Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2010 Paths of most resistance: navigating the culture industry in William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Delmore Schwartz, and Eudora Welty Jason Dupuy Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Dupuy, Jason, "Paths of most resistance: navigating the culture industry in William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Delmore Schwartz, and Eudora Welty" (2010). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 2550. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/2550 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. PATHS OF MOST RESISTANCE: NAVIGATING THE CULTURE INDUSTRY IN WILLIAM FAULKNER, RICHARD WRIGHT, DELMORE SCHWARTZ, AND EUDORA WELTY A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In The Department of English by Jason Dupuy B.A., Loyola University New Orleans, 2002 M.A., Louisiana State University, 2006 August 2010 For Melinda. ii Acknowledgements I would first like to thank Rick and Brannon, for their thoughtful guidance and feedback, along with all the other university teachers who have helped me in the past 12 years: Carl, Elsie, Ed, Robert, Brian, Sue, Liz, Kate, Larry, and anyone else I might have forgotten. Also, thanks to James and Casey, who read portions of this dissertation and helped me figure out where it was going. And to my other wonderful friends—Jeremy, Kath, Ben, Robbie, Bobbi, Claire, everyone else. Finally, thanks to my parents, Mike and Nancy Dupuy, who supported me emotionally (and, at times, financially) when I decided to quit my job and go back to school. And, of course, to Melinda, who, as the cliché goes, believed in me when I didn’t. iii Table of Contents DEDICATION. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. iii ABSTRACT. v CHAPTER ONE THE CULTURE INDUSTRY IN CONTEXT. 1 CHAPTER TWO “SUPPOSE I WENT THERE AND FOUND OUT IT WAS NOT SO?”: FAULKNER’S MOURNING AND THE EASY ANSWERS OF THE CULTURE INDUSTRY. 30 CHAPTER THREE “THAT SENSE OF FULLNESS HE HAD SO OFTEN BUT INADEQUATELY FELT IN MAGAZINES AND MOVIES”: RICHARD WRIGHT’S APPROPRIATIONS OF MASS CULTURE . 73 CHAPTER FOUR THE ORACLE AT DELPHI: DELMORE SCHWARTZ AND THE ARTIST’S APPROACH TO THE CULTURE INDUSTRY. 110 CHAPTER FIVE “HER BEETHOVEN”: EUDORA WELTY AND THE POWER OF HUMAN UNDERSTANDING. .143 CONCLUSION. 174 BIBLIOGRAPHY. .181 VITA. 193 iv Abstract This dissertation explores how four modernist writers of the 1930s and 1940s—William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Delmore Schwartz, and Eudora Welty—used their works to present ways to resist and navigate what they present as the frequently reductive worldview offered by the culture industry. Faulkner tends to show the culture industry as selling easy answers that focus on the end result, which allows his characters to approach the culture industry with a sense of fatalism. To resist this, Faulkner stresses a step-by-step, complex dialectical understanding of the culture industry, one that shows the fissures in its seemingly straightforward narratives and allows the reader to see how the narratives of the culture industry are not totalizing and can be resisted. Richard Wright, with his Native Son (1940), has written a better piece of mass culture, one that both gives the reader what he wants and helps show how the pleasures of mass culture are tied to a racist system. More than any of the other writers I’m discussing, Wright courts a wide audience by expertly using the tropes of various popular forms of the late 1930s—movies, crime novels, gothic fiction, newspapers, protest novels—and then adds an extra layer of analysis that explores how these pieces of mass culture are not ideologically neutral. One of the protagonists in a Delmore Schwartz story compares a movie to the Oracle at Delphi, which gave prophesies enigmatic enough to allow differing interpretations. The masses in Schwartz’s stories approach mass culture looking for simple entertainment, and that’s what they get. The conflicted artist figures who are the protagonists of Schwartz’s stories approach mass culture more complexly, and Schwartz shows how an artistically inclined mind can find much of value in mass culture if he knows what to look for. Eudora Welty, finally, shows mass culture as something that can help compound a sense of (frequently female) alienation. For Welty, it is small moments of emotional connection that allow people to find a way out of the totalizing system of mass culture. v Chapter One: The Culture Industry in Context The short story “Golden Land” (1935), the only of William Faulkner’s works to take place