Forms of Frustration: Unrest and Unfulfillment in American Literature after 1934 Ethan Charles Reed Canandaigua, NY M.A., University of Virginia, 2016 B.A., Brown University, 2012 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Virginia May 2019 i Abstract This dissertation offers an account of what the condition we call frustration has meant and might mean for modern and contemporary literary study. Building on theories of affect as they relate to race, class, and gender in American literature, I focus in particular upon the articulation of feeling in the face of systemic injustice within recent US literary history. Building on recent scholarship suggesting that feeling gives structure to cultural formations, I argue that a history of unrest in America reveals a pattern of artistic response, a sensibility, precipitated by specific historical moments but translated into aesthetic practice through a stable constellation of affective structures. This constellation, I argue, is an affective situation governed not by anger, despair, or hope, but by frustration as a persistent structural condition. To this end, I examine continuities between politically-engaged aesthetic projects from three periods of discontent in American history: radical journals like Partisan Review in the 1930s; the revolutionary poetry of the Black Arts Movement in the 60s; and contemporary revenge-driven novels drawing from the Red Power movement. In pursuing this inquiry, my work attempts to offer an account of frustration that bridges the gap between specific articulation and historical pattern. Where Sianne Ngai uses an “ugly feeling” (like irritation) to investigate how Nella Larsen’s novel Quicksand articulates racial injustice, I attempt to trace a larger historical trajectory of a radical sensibility in America. Alternatively, where Lauren Berlant uses affective experience to perform a broad analysis of the false promises and “cruel optimism” of recent American and European culture, I narrow my focus to three periods of social unrest in American history and embeddedness in an affective situation shared between artistic movements from those periods. Building on other scholarship that has viewed affect as potentially pre-discursive (Massumi, Deleuze), bound up in psycho- ii biological drives (Sedgwick, Tomkins), or as a discursive quality itself (Berlant, Ahmed), this project looks to periods of literary radicalism in the United States with an eye for those situations governed by discontent, unrest, and frustration as structural and structuring forces—affective situations in which individuals, groups, and institutions respond to the use of power to block, bewilder, disappoint, and prevent. iii Acknowledgements I am extremely grateful to everyone who took the time to work through ideas with me, offer encouragement, and consider various iterations of this dissertation over the years. In particular, I want to thank my dissertation committee: Rita Felski, Anna Brickhouse, and Sandhya Shukla—whose thoughts, questions, and suggestions have, for many years, been invaluable to my research and thinking—as well as Lawrie Balfour—who generously agreed to join during the project’s final stages. Additionally, I would like to thank my friends and colleagues in the department who workshopped many pieces and versions of this project in dissertation writing groups: Sophie Abramowitz, James P. Ascher, Sarah Berkowitz, Alyssa Collins, Christian Howard, and Eva Latterner. Thank you for your thoughts, perspectives, and suggestions. I would also like to thank everyone in the Scholars’ Lab, and Brandon Walsh in particular—I am extremely grateful for all the time and energy you have given so generously to me over the years. Finally, I would like to thank my family—your constant love, support, and encouragement made all of this possible. Thank you so much. iv Table of Contents Introduction Why Frustration? 1 Chapter 1 Revolutionary Difficulties: Partisan Review and the Critical Moods of the 1930s 22 Chapter 2 Measured Protest in the Poetry of the Black Arts Movement 68 Chapter 3 Frustration, Resentment, and Revenge: The Reparation Plot in Novels by Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie 141 Coda 195 Works Cited 199 1 Introduction: Why Frustration? My interest in frustration emerges from its ability, as a term, to capture the conceptually messy intersections of subjectivity, agency, ethical response, and artistic expression, all over a variable temporal scale. We can feel frustrated when faced with minor vexations, but also when faced with widespread structural conditions; we can be frustrated as individuals, but also as collectives; such a feeling can surge up all at once, or wear away at us day by day over the course of many years. Unlike many other feelings we recognize as politically charged, frustration bridges a gap between feeling and status: we can feel frustrated, as individuals responding to an event or set of circumstances, but also be frustrated, as social agents whose agency