The Columbia History of the American Novel

Introduction

The chapters in this section remind us that culture and cultural production in the United States and around the world in the first half of the twentieth century were shaped by momentous political, technological, economic, and social developments. Large numbers of immigrants from Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, and other parts of the world; the unimaginable devastation of two world wars and the Korean War; the economic catastrophe known as the Great Depression; the migration of large numbers of African Americans from the deep South to population centers in the Northeastern, Midwestern, and Western states; the enactment of increasingly repressive laws and practices to monitor, control, and segregate members of disenfranchised racial and ethnic groups; changing constructions of gender and sexuality; the rise of new technologies and industries, among them motion pictures and television; the reforms associated with the New Deal; the scourge of McCarthyism — these developments, as well as others, altered inexorably the meanings that attach to the idea of "the American."

It is therefore not surprising that fiction produced in such an apparently turbulent period would respond in a variety of ways to these changes. Indeed, even a quick glance at the titles of the chapters in this section indicates that the authors all consider American novels in relation to circumstances under which they are produced, circulated, and read. Readers of this section will, no doubt, be struck by the various challenges that writers of the period offer to the meaning of -309- a national identity and to the practice and work of fiction in the wake of the globalization of the United States economy, the internationalization of American culture, and the evolution of new media.

In this period, writers from groups historically underrepresented in the canon of American letters explored ways of representing the specific cultural practices of their communities that were accessible to a wider readership. Drawn, perhaps inevitably, to received literary forms such as realism, naturalism, regionalism, the romance, the Western, the detective novel, and so on, they challenge the boundaries of these genres by writing from fresh perspectives. In addition, the emergence of expatriate movements helped to situate American writing in an international scene and heightened the relationship between American narrative experimentation and innovations in other art forms.

Readers of this section should notice as well the prescience of American novelists in the first half of the twentieth century. In their search for narrative strategies that speak to the fabric of American experience; in their explorations of the space between fiction and history; in their quest for a language to address the power of visual media upon life in the United States; and in their simultaneous gestures toward universality and particularity, they anticipate movements and developments we have come to associate with postmodern and contemporary culture.

Valerie Smith

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Modernist Eruptions

An earthquake, the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, becomes in Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) the massive disruption that loosened Alice B. Toklas from her American moorings and launched her on her journey to Europe and into modern literary history. Like many of Stein's narratives, the anecdote makes only tenuous sense: apparently the earthquake forced Stein's brother and his wife to return abruptly from Europe, and Alice B. Toklas, her placid life already shaken by earthquake and fire, became even more unsettled when she saw what the Steins brought with them. "Mrs. Stein brought with her three little Matisse paintings, the first modern things to cross the Atlantic." Thus Stein's narration slyly links the natural earthquake in America to the first tiny rumblings of the European modern art movement that would become a cultural cataclysm in the early twentieth century. This traffic of modern art between Europe and America turned sensational in 1913, when over 1500 international works of highly experimental art were exhibited at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City, and a shocked American audience found Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase insane and depraved.

American artists, generally committed to a national literature as free as possible of British influence, responded in a variety of ways to the lure of modern European culture. Some, like Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg, stayed home and continued to work "in the American grain," to borrow William Carlos Williams's phrase. Some were drawn to Chicago, which became a hub of American literary activity -311- and the home of such important modernist publications as Poetry, edited by Harriet Monroe, and the early Little Review, edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap. As Hugh Kenner argued in A Homemade World (1974), the Continental influence eventually found its way back to America, where it produced a "homemade" variety of modernism. Meanwhile, other young artists, equipped with that spirit of experimentation they considered quintessentially American, went off to Europe. T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Hilda Doolittle ("H. D.") first stopped in London, and the rather conservative Eliot, his temperament responding to the tradition, order, and Anglicanism of England, stayed on. Some, like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, were swept across the Atlantic with the tides of war or its aftermath, and were caught up in the excited cultural tumult they encountered there. France, especially, offered Americans a place where they suffered none of the anxieties that threatened their postcolonial psyches in England, and Paris became a Mecca for young American "expatriates," who revolved around a series of literary salons and centers usually dominated by brilliant and enterprising American women — Gertrude Stein's salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, Sylvia Beach's bookstore Shakespeare and Company, Natalie Barney's pavillon with its leafy garden and Doric temple in the rue Jacob.

Gertrude Stein was the first of the American expatriates to cross the Atlantic and settle in Europe — arriving in Paris in 1903, after having acquired a fine education at Radcliffe that included instruction from the psychologist William James, brother of the novelist. Within a year of her arrival she was studying a painting by Cezanne of his wife, in order to appropriate his techniques for her own experimental verbal portraits, which she eventually published at her own expense in 1909 as Three Lives. In these three portraits of American women, two German-American servants and a young African American woman, Stein dismantled the mythology of the American dream by using her newly discovered Continental techniques to forge a writing capable of illuminating its hypocrisies and ironies. At the same time, her technique, like postimpressionist painting, drew attention to its own procedures. Inspired by Gustave Flaubert, whose story "Un Coeur Simple" she had translated to improve her French, Stein told the stories of these exploited women in a severely unadorned and stripped prose that would make Flaubert's style the -312- enduring standard of the language of modernist fiction. Ezra Pound would, ten years later, promote James Joyce's Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on precisely this ground: the verbal economy that Joyce called "a scrupulous meanness" reflected the clean, clear, disciplined, impersonal expression inaugurated by Flaubert's quest for le mot juste as an antidote to Romanticism both in expressive language and in sentiment.

But in Three Lives Stein was not only looking backward to the French novel tradition, she was also looking toward "the new" with a canny combination of insights from the American pragmatism that she had learned in college, applied to understanding the European postimpressionism that was confounding art lovers with the exorbitant demands it made on them for an active, fragmented, and creative perception. William James's theories taught Stein to think of cognition as an active, selective, purposive process aimed not at finding transcendent truths but at creative exercise of its own powers. She toyed with automatic writing in the wake of his classes (as the Surrealists and other moderns, notably the wife of W. B. Yeats, did also) to demonstrate to herself the creative and alert potential of cognition and its language even when removed from intention — like Sigmund Freud, whose Interpretation of Dreams (1900) showed the intense poetic activity of the sleeping mind. As a result, her first encounter with postimpressionist painting in France did not discomfit her as it did the many Europeans who felt disoriented by the abandonment of a focalized perspective and by the fragmentation of the viewer's position that would become even further radicalized by Cubism during the next decade.

The abstraction of formal elements that she found in Cezanne's still lifes, the attention to the geometries of shapes that made his canvases a composition of spheres and cones, Stein adapted in a prose that foregrounded the geometries of language, the nouns and verbs and adjectives, the pauses and punctuations that she would love all of her life. In the careful construction and repetitions of her sentences in Three Lives — "It was a very happy family there all together in the kitchen, the good Anna and Sally and old Baby and young Peter and jolly little Rags" — Stein created a stylistic primer of the symmetry and formality of the common sentence while simultaneously rendering its fatuous logic ironic. In later years she would write this sentence -313- again, only this time about the sentence itself: "It makes everybody happy to have words together. It makes everybody happy to have words apart."

These experiments culminated in the collection of prose pieces she called Tender Buttons (1914), where Stein moved from the postimpressionism of Three Lives to the extreme abstraction of a verbal Cubism with only vestigial references to represented things. In Tender Buttons Stein abandons even the already abstracted mimesis of the still life hinted at in her subtitle — "objects food rooms" — to concentrate on the concrete qualities and compositional possibilities of words themselves. It is not objects, food, and rooms that she represents but the playful disposition, in juxtapositions we now recognize as collage, of the sounds and look of words associated with objects, food, and rooms. "A sight a whole sight and a little groan grinding makes a trimming such a sweet singing trimming and a red thing not a round thing but a white thing, a red thing and a white thing." With this writing, the reader becomes a viewer who must forgo communication with a work of art that does not ask to be "understood" but obtrudes its medium — words as concrete as though they were laid on with a knife, like the thick paint Stein reports the outraged public tried to scratch off Matisse's La Femmeau Chapeau at the autumn salon — and as full of harmonic gradations as a musical composition by Stein's friend Erik Satie, who himself playfully invoked painting in such titles as "Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear."

