THE PROLIFERATION OF THE GROTESQUE IN FOUR NOVELS OF NELSON ALGREN by Barry Hamilton Maxwell B.A., University of Toronto, 1976 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in the Department ot English ~- I - Barry Hamilton Maxwell 1986 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY August 1986 All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without permission of the author. APPROVAL NAME : Barry Hamilton Maxwell DEGREE: M.A. English TITLE OF THESIS: The Pro1 iferation of the Grotesque in Four Novels of Nel son A1 gren Examining Committee: Chai rman: Dr. Chin Banerjee Dr. Jerry Zaslove Senior Supervisor - Dr. Evan Alderson External Examiner Associate Professor, Centre for the Arts Date Approved: August 6, 1986 I l~cr'ct~ygr.<~nl lu Sinnri TI-~J.;~;University tile right to lend my t Ire., i6,, pr oJcc t .or ~~ti!r\Jc~tlcr,!;;ry (Ilw tit lc! of which is shown below) to uwr '. 01 thc Simon Frasor Univer-tiity Libr-ary, and to make partial or singlc copic:; orrly for such users or. in rcsponse to a reqclest from the , l i brtlry of rllly other i111i vitl.5 i ty, Or c:! her- educational i r\.;t i tu't ion, on its own t~l1.31f or for- ono of i.ts uwr s. I furthor agroe that permissior~ for niir l tipl c copy i rig of ,111i r; wl~r'k for .;c:tr~l;rr.l y purpose; may be grdnted hy ri,cs oi tiI of i Ittuli I t ir; ~lntlc:r-(;io~dtt\at' copy in<) 01. ~)ubl i (:,I t i uri of t 11 i !; w1,r.k f (>I' f I r~i~nci <I l $a i rr :;/la l l not bo a l lowed w i tt11wt my wr. i I tcri pcr-rl~ic.c. i~v~. Abstract The evolution of the grotesque in four novels of Nelson Algren is the subject of this work. Algren's writing over his fifty-year career is rife with grotesque images, situations and characters, but there are important differences from novel to novel in his strategic deployment of the grotesque. His overall motive, though, from Somebody in Boots (1935) through The Devil's Stocking (posthumously published in 1983), is cultural criticism. Algren maintained throughout his writing life that "legal" au- thority was illegitimate, and that the "hard necessity of bring- ing the judge on the bench down into the dock" was the responsi- bility of any honorable writer of fiction. To do so, Algren made increasing use, in his first four novels, of the grotesque mode. The approach considers the theories of the grotesque advanced by Wolfgang Kayser, Lee Byron Jennings and Thomas Mann, and points up the insufficiencies of these theories for viewing Algrenfbs work. The theories of the grotesque advanced by Donald Fanger and Mikhail Bakhtin, and the implications and suggestions of theories in the works of Walter Benjamin, T.W. Adorno and Guy Debord provide a more adequate basis for discussion of Somebody in Boots, Never Come Morning, The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side. Further, the tradition of the para- clete, so earnestly introduced into American letters by Walt Whitman, served both as the ethical ground of Algren's work, and . 111 as the catalyst for the artistic strategy that Bakhtin calls 11 grotesque realism. I I Whitman's writing constantly informs the discussion of the nature of Algren's cultural criticism. The significance of this concept of the grotesque, which defines the relationship of Algren to Whitman, is that it con- siders that most heinous disfigurement of America: the exclusion and denial of those found guilty I I of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one. " The evolution of Algren's use of the grotesque is further illuminated by Bakhtin's emphasis on laughter and "degradation. I I An intui- tion perceptible in Algren's early novels, that laughter can topple the image of the accuser and re-member those amputated from the social body, gained imaginative play as Algren moved more surely between horror and amusement. What sprang out of the oscillation was an offering to lay the ghost of the question Algren heard an accused woman cry out to a courtroom: "Ain't anybody on 9 side?" This work is for Norman Mitchell For my part, in this foreign country, I have no objection to policemen or any other minister of authority; though I remember in America, I ha'd an innate antipathy to constables, and always sided with the mob against the law. - Nathanael Hawthorne Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks Acknowledgements Thanks to Don Stewart for the generous access he provided to his collection of material on tramps, hobos, grifters, drifters, and malcontents. Thanks to Robert Tibbetts of the Ohio State University Library Special Collections for his help with the Nelson Algren Papers housed there. vii Table of Contents Title Page . i Approval Page . i i ... Abstract . 