University of Nevada, Reno Rags, Riches And
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University of Nevada, Reno Rags, Riches and Rye: Hobohemian Practice in Twentieth Century American Literature A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Jennifer H. Forsberg Dr. Justin D. Gifford/Dissertation Advisor May, 2016 THE GRADUATE SCHOOL We recommend that the dissertation prepared under our supervision by JENNIFER H. FORSBERG Entitled Rags, Riches and Rye: Hobohemian Practice in Twentieth Century American Literature be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Justin D. Gifford, PhD, Advisor Ann Keniston, PhD, Committee Member Jen Hill, PhD, Committee Member Dennis Dworkin, PhD, Committee Member Greta de Jong, PhD, Graduate School Representative David W. Zeh, Ph. D., Dean, Graduate School May, 2016 i ABSTRACT This dissertation examines hobo symbolism in the literary works of the American writers Jack London, John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Bukowski. I argue that these authors utilize the social status of working- class identity in the tramp, hobo, migrant, or bum as a narrative technique and aesthetic model. These twentieth-century white, male writers construct an ideological and intellectual fantasy of the cultural frontier by enacting empowered mythological orders of the working class, despite its relegation to economic dispossession and social marginalization. I call attention to character types such as the tramp, hobo, migrant, and bum to investigate the circulation of mythologies about self-making, industriousness, and American progress into the twenty-first century. The inclusion of the hobo or other working-class figures in the hobo narrative incorporates, appropriates and often co-opts these American mythologies to exhibit generational and countercultural gain for white masculinity. In composing hobo narratives, London, Steinbeck, Kerouac, Thompson and Bukowski create strategic class associations that render the social and material pressures of contemporary American identity abstract and stylized in art. The hobo narrative becomes a symbolic site for popular culture and politics to re-value working-class identity as a productive cultural appeal, including but not limited to literature and television, such as in Mad Men. The hobo symbolic institutes a tension between social status and creative enterprise in what I call hobohemian practice, a writing technique that stages working-class associations for the possession of an ii American masculinity. This masculinity not only aims for hegemonic status, but values individuality and socio-economic latitude that consolidates the material conditions of an earlier generation. The concept of the hobohemian has resounding effects on the way that men construct authority as writers in the literary marketplace and as salesmen of American culture. Hobohemian practice guides my examination of the hobo narrative as it renders poverty a valuable creative association rather than a socio-economic condition. Since the hobo is both a marginal member of the working class and a constructed cultural fantasy of dominance, the hobo narrative becomes a site for examining the pressures of gender, race and class. I construct an interdisciplinary framework at the intersections of Working-Class Studies, American Studies and Masculinity Studies to highlight these social pressures as they inform the foundation of the hobo symbol in realist and naturalist literature at the turn of the century. From this foundation, I sketch a larger narrative of cultural circulation where the above authors draw on the mythos of the hobo and the politics of homelessness to market the cultural capital of white masculinity to the mid-to-late twentieth century intellectual marketplace. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Working-Class Multiplicity and The Hobo Narrative…1 Jack London and the Hobo As Artist…8 Defining the Hobo...19 Historic Hobohemia and Hobohemian Literary Practice...30 Interdisciplinary Methodologies...42 Selling Poverty: Chapter Overview...50 Chapter One: Envisioning Mobility: John Steinbeck and the Gasoline Tramp…58 The Gasoline Tramp as Passenger…63 Critical Roads Into Wrath…68 The Proletarian Passenger…69 Embodied Passengers…75 Recasting Passengers…81 Steinbeck as Gasoline Tramp…86 Chapter Two: Gray Flannel Suits and ‘Existentialist Costumes’: Jack Kerouac’s Hobohemian Self-Fashioning…93 Performing Working Class Drag...101 The Hobo’s New Clothes: Kerouac’s Appearances On the Road…108 Big Sur and the Nakedness of Fame...121 iv Chapter Three: The Cultural Work of Hunter S. Thompson’s Strange and Terrible Sagas…130 Hell’s Angels and the Work of Representation…135 Thompson and Transparency…149 Loathing the Profession…155 Chapter Four: Commodifying Skid Row: Selling Charles Bukowski and Henry Chinaski…166 Rags, Riches and Rye…173 Embodying Poverty…178 Campaigning for Outsider of the Year…184 The Surplus Value of Working-Class Identity…193 Conclusion: “Cross-Country Drives: Mad Men and the Hobo Mystique of Don Draper/Dick Whitman…202 Flashback to the Hobo Mystique…205 Finding the Great American Hobo…211 Hobohemian California...219 Bibliography…226 Appendix…243 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 Australia (CC BY-NC 2.5 AU)…244 1 Introduction: Working-Class Multiplicity and The Hobo Narrative The American hobo is a historically marginalized member of the working class who conveys the ideological pressures of citizenship on the labor of able- bodied men. Study of the hobo often examines the historical pressures on a hobo body of knowledge, such as in the innovative work of Heather Tapley, Timothy Cresswell, or John Lennon. These authors highlight how economic, educational and political social institutions reinforce hierarchies of class through the mediation of race and gender. But unlike these studies, I focus on the pressures the hobo— socially and symbolically—places twentieth-century expressions of resilient masculinity within American literature and culture. This dissertation centers analysis on a network of racial and gendered tensions within the working-class literature of the hobo’s symbolic story, what I call the hobo narrative. This type of narrative features the tale of an often first-person narration of a homeless or under- class figure who travels from job to job and/or place to place, whether by rail or by road. These twentieth-century narratives map a nationalist culture of masculinity as defined against the social development of working-class figures ranging from the tramp, hobo, migrant, and bum. As a productive narrative form, the hobo narrative enlists social class-based tensions to wage cultural conflicts between elite and popular taste. It also manipulates genre conventions like the travelogue, the autobiography or memoir, the non-fiction ethnography, and the novel to make strategic gains in the literary marketplace. 2 The development of the hobo narrative starts with the inter-century tramp autobiographies of A-No. 1, Josiah Flynt, or Harry Kemp.1 As texts that were often self-published and popularly circulated between readers within distinct social circles, the tramp autobiography provides a foundation from which the hobo narrative develops as a complex and often hybrid literary form. The tramp autobiography of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century gained recognition as a genre of flexible fictional autobiography that conflated the author and narrator for ethnographic and often journalistic critiques of social class. Often interested in staging social inequalities for highly-masculine literary validations, the tramp autobiography is a life-centered production that roots itself in an expression of mobile self-aggrandizement akin to Walt Whitman. Though informed by the style and technique of the tramp narrative, the hobo narrative asserts symbolic accounts of road-related freedoms that are not limited to first-person tales or ethnographic purpose, but rather self-consciously co-opt the romantic impulse of inter-century expression emblematic of the tramp autobiography. In this way, I define the hobo narrative as a confluence of road stories and travel narratives that draw on technological and economic transformations specific to the twentieth century. In one iteration, the hobo narrative may offer a fictionally autobiographical voice of resilient and manipulative social experience, such as in Jack Black’s You Can’t Win (1926). In another iteration, the form may exist as a strictly fictional narrative that features hobos or vagabonds through third-person or 1 A-No. 1, or Leon Ray Livingston’s Life and Adventures of A-No. 1: America's Most Celebrated Tramp (1910), Josiah Flynt’s sociological narrative Tramping With Tramps (1899) and Harry Kemp’s Tramping on Life (1922) are tramp autobiographies commonly featured in the study of the tramp. 3 experimental narration and for political commentary, such as in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy (1937). In both examples, the hobo narrative asserts itself as a flexible form that maps the social and the symbolic forms of working-class identity throughout the twentieth century. Whether for personal development or political activism, the hobo narrative emphasizes spatial mobility over social mobility, and foregrounds tales of resilient male figures like the hobo—but also the tramp, migrant, or bum—because they grant attention to both the economic and cultural poverty of America. Though the working-class figure featured in the hobo narrative changes throughout the century