But Stein's grand opus, a thousand-page American genealogy called The Making of Americans, represents an astonishingly early text of modernistic maturity: well underway while T. S. Eliot was still a Harvard undergraduate, the work was completed in 1911 (but not published until 1925), several years before Ezra Pound published his Imagist manifesto in the March 1913 issue of Poetry magazine or Ernest Hemingway saw his first Red Cross ambulance in 1917. Written far ahead of its time, this big book should have established itself as Stein's revolutionary masterwork, her Finnegans Wake, as it were: the most avant-garde of the modern family epics that include John Galsworthy's post-Victorian Forsyte Saga, Thomas Mann's neobaroque Buddenbrooks, and D. H. Lawrence's scandalous The Rainbow. From its startling opening narration — "Once an angry man -314- dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. 'Stop!' cried the groaning old man at last, 'Stop!' I did not drag my father beyond this tree" — Stein makes her own writing a violent remembering of violent rememberings, an allegory of the verbal and stylistic manhandling of one's literary forebears and traditions. Her remarkable grammatical effects in this text reflect her progress in elaborating the metaphysical implications for the collapse of traditional notions of space and time that were inaugurated with Albert Einstein's publication of his work on the special theory of relativity in 1905, and that Stein, like many other American writers including William Faulkner, attended more closely in the works of the French philosopher Henri Bergson's notion of a durée, a subjective quality of time as a present duration observable in memory. Stein, who was also friendly with Alfred North Whitehead and therefore familiar with his work on the relations of time, space, and matter, made the syntactical handling of tense in her writing a performance of the way the times of life in individuals and families felt during their present duration:

Stein's prose too has in it the steady pounding of the repeating, thereby rendering its own voice or speech, its own speaking ego or narrating subject, itself as intuitively atremble as the living being of the Herslands, whose story it tells. Before "stream of consciousness" was even properly implemented by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce as a salient technique of novelistic modernism, Gertrude Stein was already problematizing it and dismantling it in her texts.

Stein insisted throughout her life that she had invented modern writing, yet both in her own time, and during the decades after World War II when critical opinion was shaping the literary history of the modern period, her significance as an innovator was eclipsed by that of the "lost generation" novelists (to borrow her own term), Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom she befriended, encouraged, and instructed. Until a recent critical tend-315- ency began to elevate and foreground avant-garde texts over more traditional modernist productions, Stein's reputation survived mainly on the basis of her salon, her art collection, her patronage of Picasso, Matisse, and Gris, and her dominant personality that evoked both subtle and crude ambivalences in people made uncomfortable by the unconventional way she deployed her own gender identity. Her intellectual and artistic ambitions and her social power tended to be construed as egotistical and patriarchal in this gifted woman, who had been writing and experimenting for nearly twenty years before the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the vote in the United States in August 1920. The feminist impulses that led her to make her first sustained text a coded lesbian novel (Q.E.D.; or, Things as They Are [1903]), and to treat in Three Lives the conditions of lower-class ethnic women who are, in fiction, the most invisible Americans, flowered in her most popular and famous book, the 1933 Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Turning conventional perspectives upside down, like a Cubist painting, this revisionary history restores to the success of the modern art movement the labors and contributions of the wives, mistresses, sisters, and servants who invisibly cooked, kept house, posed, inspired, typed, managed, published, and loved the artists and made their work possible. Matisse may have been master to his disciples (Stein playfully called him the C. M. or cher maître), but it was Madame Matisse who posed until she was exhausted, took care of his diphtheritic daughter, accepted his abuse, and taught him how to haggle with buyers. She more than deserved to season her soup with the laurel wreath her husband eventually had bestowed on him. With the cunning inversion that lets Alice's voice and interest tell the story of modern art, Stein offers her own companion a silver anniversary gift in the form of a textual embrace, a text that problematizes the notion of authorship with a principle of female collectivity that makes it ambiguous and undecidable whether it was Gertrude or Alice who "created" the books, having become two in one mind and one life as well as in one flesh.

The issue of gender was just one of many complex factors informing the extremely heterogeneous and complex ideology of modernism. Much of the conservatism of "high modernism," the classical poetics of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, was produced by the fusion of an antiromantic intellectual bias, formally articulated by the young -316- English critic T. E. Hulme (who fell in World War I), and wedded to an elitist reaction against what was perceived, in the tradition of Matthew Arnold, as the greedy materialism, cultural philistinism, and spiritual bankruptcy of modern society. In his Culture and Anarchy (1869), Arnold wrote, "Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly. This leaves the Philistines for the bulk of the nation." Art, by imposing a geometry, discipline, and order on itself, served the modernists as a formal bulwark against what Eliot in his essay on Joyce's Ulysses was to call "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." Pound, in his essay "Why Books?" was to write of "the damned and despised litterati" — "when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive and bloated, the whole machinery of social and individual thought and order goes to pot." In the principles of Imagism, which Pound articulated for poetry during the years 1912 to 1915, he promoted a poetic language "austere, direct, free of emotional slither." This technique of verbal economy and precision was supplemented with a psychology of impersonality, encouraging the poet to adopt many voices, masks, or personae in place of poetic subjectivity or personal commentary.

During this same period, Pound along with the artist, critic, and writer Wyndham Lewis and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska began to augment the formalism of Imagism with an emphasis on the creation of energy and the celebration of violence that they shaped into a short-lived movement called Vorticism, and whose chief product was a highly avant-garde journal that began publication in June 1914 called Blast: The Review of the Great English Vortex. This movement included among its inspirations the 1909 manifesto by the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti with its glorification of war, violence, virility, and speed: "We wish to glorify War — the only health giver of the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful ideas that kill, the contempt for women." These values anticipate those of the fascist ideology that would engulf Italy and Germany in the thirties, and that swept not only Marinetti but also Pound and Lewis into its destructive philosophical vision. Pound and Lewis's Blast was first published in June 1914; within -317- three months war was declared, and the conflict that we call World War I began: the first fully mechanized modern war fought for four years, 1914-18, with machine guns, mortars, bombers, aerial dogfights, tanks, and poison gas — much of it in seemingly endless and stalemated trenches. The unprecedented slaughter and horror of this war created a virtually indeterminable number of casualties. The conservative estimate is 10 million dead and 20 million wounded, and the dead included a generation of European poets and writers, claiming T. E. Hulme, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Alan Seeger, Julian Grenfell, and Rupert Brooke among the English, the Germans Georg Trakl, August Stramm, and Ernst Stadler, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, and Pound's friend, the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska. The war poetry produced by these writers before their deaths reflects the state of art in their countries at the time of the war. The English poets struggled with mixed success to free themselves from the Georgian pastoralism that was the established and accepted form of English poetry at the same time that Pound and his American cohorts were turning it upside down with their modernist manifestos. The Germans and the French, in contrast, were using the avant-gardism already flourishing in their countries to produce a far more experimental, ironic, and nihilistic poetry, like that of August Stramm, for example, who uses destroyed syntactic forms to express the destroyed worlds and consciousnesses of dying soldiers. Because America did not enter the war until 1917, American soldiers largely escaped the "troglodyte war" (as Paul Fussell calls it in The Great War and Modern Memory [1975]) of the claustrophobic, nightmarish trenches, and the American literary treatment of World War I is consequently different as well. The American "high modernists," Pound and Eliot, treat World War I chiefly as a metaphor, a sign or symptom of a spiritually rotten modern world. "There died a myriad/ And the best, among them,/ For an old bitch gone in the teeth,/ For a botched civilization," Pound wrote in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley in 1919.

In the work of Ernest Hemingway, the young American novelist whom Pound praised as a prose "imagist," the high modernist remedy of using a disciplined, muscular, classical style to redeem the fragmentation, loss of value, and chaos both symptomatized and produced by the war, without wasting the energy of its violence, achieved its most successful fictional realization. Even before Pound -318- gave Hemingway a moral theory of style, Hemingway learned to think of writing as a rigorous craft of producing clarity, simplicity, and strength of statement and expression while working as a young reporter for the Kansas City Star. This early journalistic training was interrupted by his decision to volunteer for Red Cross service as an ambulance driver and canteen operator for Italian soldiers in the summer of 1917 — an experience itself disrupted when he was wounded in the leg by machine gun fire and shrapnel. Over ten years later, his fictionalized version of this early adventure was published as A Farewell to Arms (1929), the story of a young American serving as ambulance driver for the Italian army, who deserts and escapes the horror of the war with a young English nurse, only to have his idyllic sanctuary destroyed by her death in childbirth. Compared with Erich Maria Remarque's horrific and despairing tale of trench warfare published nearly at the same time (All Quiet on the Western Front), Hemingway's novel could be construed as romanticizing the war by displacing it onto a tragic love story. But the clean, hard prose keeps any sentimentality or idealism at bay: "He said there was so much dirt blown into the wound that there had not been much hemorrhage. They would take me as soon as possible. He went back inside. Gordini could not drive, Manera said. His shoulder was smashed and his head was hurt. He had not felt bad but now the shoulder had stiffened." The simple declarative sentences built on a strong scaffolding of substantives have been stripped of adverbial or descriptive excess and poetic adornment to the point where Ihab Hassan refers to Hemingway's style as an "anti-style."

But its modernistic impersonality, the way Hemingway replaces direct emotional expression with what T. S. Eliot called an "objective correlative," that is, the displacement of mood and feeling onto an impersonal and objective image, scene, or description that evokes, rather than names or speaks the emotion, allows him to transform style — in writing, gesture, and living — into an ethical act. He does this quite strikingly with a daring rhetorical maneuver in his first, and perhaps major novel, The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, in which the protagonist narrator, Jake Barnes, is a man literally castrated by the war, whose language must emblematize a mode of coping with the sterility, nihilism, and corruption of the postwar modernity without self-indulgence or self-delusion. The jaded coterie of -319- the opening Paris episodes of the novel was based on a circle of Hemingway friends that gives The Sun Also Rises the status of a roman à clef — Brett Ashley derived from Duff Twysden, Robert Cohn from Harold Loeb, Pedro Romero from the bullfighter Cayetano Ordonez. The plot describes the quest of this group (a quest often read by critics as a mythic variant of the same Grail legend whose themes of impotence and regeneration served T. S. Eliot as poetic paradigm for The Waste Land) for an alternative to the forced gaiety and shallow pleasures of the Paris café scene by way of a bucolic fishing trip to Burguete ("Before I could finish baiting, another trout jumped at the falls, making the same lovely arc and disappearing into the water that was thundering down") and a fiesta visit to the Dionysian running of the bulls in Pamplona in Spain.

In the figure of the perfect bullfight Hemingway offers his emblem of modernist art as redemption of modern sterility and futility by interpreting its ritual as the transformation of violence, by discipline and control, into art and beauty. Hemingway's description of Romero's technique might double as a description of his own craft as a writer:

Hemingway's own straightness and purity of line, that is, his refusal to contrive inflated emotional effects or extravagant plots and ornamental prose, become the stylistic equivalent of the protoexistentialist stoicism that makes Jake Barnes able to accept and face existence as it is — without the crutch of romanticism, idealism, or illusion. The novel ends in a famous line announcing Jake Barnes's naming and resisting of romantic delusion. To Bretts' mourning the loss of their love — "Oh, Jake…we could have had such a damned good time together" — he responds, "Yes…. Isn't it pretty to think so?"

One of the few moderns without a college education, Hemingway tended to be regarded as the least intellectual of the modernists, -320- called the "dumb ox" by the critics for his promotion of unreflective brawn in his fiction. But Hemingway read widely during the twenties, borrowing books assiduously from Sylvia Beach's lending library at Shakespeare and Company, and he read under the productive tutelage of Stein and Pound. From both he learned to value Flaubert; from Pound he learned the importance of the stylistic inventions of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. Hemingway seems not to have read philosophy widely or deeply, but he may have acquired the vision we now recognize as his proto-existentialist code of courage and fatalism in the face of nada, nothingness, from reading the Russians, particularly Dostoevsky ("Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia"), Tolstoy ("I thought about Tolstoi and what a great advantage an experience of war was to a writer"), and Turgenev. This code generates the figure of the solitary individual coming to terms with an existence of meaningless violence and extremity, the soldier, the hunter, the bullfighter, the fisherman, the writer, obliged to prove not only physical valor but also the moral courage implicit in honest, undeluded judgment and precise, undistorting language, that continues to dominate such later fiction as For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Hemingway's novel about the Spanish Civil War, and the haunting The Old Man and the Sea (1952) about an old fisherman's solitary struggle to bring in his greatest fish. But when Hemingway ventures into the realm of philosophical writing, as he does in his nonfiction works on bullfighting (Death in the Afternoon [1932]) and safari hunting (Green Hills of Africa [1935]), the hidden hypocrisies and perversities of his project are betrayed by his writing, as in life they were betrayed in the growing personality cult that made him a media celebrity and masculinist icon until his death by suicide in 1962. His Nietzschean individualism (although Hemingway seems to have read little Nietzsche beyond Thus Spake Zarathustra) can be seen to mask an egotism that escapes social responsibility in forms of adventurism such as war, bullfighting, and safari hunting. Its amoral anti-altruism further licenses a blatant array of oppressive discursive practices in Hemingway's writing: homophobia ("the nasty, sentimental pawing of humanity of a Whitman and all the mincing gentry," he writes in indictment also of Gide, Wilde, and other "fairies"); anti-Semitism ("it certainly improved his nose," Jake Barnes says of Robert Cohn, the Jewish boxer in The Sun Also Rises); racism ("I had had no -321- chance to train them; no power to discipline," of his black African guides. "If there had been no law I would have shot Garrick"); his misogynistic portraits of women as "bitches"; and a penchant for sadism found in his culturally rationalized love of cruelty, aggression, and violence that, in spite of his Loyalist sympathies during the Spanish Civil War, revealed some affinities shared with the violent futurist ideology. In pointed contrast to Stein's relatively benign memoir of Paris in the twenties, Hemingway's 1956 reminiscence, A Moveable Feast, seems an unworthy surrender to ingratitude and self-indulgent malice.

Against the background of the changing social and political developments of America in the twenties and the thirties, the exoticism of Hemingway's settings and the solipsism of his concerns gradually made his fiction seem escapist and relevant only on the level of a specific American mythology, his modern and cosmopolitan updating of the figure of the American Western hero, the pioneer, the gunslinger, the cowboy. The broader, extremely vital and complex, historical panorama of American life during these decades was left to other American novelists to express: William Faulkner, inventing highly experimental forms to articulate the moral conundrums of the emerging modern South; John Dos Passos, who expressed the urban American immigrant experience as a montage of vernacular speech and a collage panorama of struggling lives and historical events in Manhattan Transfer (1925) and his U.S.A. trilogy (collected 1938); the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, who incorporated the rich voices of African American dialect, old folkloric storytelling rhythms, and new blues sounds into poetry and prose; and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the simultaneous lyricist and demystifier of the modern American dream. Dos Passos and Fitzgerald could well be paired to emblematize the fractured and schizophrenic nature of the American reality for the different American populations of the early decades of the twentieth century.

Rapid technological advances and the increasing urbanization of American labor by immigrants and Southern African Americans brought in their wake an era of great union and populist political activity, ideologically vitalized by the Russian Revolution of 1917 but increasingly resisted by a government alarmed by "the Red scare" -322- into enacting such controversial paranoid gestures as the Sedition Act of 1918, the deportation of the anarchist Emma Goldman to Russia in 1919, and the 1920 trial and 1927 execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Dos Passos's novels allude to these events and fictionally elaborate both the emotional texture and the ideological grain of the historical milieu in which they were engendered. But the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the most popular and financially successful of the American novelists of the modernist period, gazed over these churning classes and masses populating the American landscape, much as his own character Daisy Buchanan is described, as enjoying "the mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes…gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor." Fitzgerald captures less the reality than the fantasy of another America that occupied the cultural horizon during the twenties: the "Jazz Age" (he called two collections of short stories Flappers and Philosophers [1921] and Tales of the Jazz Age [1922]), the era of Prohibition and wild financial speculation, the jostling of Jamesian "old money" with vulgar American arrivistes, the aesthetics of glamour produced by material and social extravagance — simulated and stimulated by the celluloid images of the burgeoning movie industry for which Fitzgerald intermittently wrote. Some would say he prostituted his talent writing for the screen, but he would also have demystified the film industry had he lived to complete his final novel, The Last Tycoon, a book edited by his friend Edmund Wilson and published in 1941.

Fitzgerald's more privileged milieu — his attendance at Princeton, which lent him the material for his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), which in turn brought him the fame and money to court successfully a beautiful, highstrung woman from Alabama, Zelda Sayre — generated more specifically social and ideological concerns voiced in a more symbolistic style than that of the other modernists. Fitzgerald arrived in Europe later than Hemingway, in 1924, and it was during this Continental sojourn, when, like Hemingway, he too fell under the tutelage of Pound and Stein, that he published The Great Gatsby (1925), a work still frequently nominated as "the great American novel." But although Gatsby bears the modernistic hallmark of a clean, hard prose, its craft is less foregrounded and selfdisplaying, less the logopoetic focus of its own fiction than is the -323- work of Hemingway and Stein. Hemingway and Fitzgerald seem also to have been influenced differently by their literary traditions, with Hemingway choosing Huckleberry Finn as his American gospel, while Fitzgerald grounded himself in the late nineteenth-century architects of the American moral imagination, Henry James and Theodore Dreiser. From the Continental tradition, too, Fitzgerald seemed to derive a larger share of irony, not just le mot juste of Flaubertian fiction, but Flaubert's curious logocentric modernization of the Continental adultery novel that allows him to determine the function of romances, books, and magazines in shaping the dreams and desires of, say, an Emma Bovary. Jay Gatsby outlines his Horatio Alger program on the flyleaf of Hopalong Cassidy, and Jordan Baker's beauty reminds Nick Carraway that "she looked like a good illustration." This stylistic and philosophical divergence in the strategies of Hemingway and Fitzgerald was already etched in their different secular "occupations" before coming to Europe: Hemingway's stints as a reporter and journalist against Fitzgerald's work for an advertisement agency and as a contributor to H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan's Smart Set. In a Gatsby vignette that updates the adultery novel, Fitzgerald represents Myrtle Wilson, the lower-class mistress of wealthy Tom Buchanan's slumming, reclining with her nose broken by her lover "on the couch, bleeding fluently, and trying to spread a copy of Town Tattle over the tapestry scenes of Versailles." Versailles, the emblem of monarchical glamour whose nineteenthcentury dregs Emma Bovary tries to recapture in her "aristocratic" adulteries (as well as site of the disastrous treaty that marked the closure of World War I), has become commodified as pretentious home and hotel decor of the American rich, while the society gossip rag is used to mop up the blood that will be spilled far more copiously by the socialite Buchanans before the ends of their double affairs.

Fitzgerald also read and admired the work of Joseph Conrad, and although he is known to have read Conrad's preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus just before writing Gatsby, it is Conrad's Heart of Darkness that leaves the clearest imprint on that text. They would seem to have little in common — Heart of Darkness, Conrad's dark tale of the European rape of Africa, and The Great Gatsby, Fitzger-324- Fitzger-'s tale of a single, hot Long Island summer in 1922, when Jay Gatsby, the fabulously wealthy and glamorous tycoon is unmasked and destroyed in his attempts to realize the American dream by recapturing his lost and now married sweetheart, Daisy Buchanan. But Fitzgerald keeps his focus on the same issue as Conrad — the disastrous moral cost in hypocrisy and destructiveness that civilization at its most opulent and attractive entails: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." The novel's polemical task is the seduction and disillusionment of the reader, and to this end Fitzgerald borrows Conrad's narrative device of adopting the impressionable and corruptible vision of an implicated naif, Nick Carraway, the nice Midwestern boy who, like Conrad's Marlow, must disentangle the moral enigma of a charismatic man whose immense idealism — "he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail" — becomes too large, and, passing beyond good and evil, betrays itself. Instead of the suborning of justice in the Sacco- Vanzetti case that so obsessed Dos Passos and the American writers of the Left, Nick Carraway's great moral shock comes from Gatsby's implication in the betrayal of an institution invested with the mythology of the American dream: the "Black Sox" scandal over the fixing of the 1919 World Series. Nick Carraway's negotiation of the attractions and repulsions by the glamorous world of Gatsby and the Buchanans is conducted through a poetic language charged with moral complexity. Of Daisy Buchanan's seductive voice, Nick Carraway tells Gatsby:

Like Conrad,'s Marlow, Nick Carraway too is ultimately confronted with a choice of nightmares, and like Marlow, who sides with the demonic idealism of Kurtz against the hard greed of the Company, Carraway sides with the doomed and self-corrupting questing of the -325- impostor Gatsby against the hard amorality of the rich Buchanans: "I found myself on Gatsby's side and alone."

Fitzgerald achieves both Nick's and the reader's troubled repulsions in the world of Gatsby by producing spiritually resonating distortions and symbols that defamiliarize the world and make it strange, and that we associate with the techniques of Expressionism that James Joyce had already incorporated into the brilliant and shocking Nighttown section of his modernistic 1922 novel Ulysses. The valley of the ashes that separates West Egg and New York — "a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens" — is such an expressionistic device, as is the ghostly giant oculist's billboard of "the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg," whose function as a blind panopticon inserts an image of an ineffectual conscience (ironically created by advertisement) into the amoral spiritual landscape of America. Fitzgerald's brilliant early promise was not sustained, even though his long-anticipated Tender Is the Night, with its more opulent and richly poetic prose, was considered by many a second masterpiece. This tragic story of the dissolution of the doomed marriage of a beautiful, wealthy, glamorous couple, in which many readers saw a reflection of the Fitzgeralds' own struggles with alcoholism, infidelity, madness, and institutionalization, failed in 1934 to make its panorama of the private angst of an American moneyed elite, disporting itself on the Riviera, relevant to an America in the grip of the brutal Great Depression. When Fitzgerald died prematurely in 1940 of a heart attack hastened by alcoholism and depression, none of his books were in print.

Modernism, then, changed during the thirties, with the Depression, the New Deal reforms, the Federal Writers' Project, and other WPA projects that followed in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929. Although that year saw the publication of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, a book that overtakes The Great Gatsby as a great modern American novel, the politicalization of American fiction by such writers as Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, Richard Wright, Meridel Le Sueur, and John Steinbeck marked the end of American high modernism, as stylistic experimentation was put increasingly in the service of revolutionary and protest literature. During this period the critical voice of Partisan Review, especially, promoted an engaged literature organized around a new "proletarian" fiction that would -326- make art socially responsible to the economically and racially oppressive times reflected in such events as the coal miners' strikes of Harlan County, Kentucky, and the 1931 trial for rape of a white woman by eight African American men, the "Scottsboro boys," sentenced to death by an Alabama court and eventually pardoned. The remains of a more purely logopoetic American fiction of the kind associated with high modernism took an avant-garde form inspired by the German expressionism and French and Spanish surrealism of the early twentieth century, and issued in the thirties in an American version strongly marked by gothic elements. The high modernistic prototype of this neogothic mode of fiction was created by Sherwood Anderson, who wrote his "Book of the Grotesque," a collection of tales of hidden, anguished, small-town lives published as Winesburg, Ohio (1919), under the influence of the pure syntax and language he had first encountered in the writing of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives and Tender Buttons. Anderson, who in 1932 joined fifty-one other writers in signing a "manifesto" backing a Communist presidential ticket, in turn influenced William Faulkner and Nathanael West (Miss Lonelyhearts [1933] and The Day of the Locust [1939]), two other American novelists in whose fiction the lives of simple, poor, and alienated people are dilated, by sometimes fantastic narrative and stylistic distortions, into subjectivities invaded by nightmare, criminality, and madness.

It was James Joyce, whose A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had served in the teens as model of the verbal purity of high modernistic prose, who led the way into the stylistics of verbal excess and derangement with the neologistic, densely allusive, hallucinogenic nightlanguage of his avant-garde 1939 dream text, Finnegans Wake. Published throughout the thirties in installments in Eugene Jolas's magazine transition, an avant-garde publication committed to "the revolution of the word," Joyce's new work revitalized the surrealistic tendencies that were to mark the avant-garde maturity of modernism at the same time that they inaugurated the self-consuming, selfexhausting, self-conscious fictionality of postmodernism. Samuel Beckett, who served as Joyce's amanuensis and friend during the writing of Finnegans Wake, became the first of the Wake's postmodern heirs, which later included Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges. Of American novelists, it was Djuna Barnes who brought this strange -327- subversive amalgam of nightmare and unreality, of verbal illogicality and brilliant discursive excess, of philosophical destruction and nihilism saved only by pure, nonsensical language itself, to fruition in her own 1936 night-novel, Nigbtwood. Trained as an artist in New York — she would later illustrate some of her texts with fine woodcuts — Barnes, like Hemingway, worked as a journalist (albeit a very different sort of journalist) in the United States before going to Paris on assignment for McCall's magazine in 1919. Her feature writing covered circus and vaudeville, and prompted her occasionally to participate in both sensationalistic and serious "stunts" — jumping from a skyscraper into a fireman's net or allowing herself to be forcefed in order to articulate the plight of imprisoned, hunger-striking suffragists. Before coming to Paris, she had several one-act plays produced by the Provincetown Players, and during her two decades in Paris she was a lively member of Natalie Barney's lesbian salon, whose coterie she celebrated and lampooned in the hilarious eighteenth-century pastiche of lesbian eroticism she had privately printed and circulated as Ladies Almanack in 1929. Barnes enjoyed as well the patronage of two powerful modernist giants, James Joyce, who granted her a rare interview for Vanity Fair in 1922, and T. S. Eliot, who wrote an admiring introduction to Nigbtwood: "What I would leave the reader prepared to find is the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy."