in Hollywood, takes a particularly dim view of the culture industry. Its protagonist, Ira Ewing, is a prominent California realtor with a serious drinking problem and a disastrous family life that includes a wife with whom he barely speaks, a cross-dressing son, and a daughter who is in the tabloids for her part in a sex scandal. The morning we first meet Ira, he wakes up hung-over to find a newspaper headline that reads, “APRIL LALEAR BARES ORGY SECRETS” (705). His daughter, known publicly by her stage name, has tried to stage a sex scandal with a prominent Hollywood producer in the hopes of becoming a movie star, though it backfires. Ira was born in Nebraska, and he brought his mother west with him, and the story makes a stark distinction between the honesty of the farm life in Nebraska and the corruption of life in California. As Ira’s mother tells him, “You make money too easy. This whole country is too easy for us Ewings. It may be all right for them that have been born here for generations; I don’t know about that. But not for us” (724).1 As the story sees it, moving to California and its culture industry brings about sexual perversion in the forms of Ira’s son’s cross-dressing and his daughter’s Hollywood sex life, which gives the story the distinct whiff of homophobia and sexism.2 Life in Nebraska, to which his mother wants to return to live out her days, might have been more difficult, but it was also free of such corruption. In relation to much of Faulkner’s body of work, this story is fairly simplistic. It’s the view of mass culture put forth by the Agrarians, who saw farming as a sort of social panacea to the ills brought about by industrialized society. And although Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, developers of the theory of the culture industry, would never present the issue in such a relatively uncomplicated way, they would likely agree with the distrust of Hollywood that informs the story. Indeed, much of our conception of modernism—though it’s a conception that has been 1 deeply challenged and complicated in recent years—is that it stands in opposition to the simplistic repetition of the culture industry. Of course, such a view of modernism would suggest that William Faulkner, the premiere American modernist novelist, would want to show us how vapid and destructive the culture industry could be. It goes without saying that things aren’t nearly that simple. Faulkner might have hated Hollywood—and he especially might have hated his time working there—but he, like most American modernists, understood that the culture industry must be dealt with in a more complex way by anyone who wanted to practice serious art, which makes “Golden Land” a bit of an anomaly in his body of work. The 1930s didn’t see the invention of what we call mass culture or the mass media— movies, newspapers, pulp magazines, radios—but the Depression years saw a multiplication of that mass culture with which many of the significant pre-war American authors were forced to grapple. Many people turned to mass culture as an escape from the crushing realities of Depression-era life. Gary Dean Best calls the thirties the Nickel and Dime Decade and writes, “Technological advances influenced American popular culture during the 1930s to a degree unprecedented even in the previous decade,” and, he continues, “Much of the popular culture of the 1930s was clearly attractive for the means it offered to escape from the guilt, anxieties, stresses, and insecurities of the depression years” (xii). The Great Depression remains, to this date, the greatest period of financial instability in this nation’s history. The decade also saw the rise of fascist governments in Western Europe that threatened, certainly, the world, and, specifically, American-style liberal democracy. Against this backdrop, popular culture might seem an afterthought. But it wasn’t. There was more of it than ever before, and it became increasingly technologically complex. The most significant of these changes was probably the emergence of synchronized sound in film in the late 1920s. Though film had been around since the Lumiere brothers showed their first movie in 1895, the release of The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, in 1927 changed everything, helping films transition from a mostly visual medium to 2 one that was more equally dependent on both vision and sound. Color film followed soon after, giving the still bourgeoning medium more ability to represent reality in a way that it had never before been able to do. Additionally, print media began blossoming substantially in this period.