111 Acknowledgements . vii Introduction: "Every day is D-day under the El" . 1 Notes . Chapter One: Out of the Trophonian Cave . i: The Problem of Rot . 11: "The constantly renewed invocation of fear" . ... 111: The grotesque as habitation and habitus . iv: . Notes . Chapter Two: The Grotesque as Lumpenproletariat . Notes . Chapter Three: Production and Punishment . Notes . Chapter Four: Peacetime . i: . 11:. 111:. Notes . viii Chapter Five: Ashes of Soldiers . i: . 11: . Notes . Bibliography . Introduction: "Every day is D-day under the El" I would place the span of the grotesque in Nelson Algren's writing between two footings. The first is the conclusion of a story called "Pero Venceremos" (Spanish for "but we shall win"), which appeared in the 1947 collection The Neon Wilderness. The narrator, a barroom cipher with enough change to drink and play the juke box, half-listens to the hundredth recitation by one Denny O'Connor of the latter's war-wounds story. O'Connor has repeated the story obsessively since returning from Spain, with no variations save those which failure of memory make. Conse- quently, I I no one pays 0' Connor attention anymore. O'Connor is O'Connor and we've heard it all before. There's bock beer and a bingo game that you almost beat and a juke box that still plays 'Lili Marlene' and we all have our own troubles anyhow. I' 1 O'Connor insists on show-and-tell: one wound, the bayonet through the shoulder, healed long ago, and the narrator has to remind L O'Connor that it was the right shoulder and not the left. The leg wound, from shrapnel "'no bigger'n half dollar,"' is open and festering after ten years. O'Connor holds forth: "'See that? That's rot. I used to think it'd stop but I don't think so no more. Some one of these days they'll be takin' 'er off me. "' He bullshits for a while longer, about the Spanish War, the "ball- room brawls" he's been in, his unimpeachable status as a "good union man" (not so since Pearl Harbor, the narrator tells us), the effectiveness of a broken beer glass as an equalizer in a ballroom brawl, the Spanish War, the Spanish War-- "Maybe you'd better forget Fuente de Ebro, 11 I advised him directly. "After all, that's a hundred years ago. I I He looked at me a long moment, as though trying to understand what I'd said. He was trying so hard he was biting his lip. Then he seemed to understand at last . "Why, no," he told me, a little dreamily, "it ain't that long ago at all. It's just like yesterday. I I He rose slowly, his last nickel in his palm, and leaned as though resting against the juke while it began, for the last time, "As Long As You Live You'll Be Dead If You Die." When it was fin- ished he returned slowly and asked me, "Did I say esterday?" And shook his head like a man ?ecalling an endless dream. I I It wasn't even yes- terday, the way it feels. I I "How does it feel, Denny?" I I It feels more--like tomorrow." (NW- 221) The second footing is what I take to be the central point of the preface Algren wrote in 1965 for the republication of his 1935 novel Somebody in Boots. He speaks of the genesis of the novel, which he originally called Native son,' in a hope "to show a Final Descendant: a youth alienated from family and faith; illiterate and utterly displaced. a man representing tHe desolation of the hinterlands as well as the disorder of the great city, exiled from himself and expatriated within his own frontiers. A man who felt no responsibility even toward him- self."3 Algrenwas in the mid-1960s writing after the termina- tion of yet another frontier, this one officially called the New one, and he saw in its violent conclusion some pertinence to his first novel's protagonist: "~eading, thirty years after, this attempt to depict a man of no skills in a society unaware of his existence, the curiously opaque face of Lee Harvey Oswald, alive one day and dead the next, comes through like the face of new multitudes" (SB- 9). Belonging neither to the bourgeoisie nor the working class, seeking roots in revolution one week and in reaction the next, not knowing what to cling to nor what to abandon, compulsive, un- reachable, dreaming of some sacrificial heroism, he murders a man he does not even hate, simply, by that act, to join the company of men at last.