Nightwood (1937), whose biographical core is thought to have been Djuna Barnes's disastrous affair with the American sculptor Thelma Wood, uses the setting of the lesbian demimonde of Paris in the twenties as the venue for the decline and fall of Western civilization. The aimless plot, as unfocused as Robin Vote's nocturnal prowling, presents the collapse of the heritage of the House of Hapsburg through miscegenation and imposture, culminating in the sterile issue of the celibate child of Felix Volkbein's marriage to the mad and mysterious Robin Vote. Robin Vote, who leaves Felix for a series of women whom she in turn abandons and betrays, emerges as an emblem of human "otherness" in the text, as the concentration of everything dark and strange, unintelligible and alien, in a suffering nature reduced by novel's end to that of a crawling beast: "Then she -328- began to bark also, crawling after him — barking in a fit of laughter, obscene and touching." Barnes's philosophical subversiveness resides in her comprehensive dismantling of the symbolic order, the system of everything that signifies in a culture and a society. In Nightwood every aristocrat is a phony, every doctor a quack, every priest defrocked, every story a lie, every vow a betrayal, every caress a blow, Europe is a circus and America a zoo, and Nightwood itself a novel that destroys its own coherence in the telling. The figure who embodies all these self-negations is the magnificent creation of "Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Connor," whose medical books are dusty and unread, his forceps rusty, his room a degraded den of filth ("A swill-pail stood at the head of the bed brimming with abominations"), as he lies in bed in woman's wig, rouge, and flannel nightgown, spewing a torrential logorrhea at Nora Flood on the subject of the night: "Though some go into the night as a spoon breaks easy water, others go head foremost against a new connivance; their horns make a dry crying, like the wings of the locust, late come to their shedding." Nora Flood thinks, as she looks at him and listens to him, "God, children know something they can't tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed." The residue that remains from all the negations in the text is language, like Dr. O'Connor himself making an unforgettable and unintelligible spectacle of itself: a poetic sound and fury, signifying nothing — or, as Matthew O'Connor would put it, "I'm a fart in a gale of wind, an humble violet under a cow pad."

Modernism, like any other historical literary period or movement, is a critical construct — both of its own time and its own actors, and of the ensuing critical tradition. In their own day, the modernists — especially the Americans expatriated to Europe — self-consciously responded to what they perceived as a spiritually bankrupt modernity by inventing new poetic and novelistic forms to express, critique, and redeem their age. "The age demanded an image/ Of its accelerated grimace" Ezra Pound wrote in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and thereafter put "The Age Demanded" in quotation marks to indicate the instant peril of becoming a pious cliché or a self-parody to which modernism's mission of poetic virtuosity made it vulnerable. But true to the motto Pound is said to have worn stitched on his scarf in London, "Make It New," they did indeed make it new. How their -329- newness, their innovations, have been valued and judged has changed with the critical evolution of the later twentieth century. The greater admiration for the "lost generation" novelists, Hemingway and Fitzgerald — which was inspired by New Criticism's formalistic emphasis from the forties to the sixties when the canons and values of modernism were being codified — has shifted during the seventies and eighties to the avant-garde productions of Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes, who respond far more interestingly to the metaphysical inquiries of poststructuralist theory. During the nineties, increasing concern from Marxist and Frankfurt School critics over the ideological implications of literary experimentation may yet shift attention once more, toward the critically occluded writers of political engagement from the American thirties. Modernism will thus itself continue to be remade anew.

Margot Norris

-330-

American Proletarianism

The title of this chapter may strike some readers as quaint, if not altogether contradictory. The extent to which it does measures how the language of criticism embodies the dominance of certain political narratives. "Proletarianism" (or "proletarian") has, in the cultural discourse of the United States, come to be associated with a "foreign" way of speaking, historically that of Soviet or Soviet-identified leftists, specifically that of Marxist political rhetoricians, more particularly yet, that of Stalinist cultural critics of the 1930s. In its more barbarous manifestations, this set of connections has led to the view that "proletarian" and "American" are mutually contradictory terms, and thus that their deployment in a title must represent a reprehensible effort to resurrect some (at best) outdated ways of thinking about literature from the dustbin of history into which the upheavals in Eastern Europe have swept them.

I am, of course, stating a somewhat extreme version of this argument, but until recently virtually every essay or book on the subject of proletarian culture (with a very few honorable exceptions like Walter Rideout's The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1954 [1956]) has in some degree given expression to much the same narrative. Indeed, few if any of the cultural narratives of this country have been rehearsed with such unanimity of voice — a fact that, in itself, might make one suspicious. The story told is that "proletarian art" was a failed venture of an admittedly troubled time, the years of the Great Depression of the 1930s, doomed from its very beginnings because it attempted to place the individualism of creation in service -331- to the social goals of a collectivist ideology. To the extent that such art succeeded, the story continues, it did so only because its creators by accident or design moved outside this ideological orbit and thus from under the stifling, humorless power of Communist Party functionaries.

But sustaining this narrative has, in fact, required the obliteration of much of the terrain it is ostensibly designed to map. White women and writers of color, for example, virtually disappear from these histories, as does any serious discussion of efforts to create art by people from working-class origins. The exclusion of women writers and intellectuals from these accounts and the marginalizing of writers of color have been necessary to the process of producing the dubious master narrative I described above. In short, to shift metaphors, "proletarian art" has over the last half-century taken on the qualities of an archaeological mound: one knows that something lies deeply buried under the debris, excrement, and ash of decades of Cold War propaganda, but the shape of what has been so entombed, much less its story, is only now, and slowly, beginning to be discerned.

We are better able, now, to tell a more complete story. In the first place, important texts, like Meridel Le Sueur's The Girl and I Hear Men Talking and Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio, are for the first time fully in print, as they were not in the thirties. And other works, like those of William Attaway, Josephine Herbst, Claude McKay, and Clara Weatherwax, are again widely available, as they were not when critics were both constructing and responding to the earlier Cold War narrative. Second, important recent works of criticism and biography have begun to redraw the pictures of twenties and thirties writers and the world they inhabited. This criticism engages the relationship of art and proletarianism in general, and the character of thirties fiction in particular, not as static subjects for antiquarian study or as occasions for inspirational panegyrics; rather, it sees the period and the cultural issues raised in it as important for contemporary debates over the relationship of art and politics and about the very nature of what a socialist transformation of society might mean. Such criticism has, I think, been more attentive to what previously repressed and marginalized voices reveal about that earlier cultural discourse. Finally, the evaporation of the Cold War has, in itself, weakened the political urgency of the old dominant narrative. For those interested -332- in proletarian art, the decline of what has been designated as the Left has, perhaps ironically, thus been liberating.

Given the advantages of these changes, a number of newly "rearticulated" (Cary Nelson's word) narratives of the literary history of proletarianism and the American novel can be constructed. All will differ from earlier accounts in a number of ways. In addition to new evidence, they will bring the fresh perspectives of feminist and Third World criticism to important issues that were overtly contested in the thirties. First, the debate over the social functions of art, especially the notion of "art as a weapon," will demand a new look at the often discounted impact of Soviet — and other European — models on American practice. I think it will become clearer that Soviet examples, illustrated by translations of Russian fiction, reports on Soviet critical debates, showings of Soviet films, and the like, significantly influenced American writers. The problems of form, particularly of the relevance of modernist stylistic departures, will be illuminated by considering together the practices of writers and visual artists. The autobiographical character of so much of proletarian fiction offers a distinctive entrance to the debate over the value of art created by, as well as on behalf of, the proletariat. A revisionist view will, as I illustrate below, conclude that far from being the crude products of Stalinist aparatchniks, theories of proletarian culture were-and remain — coherent and challenging expressions of a frankly engaged criticism.

Rearticulated narratives must also emphasize concerns that were less clear in the 1930s, but that came into focus with the emergence of the 1960s movements for social change. First, of course, historical omissions of white women and minority writers need correction. More important, perhaps, the analytic categories of gender and race help reattach the politics of proletarianism to the work of earlier writers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and W. E. B. Du Bois, who had insisted that radical change involves transforming not only economic but social relations. Further, the ideal of collectivity, cooperation, socialism, or "solidarity" has historically distinguished the working class from the individualism that defines bourgeois social relations and cultural production. Recent criticism argues that women's proletarian fictions dramatize, differently from men's, that putting into practice a collective ethos is central to fundamental social transfor-333- mation. Most basically, perhaps, a rearticulated narrative would maintain that the discourse represented by the term "proletarianism," which came into and then faded from critical prominence in the 1930s, marks simply one manifestation in the long history of efforts by working-class people to express, communicate, and alter the nature of their lives. All these issues cannot be explored in depth here; in summarizing them I am suggesting the outlines of the significantly revised map of proletarian art now being drawn.

Two autobiographical novels, published within a few months before and after the 1929 stock market crash that precipitated the Great Depression, provide symbolically useful starting places for this discussion. In their working-class subject matter, their autobiographical origins, their fundamentally revolutionary politics, and perhaps most of all in their class-conscious viewpoint on the world, Agnes Smed ley's Daughter of Earth (1929) and Mike Gold's Jews Without Money (1930) represent a new, "proletarian" literary departure. Jack Conroy, an active writer and editor during and after the thirties, has suggested that "the rebellion of the 20s was directed principally against the fetters of form and language taboos"; whereas, after the crash, "editors and publishers began to realize that people would read about such unpleasant things as unemployment and hunger." Conroy's is a simplistic but still useful paradigm of the movement from formalism to the idea of art as a means for shaping social values. Driving this transformation was a profound, widespread emotional response to the sudden crash: to most ordinary Americans it represented the devastating, unthought-of collapse of an earlier, hopeful dream that their work was destined to fulfill. By 1933 at least 12 million workers were unemployed. While many stood on soup lines waiting for handouts, the government, in an effort to bolster prices, was paying farmers millions of dollars to plough under wheat, kill off hogs, and dump milk into ditches. Such experiences of hunger, Hoovervilles, and hopelessness brought people to question the economic and social values they had been taught to revere. Yet to some, the calamity seemed to open a new opportunity: to build out of the wreckage of capitalism an economic system of cooperation and equality. In this effort, those on the Left developed special prestige: not only had the Soviet Union avoided the horrors of the Depression, -334- but the Communist Party and its allies took the lead at home in organizing the unemployed, fighting for aid to the dispossessed, turning despair into militance. For many writers, painters, and dramatists, also, the grim downward spiral offered a chance to turn art from a marginal commodity into an instrument for inspiring and shaping change. I would symbolize this leap into a new, "proletarian" art of hunger and fear, of protest and search, of old anger and fresh hope by the publication of Smedley's and Gold's books.

It is not that stories about working-class life nor fictions devoted to social protest or even revolutionary activity were recent developments in American, much less in European, culture. Herman Melville, Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Sinclair Lewis, among others, had written powerfully in such modes. It would be untrue to picture the 1920s wholly as a period in which artists were devoted to creating experimental works directed to sophisticated upper-class audiences. Yet, relatively little of the fiction of the 1920s was concerned with working-class life, much less with revolutionary politics. Thus, the publication of Daughter of Earth and Jews Without Money represents something more than an arbitrary divide.

Both books are fictionalized accounts of coming-of-age in working-class communities. Both dramatize the tensions between working-class families and bourgeois institutions of acculturation and social control, like schools, landlords, and employers. Both, like many proletarian fictions, chronicle the painful efforts of their young, often abrasive working-class protagonists to gain, through education, work, or politics, a sense of agency, a meaningful vocation in a fundamentally hostile world. And both, perhaps most significantly, express a deep yearning not just to gain a "place" in that world but to help transform the predatory society they picture into a true community; neither book, also characteristically, dramatizes real success in that critical project. Taken together, both in what they accomplish and in how they fail, they offered for their time a basic definition of proletarian fiction: it is focused, generally in realistic forms, on the experiential details of working-class life; energized by an often angry, sometimes bitter, insistence on forcing American culture to recognize the particular qualities of working-class experience and to respond to the distinctive imperatives of working-class values; and committed to -335- the act of writing in order to critique the dying old society, to validate the beauty often buried in working-class life, and thus to help inspire the movement to create a new, just, and therefore socialist future. Both these novels are also products of writers who devoted almost all their literary energies to the causes they supported: in fact, while both Smedley and Gold continued to write extensively, mainly as chroniclers and propagandists of revolutionary movements, neither again completed a substantial piece of fiction.

For all these parallels, it would be hard to find two books more different either in tone or in their subsequent receptions. The differences were functions not simply of subject matter or style. Gold's book, written in short, punchy, journalistic sentences, and in a voice that combines outrage, sentiment, and bitter humor, offers a series of loosely related sketches of early twentieth-century life in the ghettos of New York's Lower East Side. The tone and mid-American origins of Daughter of Earth are established in the opening pages: "To die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty. I belong to those who die from other causes — exhausted by poverty, victims of wealth and power, fighters in a great cause…. For we are of the earth and our struggle is the struggle of earth." Jews Without Money went through eleven printings within the eight months after its publication in February 1930; was translated into at least sixteen languages, including German, Yiddish, Bohemian, and Tartar, by the time Gold himself prepared an "Introduction" for a new edition in 1935; and, with his more polemical writings, rapidly helped project Gold as one of the leading figures of the cultural Left in the United States. Further, the book became something of a model for proletarian fiction, which Gold had been making efforts to define since the early twenties. It helped generate a group of semiautobiographical novels that constitutes one major form in which men of working-class origins expressed their lives in fiction during the 1930s.

Daughter of Earth, while it was also reprinted in 1935 with an appreciative introduction by Malcolm Cowley, never gained anything remotely resembling the currency of Gold's book, and Smedley remained, at best, a marginal figure on the Left cultural scene. To be sure, that was partly because she lived in China for much of the -336- thirties and worked at the fringes of the Communist movement rather than, like Gold, at the very center of the American Communist Party. Still the differences in the books, and in their receptions, express more fundamental tensions.

About a year before the publication of Jews Without Money Gold pictured his idea of a proletarian writer in a frequently quoted New Masses editorial, "Go Left, Young Writers" (January 1929):

The style is perfect Gold — as is, one suspects, the image of the proletarian writer he projects, complete with impatience, loud feelings, and masculine assertiveness, as well as the sense of swallowing life whole, like Walt Whitman and Jack London, to whom Gold refers in a succeeding paragraph. But the image, for all its individual resonance, is not simply a projection of Mike Gold; rather, it represents a widely held conception on the Left not only of the proletarian writer but of the idealized proletariat. It insists that mines, mills, and lumber camps are the only true sites of proletarian action. And it reveals the extent to which even those ideologically committed to a collectivist ethos bought into quite individualistic conceptions of agency-in art and in society as well.

Smedley's Marie Rogers confronts many of the same problems encountered by Gold's hero. But for Marie, there is nothing like the easy solution almost accidentally provided by the discovery of socialism on the last page of Jews Without Money. When she moves to New York from the West seeking an active political community, Marie finds herself altogether ill-at-ease among the middle-class intellectuals whose Bohemian lifestyle seems to dominate the socialist movement early in the second decade of the century. The talky, sexually experimental Greenwich Village Bohemia of Floyd Dell and Max and Crystal Eastman, of The Masses magazine, of the Provincetown Playhouse, of John Reed and Louise Bryant, paralyzes -337- Marie, and Smedley herself. The culture of her class becomes, ironically, a barrier to her participation in a movement ostensibly designed to liberate her class. Subsequently, she becomes deeply engaged in the movement to free India from British rule, spending some months in jail as an "enemy" collaborator during World War I. But her involvement in this movement, too, is cut short by sexual blackmail and by the inability of male members of the movement, including her husband, to accept real equality for a woman comrade. Thus Daughter of Earth concludes on the edge of despair, rather than with the "proletarian optimism" Gold prescribed for proletarian fiction and expressed in the familiar concluding peroration of Jews Without Money: "O workers' Revolution…. You are the true Messiah."

Like a number of other thirties novels by women — for example, Myra Page's Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt (1932), Fielding Burke's (Olive Tilford Dargan's) Call Home the Heart (1932), and Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio: From the Thirties (1974) — Daughter of Earth dramatizes class struggle differently, as Barbara Foley points out, from comparable men's books: as a phenomenon not just of "making history" but of making daily life (in Richard Flacks's terms). Smedley's book insists that the kitchen and the bedroom are, as much as the mill, the union hall, and the strike, places where the struggle for a new socialist society must be joined. Fewer than a quarter of all women and less than 15 percent of married women worked outside the home through most of the thirties. If the industrial "workplace" only was to be the focus for art, as it mainly was for organizing efforts by the Left, then relatively little of women's lives would be discovered in art. Further, if the working class was defined and portrayed entirely in terms of its relation to the means of production, then the significance of other distinctive group experiences — of gender, race, ethnicity-would be diminished.

It would not be accurate to claim that Smedley's book offers a paradigm for the experience of women on the Left. To the contrary, as has frequently been pointed out, the Left broadly and the Communist Party specifically, for all its patriarchal practice, provided encouragement and support for women artists unusual in American society. The "Woman Question" was taken seriously on the Left: the Party press published substantial analyses that, with older classics like those of Engels and Bebel, provided the basis for political discussions. -338-

Moreover, in significant ways the Left carried on the heritage of feminism that spoke for radical change (Smedley, for example, was deeply involved in the movement to provide birth control to workingclass women), and it provided opportunities for many women to be active on behalf of themselves and others in the working class. In fact, some women, like Meridel Le Sueur and Josephine Herbst, played significant public roles in Left cultural circles during the Depression. The Book Union, a leftist book club, selected three novels by women — A Stone Came Rolling by Fielding Burke (Olive Tilford Dargan), Marching! Marching! by Clara Weatherwax, and A Time to Remember by Leane Zugsmith — as its primary selections of "proletarian novels." Still, the "pessimism" of Daughter of Earth, like the long-delayed completion and publication of important works by Le Sueur and Olsen, suggests that the thirties Left, including its women writers, had no secure answers for vital questions about the relationship of social and cultural transformations (especially those having to do with gender roles) to a political and economic revolution.

The books that most resonate with Jews Without Money include some focused on the blighted worlds of the "bottom dogs" of society, as well as others that detail the efforts of plain working-class Americans to live through the multiplying disasters of Depression, Dust Bowl, and dispossession, to find jobs, and perhaps to organize. It became the object of a number of writers of the late 1920s as well as the 1930s to extend a "downward" view to the bottoms of American society generally unseen by the middle-class reading public. Edward Dahlberg's novels Bottom Dogs (1929), From Flushing to Calvary (1932.), and Those Who Perish (1934) gave a name and one definition to such fictions. His first book follows Lorry Lewis as he grows up around his mother's barber shops, especially in Kansas City, in a Cleveland Jewish orphanage, hobo camps, the YMCA and Solomon's Dancepalace in Los Angeles. The second book finds Lorry and Lizzie Lewis in and around New York, as Lizzie, rapidly aging, tries to establish herself as a lady eligible for marriage and Lorry tries to discover himself along the waterfront, in the cemetery, at a Coney Island festival, and finally through a pilgrimage back to the orphanage. One can observe how, as the first two books progress, the style changes from what Dahlberg himself later derogated as "the rude American vernacular," conveyed with a kind of ironic gusto, to the -339- increasingly erudite and allusive technique that marks his later works. In 1929 he had written with a Whitmanesque sense of the expressiveness of everyday details: "The barber shop, with its odor of soap and hair tonics, the Paramount Building on Times Square with its tawdry lighting effects at night, the offices and hotels along Broadway, a cheap yellow and red symphonic surge in brick are just as artistically suggestive as the Chartres Cathedral or the cafes along the walk of the Montmartre." In Bottom Dogs and Calvary Dahlberg carries out the artistic program implicit in this comment, capturing and, as Jules Chametzky has suggested, legitimizing, even celebrating that seamy, loathsome landscape just at the edges of destitution-the deluded lower middle-class America of Lizzie Lewis that at once repels and consumes Lorry. Those Who Perish, one of the first American fictions to dramatize the Nazi threat and also to attack Jewish collaborationism and self-interest, is written in a much more selfconsciously literary style; and the wandering, rootless young hero of the earlier books, who anticipates Jack Kerouac's road-drawn hipsters and, perhaps, Saul Bellow's tamer Augie March, emerges as the suicidal Eli Malamed. Dahlberg's work finally constitutes an increasingly elaborate (self)portrait of the artist transformed from hobo to guru. Politics is not his occupation, nor does revolutionary optimism characterize his people: Bottom Dogs ends with Lorrie wondering whether he has caught the clap from a dance-hall girl. And all the central characters of Those Who Perish do, indeed, die needlessly or by their own hands.

Dahlberg's people skirt the bottom, in fact; Tom Kromer's live there. Waiting for Nothing (1935), Kromer's essentially autobiographical narrative, captures from the inside the experiences of men on the fritz. The book begins — and ends — nowhere, or anywhere: a dark, nameless urban street where the hungry narrator backs off from clubbing a passing man, to an anonymous flophouse, where he lies caught between aching weariness and the fierce biting of lice. Dahlberg's wanderer hitches rides on the rails; Kromer's nails a fast drag at night, smashing against the side of the boxcar, hanging on for life, knowing that, like others he has seen, he will end in a ditch or be cut to ribbons under the wheels if his grip fails. Lorry Lewis always seems to find a friend; Kromer's narrator can, at best, fall in with a smart -340- stiff who teaches him to earn his daily keep by diving "down on a doughnut in front of a bunch of women."

Kromer's is probably the least romanticized of the books portraying the lower depths of America. His title echoes ironically one of the era's best-known works, Clifford Odets's agitational drama Waiting for Lefty. Kromer's narrator, waiting for no future, cut off from any past, isolated from any movement, is confined at the end to thinking only about "three hots; and a flop." Even Nelson Algren's gloomy Somebody in Boots (1935) provides glimpses, if transient, of real companionship and of a movement for a better society, though his central figure, Cass McKay, seems utterly unable to turn himself toward them. Like Lorry Lewis, Cass takes to the road partly from aimlessness, partly from hunger, though partly to escape the meaningless brutality and ugliness of his Texas home. But he finds, finally, that there is no place much better to go in Depression America, only a jungle where "the strong beat the weak" and all "strike out at something" when they can, if only to pass on to others their own pain. In Chicago, he is beaten for befriending an African American Communist, loses his job, is left by Norah, a young working woman with whom he has struck up a relationship, and drifts back onto the bum. Cass can briefly perceive that his condition is a result of the corruption and greed of capitalism, and briefly understand, too, how racism keeps working people separated. But to the extent that he comes to have a class identification, it seems to be that of the lumpenproletariat, the breeding ground for Fascist recruits. Indeed, Richard Pells has suggested that "Algren suspected that the 'people' were not incipient socialists but potential brownshirts who might come together solely for an orgy of looting and arson," like the people of Chicago's depths in Jack London's The Iron Heel. That judgment may be unfair to Algren's effort to symbolize in the nightmare jungles traversed by his homeless men and women the American dream that vanished with the Depression. Like his later and better-known postwar work, The Man with the Golden Arm (1949) and A Walk on the Wild Side (1956), Somebody in Boots may best be read not as a realistic coming-of-age novel but, like most of the books I am discussing, as "a gloomy parable" (Pells) of disconnection from that older, pastoral American society now "gone with the wind." -341-

In many ways, the book that most fulfilled the promise of Jews Without Money is Jack Conroy's The Disinherited (1933). Like Gold working class in origin, Conroy came from a very different tradition of American radicalism: Midwestern, small-town, populist, native, anarchic — represented by Moberly, Missouri, where Conroy was born and grew up. The Disinherited originated as a series of autobiographical sketches published by H. L. Mencken in the conservative American Mercury and was then adapted into the form of a novel in order to get a commercial press to publish it. An expert storyteller and an important editor, Conroy had always been interested in the folk dimensions of working-class culture: the tales, ballads, jokes of a rich oral tradition. In fact, The Disinherited is a treasure-chest of such materials, and it may best be understood as the search of its first-person protagonist, Larry Donovan, to find a meaningful cultural and communal center to his life after the traditional miners' world of Monkey Nest Camp has been destroyed by lost strikes, the mining deaths of his father and brothers, the fragmentation of modern society, and plain poverty. Initially, Larry believes that he can "rise" to a white-collar job if he gains sufficient education. Later, he works in a steel mill and in the burgeoning auto industry, spending his wages on the pleasures of the moment. Left broke and jobless by the crash, he returns to Monkey Nest Camp, works in construction, and ultimately discovers his solidarity with all other workers:

In the book's climactic scene, farmers organized by Larry's German World War I veteran friend Hans force a foreclosed farm and its contents to be sold back to the farmer for pennies. And Larry, having led a group of town men to support the farmers, makes a speech in cadences recognized by an old-timer as those of Larry's union-leader father. Having thus reclaimed or reconstructed the cultural heritage of his class, Larry goes off with Hans into the unromantic world of union organizing.

The most popular novel to capture Depression America on the road was, of course, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939). -342- Steinbeck's novel, while it points toward a more humane future, is in many ways also an exercise in nostalgia. For its center of value remains a kind of "agrarian utopia" (Warren Susman's term), maintained in the limbo of an idealized encampment by New Deal social policy. And its concept of breaking out of selfish individualism, dramatized in the famous scene of Rose of Sharon sharing her breast milk, involves incorporating outsiders into the more or less traditional family. But in many novels like those I have been discussing, and in 1930s America, it is precisely the disintegration of the family under the stresses of exploitation and the Depression that forces marginalized men and women onto the road.

Books like The Disinherited and the poems, stories, and "reportage" published in The Anvil and in other magazines (Left Front, Leftward, New Force, Dynamo, The Cauldron, Partisan Review) mainly begun in the early 1930s in connection with the Communist Party's John Reed Clubs represent an important part of the American response to the idea that a revolutionary working class should produce its own writers and artists. In the context of the postrevolutionary Soviet Union, there were those who saw little point in burdening a newly self-conscious proletariat with the decayed culture of Russia's aristocratic and bourgeois past. Rather, they believed, workers should be organized into what amounted to literary study groups within which, through practice and criticism, they would learn to develop an art true to their own experiences and needs and integral to their everyday lives. The resulting "Proletcult" had, by 1920, become a mass movement, with a membership (between 300,000 and 450,000) perhaps as large as that of the Soviet Communist Party itself. The subsequent heeling of the movement under Party control, the later debates over the validity of the idea of a proletarian culture (notably if problematically engaged in Trotsky's Literature and Revolution), the intricacies of organizational infighting in the Soviet Union and elsewhere throughout the twenties and thirties, and the emergence of the idea that literary content and ideas should be directed by the policies of a proletarian "vanguard party" do not concern us here, except to the extent that these developments help to explain the growing disrepute of the idea itself.

In the United States, however, Mike Gold in particular continued throughout the twenties to push this idea of proletarian culture; ul-343- timately in 1928 he succeeded in turning The New Masses into what Eric Homberger has accurately described as "a Proletcult magazine." In this phase the magazine received numerous submissions from working people like Jack Conroy, H. H. Lewis, Herman Spector, and Edwin Rolfe. And while, in 1930, The New Masses was turned back to better-known — and, perhaps, less gritty and more middle-class — contributors, it had helped lay the groundwork for the success of the John Reed Clubs and of their magazines. These were the fertile grounds from which sprang important novelists like Richard Wright and Tillie Olsen, and which encouraged many other young workingclass writers like Conroy. Such institutional supports are critical to the development of a culture rooted in working-class experience.

Many of the men and women who joined the John Reed Clubs were working on novels, but ultimately few were published. In part, the shorter forms of poetry and story were obviously easier to complete for people with full-time work and family commitments. In part, too, the Communist Party's 1934 decision (as part of its movement toward "popular front" politics) to eliminate the John Reed Clubs in favor of a League of American Writers constituted by more traditional, better-known, and largely middle-class authors shortcircuited the slow development of a militantly working-class literary culture, and helped condemn at least some of the emerging writers to what Tillie Olsen has eloquently termed "silences."

It may be, however, that the central problem was the novel itself. For how could the novel, which emerged with the development of capitalism and which, as a form, privileges "the position that individual destiny occupies in capitalist culture" (Christian Suggs's words), be reshaped to envision the emergence of a collective future implicit in proletarian politics? Suggs goes on to point out that "the novel's unique ability to focus for considerable numbers of pages on the most internalized processes of the mind and soul could have the collateral effect of isolating private sensibility from public identity" and consequently undermining the political purposes of proletarian fiction. The essentially autobiographical fictions I have been describing found it difficult to evade this dilemma. On the other hand, experimental efforts to decenter the narrative from one single hero, like Robert Cantwell's The Land of Plenty (1934), William Rollins's The-344- Shadow Before (1934), and Clara Weatherwax's Marching! Marching! (1935), ran the risk of losing a mass audience more accustomed to straightforward stories.

In fact, the variety of technical experiments would be surprising if one took too seriously critical strictures enforcing realism. Many efforts were influenced by John Dos Passos's techniques, especially multiple narrative centers, in his trilogy U.S.A. (1930, 1932, 1936), and behind him very likely the "unanimist" fictional tactics of Jules Romains. In Union Square (1933), Albert Halper provides a kind of sociological cross section of the variety of human beings who work, live, engage in politics, and hang out in and around the Square. In A Time to Remember (1936), Leane Zugsmith interweaves a series of stories about the lives of department store workers who become caught up in a strike. Robert Cantwell begins The Land of Plenty "Suddenly the lights went out." We are in the head of Carl, the foreman; subsequent chapters pick up that same moment from the perspectives of Hagen, Marie, and others in the factory, and then in the town. Weatherwax uses a wider, if generally less well-controlled, set of devices: one chapter of Marching! Marching! consists of what are presented as clippings, ads, and strike bulletins; the text moves without signal from narration to internal monologue and from the head of one character to another; the narrative of a strike meeting is suspended for six pages to describe the lumber operations in which one man works. In her trilogy of the Trexler family, Josephine Herbst places brief vignettes, out of chronological sequence, between the chapters of her main narratives. Like Dos Passos's "Newsreels," though different in form, these are mainly efforts to capture a sense of American public life as it converges with the "private" experience of the autobiographical Victoria Wendel. It is true that an insistent, and sometimes one-dimensional, naturalism constituted the mainstream of proletarian fictional technique through the 1930s. It is also true that some of the anti-Stalinist writers gathered around Partisan Review were more committed than others to sustaining the legacies of 1920s modernism. But as these examples suggest, the interest in modernist techniques was widespread; indeed, Marcus Klein presents proletarian literature as "a literary rebellion within [the] literary revolution" called modernism. However that might be, it is essential, I -345- think, to understand how such sophisticated later works as those of Tillie Olsen are grounded in these efforts to use modernist experimental tactics to reconfigure the novel to proletarian social purposes.

Proletarianism takes yet a different shape when it intersects with race. While Conroy's protagonist sought community within the framework of Midwestern radical traditions, Claude McKay's central figures looked toward the values of the African diaspora to counteract the disintegration and anomie of Western culture. McKay, a black Jamaican by birth and a published poet of dialect verse before he immigrated to the United States in 1912, became well known in Left and Bohemian circles in post-World War INew York as an editor of The Liberator (successor to The Masses) and writer of both lyric and militant verse in generally traditional forms like the sonnet. In London during 1920 he worked as a journalist on Sylvia Pankhurst's working-class feminist newspaper, Worker's Dreadnaught, and in 1922 he visited the Soviet Union. There he published an account of race relations in the United States (The Negroes in America [1923]) and a collection of fiction whose nature is expressed in its title, Trial by Lynching (1925). In France, beginning in 1923, McKay set out to establish himself as a novelist by sketching the "semi-underworld" of urban African American workers that he had inhabited between 1914 and 1919. The draft of one novel, "Color Scheme," McKay evidently destroyed after its rejection. Later, however, he was encouraged to expand a short story into his first published novel, Home to Harlem (1928).

In Home to Harlem McKay tries to maintain in tension the three elements that interest him about the lives of rootless, urban African American working men in America; they are represented by the three central male characters, