novel, emphasizing people's rootlessness. “No one settles down to anything for long” (52). 91

Regardless, he retains some half-formed sense that he wants something “pure”— i.e., a way of interacting with romantic partners that would be able to get past the unclean words. “Everything's so hellishly sordid,” he laments; “I'm sick of whores and chastity, I want to have love affairs” (282). On the face of it, this would seem to indicate that, at the very least, he has a desire for a world unaffected by capitalism and its attendant evils, but, again, the fatal flaw is that he isn't able to associate this desire for “love affairs” with actual, real women, because he can't see them as they really are—just as Mac and Ike are unable to see their political ideals as they really are. It's why he's able to pivot so easily from romantic idealism to unvarnished misogyny. This wouldn't happen—or at least wouldn't be so wholly predictable and inevitable—if his desire were directed at actual people, rather than at vague, free-floating ideas. His central “love affair,” such as it is, is with a woman named Anne Elizabeth Trent (another viewpoint character, identified in section titles as “Daughter”), who is working as a nurse on the western front with the Red

Cross. When their first sexual encounter proves abortive, for basically the reasons that

Moglen outlines, he snaps that “you oughtn't to start anything you don't want to finish.

Oh, I think women are terrible . . . except prostitutes . . . there you know what you're getting” (297). Indeed, because “what you're getting” there is a matter of a simple commercial transaction—the sort of thing that capitalism is well-equipped to encompass, and that people operating therein can easily understand. Trying to approach a romantic relationship in those terms is a guaranteed disaster, but Dick knows no other way (nor does Anne Elizabeth, of course, but we sympathize with her not only because she is a kinder person than Dick, but because she is the one who stands to materially suffer here). 92

Given a basic understanding of these issues, and of how U.S.A. works in general, it is possible to predict the outcome of this relationship with a great degree of accuracy.

The sex proves brutally unsatisfactory: “it was all right, but she bled a good deal and they didn't have a very good time. At supper afterwards they couldn't find anything to say to each other” (299). Then, when she gets pregnant, he immediately panics: “she was going to have a baby; she expected him to marry her; I'm damned if I will” (307). All through this, we see his failure to deal her as a real person. And all he's able to do when forced to deal with her face to face is babble inanities: “I don't know what love is . . . I suppose I love any lovely girl . . . and especially you, sweetheart.” At any rate, the key point here comes when he finally, cruelly, dismisses her for good, at which point “he thought of

Anne Elizabeth going home alone in a taxicab through the wet streets. He wished he had a great many lives so that he might have spent one of them with Anne Elizabeth. Might write a poem about that and send it to her. And the smell of the little cyclamens.” (315-

316). Laura Browder's response to this provides a good summation of the situation, and the ways in which the words are able to dull human feeling:

his response—to write a poem—is so inadequate to the situation, has so

little to do with his responsibility to Anne Elizabeth, that his callousness

comes across as shocking. For Savage, the little cyclamens are no more or

less important than the ruin of Anne Elizabeth's life: His art enables him to

distance himself not only from the experience of the populace as a whole

but from the individual pain he has caused. His divorce of language from 93

moral responsibility makes him perfectly suited for a role in shaping the

burgeoning consumer culture of postwar America. (56)

Note the relation between the personal and political here. Even if Dick's treatment of

Anne Elizabeth isn't causally related to his harmful future public-relations career, it's nonetheless obvious that the two of them have the same roots, in degraded language. My only objection to this is the idea that the primary issue has something do do with Dick's individual character. He's certainly not a good person, but in fact, it's a larger social problem: the fact that he thinks, speaks, and lives in clichés only means that he, like everyone else, is thoroughly inculcated in the ideals of capitalism, as facilitated by the words. True, some characters are, even within this context, not as bad as others, and would likely have behaved less badly in this situation, but the sobering fact is that regardless of who was involved, there was never any non-trivial chance of it ending well.

The real problem is that everything is flattened by language (and by extension also thought), thus enabling Dick to avoid having any sort of moral reckoning with himself after having done what he's done. This harkens back to Lukács, for whom it is essential that literature depict a hierarchy, that readers might understand how different parts of society function and which of them are the more important. For the characters of U.S.A., this is impossible; hence, the equivalence between Anne Elizabeth and the cyclamens.

Very likely, even if Dick did have a moral reckoning, it would not compel him to behave in a responsible manner. But at least it would require him to make a real choice. Swept along by forces they cannot control or understand and stripped of any substantial agency, nobody in U.S.A. chooses: things just happen to them, more or less with their consent. 94

The conclusion to be drawn from this is that, for reasons outlined above, relationships are doomed to fail, inasmuch as they cannot, by definition, be based on anything but the language in which they are conducted, which is thoroughly degraded.

Dick is an easy example due to the sheer egregiousness of his behavior and its consequences (trying to forget her troubles, Anne Elizabeth is subsequently killed in an unauthorized, drunken airplane flight with a French pilot), but the analysis applies just as well to anyone in the novel.

Potentiality in U.S.A.

This state of affairs is all highly problematic if we are trying to think about Dos

Passos' novels in terms of totality. We are not left with much opportunity for hope for the future. But I would like to argue here that, in fact, the novel's occasional utopian moments are more important than Dos Passos gives them credit for being; that he has inadvertently planted seeds of potentiality into the text, thus imbuing it with a utopian character in spite of itself. These are moments in which we are able to see people having relationships with one another that, though not contributing to any sort of totality or in any way escaping the bounds of language, are nonetheless of a sort that lends itself to potentiality—that is to say, they show us visions in which the worldview that orders the bulk of the novels is reconfigured. This kind of utopia is not one that Dos Passos is able 95

to perceive as valuable, but, again, I would argue that these situations allow us to see

U.S.A. in a different light than the one intended.

To show what I mean, I would like to present several examples. These are interesting for what they have in common and for the ways that ways that they undermine the rest of the trilogy's despair. The first instance comes in The 42nd Parallel when Mac, finding himself aimless and adrift, is taken in by a farm family.

The rancher . . . went over to the barn and offered him work for a few days

at the price of his board and lodging. They were kind to him, and had a

pretty daughter named Mona that he kinder fell in love with. She was a

plump rosy-cheeked girl, strong as a boy and afraid of nothing. She

punched him and wrestled with him; and . . . he could hardly sleep nights

for thinking of her. He lay in his bed of sweetgrass telling over the touch

of her bare arm that rubbed along his when she handed him back the

nozzle of the sprayer for the fruittrees . . . and the roundness of her breasts

and her breath sweet as a cow's on his neck when they romped and played

tricks on each other evenings after supper. (62)

This is the entirety of the fantasia, but there are several important points to be noted here.

First, we see that the gender disparities, which we saw play themselves out to such devastating effect with regard to Dick and Anne Elizabeth, and which Mac is as subject to elsewhere as much as anyone in the novel, have disappeared. Mona is “strong as a boy,” and we can see, in the way that they roughhouse with one another, that the essentially 96

predatory nature of gender relations that dominates the trilogy is absent here: Mac and

Mona are able to relate to one another as equals. This is not wholly unproblematic; as we can see, the fact that they are able to do this is primarily related to the fact that Mona's behavior is what would traditionally be considered “masculine,” and has little to do with what Mac does or does not do. This certainly shows some degree of bias, conscious or not, in Dos Passos' thinking, but regardless, the passage shows that crippling gender distinctions are not immutable. Furthermore, note that this segment takes place in a bucolic country setting. This is a pattern; we see over and over that this is Dos Passos' preferred setting for utopias of this type. There seems to be the implicit suggestion that language, associated with civilization, fails in that context, but that outside of it, it loses its power to constrain people's lives.

It should be emphasized that, in this scenario, there is no indication that Mac and

Mona's relationship has suddenly rendered them capable of renewed language; of understanding the world in a totalizing way. If this were the case, their story might have greater value for Dos Passos. As it is, however, its value is entirely of a potentializing nature, and so invisible to him.

Of course, a more usual way of things reasserts itself quickly enough: “The

Thomases had other ideas for their daughter” (62), suggesting a return to a more standard mode of sexual commerce. But for a brief moment it was able to suggest that, contrary to the trilogy's general impression, people are, at least in theory, not so fundamentally flawed that they are unable to live anything other than relentlessly superficial lives. It is 97

a vision, and even if it is only present so as to emphasize the fact that such dynamics are, given the state of the world, impossible, it is remains powerful as an alternative conception of society.

A similar instance comes when, as an adolescent, Janey Williams has “the best day of her life” (111) on a canoeing trip with her brother Joe and the boy she has a crush on, Alec.

It made Janey's throat tremble to watch Alec's back and the bulging

muscles of his arm as he paddled, made her feel happy and scared. She sat

there in her white dimity dress, trailing her hand in the weedy browngreen

water. They stopped to pick waterlilies and the white flowers of arrow-

head that glistened like ice . . . The cream soda got warm and they drank it

that way and kidded each other back and forth and Alec caught a crab and

covered Janey's dress with greemslimy splashes and Janey didn't care a bit

and they called Joe skipper and he loosened up and said he was going to

join the navy and Alec said he'd be a civil engineer and build a motorboat

and take them all cruising and Janey was happy because they included her

when they talked just like she was a boy too. (112)

The same elements are here: in an idealized country setting, stifling gender barriers fade away, even if in a somewhat problematic way (“they included her when they talked just like she was a boy too”) and people can be themselves (“Joe loosened up”), in contrast to the strict boundaries imposed by the words. “'I don't ever want to go home,' said Joe, 98

suddenly serious” (113), suggesting an awareness that this situation is contingent on being away from “home,” and that returning is going to reinstate all of the limitations that had temporarily been lifted.

Neither of these examples is explicitly political. However, there is one place where we can see the intersection of the political and personal in a utopian mode: this is in the brief involvement of Mary French—political activist and the novel's de facto

“hero”15—with Ben Compson, the Jewish radical who had first appeared as a viewpoint character in 1919 and had been sent to jail for his opposition to the war. After he's let out, in The Big Money, broken and paranoid, Mary is asked to put him up at her apartment while he tries to get back on his feet; romance ensues.

...the two of them decided that they loved each other. Mary was happier

than she'd ever been in her life. They romped around like kids on Sunday

and went out walking in the park to hear the band play in the evening.

They threw sponges at each other in the bathroom and teased each other

while they were getting undressed; they slept tightly clasped in each other's

arms. (356)

They appear to have gotten past the usual oppressions of the book's language. The problem is that, while they are happy together, their politics have nothing to do with it, and in fact, it is those politics that ruin this idyll: Ben wants to get better so he can go back to trying to fight the system, but his politics are every bit as immersed in the same

15For a good overview of Mary, see Clara Juncker's article “Romancing the Revolution: Dos Passos' Radical Heroine.” 99

old words as Mary is, and thus still doomed to failure. Here we can see quite clearly how

Dos Passos's ideals get in the way of forging real utopia. Mary and Ben are able to have a relationship that, in the potentializing sense, is valuable and utopian in nature.

However, Dos Passos has no interest in that; we would only care if this relationship was clearly political and totalizing—that is, if it offered an explicit means to achieve radical social reform. Therefore, he cannot simply let the potentializing version of the relationship speak for itself; he feels compelled to place it back in the regular political order, from which it is doomed to fail, at which point Dos Passos can point to it as just another indication of the hopelessness of the sociopolitical milieu, never realizing that in so doing, he had glossed over a radically different way of approaching utopian ideals.

The two of them are thrown together by extreme circumstances, and hence are able to forge real bonds. But these bonds do not last, any more than any other of the novel's moments of potentiality do.

It is easy to anatomize the relationships and its failure in Dos Passos' terms.

Mary's notions of romance and gender roles are—as Janet Galligani Casey argues16— entirely those of the status quo; the same old, worn-out words. This, I would further

16She argues that Mary's habit of servility . . . defines her relationship with men, as her exaggerated nurturing tendencies enable their exaggerated needs to authority and influence. Each of her romantic relationships gives rise to a typically gendered division of labor, whereby Mary, in addition to her social work, serves as secretary, valet, and cheerleader to a male whose political activities are presumed to be more meaningful than hers. (172) In spite of its positive aspects, this is also true to a substantial extent of her relationship with Ben. Note that these situations do not necessarily indicate that the men involved are being cynical or intentionally manipulative (though some of them clearly are); they're as helplessly subject to the system as the women are. 100

assert, is because her sensibilities are shaped by the words, as indicated by not just her general upbringing but also by the way we see her reading Sinclair and Ernest Poole. If, as I have argued, the important thing for society to function in a healthy way is relationships, then we can see here how the words, by upholding social norms, prevent relationships from forming. It is an insidious process; Mary wants to change the world, but, like everyone else, she lacks the self-awareness to see just how deeply mired she is in the current world. “Mary's unselfconscious submission to the gender roles of bourgeois society suggests ultimately that she is incapable of social challenge on a higher plane”

(173), Casey argues. This seems correct to me; however, it also, problematically, performs the critical move of insisting that we see a relationship such as Mary's and Ben's in the context of the society depicted in the rest of the novel. It is only natural to try to do this, but it obscures the point that, in fact, situations like Ben's and Mary's are important precisely because they are so out of sync with the majority of the narrative. We can easily point out the ways in which they are doomed to fail, but in so doing, we lose sight of the fact that, by asserting an order that seems wholly untenable, they are engaging in potentializing thinking; defiantly showing us a different, radically utopian way of living.

How to get from here to there is not the point, as much as Dos Passos may believe it is the only thing that matters.

Margo Dowling 101

For a number of reasons, I find Margo to be the most interesting character in all of

U.S.A. Her story relates to the potentialities that I note above; while her story is not exactly the same as those, it does allow us to look at potentiality in a more sustained way, to see what happens when Dos Passos allows a relationship with potentializing rather than totalizing characteristics and allows it to last for longer than a few paragraphs.

The importance that I attach to her is not widely shared; if critics note Margo at all, it is usually in periphery, as just another example among many of someone riding the capitalist merry-go-round, exerting little of her own will, exhibiting little in the way of social conscience, and ultimately getting where she gets through a series of arbitrary circumstances.17 But if we wish to contest the notion that “there are no people in the book, only automata walking stiffly to the beat of Dos Passos' despair” (Ward 125), I believe that this is where we must look.

Margo and Mary French, together, dominate the bulk of the narrative of The Big

Money. They are both key characters in the novel; there are, in my view, two key differences between them, and neither have anything to do with the fact that the one has a social conscience and the other doesn't. First, it's that Margo has a helpful parental figure throughout her entire narrative, while Mary does not. Second, counterintuitively, Margo

17Maxwell Geismar claims that she is “perhaps the worst of [the characters in The Big Money]—this child accustomed to deceit, thieving, sexual depravity; this glamorous lady who would be deeply pathological if she were not totally amoral” (124). This is an exaggerated, uncharitable, and arguably misogynistic assessment, but it does show that U.S.A.'s tone is so all-pervasive that it's difficult to think of its characters other than in terms of it. Clara Juncker provides a better assessment of the character, fully exploring her substantial seamy side while also conceding that she nonetheless has a unique appeal; that in spite of everything, she is also “warm-hearted, generous, unselfish, and likeable” (13). Arthur Mizener likewise declares her “a fundamentally decent human being” (102); neither of them, however, make any effort to conceptualize what, if true, this demonstrates about the novel's overall assessment of human nature and the problems it causes. 102

is fundamentally a kinder person than Mary; more able to see other people as people, and thus more able to relate to them without getting caught up in language.18 These two things come together, and they prove significant in that they allow Margo to be much more successful at reaching her chosen goals than Mary is.

In fact, Margo is the only character in the novel who is truly successful. J. Ward

Moorehouse and Dick Savage are successes in their careers according to capitalist terms, but it is made clear that this “success” is not and can never be sufficient to ameliorate the emptiness of their lives. Whereas Margo, in spite of having to endure a greater degree of suffering than most, achieves her goals, with no indication that she's anything but glad to have done this. This is not to say, of course, that her idea of “success”—fame as a

Hollywood starlet—is seen by Dos Passos as in any way socially valuable. Indeed, the ephemeral nature of moving pictures is indicative of the kind of hollow, insubstantial culture that the novel decries. The fact remains, though, that she is unique in the novel, and it's worth looking in more detail at the reasons as to why this should be so, and seeing, by extension, whether these reasons could apply even to characters who have

18Many people would strongly dispute this characterization, based on Mary's social conscience and her selfless hard work on behalf of social justice, but this is missing the point. While I do not want to take anything away from the character, who is indeed genuinely admirable, I would argue that, unlike Margo, she lacks the instinctive ability to see people as people and not merely abstractions. Thinking of the work there was to be done to make the country what it ought to be, the social conditions, the slums, the shanties with filthy tottering backhouses, the miners' children in grimy coats too big for them, the overworked women stooping over stoves, the youngsters struggling for an education in nightschools, hunger and unemployment and drink, and the police and the lawyers and the judges always ready to take it out on the weak . . . (93) If this sounds as though she's gleaned her knowledge of working conditions from social novels, it's because she has; Dos Passos specifically mentioned that she's been reading The Jungle as she's thinking these things; in other words, her thinking is founded on clichés about people more than it is on actual people themselves, and thus it is not surprising that she should have difficulty relating to people in the flesh, as opposed to as abstract concepts. Note also that her classifying “drink” as a social problem the same level as “hunger” indicates a somewhat Sinclair-like sensibility on her part. 103

actual political aspirations. If they could—and, as we will see, there is no compelling reason why they couldn't—then we can read U.S.A. in a substantially different light than we might have expected we could.

Margo's family life is tumultuous. Her father, Fred, is an alcoholic, which ultimately destroys him, but he's kind when sober, and Dos Passos' description of her life with her father and stepmother (on good days) seems to be another of the novel's occasional moments of potentiality:

…they'd let Margie sit up till she was nodding and her eyes were sandy

and there was the sandman coming in the door, listening to Fred tell about

pocket billiards and sweepstakes and racehorses and terrible fights in the

city. Then Agnes would carry her into bed in the cold room and Fred

would stand over her smoking his pipe and tell her about shipwrecks at

Fire Island when he was in the Coast Guard, till the chinks of light coming

in through the door from the kitchen got more and more blurred, and in

spite of Margie's trying all the time to keep awake because she was so

happy listening to Fred's burring voice, the sandman she'd tried to pretend

had lost the train would come in behind Fred, and she'd drop off. (130)

This harkens back to those moments that I noted above, in that here we see a family communicating and interacting with one another without language ruining everything. It is purely a transient situation, of course; however, I want to point out the scene of familial bliss it paints, and in particular to note Fred's stories. Fred is no more self-aware than 104

anyone else, but the stories that he tells are nonetheless able to form a vital part of a relationship with his daughter, regardless of whether or not they are in any way totalizing.

This family dynamic does not provide us with any sort of totalizing insight, and yet it is still a positive one. This is a recurring theme in Margo's story: in spite of the evidence of the balance of U.S.A., just because the character is unable to rise above the problematic nature of the words does not necessarily mean that she is unable to achieve deeper connections with others. We see, then—as we saw in the first half of this chapter, in which I pointed out other moments of non-totalizing utopia—that, in fact, a properly totalizing socioeconomic understanding is not actually necessary for people to connect with one another. Why should this be? Here, again, we return to the notion of potentiality, which, as I have noted, provides a vision rather than a blueprint. Margo's early family life certainly does not provide the latter; that is, it does not demonstrate any totalization. However, it does provide a vision of a world that is counter to the more prevalent world of U.S.A., thus keeping alive a utopian mode that Dos Passos has no interest in but that, I would argue, is very important in its own right. This is a recurring theme in Margo's narrative. The way she goes through life, oblivious to any of the larger issues that are important to Dos Passos, seems to condemn her as no different than anyone else in the novel. And yet, her life, and particularly her persistent relationship with her mother-in-law, nonetheless offers great potentializing value, as I will show.

Before long, naturally, Fred (who had worked as a lifeguard) is out of the picture.

It has often been remarked that that the characters in U.S.A. do not have parents in any meaningful way: fathers quickly disappear or die, and mothers are indistinct background 105

characters who certainly don't have any real influence on their children's development or later lives. This emphasizes the novel's static quality, as noted by Moglen, Denning, and others; I.e., its lack of a sense of past or future. In this context, then, it is significant that

Agnes is by far the most important and effectual parental figure in the novel, in spite of not actually being related to her de facto daughter by blood. Agnes' own mother complains that she “thought it was very silly of her daughter to support the child of a noaccount like Fred” (137), drawing attention to this symbolic non-connection. The intention of this is probably to establish that, like every other connection in the novel, the relationship between Margo and Agnes is not “real,” but that's not how the story plays out.

To make ends meet, Agnes gets a job as a cook for a rich family. Margo, naturally, is less than appreciative of her hard work; she prefers Agnes' new husband, a vaudeville actor named Frank Mandeville, because “Agnes was always peevish, in a hurry to go to work or else deadtired just back from work, but Frank always spoke to her seriously as if she were a grownup young lady” (142). No serious analysis goes into considering why Agnes is how she is—why she can't be “nice” all the time; in other words, there is no deeper understanding of the economic factors that cause her to behave as she does. Yet, the fact that she does this—works hard to take care of her daughter-in- law—indicates that she is able to take steps to maintain such a relationship, even without any sort of larger, totalizing understanding. 106

To a large extent, Margo's lack of appreciation looks like ordinary childish solipsism, but in the context of the novel, it seems to be just another indication of the failure of anybody to have good relationships. Her preference for Frank proves to be disastrous when he gets drunk and rapes her, marking the biggest trauma in her life thus far. Agnes never finds out about this; in spite of her perhaps forgivable obliviousness, though, she is always there, doing what is necessary for her daughter. In a sense, she's simply bypassing the words: she's as much a part of this society as anyone, and certainly not immune to surface-level triviality, but this does not prevent her from doing what she needs to do.

Margo, understandably eager to escape her situation, decides that she's fallen in love with a Cuban youth named Tony Garrido, and cajoles him into agreeing to marry her and take her back to Cuba. Agnes and Frank are of course utterly opposed to this, but

Margo steals some money from Agnes to pay for a marriage license, and they hastily get married and head down to Cuba. This turns out to have been a bad idea. Tony's descriptions of the regal life that they will live prove to have been, at best, wishful thinking, as she ends up a virtual prisoner with his family, while he himself is largely out of the picture (in an instance of the novel's casual homophobia, we are led to understand that his being in large part gay is a big part of the reason for this). Unfortunately, she's also pregnant, and due to some sort of sexually transmitted illness she's picked up from

Tony, the baby is born deformed and dies soon after. 107

This is the last straw, and she sends a telegram to Agnes begging her to send the considerable sum of fifty dollars so she can return home. Somehow, Agnes is able to scrape the money together, and when Margo gets back to New York, she doesn't reprimand her daughter at all for her poor decision-making. In fact,

Agnes was wonderful. She managed to raise money through the Morris

Plan19 for Margo's operation when Dr. Dennison said it was absolutely

necessary if her health wasn't to be seriously impaired, and nursed her the

way she'd nursed her when she'd had measles when she was a little girl.

When they told Margo she never could have a baby, Margo didn't care so

much but Agnes cried and cried. (203)

Once again, Agnes' selflessness is apparent. Note also their contrasting reactions to the news of Margo's barrenness. The fact that Margo “didn't care so much” is clearly indicative of the novel's larger lack of a meaningful sense of past or future: not only can she never have children, but the fact doesn't even bother her. Agnes, on the other hand, is very upset by this, indicating that she, in fact, does care about this loss, and that, even if her thinking in most ways isn't really different than anyone else in the novel, she is nonetheless able on some level to understand what this loss means—the elimination of a future—and to mourn it. This suggests, again, that, in fact, possessing a totalizing understanding of society is not actually necessary to imagine a future, or to mourn the lack of any such thing.

19A high-interest lending scheme instituted in 1910 and aimed at people who would not otherwise be able to get loans; see Louis N. Robinson's article “The Morris Plan.” 108

This pattern continues throughout Margo's narrative. For a time, she is kept by

Charley Anderson, Great War veteran and mechanic turned stock speculator. When he dies in a drunken auto accident, leaving her adrift, Agnes is there to help pick up the pieces. She reigns in her daughter's profligate tendencies, allowing them to weather their precarious financial situation (“Agnes wouldn't even let them get Coca-Cola at the dustylooking drugstores . . . because she said they had to save every cent if they weren't going to hit Los Angeles deadbroke” (314); she saves money (“they still had twentyfive dollars that Agnes had saved out of the housekeeping money in Miami, that she hadn't said anything about” (315)); she takes care of their finances when they're getting established in California (“Agnes was wonderful. She attended to everything” (323)); and she gets Margo a better contract when she finally breaks through and starts to make the big money (“Agnes was wonderful. She talked about commitments and important business to be transacted and an estate to care for” (322)). It's no exaggeration to say that without her, Margo would never have been able to achieve anything like the level of success that she does. This isn't to say that she is perfect, of course: Dos Passos mocks her for her conversion to Christian Science, her belief in seances, and her general sloppy sentimentality. But regardless of any character flaws, the fact remains that she is there and she doesn't ever give up or go away, something which is the case for no other supporting character in the novel. The fact that her relationship with her de facto daughter does not strive for any kind of totalizing understanding, and is not, in itself, going to effect wholesale societal transformation is irrelevant—and here, again, we see the way that Dos Passos is not always able to understand the significance of his own 109

characters, who here demonstrate that relationships can be productive without having anything to do with his preferred means of social reform.

For all that Margo is self-centered and not always appreciative of what she gets from Agnes or from anyone else, her character has substantial redeeming characteristics

—certainly more so than the novel's other “neutral” characters like Charley Anderson,

Eveline Hutchins, or Eleanor Stoddard; more, indeed, than anyone else in the novel.

This is an extreme claim, but I believe it to be the case. Chief among her positive traits is that she is, as a rule, genuinely kind to people, and thus capable of forming relationships with them that are not as weak or transitory as those formed by most characters in the novels (and, again, this is in spite of her not having any greater powers of language than anyone else). When her Cuban husband Tony reappears, strung-out, sick, and broke, she gets him medical attention and helps him to recover, even after he had stolen the last of her money and left her flat in a strange city. She also supports Agnes and even pays for

Frank's medical costs as he's dying of a kidney ailment. “I'm fond of my stepmother, believe it or not,” she remarks to Charley. “She's been the only friend I had in the world”

(287). In the world of U.S.A., “fondness” is cheap and doesn't mean very much; however, in this instance, the evidence suggests that it's more solid than usual. This is because she's good, not at any sort of deep thinking, but at seeing people as people—that is, entirely bypassing the words. This is in contrast to Dick Savage, for whom, as I've noted, romantic ideals are entirely disconnected from actual people. Even if she can be somewhat condescending about it at times, she is able to see the humanity even in her pathetic ex-husband, in spite of all he did to her. This is not wholly consistent, nor is it an 110

overriding philosophy of any sort, but it suggests that something of Agnes has rubbed off on her.

Alfred Kazin suggests that there are only two “survivors” In U.S.A.—that is, people who haven't been killed (like Charley), been politically defeated (like Mary), or had their lives exposed as thoroughly empty (like J. Ward Moorehouse). These are

“Vag,” the unnamed hitchhiker with whom Dos Passos closes the trilogy, and Margo. In fact, this isn't really technically accurate; near the very end of the novel, a character suggests that Margo's fall is imminent, that “she's through; it seems that she's no good for talkingpictures . . . voice sounds like the croaking of an old crow over the loudspeaker”

(442). This is only presented as a rumor, but it would be uncharacteristic of the novel if it turned out not to be true. However, it's easy to see how Kazin, or any critic, could gloss over that passage. The overwhelming impression that her story kindles is that she is nothing if not resilient, and that she's bound to ultimately do well enough for herself in some way or another, due to her surprising ability to relate to others in a small-scale, potentializing way.

Obviously, we cannot simply equate Margo's life and relationship with Agnes with those moments of non-totalizing utopia I have pointed to. We can easily see that

Margo's life cannot be termed “utopian” in any way; she may achieve a measure of success, but her life is difficult, and her future uncertain. In spite of this, however, we can think about this relationship in very much the same terms as the non-totalizing utopias in the novel. They, the moments, are not teleologically-oriented. They suggest 111

the potential for a totalizing utopia, but there's nothing about them in particular that suggests an effort to make any such thing come about. Their value is not the value of the social reformer, looking forward to a better future; it inheres in the moments themselves

—they are valuable with reference to what they are, rather than any longer-term goals they represent.

Margo and Potentiality

There is a sizable problem here: as noted, in spite of whatever redeeming characteristics she may have, Margo is perhaps the most wholly apolitical character in the trilogy; most of the others tend to find themselves in some way touched by sociopolitical events around them and thus are forced to be aware of them to some extent (even if, inevitably, only in a trivial way), but she manages to almost entirely avoid such things, and has no opinion about anything in which she is not personally invested. This obliviousness may be part of what allows her to escape some of the most pernicious effects of the words, but the fact remains, the existence of people like her is a significant part of the reason that social progress seems impossible. And while I would argue that her position is unique in the novel, it's not at all clear that that makes it “better.” Margo and Agnes are inseparable, but their conscious goals are not what Dos Passos sees as valuable: they want to make money from Margo's acting career. That is to say, they do 112

not in fact provide a shining beacon of selflessness from which we can draw clear-cut moral lessons.

I would argue that Margo's apolitical nature is actually quite important. There is an implicit argument in U.S.A. that political awareness is associated with the ability of people to form healthy relationships with one another. In his brilliant exegesis of “Lover of Mankind,” The 42nd Parallel's biography of Eugene Debs, Moglen notes that Debs' effectiveness is presented as being rooted in his ability to form homosocial bonds with workers, leading to the kind of solidarity that won him almost a million votes in the 1912

Presidential election. However, these bonds prove to be inadequate, and the workers' failure to stand with Debs when he is arrested in 1918 for opposing the war is connected with his political downfall. “But where were Gene Debs' brothers in nineteen eighteen when Woodrow Wilson had him locked up in Atlanta for speaking against war?” (20),

Dos Passos asks. In other words, if this is an accurate analysis, we should be able to correlate strong social bonds with political effectiveness.

However, we cannot do this: for the novel's fictional characters, there is no correlation between the two. Everyone save Margo fails, and fails in the same way: through poor thinking brought on by poor language, and by extension, through failures to relate to one another. It doesn't matter if Mary works her fingers to the bone for left-wing causes; her failure is still no less than anyone else's.

Therefore, it is necessary for us to reconsider the notion that this question of language is really even the main point. As I have noted, for whatever reason, Margo is, in 113

spite of everything, a kind person. This, combined with a mother-in-law who shares many of her sensibilities, allows her to succeed. I believe, therefore, that the real key would be to find people who share Margo's kindness and Mary's social conscience. Of course, this is much easier said than done. However, having demonstrated, both through small moments of potentiality and through the character of Margo, that language failure isn't necessarily the insurmountable barrier that it initially seemed, I would like to argue that we can question U.S.A.'s relentlessly pessimistic tone.

As I noted at the beginning of the chapter, Michael Denning argues that U.S.A. seems largely culturally irrelevant today, in spite of the widespread contemporaneous acclaim that led Lionel Trilling to call it “the most important American novel of the decade” (93). The reason for this, of course, is that it tells a story—of “the tale of the decline and fall of the Lincoln republic” (167)—that simply lacks contemporary relevance. However, I would like to think more carefully about this statement. It is true that U.S.A. is very culturally specific, but when we note that Dos Passos is only concerned with the here and now, we must also note that the case is actually more specific than this: he is concerned with the here and now, but he is only concerned with its failures: with the ways that people are unable to perceive the totality of society. The fact that, at a number of intervals, he shows that a failure to perceive the totality is not an insurmountable obstacle for forming strong relationships simply does not register. In demonstrating that these small non-totalizing utopias are, from a Lukácsian, totalizing perspective, not meaningful, he simultaneously demonstrates, inadvertently, that, from another perspective—that of the potentializing—there still may be reason for hope. 114

A key difference here between Lukács and Dos Passos is the way they conceive of the relationship between the personal and the political. For Lukács, it's quite straightforward: bad political conditions ruin people personally. For instance, of Tolstoy's short story “After the Ball,” he approvingly writes that it “show[s] . . . how the czarist régime transforms people decent and self-sacrificing in their private lives into passive and eager instruments of its brutality” (“Narrate” 129). The notable thing here is that this is purely a one-way street: there's no indication that being “decent and self-sacrificing” would allow anyone to stand up to the czarist régime. However, from my reading of

U.S.A., I take this to be the point exactly: “decency,” if only it could be achieved, would solve many of Dos Passos' problems. He does not believe that it can be, but as I have shown, the novel itself, read in the right way, belies this. CHAPTER 3

Robert Coover, Richard Nixon, and the Search for an Apolitical Utopia

Introduction

In the first two chapters, we moved from literature that is putatively concerned with a totalizing utopia to literature that has decided that such a utopia is impossible.

However, between the one and the other, the notion of utopia was fairly stable. Sinclair thought effort should be made to push the world in that direction, while Dos Passos decided that this was a hopeless effort; but they both agreed that America was corrupt in more or less the same ways, and they both depicted it in a generally naturalistic way. In this chapter, we will examine a novel with a substantially different epistemology.

Robert Coover's Public Burning was originally conceived, in 1966, as a piece of radical theater, which would recreate the executions of the Rosenbergs (which, to

Coover's eyes, seemed to have largely vanished from the public consciousness, in spite of having happened little more than a decade ago20). This never came to fruition, for various reasons mainly having to do with practicality, but the basic idea continued to gestate and

20See Larry McCaffery's interview with Coover, “As Guilty as the Rest of Them.”

115 116

develop, gradually becoming a much longer and more research-intensive piece than originally conceived.21

The final product is a long novel chronicling the days leading up to the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage in June of 1953. About half of the novel is in the third person, but this is far from the third-person of Sinclair and Dos Passos.

Coover attempts to engage with America's id, as he sees it, during this time period. This takes the form of a sort of nationalistic, anti-communist hysteria that could assert entirely straightfacedly that the Rosenbergs had committed the most heinous crime of the century,22 that would inevitably lead to millions of deaths—and that their own deaths, in some symbolic way, would atone for this. In an effort to depict this, Coover paints a loud, cartoonish world in which superheroes battle for the fate of the world. Uncle Sam, raconteur, snake-oil salesman, and revivalist preacher represents America,23 and the sinister and mysterious Phantom takes the side of communism and, more generally, anything outside of America (indicating the kind of Manichean thinking that led to the executions). The execution takes place publicly at Times Square as a kind of Busby-

21For a long, exhaustive look at the process of writing the book from conception to completion and the many editorial roadblocks that delayed its publication, see Coover's “Public Burning Log.” 22I.e., passing nuclear engineering secrets along to the Soviet government. Although it seems certain that the Rosenbergs were in contact with the U.S.S.R. and at least made an effort to provide them with information, it is very unlikely that they provided anything of any value. Morton Sobell, who was tried with the Rosenbergs and sentenced to thirty years in prison, later claimed to the New York Times that he had indeed been a Soviet spy along with Julius, but dismissed his colleague's contributions: "What he gave them was junk." 23Sam is certainly set up as the “good guy,” but as John Ramage notes, the character is “less a moral agent than a force that requires the opposition of the Phantom . . . to keep himself going.” To use the words “good” and “evil” to describe the American political moment that the novel describes is to give it too much credit; the characters certainly think of themselves in those terms, but in fact, the ritual that surrounds them is not imbued with any real moral force. 117

Berkley-esque spectacular, with the participation of all of the nation's biggest entertainers and witnessed by everyone in the country.

In order to keep the novel grounded—to provide “a quieter voice as contrast or balance” (McCaffery 118)—Coover hit on the idea of alternating the third-person sections with less manic segments narrated by Vice President Richard M. Nixon. Nixon was chosen partially by happenstance—the inspiration initially came when, as he was casting about for a character to fill this role, Nixon was being sworn into office in 1969— and partially because, as an outsider of sorts in Eisenhower's administration, Nixon provided an unusual sense of perspective. This chapter will largely focus on Nixon's narrative, as it is through him that we see the nature of political aspiration and utopian longing, greatly changed from its manifestation in novels earlier in the century.

Nixon, Totality, and Utopia

As I argue in this chapter, the world of The Public Burning is one in which politics can no longer be understood by considering matters of rational cause and effect.

Large events—political upheavals, sudden acts of violence—happen, and nobody seems able to know why or what to do about them, because nobody knows how to conceptualize them within a larger framework. Hence, politics are reduced to a kind of ritual; e.g.: 118

They are tried, found guilty, and on April 5, 1951, sentenced by the judge

to die—thieves of light to be burned by light—in the electric chair, for it is

written that “any man who is dominated by demonic spirits to the extent

that he gives voice to apostasy is to be subject to the judgment upon

sorcerers and wizards.” (Coover 3)

There is a non-rational sense that burning the Rosenbergs will propitiate the gods and deliver the United States from communism and/or nuclear annihilation. Hence, also, the characters of Uncle Sam and the Phantom, in whom complicated geopolitical conflicts get reframed as loud, simple clashes between superheroes and villains.

With all this in mind, it is only natural that the practice of politics is very different than it once was. Before, it was necessary to at least consider the situation in genuine socioeconomic terms. This didn't mean that you'd come to the “right” conclusion, or that you couldn't dishonestly frame your arguments in artifice to gain support for your agenda, but there was at least the feeling that there was, somewhere, some core of rationality underlying what you were doing, whether you were championing or condemning radical causes. This was taken as a given in Coal. The fact that the United States seemed to be reaching a juncture in which it could not be taken as a given; in which, indeed, politics seemed to be thoroughly breaking down, was a source of great distress for Dos Passos in

U.S.A. But as we reach The Public Burning, the question becomes moot, as people everywhere on the political spectrum have come to understand politics as ritual, which, even if they are sometimes able to convince themselves otherwise, is unconnected in any 119

but the most superficial way from the socioeconomic reality of the nation. And nobody stops to consider that this is a new development, because they cannot even remember a time when things were different. They have grown accustomed to operating according to these non-rational precepts. Judge Irving Kaufman (who sentenced the Rosenbergs to die) and others involved with the case prove remarkably effective at convincing the public that the executions are both just and important, even though actual evidence of the

Rosenbergs' guilt—much less the question of whether or not they ever actually accomplished anything meaningful with their alleged espionage—is very much in doubt.24 This means that people's day-to-day lives must involve a great deal of self- deception—that is, people have to convince themselves of the existence of causal links that from a purely logical perspective seem to make no sense. Once this way of living is established, however, the new political system, such as it is, is able to perpetuate itself quite well, and an earlier mode of politics—one that, however precariously, genuinely acts in a way that is responsive to socioeconomic reality; to the true nature of society— simply becomes unimaginable. It should be emphasized that when I discuss “politics” in this chapter, I am referring specifically to this ritualistic mode.

But what if a person, consciously or not, senses that there is something wrong with this system and wishes to push back against it? One thing is certain: returning to a previous political model, in which cause and effect can be perceived normally, is not

24The question of the specific relationships between real historical figures and Coover's versions thereof is a complicated one, but one that I do not intend to address in any great depth in this chapter. When I refer to Irving Kaufman, I am referring to Coover's version, and, unless otherwise indicated, this should be assumed for all of the historical characters throughout the novel. For an overview of some of these issues, see Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso's "Robert Coover's The Public Burning and the Ethics of Historical Understanding." 120

possible, even if it should be desired. What one might try to do, however, is to strip away the politics that do exist: to simply try to eschew all of this symbolic political theater

(although as I note later on in the chapter, the question of what one would replace them with is a serious stumbling block). This is certainly what Nixon attempts to do, but it is a very difficult task for him: he has become extremely adept at working within the political system; fundamentally, he is a creature of this system. Stepping outside of it threatens his identity, besides which, he lacks the imagination to conceive of any alternative to the current state of affairs. As I will show, he attempts to replace political content with personal: that is, a world that revolves around non-political relationships, in which the political is rendered irrelevant. In attempting to do this, however, he comes up against a problem, which is that he can't actually imagine the personal utopias he longs for in terms that are different than the political world of which he is a part. What he wants is rendered inaccessible by who he is.

This does not, however, prevent him from at least making an effort to reach his utopia—a place in which there is no more political theater—while simultaneously maintaining his political self. This he does by attempting to fashion utopian scenarios which maintain the form of politics, but drain away their political content. For instance, in his fantasy love affair with Ethel Rosenberg, he clumsily attempts to remove the case's political significance and replace it with a vague, soft-focus notion of “love.” Since the scenario still involves a Rosenberg, it can still be seen, in some sense, as “political;” that is, it retains a political form of sorts. However, all of the case's political content—its connection to real geopolitical concerns—has been eliminated. It only appears to be 121

political; it no longer contains anything that would make it genuinely so. For another instance, in his fantasy new world order, everyone is happy and venerates him without him having to engage in any of the kind of political legerdemain to which he is accustomed. Here we see a similar dynamic at work: he is essentially ruling the world, which clearly implies political content. A government without politics is a contradiction in terms, leading one to assume that there must be a political aspect to this fantasy.

However, examining it closely leads one to the realization that there is not. All that's really relevant to the fantasy is that people like him. So again, this fantasy has the form of the political, but none of the content.

So if the political element—i.e., the artifice—by which he defines his identity is gone, then how does he try to avoid having his sense of self-identity damaged? By including a strong element of what we might call plausible deniability in his fantasies.

He may drain the politics from his romance with Ethel, but she is still Ethel Rosenberg, and therefore he can fool himself, and anyone who might be watching, into thinking that the fantasy is still highly political. Likewise, his utopian new world order may not actually include any of the political content by which he orders his life; however, as noted above, there is an obvious implicit assumption that any “world order” must by definition contain a political element. Therefore, in spite of the fact that no such thing is present here, he can, again, fool himself into thinking that the political as he understands it remains a factor. The problem with this, again, is that he can't really imagine what a world quantitatively different from his current one would look like. 122

This brings us to one of the most important points both for this chapter and the next, and that is the divide between the political and the personal as utopian modes.

Nixon's utopian imaginings must inhere in the latter, given that he perceives, however consciously, that his political life provides him with no vehicle by which to pursue utopia.

Therefore, he is compelled to retreat to the realm of personal edification. We can easily see this in his fantasy romance with Ethel, in which political concerns have vanished, and he is able to “be himself”—that is, to no longer be constrained by a political role. But, as

I will argue, it is not such a simple task to substitute one mode for the other: however useless as a vehicle for utopia the political may be, the fact remains that Nixon has built his life around it, and simply throwing it away is problematic both because it threatens to do great damage to the sense of self he has built up and also because he is unable actually to conceptualize a utopian world that is built purely around personal concerns. This, I argue, is characteristic of the dilemmas that people face in this milieu. In the fourth and final chapter, we will see the problem functioning on a larger scale.

This chapter is divided into two parts: in the first, I consider the question of the nature of this postmodern milieu, and what becomes of totality within it. This is important, because the central question of the chapter revolves around the character of

Nixon. His understanding of the world is deeply informed by his inability to make sense of it in a totalizing way that would allow him to put all the pieces together and perhaps understand the meaning of the Rosenberg case and, by extension, society as a whole. 123

Second, in the longer half of the chapter, I examine the character of Nixon himself, to show how his mind works. He is a very complex character, and here, once again, totality, or in this case the lack thereof, makes itself felt. His inability to understand society in a totalizing way is why the Rosenberg trial gives him so much trouble, and it is also a strong factor in the shaping of his utopian fantasies. Once I have demonstrated this, I show how his utopias work, or fail to work, in practice. I argue that his problem can be understood via the same Jamesonian dialectic that I discussed in the first chapter with regard to Sinclair's unconscious ambivalence about genuine radical action: Nixon wants to imagine a utopian scenario outside of the current political environment of which he is a part—that is, one that relies entirely on the personal. But the idea of actually leaving this political milieu behind is terrifying to him, both because the current world is the world he knows, and because he cannot actually imagine what could possibly replace that world.

So he tries to split the difference, as it were, by creating a utopia that looks political but is, in fact, drained of all its political content. This might work, if he had anything in the realm of the personal to replace that political content with. But, constrained by the limits of his own imagination, he doesn't: as we will see, his personal fantasies are also limited by social constraints, and as such, they have no solid foundation and ultimately prove not to amount to anything.

Postmodern Totality 124

The question of totality, and what it means and how it functions (or, more accurately, fails to function) in The Public Burning, is important. When we think about the distinction between what is considered “modern” literature and what is considered

“postmodern,” we may expect, a priori, that we will not find any sort of sense of totality anywhere in the novel. As we've seen, Dos Passos' problem was that the much longed-for totalizing utopia was present only through its absence. However, this absence was significant, and in spite of only existing by not existing, utopian impulses to a large extent shaped the narrative of U.S.A. itself.

The postmodern situation is different, however. It is often held that modern literature has lost its ability to conceptualize history as a totality in a Lukácsian sense, but that it is nonetheless capable of recognizing that this totality is in fact not present, and therefore acts on the knowledge of this absence25—whether it is conceived of as having existed in the past, as being a future goal, or both. We certainly see this in Dos Passos.

However, it is felt that at a certain point, with the inception of postmodernity, we lose the ability to feel totality even as an absence; hence, the fractured nature of postmodern literature, in which the political and social becomes fragmentary and impossible to conceptualize as a whole. Since totality is, at most, a vague, dim memory, literature

25Discussing this question in economic terms, Jameson argues that “modernism was still minimally and tendentially the critique of the commodity and the effort to make it transcend itself,” whereas “postmodernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process” (Postmodernism X) . In other words, although the rise of capitalism means that life under modernism is (in Lukács' terms) alienated, it nonetheless is able to see beyond itself to the extent that it can make an effort to conceptualize the nature of culture as a totality. Whereas postmodernism is so wholly consumed by capitalism that it can only see itself, and it unable to even try to imagine a totality. 125

cannot even mourn a lost sense of sociopolitical wholeness in the way that Dos Passos does.

Now, there are ways in which The Public Burning seems to fly in the face of this assessment. Lance Olsen, for instance, attempts to divide the novel into “pre-modern,”

“modern,” and “post-modern” parts. In his telling, the bulk of the characters, including

Uncle Sam, Eisenhower, and the Rosenbergs, are “pre-modern,” in the sense that they are operating according to very clear political certainties and conceptions of right and wrong.

Nixon, filled with doubts and uncertainties, is held to be “modern,” as he is quite uncertain: the old familiar narratives aren't enough for him. Finally, the Phantom—a force so elusive it can never be seen, but only felt by its terrifying, destabilizing effects— is held to be “postmodern.” If we thought about it this way, we could argue that there is a totality of sorts, which is what most of the novel's characters experience.

There may be something to this, but I would like to step back for a moment and examine the concept from a Lukácsian standpoint. There's an extent to which Olsen's division maps onto Lukács' conceptions of literature fairly well. This “pre-modern” literature is able to totalize in a way that modern literature does not, and these totalities lay bare the nature of their socioeconomic situations. Modern literature has trouble creating such overarching narratives, and thus, to Lukács, tends to be less valuable.

However, while this is one way to think about literature, the use of “pre-modern” in this conception would not ultimately be useful for Lukács. It is true that Uncle Sam and the rest have a very simple, Manichean way of looking at the world—“sons of light” 126

locked in mortal combat with “sons of darkness”—and it's true that this, as far as it goes, this is a coherent and complete way of looking at the world. It has this in common with a

“pre-modern” outlook..26

But the fact that these two ways of looking at the world are superficially similar is not adequate. Lukács does not believe that totality is important for mere aesthetic reasons; that it doesn't matter whether or not the totality is accurate as long as it appears to exist. The point of totality is to illuminate the nature of the socioeconomic circumstances of society. If this totality is inaccurate or misleading, it is not nonetheless valuable in itself; it's not even totality in the sense that Lukács means the word. Just because we can discern something totality-shaped in The Public Burning doesn't mean that the book is automatically a success in Lukácsian terms. It is reasonable, therefore, to define “totality” not according to the more broad definition of “any comprehensive depiction of a society,” but to also append Lukács to it and specify that this depiction must be an accurate one, and one that allows us to understand the mechanisms of that society.

This is an important question because I am going to be thinking about the idea of utopia as it applies to The Public Burning. If the novel depicts a society that is only able to conceptualize totality in terms of simplistic good-versus-evil narratives that have little if any relationship to actual sociopolitical conditions, totalizing utopia becomes impossible because the ability to think in those terms no longer exists.

26When I say “pre-modern” here, I am referring specifically to the sort of sociopolitical moment that produced writers of whom Lukács approves, like Scott and Balzac. That is to say, it is not intended as a pejorative, even though Olsen seems to mean it as such. 127

Totality in The Public Burning

“What's happening?!?” (36). This panicky question is perhaps the central motif of The Public Burning: a frantic effort to figure out how the world works and how it can be controlled, the Rosenberg execution representing a last-ditch effort to do this. Indeed, loss of control seems to define the situation. “An international crisis develops, and

America seems unable to do anything about it” (38). At a number of points throughout the third-person sections of the narrative, Coover includes collages of disparate events that were in the news at the time, suggesting that they are meant to be in some way connected,27 all part of one giant battle between “good” (the United States) and “evil”

(communism, and more generally The Other). “Everything [is] tumbling irresistibly into place” (10). There is a very strong sense of searching for mystical knowledge or secret patterns that will allow everything to come into focus, including numerological quantifications in which numbers “rattle through the streets like apocalyptic codes,” which “resolv[e] [them]selves toward catastrophe”28 (40).

27For instance, Terrorists creep out of their jungle hiding places and lay waste to villages in Indonesia, Malaya, French Indochina. A full company sweeps down on U.N. Positions north of the Hwachon Reservoir in Korea and a U.N. effort to retake Christmas Hill is repulsed . . . Two hundred Indian fishermen are reported missing forty miles off Madras in the Bay of Bengal. Officers sift through the ashes of the fire in Whittier, Alaska. (106) The novel never tries to explain how these things are connected, which gets at the novel's lack of a sense of totality: there is a sense that all of these events must be connected in some way, but the nature of this supposed connection remains obscure. 28To wit, 128

Under these circumstances, it is unsurprising that the Rosenberg case should take on a degree of importance which the facts of the case in themselves hardly merit.29 Irving

Kaufman, the judge who sentenced the Rosenbergs to die, also issued a statement (quoted by Coover) which assigned the two of them responsibility for the Korean War, predicted that their treason would result in millions of additional deaths, and asserted that they

“undoubtedly ha[d] altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country!”

(25). The Rosenbergs here are being used to provide a sort of false sense of totality: if we have decided that all of the turmoil afflicting the world can be laid at the feet of these people, then we can have an illusory sense of order. And if we have decided that they are

“sorcerers and wizards,” we do not have to trouble ourselves with the question of where they came from and how they came to be who they are, since these are magical classifications that exist outside any totalizing view of society.

So we can see that there is an enforced sense of certainty in the novel's depiction of a particular sociopolitical moment, a sense that all of the country's problems can be boiled down to a struggle against a force that, while difficult to quantify, is not, in its essence, complicated. This force can be defined by the fact that it is is implacably evil; there is no need to look for any more complex motivation. This is something resembling a totality, though, as I note above, not an accurate one. However, what Olsen and others

Indonesian terrorists kill 60 villagers and burn 800 homes in a raid on 4 villages south of Jakarta, leaving 3500 homeless. US casualties in Korea shoot up to 136,029, while at home 305 new polio cases are reported for the week, bringing the year's total to 3124. (40) 29As Daniel E. Frick notes that, in Coover's representation of American culture, the Rosenbergs are also psychologically useful in that, by virtue of the US being a perfect, shining beacon for the world, “any failure . . . to control the world's destiny must be explained in terms of betrayal rather than weakness” (83). 129

who make this point overlook is that—as we've seen—the novel makes it quite clear that this totality is purely illusory. Uncle Sam and others may be sure of themselves, but they are wrong to be so sure. They do not represent a totality of the sort that Balzac, for instance, depicts, because they are only fooling themselves in thinking that their worldviews are so coherent. In reality, Coover insists, they are anything but. With this as context, it is no wonder that Nixon—a character positioned as someone who, in spite of being a part of this artificial world, nonetheless on some level wants to get beneath it, and understand the nation and world as they really are—should be filled with uncertainty.

Of course, the fact that the novel's characters have difficulty piecing together a totality does not necessarily mean that the the novel itself does not depict such a thing. In his interview with Larry McCaffery, Coover asserts that a great deal of research was necessary because “everything seemed relevant,” and “if [he] was to bring the entire tribe to Times Square that night, then they had to be doing all the things the tribe was doing”

(118). In other words, he felt it was necessary that the novel be realistic in the sense of depicting the landscape in as much accurate detail as possible.

However, it would be very difficult indeed to extract from this a genuine sense of totality. It's true that there is a great deal of information in the novel, culled from the headlines and representing a good cross-section of the news and entertainments that people were engaged in at the time. However, this information, for better or worse, never really coalesces, and efforts to make it do so are likely to be no more successful than the third-person narrator's efforts to place many disparate events in a single context. This is 130

surely intentional: Coover, that is, is making a concentrated effort to demonstrate that making all of this into a coherent whole is a fool's mission.

I think it can safely be said, then, that we do not find a Lukácsian sense of totality in the novel. This means that neither will we find a totalizing utopia. As we will see, there is presented (by Nixon) a grandiose and far-reaching vision of a possible utopian future, but this is qualitatively distinct from the visions that we see in Dos Passos, in that it isn't something that can be genuinely aspired to—it exists in the realm of pure fantasy.

The absence of a sense of totality is related to the absence of a comprehensive utopian political impulse. With the exception of Nixon, almost no one in the novel30, including both pro- and anti-Rosenberg factions, is able even to begin to conceive of the world as anything other than an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil, and this is because, as we've seen, they are unable to put together the pieces to create a coherent whole. It would be one thing if Coover was simply depicting a world in which people have such problems, but in fact the novel makes it clear that these problems are universal; that there's no way that they ever could truly be escaped. This is how it is. Hence, an inability to imagine a utopia that is based on a true understanding of the world: this understanding is no longer possible.

30There are a few small exceptions to this; for instance, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (to whom Coover dedicates the novel), who tried to put a last-minute stay on the executions and to whom Coover dedicates the novel, has a small role, and is clearly trying to eschew the political theater that characterizes the novel. However, such instances, in the novel's larger scheme, are quite insignificant; they do not represent an alternative to the world of the novel even to the extent that those moments of potentiality in U.S.A do. 131

Perhaps we can think about this in another way, though. The central difference between The Public Burning and U.S.A.—indeed, between The Public Burning and earlier kinds of writing in general—is what Thomas LeClair calls its “excess,” a characteristic that can also be applied to other maximalist novelists of Coover's generation (e.g., Pynchon, Gaddis, Barth). LeClair argues that the strategy of including

“too much” in a novel “lead[s] or force[s] the reader to a qualitative recognition: that the text he began with the usual assumptions is actually a different kind of fictional system worthy of his understanding” (6). He also argues that The Public Burning is ideally suited for this kind of strategy inasmuch as it's an excessive performance that is also about performance; i.e., the quasi-religious ritual is the executions themselves.

We might argue that this allows us to understand the world on a different level than U.S.A. does; this is certainly LeClair's contention. The advantage of the sort of carnivalesque view of the world that Coover reveals, the argument goes, is that it allows us to better understand the mechanism of political repression (even if we still don't fully grasp where it comes from). That is, we can see what the executions mean, and how they fit into our social structure. “The orgasmic and sacrificial ceremonies in Times Square,”

LeClair argues, “are a well-done performance that gives the nation solidarity even as they violate its codes and taboos” (8). Thus the question of why all this is happening is answered: it is a mystical ceremony that has its own rules, even if we cannot make sense of it by trying to understand it as a totality. 132

As an illustration of the way that highly-charged political executions may be understood differently in modern and postmodern settings, let us compare the Rosenberg execution to that of Sacco and Vanzetti, which is central to The Big Money. Both of these sets of executions occurred because of a strong, paranoid sense that the United States was embattled by incomprehensible but definitely evil outside forces, whether anarchism or communism (the indeterminate nature of the Phantom makes it clear that there are no meaningful distinctions to be drawn here between different forms of “Unamericanism”).

This, however, is not something that U.S.A. can really conceptualize. In Dos Passos' world, these things happen because people aren't able to effectively stand up to repressive forces. If that's the only way you are able to understand political impotence, it's only natural to be frustrated, because it just doesn't make sense: why are “they” so powerful?

How did it come to this? This is where—if we accept LeClair's sense of things—we have an advantage: by understanding how politics work in this new world, that they are not coherently related to the socioeconomic reality but instead revolve around superstitious rituals such as “public burnings,” we can better understand the nature of the political landscape.

There's something to this; however, I would argue that the Lukácsian response here would be very similar to the one regarding Zola, to critics who argue that there's something valuable in a vivid depiction of objects per se, without reference to whether they reflect outward on society. Lukács flatly denies that that there is value in depicting objects for their own sake, asserting that “boxes and orchestra, stage and parterre, backstage and dressing-room are in themselves inanimate, absolutely devoid of interest” 133

(“Narrate” 134). They only become valuable inasmuch as they help to shed light on the nature of society. Just depicting a wide range of objects without making any effort to conceptualize how they fit together is a waste of time; while these items may be a part of the raw material of society, if they're not synthesized in some way they are simply inert.

Similarly, Coover, by including a jumble of news snippets, popular songs, and movie quotes, does not do anything to make sense of this rush of information; to show how it all fits together. They may show how the world is, and they may show in some inchoate way that something is wrong, but they do nothing to show why this should be, which is the central point. Coover's strategy here bears obvious similarities to the Newsreel sections in U.S.A., but those play a relatively minor part in the greater narrative. The strategy is much more ubiquitous in Coover. The fact that the confusion, for Coover, is, as we've seen, intentional so as to create a specific effect does not make it any more effective from a Lukácsian perspective—though it may outline a potential variety of effectiveness which is outside of Lukács' realm of interest. That doesn't mean that it can't be useful in its own right, but in terms of looking at Lukácsian totality and the way it develops in different fictions, it is rather beside the point.

This raises an important question. If if this is the case—if totality in a Lukácsian sense is gone in a way that it was not in Dos Passos—then what of utopia? The impulse towards utopia cannot simply disappear; it still has to manifest itself in some way. In Dos

Passos, we saw it in the trilogy's moments of potentiality. Here, however, potentiality plays no meaningful role—utopia tries to appear in a different and less successful way, as we will see from Nixon's utopian efforts. As we will see in both Coover and Pynchon, 134

the political in this milieu becomes substantially mixed up with the personal. As we have seen, the personal and political were linked in Dos Passos, but the difference is that in

U.S.A., the personal is necessary for politically utopian worlds to come about. In Coover, a similar dynamic might be in effect—except that, since the idea that the political system could ever become anything other than what it is is unthinkable, the personal starts to becomes the end itself, while still masquerading, as it were, as the political. This is what we see in the character of Nixon.

This is an interesting evolution: for Sinclair, it is necessary that the two stay separate (resulting, as we've seen, in some theoretical problems). For Dos Passos, the two need to be connected—the crucial problem of U.S.A. is the failure of relationships, including erotic relationships—but they cannot be in any systematic way, resulting in the trilogy's ultimate despair. For Coover, however, there is a twist: a radical politics based on Lukácsian principles—i.e., an accurate view of the way that different aspects of society interact—can no longer exist, and thus radical energy is required to be rechanneled so as to inhere within the personal. This certainly represents something very distinct from any of the kinds of politics we've seen in the first two chapters. We will see something similar in the fourth chapter, as Pynchon makes the connection even more explicit than Coover does.

Richard Nixon 135

Before we specifically get to his utopian aspects, we must examine the character in a more general way. It is interesting to note that he is far more slippery and difficult to pin down than anyone we have seen in Sinclair or Dos Passos (or, arguably, will see in

Pynchon, for that matter). This, indeed, is part of the reason that it is necessary to distinguish postmodern literature from previous forms. I argue that Nixon has an essential problem, and that problem is that he cannot (for reasons that the previous section has made apparent) see any kind of social totality. This severely limits the ways in which he is able to understand and interact with the world around him, and it affects both his personal and political lives.

Nixon's initial appearance in The Public Burning immediately sets the tone and establishes the kind of world that he inhabits: he is in the midst of wrangling with some senators over the passage of a procedural bill. Of this, he remarks, “it was just the kind of political battle I loved: nobody gave a shit about the bill itself, it was a straight-out power struggle, raw and pure, like a move in chess” (46). From this, we can see that politics as practiced has become wholly unmoored from any effort or desire (progressive or regressive, cynical or naïve) to actually affect the world in any way. What does this bill do? Nothing meaningful, apparently; certainly nothing that can be concretely understood in relation to the larger world. This is representative of the political landscape that Nixon inhabits: he engages in all kinds of political maneuvering, but none of it is in service to a larger vision of the world. 136

As cynical as Dos Passos was, this certainly represents new vistas of cynicism:

U.S.A. believes that there are repressive forces at work preventing any measure of social justice. The Public Burning, on the other hand, posits that, while these forces may exist, they aren't necessarily malevolent per se; rather, they simply don't care about anything other than amorally jockeying for power. They may bring social regression with them

(indeed, this may be their inevitable result), but they are largely indifferent to whether or not this is the case. Nixon is firmly entrenched in this mode of thinking and acting.

“Hatred is a big waste,” he remarks, which belief, of course, does not stop him from playing into a socially destructive system. “Issues are everything, even when they're meaningless” (48). This seems indicative of the general state of affairs: what's important is “issues,” but, unlike in times past, “issues” as a signifier doesn't actually point to anything apart from itself.

This proud, hardbitten cynicism may be a constant, and it may go to the core of who the character is, but the frequency with which he drops it, or appears to drop it, is notable. He is able to vacillate—sometimes within the space of a scene—from cynical to grandiose to idealistic and even to compassionate.31 We see this especially regarding the

Rosenberg case and his reactions thereto. This is where we really see the complexity of his way of thinking, because on the one hand, as Eisenhower's Vice President, it is necessary for him to take an un-nuanced anti-communist stance, which naturally entails

31See also John Z. Guzlowski, “Coover's The Public Burning: Richard Nixon and the Politics of Experience.” Guzlowski argues that Coover's Nixon Nixon feels a desire to be able to “reveal himself”—to make his true self manifest—but feels constrained by his political life. This dovetails with my own argument, as we will see. Guzlowski's article is an astute psychoanalytic study, but my argument diverges from his in that it explicitly connects Nixon's personality and his conflictedness with his sociopolitical milieu. 137

never publicly wavering from the opinion that the Rosenbergs are guilty of frightful crimes against America and indeed all of humanity, and should be punished accordingly.

On the other hand, as we will quickly see, his private reactions to the crime are much more varied and uncertain, significantly obscuring the question of what he “really” believes. This, again, comes down to a problem of totality: he cannot say for certain what he feels because he doesn't know what is true, and he doesn't know this because the

Rosenberg case has been removed from its objective social context. He certainly cannot understand it in terms of America's Cold-War paranoia, or its concrete geopolitical significance: it has come to represent a pitched battle between good and evil, something that breaks down under scrutiny, but that he is nonetheless “supposed” to believe. Thus, naturally, when he tries to consider the actual facts of the case, confusion is the result, as they clearly do not match up with this non-totalizing conception of the world into which he has has no choice but to buy.

Nixon is far from a wholly reliable narrator, in part because he is so self- conscious about his public image. Regarding this public image, for instance, “on the other hand,” he muses, as he considers the pros and cons of the case, “I was a little sorry that—and I don't mind being controversial on this subject—I was a little sorry that two people, a father and mother of two little boys, had to die” (84). He seems to be groping towards the valid idea that anti-communist hysteria—or, more broadly, repressive, jingoistic politics in general—is responsible for the destruction of natural family structures. This harkens back to Marcuse's idea that more and more, even those aspects of society that in theory have nothing to do with capital are nonetheless gradually taken 138

over by structures that reproduce capitalism so as to maintain themselves. So in this case, in order to maintain itself, society has to make Ethel and Julius into a part of the

Phantom's unfathomably evil machine, dismissing the importance of any other part of their lives. We can see, therefore, that it's possible to read into this remark of Nixon's a deep, implicit criticism of the order of which he is part, in spite of the “I don't mind being controversial” aside, which makes him sound somewhat defensive about voicing this opinion. He seems, at this moment, to be trying to think about the case in a totalizing way: trying to understand what it actually means, and how it fits into society. However, he immediately qualifies his remarks. “I'm always sorry when people have to die,” he continues, immediately making his “sorrow” much less specific and much more into a banal, unenlightening commonplace. “My mother taught me this,” he adds. “Especially women and children” (84). At this point, he has retreated into the territory of blandly patriotic bromides to such an extent that the original statement no longer has much meaning at all.32 This is not necessarily to say that he didn't believe what he initially said, but rather to note that his opinions are a complex mixture of genuine conviction, political calculation, and playing to a perceived audience, all of which is colored by the varying degrees to which he tries to move in the direction of totalizing thinking.

Obviously, it is necessary for him to avoid publicly displaying any doubts about the righteousness of the verdict, since this righteousness is the official opinion of the

Eisenhower administration and his political ambitions rely on being approved of by the

32Jackson I. Cope argues that this is evidence of “an inner flatness of character;” that it shows that he “has to learn emotion” (90). Again, this may be valid to an extent, but, as I argue, there's a strong performative aspect to this, and it's not adequate to simple argue that he is emotionally stilted and leave it at that. 139

kind of people who support this administration. However, in keeping with his vague awareness of the possibility of some degree of totalizing thinking, he cannot dismiss the nagging feeling that, guilty though the Rosenbergs may be, he may not fully understand the case. Nominally, this feeling comes from Uncle Sam, who, for reasons that he doesn't understand, had brought up the case while they were playing golf, talking in an unclear manner “about history, about guilt and innocence, death and regeneration, about the security of the whole nation and the cause of free men everywhere” (53), leaving Nixon not entirely sure what he's supposed to think or feel about the case and therefore planting seeds of doubt in his mind that his easy, conventional convictions are as simple as they had seemed. “Why the devil had Uncle Sam got me into this?” he wonders as he pores over the documents related to the case. “Just to convince me of the enormity of their crime? But I was already convinced” (79). Once again, we see a touch of defensiveness, but the more substantive point has to do with this lack of certainty: the world in which

Nixon is operating is one that makes it difficult if not impossible to know the “truth” about these things; other people deal with this by retreating into a world of unjustified certainty, but for anyone, like Nixon, who cares, for whatever reason, to think about these them, it represents considerable difficulty.

In spite of his occasional assertions of his belief in the Rosenbergs' guilt, Nixon is extremely, almost painfully cognizant of the politics of the case as a kind of performance art. In spite of all his various delusions, he is at least clear-eyed about the fact that, on some level, this is really all a big game: that is, he knows that something is wrong; he just can't see how it could be made right. When he gets a ride with a garrulous cab driver 140

who lets loose with an endless stream of invective and dirty jokes about previous US

Presidents and about the Rosenbergs themselves, he immediately decides that the man must be the Phantom when he makes a plea for all of this pageantry to stop. “Look, can't we get past all these worn-out rituals,” he asks, “these stupid fuckin' reflexes? They got nothin' to do with life, you know that, life's always new and changing, so why fuck it up with all this shit about scapegoats, sacrifices, initiations, saturnalias—?” (273). Of course, “all this shit” is in fact the entire political content of the American order. Nixon can grin and bear it when it comes to dirty jokes, even if they're about himself, but the suggestion that the foundation of the political order on which he has made his career should be abolished is of another order entirely. It can't be countenanced, as it threatens him in a way that more usual political threats don't: it potentially undermines the entire basis of his existence. Indeed, the way that it threatens him is actually similar to the way that his utopian fantasies come to threaten him: they, too, potentially threaten his worldview.

Nixon is not entirely a reluctant participant in all this theater. He genuinely enjoys political maneuvering. And from this, we can see that his occasional defenses-of- sorts of the Rosenbergs—his doubts about their guilt—aren't exactly selfless, or based on some sort of “pure” desire to see the world as it really is. Of the prosecuting attorney on the case, Irving Saypol, he admires the skill with which he prosecuted it, while nonetheless asserting that “tough as he was, I could have whipped his ass from Foley

Square to Jenkins Hill and back again, could have beat the rap on the Rosenbergs.” He hastens to add the disclaimer that “of course this would have been a miscarriage of 141

justice,” (122-123), but this sounds every inch the hasty and insincere rhetorical defense it is. In reality, it's quite apparent that whether or not the verdict was a “miscarriage of justice” is entirely beside the point. The fact that he is comparing his rhetorical skills with Saypol's clearly indicates that victory or defeat in this instance is entirely dependent on how well one is able to manipulate this system, and that he really enjoys and takes pride in the fact that he is able to do it so effectively. Categories of guilt and innocence don't even enter into it. He isn't merely being forced to participate in this political system; he also enjoys it. There's a sense, then, in which, for all of his weighing and calculating, he is nonetheless very much a willing and eager part of the machine that determined that the Rosenbergs had to die to expiate their sins. He understands perfectly well how the system works, and this tempers all of the reservations he has about it.

Another key thing to note is that Nixon conceptualizes politics in the same way he does his personal life: as I will show in the next section, he wants the same things from both; namely, some kind of “secret knowledge” such that he would no longer have to fumble around trying to make sense of confusing patterns, and his life would no longer be hindered by a discourse inadequate to reflect either socioeconomic or personally-oriented truth. As a consummate politician, the ways that he approaches his personal problems tend to be highly colored by the way he approaches politics.

Ultimately, Nixon is trapped, whether he knows it or not. He is a part of his culture: he was inculcated into it, and now that he's there, he has found that he is good at it and he likes it. He does sense there's something the matter with a system that would 142

treat the Rosenbergs in the way that it is doing, and as such he struggles against it to a certain extent, but in spite of all his efforts in this regard, he is unable to get outside of it to any degree, because he is unable to understand what being outside would actually look like. Thus, even when he tries to imagine himself as part of a historical tradition that has a greater connection to the true nature of the world, he reduces history to a set of words that don't signify anything about the social or historical totality. Musing on his public image, for instance, he decides that he is “a lot like Lincoln, I guess, who was kind and compassionate on the one hand, and strong and competitive on the other” (49). To an extent, this is meaningless self-aggrandizement, but it certainly harkens back to a time in which politics actually meant something; when there was a sense of totality: Lincoln effected the abolition of slavery, a huge, concrete accomplishment that makes this effort to make the Rosenberg case representative of a pitched battle between good and evil look even more grotesque. The problem with thinking of this as anything like a harkening back to an earlier time period—a time, perhaps, when, in Dos Passos' terms, the words were “clean”—is that he isn't referring to anything that Lincoln actually did: only to these ideas of “compassion” and “strength,” even though without any further context, these words do not refer to Lincoln in any meaningful way. As Guzlowski notes, for Nixon,

“the content of a policy—its inner motivation or philosophy—doesn't count at all” (59).

The only thing that matters is the policy's political effectiveness. There is a constant tension, in other words, between his aspirations (“be like Lincoln”) and the way he actually attempts to put these into practice (“be strong/compassionate”). 143

Nixon's Utopias

Nixon is a dreamer. As we shall see, he has several long, romantic fantasias, which stand in stark contrast to his political persona. As we've seen, he has grave doubts about the Rosenberg case, even if he knows full well that he cannot publicly express them for fear of harming his political prospects. But his timidity in this regard is not strictly a matter of his image to others; as we've seen, he has internalized these political values to the point that even thinking about his doubts is frightening to him. This inability to openly express, or even think unguardedly about, his doubts means that they have to be in large part sublimated. His fantasies have to avoid being expressly political because they clash with his political ideals. To be acceptable, his politics do not necessarily have to be specifically the politics of the Eisenhower administration, but they do have to be faithful to the essentially artificial nature of the political landscape. So, even in his fantasies, the political content of the case has to maintain at least the appearance of being present. If it disappeared without a trace, he would be left adrift, since he is so invested in politics as it exists. He is compelled therefore to incorporate aspects of the political, as a sort of safeguard, into his utopian fantasies.

His fantasies are often libidinal in nature, and this is in large part because he is very self-conscious about what he perceives as his romantic and sexual shortcomings, his general lack of success with women in his younger years, until he met his future wife, Pat

—and although he expresses his love for her and happiness with her on numerous 144

occasions, he also makes remarks that place the question of how happy this marriage really is open to grave doubt (“I could never count on her when I was really down”

(347)). Unsurprisingly, therefore, he contemplates the trial in sexual terms, and Ethel

Rosenberg in particular becomes his fantasy object.

Nixon's romantic efforts and failures are very much on his mind. In one revealing passage, he refers to an incident in which, in a school play, he had played Aeneas to a classmate's Dido, and “it was maybe the most romantic thing that ever happened to me—

I was Aeneas and Ola was Queen Dido and we wore white gowns and fell in love.”

However, this idyll is broken up by childish immaturity, when the other students “started calling [him] 'Anus' and not even Ola could keep from giggling. Years later . . . I realized we could have called her Queen Dildo, but we were all too green at the time to know about that” (50). The novel does not make clear to what extent the romantic overtones were felt by Ola, but it does show how concerned he is with this kind of romance, and how he conceives of his failures in this regard as tactical in the same way as politics are

—i.e., he could have retaliated and perhaps “won” if he had “known about” dildos.

There's no real consideration of how grade-school social dynamics led to this situation, or what could be done to change it.

He is, however, very uncertain how to understand any of this. He is good at political strategizing, but when it comes to romance, he has no idea what he's doing. For instance, musing about his theatrical experiences, he remembers that “it was while a girl in my class was putting makeup on me one night that I thought she was in love with me. 145

Maybe she was. Probably I didn't make the right moves” (111). In this situation and others like it, he finds himself on very unstable ground, because not only is he unsure of where he stands—whether or not “she was in love with” him—but he is not equipped to know what he could have done, even if she had been, for him to make something of the situation. Unlike politics, which, even if they don't get at socioeconomic reality, at least have a very clear and comforting sense of ritual and in which success or failure can be straightforwardly judged by poll numbers, personal interactions of this sort remain persistently unclear. To be sure, this is not an unusual adolescent problem to have, but for

Nixon, the contrast between the personal and political makes it clear that his career was motivated in large part by a desire to be free of this kind of uncertainty and second- guessing. He notes, of his marriage to Pat, that after this “everything became easier for me” (55)—less a romantic than a practical sentiment: he no longer has to try to clumsily feel his way through these nerve-wracking interactions with women. This will be an important point when we go on to look at his more grandiose fantasies and the ways that they are informed by his ambivalent view towards both political and personal.

Part of Nixon's intense interest in and concern with the case comes from the fact that he strongly identifies with the Rosenbergs, which, once again, emphasizes how political and personal elements come together in his mind and the former ceases to signify as the framework that it was initially meant to be. “We all probably went to the same movies, sang the same songs, read some of the same books,” he muses. “We were the Generation of the Great Depression. Now I was the Vice President of the United

States. They were condemned as traitors. What went wrong?” (143). He has difficulty 146

even understanding what the differences are, because he is trying to understand the

Rosenbergs while disregarding the political aspect of their lives. He identifies with them because, consciously or not, he can see in them a possible way that the personal can supplant the political while still maintaining the appearance of the political. This would be a potential way out of his situation. His identification with the Rosenbergs isn't a matter of any real connections—naturally, the parallels that he sees are limited and highly selective. It's more a matter of him seeing in them fuel for his inchoate utopian fantasies about living a life that is not constrained by convention or by artificial political necessity.33 Naturally, these fantasies inhere in the person of Ethel Rosenberg; Julius is pushed off to the side. In his first extended fantasy, he imagines that, as teenagers, he had saved her from a riot, and she took him back to her apartment to get him cleaned up. The inevitable romantic interlude that follows is parodic in its exaggerated sense of innocence:

'Richard,' she whispers, 'I've never . . . never . . . ' 'Neither have I,' I say

softly. We stare at each other in the bare room. A warm summery breeze

is blowing in through the window, a song from some radio. We kiss. (318)

It is notable that the “riot” that leads to this in Nixon's imagination is not in itself political, or at least not in the same sense as the Rosenbergs' alleged crimes were—it is purely a result of people getting angry over not being able to find jobs. The political is

33Richard Walsh argues that Nixon's identification with the Rosenbergs is purely pragmatic on his part— that he only cares about them inasmuch as it allows him to “assess where Julius deviated from the Horatio Alger narrative, establishing his own adherence to that narrative” (332). This is certainly an aspect of his concern, but I would—and will—strongly argue that there is substantially more to it than that; that, in fact, his identification with them plays a key component in his utopian imagination. 147

leeched out of the fantasy, in spite of the fact that he certainly wouldn't be having it if not for the trial. This seems indicative of a desire on his part for a utopia that is simultaneously political and divorced from politics, the virginal nature of both characters in the fantasy further indicating a distancing from the sort of politicking that Nixon has had to engage in to make his career. At one point, he complains that “a politician cannot display his emotions in public, this is part of the job. Nor can you enjoy the luxury of intimate personal friendships. You can't confide absolutely in anyone” (298). This interlude clearly represents an effort to transcend that perceived limitation.

Nixon has utopian impulses, and—since he is a consummate politician—his instinct is to imagine his utopias in political terms. And since the Rosenberg case is foremost in his mind, Ethel provides the ideal figure in which to try to manifest them.

However, thinking about the case is a distinctly non-utopian activity. It's stressful, and it just serves to remind him ceaselessly of the politicking going on all around him and that he himself is engaged in—and politics as society conceives of them preclude utopia. So when he fantasizes about Ethel, the political aspect of the case is downplayed or eliminated. This both allows the fantasy to function on a utopian level, and in so doing makes it “safe”—there is no need to consider its political ramifications, or what would need to happen to achieve it in the real world, because it remains—and is intended to remain—in the realm of fantasy. We see, then, the dialectic described in Jameson's

“Reification and Mass Culture” functioning. Jameson argues that radical, utopian impulses are on some level frightening, because they represent a challenge to the psyche's symbolic structure; therefore, they are matched by regressive impulses that are meant to 148

hold back the utopian and thereby remove the danger. In this particular instance, this dynamic works in the sense that Nixon's utopian fantasies must be leached of their political content, because it's impossible to imagine any sort of “political” utopia in postmodern terms. This is his problem: he is trapped in a dialectic between the political, which he finds to a large degree intolerable, and the non-political, which he finds both inconceivable and frightening—because what could it possibly consist of? This is what informs this particular daydream, as well as his other fantasies throughout the novel.

We can see this more clearly when we look at Nixon's final, decisive action in the novel—his quixotic attempt to free Ethel—and the associated fantasies as we undertakes this quest. This is the point at which, however incoherently and clumsily, he attempts to manifest a utopia in the real world. Feeling harassed and overwhelmed by the case, he lets the train that's meant to take him to Times Square for the execution go all the way to

Ossining, where the Rosenbergs are imprisoned. And—in a final act of mental rebellion

—he “realizes what had been bothering [him]: that sense that everything happening was somehow inevitable, as though it had all been scripted out in advance,” but determines that, in fact, “bullshit! there were no scripts, no necessary patterns, no final scenes, there was just action!” He appears to be denying the notion of totality, but in fact he is not doing any such thing, from a Lukácsian standpoint: instead, he is simply denying that any of the political ritual in which the country (and he personally) partakes is meaningful— which, obviously, is a dramatic move, given his concern that his fantasies not threaten his political self-identity. 149

In practice, however, this is not a problem for him, because, as grandiose as they are, they don't. His idea—which is founded on a number of assumptions which are little more than sheer guesswork and wishful thinking—is that the Rosenbergs were set up by the FBI, and that if he could get them to come forward with the truth, not only would they be spared, but this information would be enough to bring down both FBI and Justice

Department, ultimately destroying the American people's faith in all of their institutions, leaving a power vacuum that only he, Nixon, could fill. The details of how exactly this interregnum will function remain vague—once again, the actual achievement of utopia is very difficult to envision—but it nonetheless demonstrates a willingness to strike out against the established order. His imaginings-cum-visions reach ever-greater heights, culminating with him being hailed as a godlike, conquering hero—imagining, among many other things, equestrian statues of himself in cities all around the world, marking “a universal veneration for the hardnosed but warmhearted Man of Peace, the Fighting

Quaker.”

This is in service of a world in which he has “[made] war and rebellion physically impossible, and world commerce would flourish with an energy and elegance not seen since the first trade routes were opened up to China.” Now, this obviously isn't precisely an apolitical version—we might prefer a world without war where “rebellion” is never necessary, but the notion that these things are “physically impossible” suggests a high degree of political control, especially since he never clarifies what exactly he means by this. Furthermore, the lionization of “commerce” demonstrates an obvious preference for a certain sort of capitalism. However, let us not overstate the extent to which all this is 150

political. These are the things that Nixon imagines in his perfect world because he is a product of his culture; the old problem resurfaces: being part of a culture, it is impossible to concretely imagine something fundamentally other than that culture. This is reflective of his inability to imagine a genuine alternative to the current world. However, politics are not the main point, which is that “naturally I'd be loved,” as shown by the fact that

“the people were pouring out into the street singing my praises” (371-372). Ultimately, this is much more a personal vision; the political aspects to it are present because, to protect Nixon's psyche, they have to be, but they are not central to the thing itself.

Nixon is fundamentally a creature finely tuned to the political necessity of his time. A non-political utopia, even if it were possible, would put him far outside of this necessity—and as we've seen, especially when he is contemplating his past romantic failures, he is very uncomfortable when it comes to relating to people and engaging with personal situations that have no easy political angle. Therefore, he makes his utopia as apolitical as he knows how: it's all about the personal adoration that he receives. But since it involves a new society, there's still plausible deniability; that is, he could make the argument that what he is imagining is political. But in fact, it's not, and this is what protects him; lets him off the hook: he isn't really thinking in terms of completely overturning the existing political order, or at least he could argue as much. He can't abandon politics, but nor can he make them work in a utopian way. But for his utopias to be effective, they have to abandon politics. Therefore, he has to give them at least the appearance of being political. This entails a constant sense of tension: his vision is never going to clearly resolve itself into something political or not. He can have a vision of the 151

world in which politics run effortlessly and harmoniously to make everything happy, but the actual politics of this are really not the point, which is that in this world, he does not have to engage in political performances. We can see how he tries to merge the political and personal here: a world in which the government runs perfectly and effortlessly to make everyone happy is equivalent to a world in which he is good with women.

The fact that these two things are more or less the same is demonstrated by his climactic encounter with Ethel, which, though supposedly actually happening, has to be read more as fantasy than anything else. He visits her in her cell, for reasons that he doesn't quite understand—though his choosing to visit her over Julius is clearly so that she can serve as his romanticized “love interest.” “This has nothing to do with government,” he assures her when they first meet. “It's you I care about, can't you see that?” (433). Essentially, the visit consists of an attempt to conceptualize the Rosenberg situation in non-political terms, combined with his desire to experience the kind of romantic love and passion that he feels has been missing from his life. “Admit it, Ethel,” he urges her. “You've dreamed of love all your life! You dream of it now!” (435), and we see his persistent effort to divorce the case from its political center. He doesn't want it to revolve around questions of ideology; he wants to be able to reduce it to this vague question of “love.”

This is the fate of utopia in which the political has ceased to have any meaningful connection to actual events and has become purely a product of the anxieties of the time: not containing any useful content that one could use to extrapolate a better situation, the 152

only remaining possibility is to excise it altogether and rely upon human emotions which, in theory, are not subject to its limitations in order to create a utopia. Hence the romance of sorts that Nixon experiences, or imagines he is experiencing, with Ethel. 34 In terms of its aura of unconstrained playfulness—perverse in this case, given that it is happening mere hours before her execution—it is reminiscent of the brief romance between Ben and

Mary in The Big Money.

We separated. We stared at each other through our tears. We laughed. We

hugged each other, stared, laughed again. We pecked playfully at each

other's lips. We patted each other's bottoms. We rubbed noses. . . . “I've

never been able to let my hair down with anyone before,” I said. I licked

her lips, kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her throat, caressed her breasts. “I've

always been afraid of seeming square. But with you it's not like that—I

feel I can talk about anything with you!”

This is the character's utopian ideal: a world in which all of the barriers that have lowered, and the kind of self-consciousness that has defined his political career is no longer necessary. He no longer has to worry about “seeming square,” nor does he have to watch what he says for fear of having it used against him by political adversaries. In love

—his conception of love, a sort of love that he has never personally known—he believes that this refuge is possible. This freedom is positioned as a sort of alternative to the

34See Molly Hite, “A Parody of Martyrdom.” Hite argues not only that this “romance” is a burlesque of a popular romance-novel narrative, but that Nixon enacts a number of different genre exercises as he is engaged in this quest for Ethel. These all seem to me to be indicators of the same thing, of an effort to escape from politics; “romance” is merely the most powerful. As we shall see, however, it also demonstrates the limitations of these efforts. 153

political. This utopia turns out to be untenable because, in fact, in spite of all his efforts to position it as such, the trial is not apolitical, and the tension of trying to have it both ways—i.e., it's political because it involves Ethel Roseneberg, but it's not because it disregards just about everything about the case—is too much for it to bear. He would have to be able to reconcile these two aspects of it in order for the fantasy to work, but he cannot, because he lacks the ability to envision a genuinely new utopian world. All these fantasies are very seriously constrained by the limits of Nixon's imagination, which is not equipped to conceptualize any alternative to the current state of affairs that would involve any sort of shift in the political paradigm. He may, in his fumbling way, try to “break free,” but in fact being a part of the dominant political culture means that he can't conceptualize any sort of fantasy that represents a real escape from it. He certainly can't harken back to an earlier way of understanding the world, so where indeed can he go?

This is why, as Hite argues, the fantasy is staged in such a banal, clichéd manner: it is built from a conception of love that comes from popular books and movies, and this is all of a piece with the culture that imagines that it can save itself from the threat posed by communism and others in general by putting the Rosenbergs to death. Even though he imagines it as an escape from the political, it's really just another aspect of the culture that gives rise to this particular version of politics.

Ultimately, this is the postmodern problem in miniature: politics are such that they provide no vehicle through which utopian impulses can usefully manifest themselves; therefore, all of that frustrated energy has to go into personal channels. The channels, however, prove inadequate to the task; to function properly, they would have to 154

be able to imagine an alternative to the current political culture, and the imagination of people caught in this trap, like Nixon, is not such that it would ever be able to provide any sort of meaningful alternative to the dominant way of thinking. This is a closed system, and a real dilemma for anyone with radical, utopian aspirations. In the final chapter, we will look at another attempt to resolve it. Chapter 4

Pynchon, Against the Day, and Utopian Potentiality

Introduction

In the previous chapter, I argued that Nixon's problems in The Public Burning stemmed from his efforts to maintain the feel of politics in a utopia that was, ultimately, not political. He couldn't abandon politics, but neither could he conceptualize any sort of utopia while remaining genuinely inside of them, so he messily tried to split the difference, with predictably unsatisfactory results.

Obviously, Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day is a substantially different novel than The Public Burning. For one thing, it's much wider in scope; while Coover's novel focused on one particular event and the implications surrounding it, Pynchon attempts to articulate the entirety of American culture (and even world culture, though the focus is clearly on the United States) within a certain time period (roughly, the 1890s to just after the first World War). It would be otiose to try to describe the entire plot of the novel here, but the “main” narrative, to the extent that there is such, revolves around the Traverse family: the father, radical coal mining activist and anarchist Webb, is murdered by goons hired by plutocratic capitalist overlord Scarsdale Vibe, and his children, Frank, Reef, Kit,

155 156

and Lake, react in their various ways, most of them revolving around questions of vengeance and how, why, or whether they should be attempting to take it. Naturally, this leads to larger questions about the nature of capitalism and how and whether it can be successfully combatted, given the seismic changes to the social order and the nature of its sociopolitical milieu that the twentieth century is heralding.

The distinction between Coover's and Pynchon's novels is not merely a question of scope, however, as the latter tries to conceptualize the workings of society in a way that Coover had strongly argued was impossible. This is not to say that the novel is entirely successful on this front, but it does necessitate a return to Lukács in order to re- interrogate the nature of totality, which is clearly not imagined in the same way as it is in the earlier novel.35

In addition, Pynchon's novel attempts to conceptualize a sort of utopia which is wholly distinct from the sort that Coover's Nixon—and much of postmodern literature— tries, and fails, to make manifest. Against the Day spends a lot of time showing what the barriers are that stand in the way of achieving any sort of concrete real-world utopia, but it also posits a sort of utopian thinking that postmodern literature often does not.

I argue, in this chapter, that the postmodern milieu that we see in Against the Day is similar to the one we saw in The Public Burning: characters have difficulty seeing any kind of social totality—any way to understand the world as a whole—and as such, their

35I should note, also, that Against the Day is distinct from most of Pynchon's other work in the same regard. If I were writing about Gravity's Rainbow, the analysis would show that it was much more similar to The Public Burning than Against the Day is. 157

utopian scenarios become very problematic. Both of these novels are suffused by politics, and the characters therein understand (or misunderstand) the world in political ways. As such, their utopian fantasies are necessarily political. But the novels do not depict worlds in which pursuing utopian ends through political means seems plausible.

In this regard, Against the Day goes further than The Public Burning: rather than merely depicting a society in which the world is fragmented and confusing and nobody can tell what's really going on, Pynchon depicts a world in which corporate and government interests have very definitely taken advantage of this in order to achieve total dominance.

From The Public Burning, we can infer that the world is not a just one; from Against the

Day, we can see the particular details of the ways in which this is so.

The purpose of this chapter is to show how Pynchon handles this failure of totality. Some of the dilemmas that his characters face are notably similar to the ones that

Nixon does, and yet, while Pynchon's depiction of the world seems no less pessimistic than Coover's, his characters are, on the whole, able to achieve much happier outcomes than Nixon is. I want to account for why this is.

My ultimate argument is that Pynchon approaches his novel in ways that we can very strongly identify with José Esteban Muñoz's notion of potentiality: of the idea that we can rehearse utopian futures in the here and now by means of small, symbolic gestures that do not, in themselves, signify the existence of a utopian order, but that nonetheless model such an order. If we take this to be something like what is going on, then we have a way to understand why Against the Day, in spite of everything, should 158

seem as optimistic as it does. As I argued, potentiality appears in U.S.A., but not in any conscious way, or any way that would alter the central, overt thrust of the trilogy.

Whereas in Against the Day, the idea is quite central and, I think, consciously deployed.

Indeed, I argue that the novel rehearses, in a great deal of detail, the problems with trying to approach utopia in a postmodern milieu. Like Coover, Pynchon realizes that approaching utopia in a political way, as Dos Passos would like to—i.e., in a way in which socialism or another leftist philosophy (anarchism, in the case of Against the Day) becomes ascendant and allows people to lead lives that are not ground down by capitalist depredations and that are as free of repression as possible—is impossible. Therefore, if there is to be a postmodern utopia, it must bypass the political. But how is this possible?

What is there “past” the political? How is it possible to avoid simply falling into the trap that Nixon does; i.e., trying to create a utopia that appears at first glance to be political but that is actually drained of political content and—since there's nothing to replace that content with—ends up not having any substantial content at all? One can try to distance oneself as much as possible from the world, but in that case, one will simply end up losing all contact with the world as it exists. Or one can attempt to exist as part of the world, but then, the utopian feeling will naturally be lost.

Against the Day is very concerned with this dilemma. The ultimate argument is that any large-scale, totalizing utopia based on political principles is doomed to fail, but, unlike Dos Passos and Coover, the novel does not take this failure as a given. In other words, Dos Passos, and even more so Coover, assume from the start start that utopian 159

aspirations are futile, and their novels are devoted to demonstrating the ways that this is so. Whereas Pynchon, in spite of presumably knowing in advance where his story would lead him, nonetheless makes a serious effort to show exactly what possible responses one might have to capitalist depredations, and the particular ways in which these responses fail.

However, as I noted above, we can see something that we can identify with potentiality in the novel. The text does a very thorough job of showing why, in theory, there is absolutely no reason for anyone to be optimistic; then, by wedging in happy endings in spite of this, it forces readers to step back and ask how that can be, and ultimately to consider that the book a actually has a fundamentally different approach to utopia than we had been led to expect, and indeed a different one than any of the previous writers whose work I have examined.

First, I briefly discuss the concept of totality in Against the Day, and show how, although the characters grope towards some sort of accurate conception of the idea, they are ultimately confused because they see their conflicts as battle between individuals, rather than between the larger groups and institutions that these individuals represent.

The fact that characters seem not quite to be able to understand society in these broader terms is a central reason that their conflicts seem so futile.

What does this amount to? To answer this question, I examine in some significant detail what is probably, for my purposes, the most central grouping of characters in the novel, the Chums of Chance. The CoC are a group of five adolescent boys who fly 160

around in an airship and have adventures—a parody of the boys' adventure stories of the

Tom Swift type that were popular during the time period of Against the Day's setting.

Pynchon's novel, here, entertains a hypothetical: what if there were a way to escape earthly oppression? He thoroughly explores this question, and ultimately determines that, although appealing, the idea is, realistically, futile: it is necessary to maintain some contact with the world—that is, with “earthly oppression”—because it is impossible to imagine a world with literally no relation to our own. All that can be done is to maintain an uneasy tension between maintaining and eschewing contact with the world. However, potentializing thinking can provide a solution, of sorts: it absolutely does not provide a realistic path by which one could “solve” this problem and achieve a repression-free utopian existence. That is not its purpose. What it does, however is this: in refusing to acquiesce to political necessity, and insisting on the potential presence of a world other than our own, it keeps alive utopian visions. This may seem pointless, like nothing more than a Pollyanna-ish fantasy, but in fact, as we will see, it militates quite strongly against political despair, and, in any case, is the most powerful response, offering a vision of wholeness—not a vision of a return to totality, precisely, but of that elusive quality post- postmodern quality that Nixon wanted but was unable to achieve.

I am not, in this discussion, going to limit myself to the CoC sequences. In order to provide a more balanced viewpoint, I am going to finish the chapter by looking at another pivotal plot-line in the novel, of a three-way romantic relationship that bears certain similarities to the Chums, inasmuch as it too makes much use of the idea of potentiality, but that also involves “real” characters; i.e., ones who lack even even the 161

theoretical benefits of being “fictional.” These characters are Reef Traverse, Yashmeen

Halfcourt, and Cyprian Latewood, and, in embodying various surprising and unstable sexual identities, they too posit a future in which repressive norms are defeated and people can lead full lives.

Totality in Against the Day

As a prelude, I would like to discuss how totality does function in the novel, from a

Lukácsian perspective. Some of the same issues apply to Against the Day as do to The

Public Burning, but it is also, in some ways, a substantially different sort of work than that novel—and, more, a different sort of work than most postmodern fiction, including

Pynchon's previous work. What I mean is that, like The Public Burning, Gravity's

Rainbow (say) posits a socioeconomic vision that consists of a wide variety of aspects of society—historical and cultural facts and factoids—without placing them all in a coherent order. The implication is that all this information is present, but difficult or impossible to understand in any holistic way, in anything approaching a totality in the Lukácsian sense.

Against the Day is measurably different from this, inasmuch as, in spite of including much that is reminiscent of these previous texts, it also makes a concerted effort to try to understand and conceptualize society, even if it is hindered in this effort by its postmodern roots. Let me provide a few examples. 162

First, there is this speech, coming from a radical preacher, the Reverend Moss

Gatlin:

When you reach a point in your life where you understand who is fucking

who—beg pardon, Lord—who's taking it and who's not, that's when you're

obliged to choose how much you'll go along with. If you are not devoting

every breath of every day waking and sleeping to destroying those who

slaughter the innocent as easy as signing a check, then how innocent are

you willing to call yourself? (87)

The Lukácsian criticism of non-realist fiction is that it fails to present a full, accurate picture of the world, and thereby does not help readers to understand the economic relationships in which they are trapped. Gatlin would understand this critique; his view is that the most important economic relationship—between capital and labor—can be understood by the simple realization of “who is fucking who,” and that, once understood, it is possible to react to this knowledge in a constructive way by pushing back against the ones doing the “fucking,” by means including but not limited to blowing them up with dynamite.

The problem is that this simple but seemingly accurate view of the world is fatally flawed by the fact that it misleads: while it isn't wrong to say that the capitalist class is representative of the problem, the characters fall into the trap of going from this to believing that, in fact, individual capitalists are the problem.36 And this is not mitigated

36Marianne Dekoven concurs, noting that “the anarchists got it wrong . . . when they decided that killing individual powerful evil capitalist men would bring on the revolution” (335). The question of whether, 163

by the fact that, in fact, individual capitalists think they're the “problem”—or what they perceive as the “solution”—too. Scarsdale Vibe, the book's arch-capitalist villain, opines that “the future belongs to the Asiatic masses, the pan-Slavic brutes, even, God help us, the black seething spawn of Africa interminable.” He has the same us-against-them perspective as the radicals, albeit from the opposite side, and his solution—“what we need to do is start killing them in significant numbers, for nothing else has worked” (333)

—is also the same. Vibe may not perceive the “masses” as individuals, but all the same, he thinks that killing enough of them will solve the “problem,” just as Webb Traverse and his cohort believe that this is true of the capitalists themselves. Vibe's death ultimately comes at the hands of his formerly-faithful adjutant, Foley Walker, and it comes because

Vibe was unable to understand that solving his problems by killing or grinding down everyone who got in his way was inevitably an incomplete, piecemeal system.

Somebody—like Walker—is always going to get through the cracks.

No matter who's doing the killing, however, it makes little difference, as the book itself acknowledges. When Vibe is finally assassinated, it proves to be a meaningless victory in practical terms. The system proceeds as ever. The characters in Sinclair and

Dos Passos were able to perceive, however imperfectly, that the problem was larger than mere individuals; in Pynchon—or at least the Pynchon of Against the Day—they try to understand but are ultimately unable quite to get there. It should be noted, also, that, while this lack of understanding is problematic for both oppressors and oppressed, it is, in under the circumstances, they could ever have gotten it “right” remains open. A Lukácsian argument would note that this is exactly the problem with an inaccurate understanding of society: if they don't understand the true nature of the problems, how can they ever hope to find solutions? 164

balance, much more favorable to the former—it has to be, since they have almost all of the power. A few of them may get killed off for their troubles, but the odds are much more in their favor than against it.

Real totality, therefore, seems a difficult proposition, and unlike The Public

Burning, Against the Day doesn't merely illustrate why totality doesn't seem possible; it illustrates why totality doesn't work even when there's a concerted effort to make it do so.

The novel seems to be arguing that, indeed, we are unable to effectively understand how the world works, in spite of our best efforts; however, as we will see, there are elements at play here which allow us to see Against the Day's world in other terms.

Chums of Chance

As noted, the Chums of Chance is a group of five adolescent boys who fly around in a hydrogen-powered airship and have adventures, after the manner of Tom Swift.

They are Randolph St. Cosmo, the captain; Lindsay Noseworth, the fastidious second-in- command; Miles Blundell, the chef and a sort of mystic; Darby Suckling, the “brat” who serves as “both factotum and mascotte,” and Chick Counterfly, scientific officer and the most “worldly” of the five. They also have a dog, Pugnax. Their narrative opens and closes the novel,37 and, they are fundamentally distinct from the other characters, in the

37“In direct contrast to Gravity's Rainbow,” Henry Veggian points out, “Against the Day begins (and ends) with an ascent” (213). This point is striking, and indicative of the ways that the latter novel is a departure 165

sense that their epistemological status within the novel is very ambiguous—that is, it's unclear to what extent they are “real” people, and to what they're merely fictional characters. They rarely interact in a sustained way with the more grounded characters, and to the extent that they do, they tend to play up the ambiguity (“but every boy knows the Chums of Chance . . . What could you have been reading, as a youth?” (36)), and dismiss the question in a somewhat glib fashion (“the longer a fellow's name has been in the magazines, the harder it is to tell fiction from non-fiction”). At one point, Frank

Traverse is seen reading a CoC novel.

The importance of the Chums to the novel's design—and, by extension, the importance of this idea of “real” versus “fictitious”—is underlined by the register in which their narratives are written. Throughout the novel, Pynchon effects a number of different authorial voices in order to parody different genres of writing, but never so noticeably as in the Chums sections, which are, naturally enough, written in the intrusive, somewhat condescending style of the books he is imitating, occasionally addressing the reader and referring to the Chums' previous exploits (“...which the more scientific among my young readers may recall from the boys' earlier adventures” (6). While the novel quite frequently calls attention to its own fictiveness, it never does so quite as overtly as it does here.

for Pynchon. It certainly contains elements of his previous work, but whereas the increasingly-fragmented action in Gravity's Rainbow is bookended by bombs falling—i.e., an indication that the chaos will continue, and indeed is constitutive of the world—Against the Day ascends, indicating that this endless fragmentation may in fact not be the world's inevitable fate. 166

This is highly relevant to the question of pleasure and performance principle. As I have noted, the unregulated play of the former is something that exists only in theory; however, as it happens, the Chums exist mainly in theory themselves, so an opportunity is present to test the limits of the pleasure principle in a way that is not available to the novel's other characters (though, as we will see, this turns out to present its own difficulties). Their destiny is, as per the books that inspired them, to fly around endlessly and have endless exciting but ultimately not truly threatening exploits. They can make the implicit assumption that they will live forever, and that their material needs will never fail to be met.

The fact that they can assume this is because they are based upon (seemingly) guileless boys' novels in which there was no interrogation of the conditions for their existence, nor any need to reconcile them with genuine sociopolitical concerns. We could read these books against themselves and so achieve sociopolitical insight, but the target audience is not meant to receive them in this way. The books are essentially premodern, in that they posit a complete, continuous world of simple, Manichean morality, and the action consists of resolving threats to the status quo.

From the perspective afforded by U.S.A. (for example), this sort of worldview is, to give it the most charitable interpretation, extremely naïve, and not worth engaging with except perhaps as a negative example. However, as we've seen as regards The Public

Burning, postmodern literature is past the point of raging against the seeming inevitability of political failure. There is no practical reason, then, that Pynchon cannot 167

revive these characters, albeit in a modified and more self-conscious form. But what is the purpose of doing this? What do the Chums bring to the novel that can't be found in the more “real” characters?

In fact, the preternatural “innocence” of the Chums is relevant because it allows for a different perspective on utopianism. The question of utopia in the previous novels that we have seen inevitably concerned itself with the effort to implement realistic solutions to political problems—that is, solutions that we could imagine coming to be in the real world. The idea that the leftist protesters in U.S.A. could actually have used political pressure to usher in a new society may seem wildly implausible, but there's nothing magical about the idea, and if it had happened, we could analyze the situation and understand, in rational terms, why and how it did.38 However, the Chums represent a more postmodern utopia, in the sense that it isn't at all plausible, nor is it meant to be such—i.e., inasmuch as it exists in a realm in which real political action seems to have become meaningless, there seems to be little motivation to follow political “rules,” and as such, the Chums scenario does not do so. How does one achieve the sort of figurative and literal transcendence that they do? One doesn't. That is the main point.

So far, this is fairly unobjectionable, but not particularly useful, either. As a wistful fantasy, there's nothing wrong with the Chums, but if that is all there is to, it's a rather trivial aspect of the novel. In point of fact, however, that's not all there is to it. The

Chums are hardly static, and their development is, at least in part, a critique of the sort of

38This, as I will discuss later, is also important inasmuch as it underscores the ways in which their utopian ideals get mixed up with the idea of potentiality. 168

airy utopian thinking that they represent. There is a suggestion that, even if utopia as a political goal is no longer operative, that is no excuse to simply run away, as the Chums, in essence, are trying to do.

However, not simply running away may be difficult. The Chums' initial version of utopia is a synchronic one: that is, is spatially rather than temporally structured. It describes the particular structure of itself, but has nothing to say about how such a situation would be achieved, or how one would, from this vantage point, interact with the world in a sustained way even if one wanted to. This makes sense, as in fact it is quite apparent that there is no way to “achieve” their situation. That is the point of the Chums: their lives cannot serve as models for anyone to follow. Insofar as their story is interesting from a utopian viewpoint, it must be so in a purely theoretical sense.

However, there would be little interest in the scenario as a narrative if this were going to remain the case, if all that Pynchon were going to do was to maintain the status quo as established by the boys' books in question. That is not the case, however; therefore, it is necessary that the Chums' scenario, in fact, move in time, that it be temporally dynamic, and that there be some sort of reckoning with the nature of their relationship with the “real” world.” It is at this point that the performance principle must make its presence felt: because once we have accepted the existence of this group of people—this society, in essence—then we cannot help but start questioning its nature and the principles around which it is ordered. And since its nature is not entirely separate from the surface world (in spite of their general distance, they do interact with 169

earthbound characters and events), and since indeed the very essence of their existence relies on being known—on their books being read—by people, they are inevitably going to come up against a version of the same exigencies that “normal” people do.39 Fredric

Jameson characterizes the situation thusly, writing specifically about the issues that genre writing confronts:

. . . we confront something like a binary alternation between the reality

principle of SF and the pleasure principle of fantasy. Perhaps in that sense

Utopia does constitute a working synthesis of these two

incommensurables: the supreme creativity or shaping impulse of fantasy

marshaling the most recalcitrant raw material of all, in the state and the

social order. (Archaeologies 74)

I would argue that this synthesis is not limited specifically to genre fiction, and that, indeed, it is in evidence throughout Against the Day, as well as in other works that are not at all “fantastical.”

For the Chums of Chance, the dialectic between “pleasure” and “performance” functions in this way: very consciously, the group tries to avoid the most egregious aspects of surface life; i.e., of politics that repress people. The novel as a whole takes the

39This becomes even more evident if we look at the titles of some of the Chums of Chance books that Pynchon mentions, which obliquely refer to the events of the novel: Chums of Chance in Old Mexico (6) predicts the Mexican Revolution, in which Frank Traverse and other characters will later become involved; Chums of Chance and the Ice Pirates (123) refers to the disastrous scientific expedition to the Arctic that occurs in the novel; and Chums of Chance Nearly Crash into the Kremlin (123) reminds us of the Chums' ambivalent relationship with their Russian “counterparts,” the Tovarishchi Slutchainyi (“Comrades of Randomness”), and by extension with international relationships more broadly; finally, The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit (5), taking place in “Our Nation's Capital,” seems almost certainly to be intended as a swipe at George W. Bush. 170

position that, given the milieu that it depicts, there is indeed something essential for utopia-minded individuals about selectively disregarding aspects of the present: government and business interests are undeniably oppressive, and are only becoming more so. Therefore, if one wants to maintain a utopian outlook, it is necessary to—as one character notes—engage in “defective forms of time travel” (942); i.e., to pretend that aspects of the hoped-for future exist in the present. That this is an idea related to the

Chums is hinted at by a section in which they are seen to “find” artifacts from the future,40 while at the same time disavowing the necessity of the specific future where such artifacts exist: “Your own future may never include it. Nor mine. It's not the way times seems to work” (252). We see, then, that reeling a desired future into the present is not even necessarily a matter of thinking that this future is likely to actually come to pass.

Time travel is a common metaphor in the novel, and never more so than in the Chums' narrative.

We can see, then, that making a concerted effort to pretend that the world is other than it is is an important component here. This doesn't necessarily involve self-delusion per se, but it does involve remaining—always in theory—unimplicated; in the Chums' case, this means flying, both literally and figuratively, over all the violence taking place below, in the “real world.” Early in the book, mention is made of the so-called “Garçons de '71,” supposed balloonists who, during the 1870-71 siege of Paris, in which they utilized balloons to maintain contact with the outside world, realized “how much the modern state depended for its survival on maintaining a condition of permanent siege—

40“This hasn't been invented yet. I found it—it found me?—a fisherman in the fog, casting his lines again and again into the invisible river, the flow of time, hoping to retrieve just such artifacts as this.” 171

through the systematic encirclement of populations, the starvation of bodies and spirits . . . even to the point of committing atrocities.” In response to this, after the siege, they “chose to fly on, free of the political delusions that reigned more than ever on the ground, pledged solemnly only to one another” (19). The reader is clearly meant to consider this concept in relation to the Chums.41

However, this can be a little bit misleading, because in fact the Chums, in spite of their otherworldly nature, are in fact far from apolitical. Indeed, it would be reasonable to define the Chums' narrative as an argument about how much of the “real world” they should acknowledge, to what extent they should be participating in it, and how. Initially, the group doesn't appear to have done much thinking about political matters; rather, they reflexively hew to what is perceived as the American status quo. When Pugnax, who can read, is seen with Henry James' Princess Casamassima, Lindsay characterizes the book as being about “the inexorably rising tide of world anarchism . . . a sinister affliction to which I pray we shall suffer no occasion for exposure more immediate than that to be experienced . . . safely within the fictional leaves of some book” (6). We note the meta- joke here—Lindsay, a character in a book in large part about anarchism, hoping to find the subject only in books. But more importantly, we see the importance of the fact that he and his compatriots are, within the novel, at least partially fictional characters in books. The fact that he wishes only to encounter anarchism in safely-fictional terms is

41“Much of Pynchon's [novel] travels down, into mines and caves, towards the underground organizations of revolutionaries and 'Wall Street Operatives,'” Fabienne Gollignon notes; “it's concentration is directed towards the excavation of concentric spheres, great hollow cavities at the centre of the earth” (552). More than a physical descent, this demonstrates the crushing political pressures that the characters experience; as the odd characters out, the Chums push back—literally as well as figuratively—against this tendency. 172

indicative of a kind of delusion: he wants anarchism, and by extension anarchist notions of utopia, to not be a real thing, to perhaps be something that can be read about and gawked at, but not something that has real import in the world. And, indeed, this may ultimately be anarchism's fate as a political movement. However, given that the Chums are also fictional, they are implicitly part of the same world in which it exists: it is not something that they can simply brush aside so easily: they must decide, one way or another, how they are going to react to it.

Of course, this isn't necessarily true, strictly speaking; since they are fictional characters, they could certainly remain apart from the novel's real political agenda purely by authorial fiat. But this is not going to be the case. This quickly becomes clear, as I will explicate shortly. For now, however, the important point is that their flying above the world is their vigorous effort to embrace the pleasure principle, entirely free of repression. The unreflective support of an American status quo is political, of course, but it is really only political in the same way that Nixon's epic fantasies are in The Public

Burning; i.e., the world is as it is, but only because this is as far as Nixon's conception of said world is able to go. It does point out the limitations of the way people are able to imagine utopia, and this does have wider implications, but it's not a matter of trying to be political, and its inherent importance is limited.

In this situation, the earthly world represents repression generally. However, the case is made more difficult by the fact that the Chums' existence is contingent on, in spite of everything, being somewhat involved with said world:42 after all, they only “exist” (to

42It is easy to misread or oversimplify the Chums, to assume that their existence is simply a matter of 173

the extent that they do) because of the popularity of the books (a number of which are mentioned in the novel) that some invisible narrator has written about them; their existence relies on them being a part of the popular imagination. It cannot, therefore, simply be a matter of staying as far removed from the world as possible. Somehow, some sort of balance has to be negotiated between maintaining an involvement with the world, but not becoming too involved. This is representative of a dilemma that the book as a whole faces: if it's true that—as detailed in Coover—utopia of a totalizing variety is now impossible, then it would seem to be the case that these utopian situations that involve disconnecting from the world to some degree may be the only other possibility—and even those are difficult, since, as I have noted, it is difficult to know what this disconnecting would entail. And in any case, is there a distinction between this sort of disconnection and simply turning away and abdicating responsibility? If not, it is very difficult to say what one could ethically do. The Chums' narrative asks these questions: first, what are the consequences for utopia of flying away altogether, of distancing oneself from the real world completely? And second, what are the consequences for utopia of embracing the world, of moving in the other direction?

These are questions that the narrative addresses, in turn, albeit in an elliptical fashion. All of this is related to and reinforced by the concept of doubling in the novel: of multiple branching ways that the world is and could be. A complete cataloguing of all the ways that this doubling manifests itself in the novel would be a project in itself (the moving ever upward, to assert that they merely “refut[e] the claims of Earth's politics, lead[ing] to a removal of the dependence on the psychopathologies of capitalism that and the state and thereby lead[ing] to true freedom” (Molloy). As I will be arguing, the situation is in fact far more complex and problematic than that. 174

second section of the novel is entitled “Iceland Spar,” after a mineral which has the property of dividing beams of light in two). In the Chums' case the idea of doubling relates to the idea of dialectical tension between utopia and reality. As the end of the book's very first segment, Randolph and Chick have a cryptic conversation about what going “up” means. According to Randolph, it's “like going north,” to which Chick responds with the observation that if one goes far enough north, one ends up passing the pole and going south again, and further reasons from this that, analogously, going up must ultimately lead to going down. “Approaching the surface of another planet, maybe?” he wonders. “Not exactly, no,” Randolph answers, “another 'surface,' but an earthly one. Often to our regret, all too earthly” (9). This only hints at the possibilities, but it does indicate the probable existence of multiple versions of the world. More intriguingly, it indicates that constantly going up ultimately leads to going down in a figurative as well as a literal sense: even if they keep going up for long enough—i.e., disregarding earthly concerns—they will ultimately find themselves back on the ground: thus, the necessity of maintaining some sort of balance is underlined. But there's still an important question here: is it, in fact, possible to maintain this balance? Or is it the case that the world's gravitational force is such that avoiding it requires one to take ever-more extreme measures to stay aloft, ultimately resulting in going downwards and thus losing the utopian balance that had been set?

“There were no navigational charts to help them find their way” (107), the narrator asserts, succinctly summing up the Chums' problem. This is in regard to a situation in which their airship, the Inconvenience, is in need of a new figurehead, and the 175

arguments surrounding this question reveal that the harmony amongst the crew members

—which had previously been disturbed only by low-stakes, childish bickering—may not be as complete as had been imagined. The argument over the figurehead quickly becomes essentially an argument about who the group wants to be. Randolph is in favor of “the National Bird, as a safe and patriotic choice”—an argument in favor of the status quo, essentially. Chick and Darby are leeringly in favor of a naked woman, an idea that subverts the exaggerated sense of “innocence” associated with the sort of books that the

Chums are parodying. Meanwhile, Lindsay, “as if offended by the worldliness of these choices, argued as always for pure abstraction—'One of the Platonic polyhedra, perhaps.'” (110).

This dispute is solved via a compromise that clearly only papers over the more serious problems that it represents. The problem remains: if the dialectic between real and imaginary worlds is not in constant tension, they will not be able to maintain their uneasy position. Hence, to return to the question of figureheads, the debate—between

Lindsay's desire for pure transcendence, Randolph's for stolid support of the American political status quo, and Chick's and Darby's for something sexual—generates the energy necessary to, as it were, keep them aloft. In other words, the “pure” utopia that would allow them to truly be “outside” of society—the utopia that, we have posited, is necessary because a “political” utopia no longer seems to be a possibility—relies, itself, on its interaction with the political. This isn't necessarily a problem, but it has strong implications for the ability of the group to actually remain unaffected by the political concerns of the “real” world. 176

Too Far

But what happens when they attempt to take their privileged nature to its logical conclusion—when they try, indeed, to make a serious effort to eschew anything having to do with the “real” world? Strictly speaking, this is probably impossible, at least if they wish to continue to exist in any way that readers can be expected to understand, but they certainly make a serious effort.

“Was it any wonder,” the narrator ominously asks, after the resolution of the figurehead dispute, “that when the opportunity did arise, as it would shortly, the boys would grasp unreflectively at a chance to transcend 'the secular,' even at the cost of betraying their organization, their country, even humankind” (113)? The reason that it seems to be “no wonder” is because this argument had revealed potential weaknesses in their organization, a potential susceptibility to “earthly” squabbling. If any more serious challenges to their equilibrium came along, then, they might not be so easily resolved.

It is at this point that the idea of time travel makes its presence felt in the novel.

This incident occurs while they are on leave at Candlebrow University, a school of

Pynchon's invention which organizes time travel symposia, at which “the crew of the

Inconvenience would find exactly the mixture of nostalgia and amnesia to provide them a reasonable counterfeit of the timeless” (406). This remark emphasizes the fragility of the 177

Chums' arrangement: in order to keep their organization going, there is a need for

“nostalgia”—i.e., a preoccupation with the past, or an idealized version thereof; as well as “amnesia”—i.e., an inability to remember the world as it is. These two factors indicate that there is something unnatural about the utopian instinct here; that is, it relies upon a systematic corruption of memory in order to keep itself going.

While they are at Candlebrow, the Chums happen to bump into a mysterious group known as the “Trespassers,” who claim to be time travelers having arrived at this time from a dystopian future; they describe themselves as

seekers of refuge from our present—your future—a time of worldwide

famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty—the end of the

capitalistic experiment. Once we came to understand that Earth's

resources were limited, in fact soon to run out, the whole capitalist illusion

fell to pieces. Those of us who spoke this truth aloud were denounced as

heretics, as enemies of the prevailing economic faith. (415)

Now, this description of the world, if accurate, leaves little room for hope, and it comes up uncomfortably against the Chums' lifestyle. They are able to exist by means of floating above political strife and upheaval—but at the same time, their existence is contingent on that world below them. So what happens when they run into a situation like this, from which there seems to be no escape, from which they can't just fly away?

At this point, the limits of their existence come sharply into focus: if they are focused on how, concretely, this existence is to be continued, there isn't anything they can do beyond, 178

to the best of their abilities, wholly disengaging with the world and thus losing their own self-definition.

They are stuck, and once this concept—of a world in which their existence becomes untenable—is introduced to them, they become increasingly unhinged. They are forced to consider the possibility of their own mortality, a concept which had never come up before, an existence without end having always been implicitly assumed. The

Trespassers know the effect that this upsetting of their existence has, and try to take advantage of it by offering them the possibility of eternal life (which can no longer be taken for granted), in exchange, vaguely but sinisterly, for “accept[ing] a commission from them now and then” (415).

How to respond to this? We are told that

some Chums of Chance [not our protagonists but people from different

ships] turned in panic to the corrupt embrace of the Trespassers, ready to

deal with Hell itself, to betray anything and anyone if they could only be

sent back to when they were young, be allowed to regain the early boys'-

book innocence they were so willing now to turn right around and violate

on behalf of their insidious benefactors” (418).

The problem here is readily apparent: they are trying to regain their “innocence” by further embracing corruption, a clearly unworkable paradox. The “innocence” relies on 179

its remaining unviolated; once it is, regaining it as anything other than a gruesome simulacrum becomes impossible.

It is for this reason that “our” Chums of Chance take a different tack: rather than acknowledging and desperately trying to deal with the grim reality of the world, they withdraw completely. This involves forgetting their involvement with an aeronautics organization and becoming students at Candlebrow's “Harmonica Band Marching

Academy,” entirely disregarding the larger world and entering a carnivalesque realm characterized by the spontaneous outbreak of comic musical numbers. This is as distant as they are able to get from “real-world” concerns.

Belonging to this academy does indeed provide them with the opportunity to escape from the world which they had found so frightening, but it obscures their identity, and they can't maintain the illusion. The fact is that this is not, fundamentally, who they are,43 and the notion that it isn't a responsible thing to simply ignore the world keeps on pushing through. For this reason, they find that they must “revert” to their normal identities, but having experienced this—having seen what it was like to have to live in a world entirely separate from, and non-contiguous with, the real—they are able to do better; they have experienced “a certain release from longing,” and find themselves

“more closely tuned to [the Trespassers'] presences and long disabused of any faith in their miracle working abilities” (424). That's all very well, but it leaves open the question

43 “What if they weren't harmonica players? Really? If it was all just some elaborate hoax they'd chosen to play on themselves?” (422) 180

of what the alternative is; i.e., how, in the knowledge that their existence is imperfect, they can nonetheless continue to live largely as before.

Too Close

There is, however, a Trespassers redux later on in the novel, and this is the point at which the Chums are confronted with the question of what happens when the world cannot be avoided. It is possible at least to rationalize the Trespassers' predictions of dire societal and environmental collapse away, to note that even if this is all accurate, it's still far in the future, and in any case, there's no way to know for certain whether it's an accurate vision—it could just be a canny effort by the Trespassers to hit the Chums where they are most vulnerable. It may be accurate, and if so it may expose a crack in the

Chums' utopian edifice, but it can still be more or less ignored for the foreseeable future.

However, the fact having been established that there is indeed a category of information about the world that can break their equilibrium, it remains only to bring things closer to home.

A Trespasser agent named Ryder Thorn does just this, asserting that the Chums are oblivious to the situation that awaits them, that “the world you take to be 'the' world will die, and descend into Hell, and all history after that will properly belong to the history of Hell.” This is not a statement about the far-flung future, either; Thorn is 181

specifically talking about the First World War, and more specifically about Flanders, where this conversation is taking place, just a few years (it's impossible to pinpoint the exact chronology) before the war.

Flanders will be the mass grave of history . . . and that is not the most

perverse part of it. They will all embrace death. Passionately. . . . on a

scale that has never yet been imagined. . . . This, what you see, the great

plain, turned over and harrowed, all that lies below brought to the surface

—deliberately flooded, not the sea come to claim its due but the human

counterpart to that same utter absence of mercy—for not a village will be

left standing. League on league of filth, corpses by the uncounted

thousands, the breath you took for granted become corrosive and death-

giving. (554)

This is a different scenario than the Trespassers' previous description of collapse, but it amounts to something very similar: both serve the purpose of being huge, apocalyptic events that will utterly change the nature of the world, and the way that it's even possible to think about history; i.e., they are both sufficiently catastrophic that they call into doubt any optimistic, teleological ways of conceptualizing the trajectory of human progress.

Neither of them is anything we, as readers, can simply think of as being in the distant future. When we read the Trespassers' description of the way that capitalism has destroyed the world, we may find it quite familiar-looking. It may seem to be a plausible description of the near future, a future in which the progression of civilization as we 182

conceptualize it would simply end. But, Against the Day argues, this is myopic on our part: in fact, history has been “ending” in this way for most of the twentieth century at least. “History,” Pynchon's novel argues, has been problematic for a long time: problematic in the sense that we cannot understand it in the context of a larger historical past in which one event naturally leads to another. This is the antithesis of a Lukácsian argument, in which literature serves the very purpose of helping us to understand how events lead to other events. Against the Day, by contrast, argues that events in the twentieth century are such that this is not possible. Even if they can't quite articulate it in those terms, this is a frightening revelation for the Chums, who come to realize something that had always been apparent to readers, but that they had never truly grasped: that their existence is purely contingent. It lacks any real historical basis, and hence, there is no particular reason why it couldn't stop as arbitrarily as it started. The situation is compounded when the realization comes that the Trespassers are not in fact immortal, but that they are merely ghosts of some sort (the vengeful spirits of World War

I dead come unstuck in time, it is implied). Suddenly, even the possibility of the Chums existing as they are comes into grave doubt.

The Chums' situation remains indeterminate. However, as the novel progresses, there is more and more tension between the world(s) that they inhabit; i.e., between the sky and the Earth. Regarding the Tunguska Event—the massive 1908 explosion of mysterious origin over central Russia—we are told that “the great burst of light had also torn the veil separating their own space from that of the everyday world” (793). Later, they visit another planet that may or may not be the same as Earth (building on the idea, 183

presented at the beginning of the novel, that going “up” will eventually lead back to going “down” somewhere else: “They were on the Counter-Earth, on it and of it, yet at the same time also on the Earth they had never, it seemed, left” (1021). None of this is unequivocal. Their ontological status remains ambiguous, but it certainly affects their state of mind.

The boys could almost believe some days that they were safely back home

on Earth—on others they found an American Republic whose welfare they

believed they were sworn to advance passed so irrevocably into the

control of the evil and moronic that it seemed they could not, after all,

have escaped the gravity of the Counter-Earth. Sworn by their

Foundational Memorandum never to interfere in the affairs of the

"groundhogs," they looked on in helplessness and a depression of spirit

new to them. (1021)

This comes of being more closely implicated in the world's events; during this time, they are seeing the world more closely than they had before, and as a result, they are unable to maintain the kind of dual existence that they had before.

In the protracted journey which was to follow, covering eventually most of

the World-Island, it would not escape the boys' attention that something

very peculiar indeed was going on down on the surface. More and more

often, detours became necessary. Entire blocks of sky were posted as off-

limits. (1022) 184

In other words, they are finding their own freedom limited in the same way as the

“groundlings;” the performance principle is playing a more prominent part in their existence. They are coming face to face with the conundrum implicit in the Trespassers' nightmare scenarios: avoiding real-world events is simply not a thing that can be done with any success—nor indeed is it desirable to do so. The connection between the

Chums situation and that of people like them in the real world finally becomes explicit.

This is all taking place as the First World War is getting underway, prompting a revelation on Miles' part that the people on the ground are actually not much different than they themselves are.

“Those poor innocents," he exclaimed in a stricken whisper, as if some

blindness had abruptly healed itself, allowing him at last to see the horror

transpiring on the ground. "Back at the beginning of this . . . they must

have been boys, so much like us . . . They knew they were standing before

a great chasm none could see to the bottom of. But they launched

themselves into it anyway. Cheering and laughing. It was their own grand

'Adventure.' They were juvenile heroes of a World-Narrative--unreflective

and free, they went on hurling themselves into those depths by tens of

thousands until one day they awoke, those who were still alive, and

instead of finding themselves posed nobly against some dramatic moral

geography, they were down cringing in a mud trench swarming with rats

and smelling of shit and death." (1023-24) 185

In other words, the Chums have been able to avoid the war by virtue of their special dispensation—but when faced with such horrors, how can it possibly be ethical for them to remain aloof, whether or not it's possible to possess any kind of utopian vision in real political terms? When they're able to actually see what's going on like this, that becomes impossible. By necessity, then, they find themselves doing more humanitarian kinds of work—joining with their Russian counterparts in order to “send . . . food, clothing and— since a great influenza epidemic the boys had not till now been aware of—medical supplies, gently down by parachute to whatever populations below were in need of them”

(1024). This creates a more firm connection between them and the people who they were previously content to simply fly above, and it tries to reconfigure their utopia as something that is no longer so alien to the world itself.

Ultimately, we find that “Inconvenience, once a vehicle of sky-pilgrimage, has transformed into its own destination, where any wish that can be made is at least addressed, if not always granted” (1085). This world, then, becomes one that may not be perfect (“there are slum conditions” (1084), we also learn), but it becomes one nonetheless that addresses itself to human needs in a way that the “real” world—having been perverted by capital—does not and cannot. This would seem to be one definition of what the novel is looking for: a world in which human capacity is neither mediated nor attenuated by interfering outside forces. One is unable to escape the sense, however, that they are able to have a happy ending primarily by authorial fiat—that is, the end of their story does not really resolve the question of how one should try to resolve the tension between the two poles—engaging with the world and trying simply to avoid its problems. 186

There is something unsatisfying about this from a theoretical standpoint, inasmuch as it leaves the central theoretical tension unresolved—or, rather, it substitutes a gauzy, somewhat unconvincing humanism for any more definitive solution. I intend to return to it later in the chapter to provide another perspective.

The “Real” World

Before I discuss Reef, Yashmeen, and Cyprian, I would like to step back and think about the very nature of the world in Against the Day. How much difference is there, really, between the utopian stylings of the Chums' skyward fantasia and those of the more

“realistic” characters in the novel? I am going to be arguing that, while there are differences, there are also very definite, concrete similarities, and that these demonstrate the limitations of utopia in a postmodern setting even as they address these limitations in a more expansive way than Coover did before.

We see the same distinctions that we did before, between pleasure and performance principles. The difference—in theory—is that, as a self-conscious genre exercise, the Chums sections allowed for freer play of the former, asking the question: if we take it as a given that political activity is not going to accomplish a utopian world, is there a way to bypass this activity altogether? The answer, though ambiguous, was more 187

negative than otherwise. As we have seen, the Chums tried to negotiate a middle ground between flying away and landing, only partially successfully.

As I have noted, the fact that Pynchon's heroes are all anarchists is a clear indication of the stakes at play here. They want to be free of any kind of law or social structure that would contain them, that would prevent them from embracing unconstrained pleasure. This is clearly why anarchism as opposed to any other form of leftism is held up as an ideal. It's not a matter of practicality, and indeed, the novel makes it quite clear that anarchism is ultimately not working on a larger scale. I noted previously that killing capitalists—which is the main “political” activity that the anarchists engage in—is doomed to fail. The book's political viewpoint regarding anarchism is somewhat more complex than that, but it remains problematic. One character sums up the problems that anarchism is likely to suffer if from the Great War:

anarchists would be the biggest losers, wouldn't they. Industrial

corporations, armies, navies, governments, all would go on as before, if

not more powerful. But in a general war among nations, every small

victory Anarchism has struggled to win so far would simply turn to dust.

Today even the dimmest of capitalists can see that the centralized nation-

state, so promising an idea a generation ago, has lost all credibility with

the population. . . . A general European war, with every striking worker a

traitor, flags threatened, the sacred soils of homelands defiled, would be

just the ticket to wipe anarchism off the political map. The national idea 188

would be reborn. One trembles at the pestilent forms that would rise up

afterward, from the swamp of the ruined Europe. (938)

This reinforces the idea, which I noted in my discussion of the Chums narrative, that this war is essentially a turning point, that history as we know it will morph into “the history of hell.” It also, in its evocation of “striking workers,” recognizes that there is more to this philosophy than pure political violence. However, while the argument that the war would rekindle nationalist sentiment and thereby substantially set back the cause of anarchism and other leftisms, if not wholly destroy them, proves in hindsight to have been justified, we face the same issue as we did earlier: just as anarchist violence— killing Scarsdale Vibe—proves, predictably, not to have any discernible effect on the fortunes of capitalism in the novel, so, less predictably, does the war itself seem not to have much impact. Granted, the narrative itself does not extend very far past the end of the war, and granted, it is not a historical survey; nonetheless, as we've seen with regard to the Chums and will see with regard to other characters, the actual impact on people's lives seems to be negligible, or they seem to be able to triumph in spite of the war's depredations.

This is where the concept of potentiality comes in. As I will argue in the upcoming segment, the key is not to think of the characters' denouements as actually being meant to represent any sort of map demonstrating how utopian goals can be realized. Taking them as such is intuitively tempting, since the previous novels I have examined have all either try to demonstrate how utopia could be achieved or to show the 189

theoretical problems with this achievement. Against the Day is certainly not optimistic in practical terms—it is perfectly cognizant of the difficulties faced by utopia-minded individuals living in the era it describes—yet, it is an optimistic book nonetheless.

Sex and Anarchism

More than anywhere else in the novel, we see the political equated with the personal in the novel in the comparatively brief section in the latter half of the book detailing the menage à trois among Reef Traverse, Yashmeen Halfcourt (Russian mathematician of uncertain parentage), and Cyprian Latewood (flamboyantly gay sometime-prostitute, sometime-secret-agent). Their relationship is quite complex, and involves the overturning or subverting of many aspects of their self-identities, but for the purposes of this chapter, I want to focus specifically on the ways in which this relationship serves as both a complement to and a replacement for explicitly political activity.

None of the characters involved in this relationship are themselves overtly political, except in a very general, populist way. Reef—as the most enthusiastic about explosives of the Traverses—has a somewhat vaguely-formed faith in the efficacy of blowing up plutocrats, but is not generally very politically-minded in any coherent way.44

44“Reef was running as always on what, except for its lack of analysis, would've been class hostility, but usually had more to do with how some suit-wearing bastard happened to've looked at him that day.” (942) 190

Cyprian is “absolutely without political faith.” Yashmeen is the only one with anything like political convictions; “she had no illusions about bourgeois innocence, and yet held on to a limitless faith that history could be helped to keep its promises, including someday, a commonwealth of the oppressed.” However, the political aspect here, for

Yashmeen, is in fact part of a more general impulse—“her old need for some kind of transcendence”—that she also tries to achieve via her passion for mathematics as well as for sex. This desire for “transcendence,” as we will see, is broader than anything that can be expressed in political terms.

It will also be noted, however, that all three of them are, in some way, missing something. Reef feels a kind of guilt over his endless, compulsive profligacy, that he recognizes is having adverse an adverse effect on his life, but that he feels incapable of addressing (“I did everything wrong. I ran away from my baby and the woman I loved”

(852). Yashmeen, meanwhile, is sexually omnivorous, but feels generally detached about her encounters: “For years Yashmeen had been the one obliged to put up with passions directed at her by others, settling for moments of amusement” (877). And Cyprian, finally, is subject to endless, directionless desire that, again leaves him inchoately wanting something more: “Where was desire, and where was he, who had been almost entirely fashioned of nothing but desire?” (844).

What we see, in other words, is that these three characters are suffering from a kind of disconnect that is recognizably similar to that afflicting the characters in Dos

Passos. None of these problems that they are having are political per se, but they all stem 191

from a difficulty finding real human connection, and I would assert that this connection, like the one in Dos Passos, needs to be based on a correct understanding of the socioeconomic nature of the world. Their general lack of political conviction can be tied to their lack of personal conviction: if they were able to achieve the latter, the theory goes, then the former would naturally be facilitated. So it was in U.S.A., and so it is here.

The problem that naturally turns up is that—as I have noted—discovering a

“correct understanding of the socioeconomic nature of the world” is difficult or impossible in this particular setting. It's the same problem that Nixon had: politics was such that it only confused him about his connections to the world.

For Nixon, the personal was difficult to understand, so he tried to combine it with the political, which felt “safer.” This did not work either, however, as politics precluded the sort of deeper understanding he was looking for. In this particular scenario in Against the Day, a personal connection leads to a better understanding of the political. The sexual relationship among the three of them is highly transgressive, with strong sadomasochistic elements; Yashmeen gives orders both Cyprian and Reef (even if the latter doesn't quite understand that he's being controlled); furthermore, Reef, who had previously been intensely and exclusively heterosexual, finds himself, surprisingly, highly attracted to

Cyprian. Furthermore, in spite of being so radically different from anything to which any of the three had previously been accustomed, it functions highly harmoniously: “[Reef] kept waiting to feel jealous about something, having a personal history himself of purely 192

mean sumbitch ways . . . but among the three of them something was different, jealousy hadn't ever figured into it, in some way it never could” (944).

Of course, one could question how useful all of this really is. This romance certainly functions in a way that mirrors political protest—that is to say, the characters are rebelling against a set of norms that, like the political situations that the novel outlines, are preventing them from living full lives entailing as little repression as possible—but just what does this mean in a larger sense? I believe that Laura Kipnis gets at the nature of this situation to a large extent in her essay “Adultery.” Kipnis argues that

“if collective demands for better conditions are ignored, workers will organize, bargain, or strike” (303)—something that applies to sexual as well as market economies.

Adultery, Kipnis further asserts, can be thought of as an inchoate utopian impulse; unhappy with the strict terms under which one is being compelled by social and market forces to labor, one strikes out, searching for something outside of all that.

Adultery doesn't necessarily present you with models of utopian worlds:

instead, the utopianism is contained in the feelings it embodies—an

experience, not a blueprint. . . . In the conspiracies of your illicit

adventurous cells, you lovers are pursuing desire, yes, but aren't you also

playing closet theorists, vernacular utopians, performatively arguing the

minority position that discontent isn't . . . the human condition, or

somehow natural? (323) 193

Although part of this rebellion consists of betrayal of one's partner—who presumably represents the system that one is trying to get outside—the general principle could and should apply to any sexual arrangement that has the wherewithal to shake off the established order and go after new, liberating means of self-expression. For “adultery,” one can substitute the more general “sexual transgression,” thereby broadening the piece's implications, and making it relevant to this plot-line in Against the Day.

The key phrase here is “an experience, not a blueprint.” Obviously, the experience of Reef, Yashmeen, and Cyprian is not broadly generalizable as a plan for the population as a whole; it is, after all, a fantasy. Against the Day in general and this part of Against the Day in particular do not present a clear plan for how people should go about trying to achieve their utopian dreams, the way King Coal and its sequel do. The

Public Burning, though describing a milieu similar to that of Against the Day, was too preoccupied with the problems of said milieu—which do, after all, loom large—to imagine how anyone could work against it. Against the Day varies from this formula by, as Kipnis notes, providing an “experience.” It doesn't specifically point to a particular future, but it suggests a potentiality of a future in a way that postmodern fiction, including most of Pynchon's previous work, usually does not.

My argument here draws on José Estaban Muñoz's work on the subject of the utopian valences of queerness. We can here define “queerness” as any vision of human relationships, libidinal and otherwise, that challenges reified norms; we can see, therefore, that, by definition, it can never quite exist in the present, except in occasional 194

premonitory flashes—if it did, it would have to become the norm. Muñoz writes, characterizing the work of Ernst Bloch, that

A Blochian approach to aesthetic theory is invested in describing the

anticipatory illumination of art, which can be characterized as the process

of identifying certain properties that can be detected in representational

practices helping us to see the not-yet-conscious. This not-yet-conscious

is knowable, to some extent, as utopian feeling. (3)

I would like to highlight that final line: “The not-yet-conscious is knowable . . . as utopian feeling.” In Against the Day, the nature of political utopia does indeed reside in the realm of “the not-yet-conscious,” and is therefore very difficult to see.45 The book, as

I have noted, does not provide “blueprints.” However, it does establish potentiality; as

Muñoz notes, “unlike a possibility, a thing that simply might happen, a potentiality is a certain kind of nonbeing that is eminent, a thing that is present but not actually existing in the present tense” (9). Yashmeen tells Cyprian at one point, “I have loved women, as you have loved men . . . and what of it? We can do whatever we can imagine. Are we not the world to come?” (879). This illustrates the process: their relationship is a projection into

45This obviously has a lot in common with what I have called “non-totalizing utopia;” both of them suggest that small moments of illumination in the present can suggest utopia in the future. The two can and do overlap, and as I noted in the second chapter, we can to a large extent identify the one with the other, but to the extent that they are distinct, I would suggest that this is because the former is more general, and can encompass both small moments of personal connectedness and small public policy changes. The latter, by contrast, does not include the latter, nor does it require its future-in-the-present visions to actually be anything that would be possible in the real world: think, for instance, of the relationship between Mary and Ben in The Big Money. That novel suggested that, in a world in which language was properly rooted in socioeconomic reality, that relationship and others of that sort could be common and lasting. In Against the Day, however, there's no suggestion of any such thing about the Reef-Yashmeen-Cyprian relationship; indeed, it is explicitly not something that would be possible in the “real” world. However, in its implications, it suggests a profound refiguring of society. 195

a future. And when we place these lines beside the rhetorical question from one of her fellow anarchists, Jennifer McHugh, asking “what are any of these 'utopian dreams' of ours but defective forms of time travel?” (942), we can see the connection between political and personal visions of this: in fact, they are one and the same. Political potentiality that squelches the personal is meaningless. McHugh also notes that one of the traditional problems with anarchism was “these ancient all-male power structures” that “blighted the hopes of anarchism for years.” These groups led by males may have looked appealing from the outside; however, they only resulted in “anarchist fiction,” that

“did not exist [and] could not with that sort of patriarchal rubbish” (934). In other words, if anarchism clings to such regressive structures, it cannot be anything more than an illusion. The three-way relationship here is valuable in part because it subverts those very power structures. And the fact that it is explicitly unrealistic—there is, as noted, no jealousy, and the characters' sexual identifies abruptly shift for no obvious reason—only serves to make it more so, as it represents a complete rejection of aspects of the world that we simply take for granted.

Probably inevitably, the relationship is ultimately broken; this happens when

Cyprian—who, as noted above, is preoccupied with the question of “desire” and how it relates to him—decides to shut down these questions for good by joining a convent in the

Balkans. “It may be,” he posits, “that God doesn't always require us to wander about. It may be that sometimes there is a—would you say a 'convergence' to a kind of stillness, not merely in Space but in Time as well” (958). Cyprian's complete motivations here are somewhat obscure, but this notion suggests that he may be doing exactly what has proven 196

so difficult throughout the novel; i.e., discovering the unimaginable utopian substance that one finds when one denies the world: that is, the thing that the Chums of Chance are unable to find because their existences, though to a substantial degree magical, are nonetheless dependent on the presence of the world for their substance. If this is accurate, then it demonstrates the ineffable nature of this utopia: Cyprian is only able to reach it by disappearing entirely from the narrative, and from the world itself.

This, of course, is not, for most people, a practical solution, and Yashmeen and

Reef have to go on living in the world. It appears, however, that their moment of potentiality has been broken, inasmuch as the complex dynamic is gone. Yet this need not be the case, or not in an uncomplicated way. Muñoz suggests, of the potentiality generated by a performance (in this case, this particular menage à trois), that “it is something like a trace or potential that exists or lingers after a performance. At performance's end, if it is situated historically and materially, it is never just the duration of the event.” The relationship at no point creates a tangible “thing” that the remaining characters can transfer to other situations. However, it does—as Muñoz suggestively puts it—“linger.” In other words, the nature of this relationship, and its “modality of knowing and recognition . . . that facilitates modes of belonging” (99). The fact that the trio is broken does not mean that the invisible intrusion of the future into the present does not continue to exert a certain influence.

Practically speaking, what this means for Yashmeen and Reef is that, even if they aren't continuing to live their lives in exactly the same terms that they had before, the 197

“spirit” of their lives with Cyprian continues, as they return to the United States, hoping to find “someplace, some deep penultimate town the capitalist/Christer gridwork hadn't got to quite yet” (1075). They meet up with some other characters, and the family dynamic becomes tangled: Frank Traverse is now involved with Reef's former amour,

Stray, and the two of them have essentially adopted her and Reef's son, Jesse. All of this suggests an echo of the transgressive nature of the former relationship, especially given the implication that Yashmeen and Stray are to become romantically involved themselves

—thus adding in a vector of desire that was absent, even, from it.

Muñoz quotes CLR James to the effect that

in one department of a certain plant in the U.S. There is a worker who is

physically incapable of carrying out his duties. But he is a man with wife

and children and his condition is due to the strain of previous work in the

plant. The workers have organized their work so that for ten years he has

had practically nothing to do.” James looks to this situation and others

like it throughout the world as examples of an already existing socialist

present outside of the bureaucracy that was the Eastern Bloc. (55)

As Muñoz notes, this notion looks somewhat naïve on the face of it. However, he also argues, and I agree, that “it helps us to imagine the future without abandoning the present” (56). Yashmeen suggests, half-jokingly, that “we should start our own little republic. Secede” (1076). Of course, they cannot literally pull up roots and start their own country. However, in their mini-community—which, I would argue, became 198

conceivable largely due to the original Reef-Yashmeen-Cyprian coupling—they are able to, indeed, model a future in the present, challenging the “capitalist/Christer gridwork” in a way that novels that refuse to engage with the notion of potentiality are not able.

Earth & Sky

I would like to go further with this analysis as it applies to the Chums of Chance.

In their narrative we see characters uncertain how to proceed, how high it is advisable to fly. They never reach a wholly satisfying answer in this regard. We could argue that this is because they don't enact potentiality in the way that Reef, Yashmeen, and Cyprian do.

Chick may characterize himself as a “fisherman in the fog, casting his lines again and again into the invisible river, the flow of time” (252), which is clearly of a piece with the other plotline, but there's no specifically personal or political aspect to this. Trying to analyze the Chums in the same terms in which I have defined the threesome seems futile: they are less realistic characters, and so thinking of them as enacting any sort of future-in- the-present seems meaningless.

However, I would argue that ultimately, the Chums, rather than breaking away from this concept, represent it on a higher level than anyone else in the novel does. Reef,

Yashmeen, and Cyprian enact utopianism on a personal level, which plays into politics but is not immanently political per se. The Chums, on the other hand, enact utopianism 199

on a social level that is only implicitly political. Let us look at the final paragraph of the novel:

Never sleeping, clamorous as a nonstop feast day, Inconvenience, once a

vehicle of sky-pilgrimage, has been transformed into its own destination,

where any wish that can be made is at least addressed, if not always

granted. For every wish to come true would mean that in the known

Creation, good unsought and uncompensated would have evolved

somehow, to become at least more accessible to us. No one aboard

Inconvenience has yet observed any sign of this. They know—Miles is

certain—it is there, like an approaching rainstorm, but invisible. Soon

they will see the pressure-gauge begin to fall. They will feel the turn in the

wind. They will put on smoked goggles for the glory of what is coming to

part the sky. They fly toward grace. (1085)

This vision fairly explicitly builds on the same idea of potentiality that I have discussed regarding Reef, Yashmeen, and Cyprian.46 They would ideally like to live a world in which “good unsought and uncompensated would have . . . become more accessible to us.” A world, in other words, in which oppressive institutional power does

46Kathryn Hume asserts that “Pynchon seems to see in the ship and in the small city the possibility for sharing, for cooperation, for socialism and anarchism, or maybe just for the piety that emerges from a need for community.” From my perspective, this is simply wrong. There is no “possibility” here. The Chums are obviously not capable of existing in the “real” world, and the novel makes quite clear that there is no meaningful chance of socialism or anarchism really coming about. This illustrates a critical difference between possibility and potentiality: the former can only suggest that something might happen or might not, whereas the latter can suggest future potential without ever requiring there to be a practical way that that potential might come into being. 200

not prevent us from achieving our goals.47 As I have indicated, the Chums scenario does not at any point provide a blueprint by which one might see how one would get to that point; indeed, such a map is not possible in this sort of postmodern milieu. However, we can see them enacting this desired future, to the extent that they can, in the present, thereby creating a potentiality. The simile that Pynchon uses—“like an approaching rainstorm”—is a suggestive one. The rainstorm might not come, but the atmospheric conditions—the wind, the clouds, the low air pressure—herald it, and make it into more than a mere possibility. Sascha Pöhlmann usefully encapsulates the situation, noting that

“rationalization . . . leads from freedom to death as all possibilities are reduced to certainty, the potential to merely the actual” (362). When the world's politics are taken to their logical conclusion, there may well be no cause for hope. The trick, then, is to avoid reducing possibilities to certainty, but rather to work those possibilities and change them to much stronger potentialities.

47Inger H. Dalsgaard argues that this marks a return to the “real” world, that the Chums “finally enter a present tense at the end of the novel. They give up on eternal youth in order to join the stream of time, get married and have children, who will also grow up in turn” (93). This is accurate in a sense, and Dalsgaard acknowledges that this does not mean that they have suddenly become equivalent to the book's other characters, but at the same time, it is not really true that they are “enter[ing] a present tense;” rather, they are serving as the subjects of a potential future, one which we cannot, by definition, fully comprehend. 201

Coda

I believe I have made it clear that totality, as Lukács characterizes it, is not a feasible proposition in postmodern literature. This is no surprise; after all, if, in his view, modern literature is too focused on technique, if it is unable to encompass society in any comprehensive way, then we would expect postmodern literature to be just as bad.

However, the notion of potentiality may offer us a different way to think about these issues. For writers like Dos Passos, the concept is no good. U.S.A. does offer us a number of non-totalizing utopias that seem to offer an approximation of potentiality, but these are not present to offer hope; Dos Passos merely uses them to demonstrate that this kind of utopia is futile. I argue that they offer hope in spite of themselves, but this is very much reading against the grain of the novel. For Dos Passos—for anyone who believes that without a radical reinvention of society, anything else is beside the point—the very notion of potentiality is a bad joke, and it is a joke because for Dos Passos, able to conceive of a time when (as he perceived it, at least) language had meaning and allowed us to understand society, some vague notion of a concept that would hint at a possible utopian future cannot help but seem like a very poor substitute for a real, totalizing utopia.

We can see this attitude changing in later fiction. Coover in The Public Burning noticed that people no longer seemed able to conceive of history in any coherent way: 202

hence, the belief that incomprehensible, magical forces were the real drivers of society.

Pynchon in Against the Day takes this a step further: given that historical understanding has suffered such fatal damage, he is able to move past raging against it, and posits a different way to conceive of utopia. I do not claim that this makes his work “better” than that of his predecessors, but I do claim that there is something here that fiction like that of

Sinclair or Dos Passos—or Coover or earlier Pynchon, for that matter—does not quite get at. For in spite of its commonalities with other postmodern literature—which, in turn, shares many aspects with modern literature—we can actually discern something decidedly Lukácsian in Against the Day. In “Narrate or Describe,” discussing the horse race in Anna Karenina, Lukács asserts that “Tolstoy is not describing a 'thing,' a horse- race. He is recounting the vicissitudes of human beings” (111). Through this race, in other words, readers are able to understand larger truths about human nature that are only hinted at in the scene itself. Lukács contrasts this kind of artistry with the writings of non-“realist” authors, in whose works a scene like a horse race would be depicted strictly for its own sake, without regard to how well it was able to reflect the broader concerns of the characters and, by extension, the natures of the societies in which they lived.

This way of thinking has a lot in common with the idea of potentiality: in one, isolated piece of action, we are afforded a sudden illumination; a greater understanding of the world. The largest difference is that for Lukács, this understanding is oriented towards the present, whereas for the Pynchon of Against the Day, it is oriented towards a future. However, in a broader sense, Lukács does not simply want to understand the present for its own sake. As I have noted, from his perspective we need to be able to 203

understand how society functions in order to be able to envision a revolutionary, utopian totality.

By contrast, potentiality is about, not how society is, but how it could be—and in a far less concrete way. Lukács wants a way to perfectly understand society, whereas potentiality tends to function by offering glimpses. However, both of these concepts offer us a sort of short-hand way to see things about the world without these things having to be laboriously spelled out. Potentiality is not the same thing as Lukácsian realism; far from it. But it does provide a tool for seeing the world that is not part of Lukács' thinking. If we are willing to accept the idea that there is indeed something fundamental about modern writing, and postmodern even more so, that prevents it from quite being able to do what he wants it to do, then books like Against the Day can at least provide a partial solution. By saying this, I do not mean to fully endorse the purist, Lukácsian condemnation of the wrong kinds of literature, but as we have seen, there is a quality of despair in both Dos Passos and Coover, which results from an inability to conceptualize any better future. In that sense, Lukács' criticisms have merit, and Pynchon represents a solution of sorts.

I do not want to create the impression that I consider the concept of potentiality to be some sort of “magic bullet” that, when recognized, allows us to somehow disregard all of the practical limitations to the concept of utopia. In fact, of course, these limitations do not cease to exert their force: so, for instance, it would be a perverse exercise to try to 204

claim that, because we can see hints of potentiality, U.S.A. is therefore an optimistic work.

What I want to do is broader than that. The works that I have examined paint a pessimistic picture of American culture. However, that's not all they do. I would largely agree with these authors about the problems facing anyone with radical aspirations; the problem is that they frame the debate in such a way that there are only two options: either people are able to successfully fight back against oppressive government and corporate entities, or they are not. And since the power of these entities is such that combating them is extremely difficult in any circumstances, the conclusion of these writers' analyses becomes quite predictable. But the nature of human existence in any given situation is not such that it can be reduced to a binary, in which things are “good” or “bad.” As I have documented, even in the worst of circumstances, it is possible to discern at least the outline of a utopian existence; that elusive, potentializing concept.

How relevant is this? Or, to put it another way, to what extent does it matter that we are able to see visions of a future if these visions are not integrated into a larger understanding of the world which implies ways in which they could be realized? From an orthodox Lukácsian approach to socioeconomic and political understanding, the question answers itself: they have nothing to do with a purely rational, mechanistic understanding of society, and thus are not valuable at all. However, there is a certain danger to this kind of thinking, in that it can promote paralysis. Lukács insists that, no matter the circumstances, it is important for writers to help their readers to understand the 205

nature of society; that it is not an adequate excuse to claim that their writing fails to do this because it is mirroring the very nature of society itself. This may be a good ideal in theory, but even to the extent that it is possible for a writer to document society in a perfectly objective way while nonetheless being a part of that society, it puts very serious limits on the nature of utopia itself. This is not a problem for Lukács, for whom utopia is essentially synonymous with socialism, but, by insisting that utopia be of a totalizing sort, he is excluding those potentializing moments that, while not totalizing, nonetheless carry within them many of the social values and ideals that Lukács and other leftist critics value. By insisting that utopia can only be a matter of all or nothing, these critics are in fact reinforcing a context in which, since it is certainly not all, it can only be nothing.

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