has, for whatever reason, been obstructed. Moreover, as we shall see, both can act as a spur to combat perceived injustice in the world through aesthetic production. In this sense, while some may view frustration as a “minor,” perhaps even trivial feeling ill-suited to investigate experiences of political injustice—rather than, say, anger—it is precisely this overlap of mundane, day-to-day experience and broader structural conditions that makes this affective structure worth examining. Investigating this feeling/status allows us to pursue important questions: what happens when feelings associated with injustice persist for years? Or decades? What happens when certain affective responses become so consistent with a given structural condition that the two are difficult to disentangle? To give an example combining both: what happens when various frustrations emerging from personal, day-to-day encounters with systemic inequality (i.e., microaggressions) accrue over time, building, informing, even transforming one another? And how do these affective conditions that emerge from persistent injustice relate to aesthetic production? 2 Not all forms of frustration, of course, connect back to political injustice. But many do, and often in diverse ways that reveal unique patterns, both in terms of aesthetic practice and the linkages between affect and specific historical situations. Because of its conceptual complexity, a feeling/status like frustration intertwines readily with other, more recognizably “political” feelings and categories—anger and despair, but also hope and even resolve—while allowing us to see how encounters with injustice can inspire complex responses that push at the boundaries of what might seem to count as a “feeling.” By focusing our lens through various forms of frustration—the way these forms emerge out of specific structural conditions as well as aesthetic practices—we are better able to track this complexity and explore the conceptual terrain between affective response, agency, and unjust historical situations. One example: in her keynote to the 1981 National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Audre Lorde begins by discussing the feelings that racism brings into her life. “My response to racism,” she writes, is anger. I have lived with that anger, on that anger, beneath that anger, on top of that anger, ignoring that anger, feeding upon that anger, learning to use that anger before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight of that anger. My fear of that anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also. (Lorde 1997, 278) Lorde’s relationship with anger in this passage is complicated. A response to systemic racism, this feeling has spatial dimensions that shift over time (“with,” “on,” “beneath,” “on top of”), as though it were a concrete—and persistent—presence in the world around which she must constantly maneuver. In these maneuverings, this feeling can be so destructive (laying “visions to waste”) that the very fact of it (“the weight of that anger”) sparks chain-reactions into other feelings, like fear. Yet this feeling can also provide nourishment (“feeding upon that anger”); though dangerous, it can be wielded tactically (“learning to use that anger”). And while isolating 3 (lived with “in silence”), it can become an object of knowledge in its own right—one capable of creating community (shared experiences between “my fear” and “your fear”), providing, for example, the occasion for a keynote address to an interested audience. Though Lorde soon after shifts her focus to discuss “the uses of anger” more generally, these initial lines provide the beginnings of a phenomenology for a certain kind of affective response. Her descriptions, in effect, push at the boundaries of what a feeling like “anger” can be as it relates to individual experience: this is an anger that seems to exist outside the self— embedded in and emerging from external, concrete realities. This condition also takes on a number of different relational configurations over long periods of time—something Lorde has “lived with,” as she describes, “for most of [her] life.” Her account hearkens back to the word’s root, which it shares with “anguish,” or the list of feelings that the OED provides in its first definition: “trouble, affliction, vexation, sorrow.” (“anger, n.”, OED Online). In the spread of this definition alone, we can see the conceptual complexity that emerges when one rigorously examines, as Lorde does here, the intersections between subjectivity, affective experience, and structural injustice. In another example, we see an account of a similar condition in Sherman Alexie’s 1996 novel Indian Killer, a thriller that follows the investigation of a murderer in Seattle and the explosion of lingering racial tensions that follow in their wake. Alexie’s character, like Lorde, discusses anger in such a way that pushes at the conceptual limits of what the term might normally accommodate: All the anger in the world has come to my house.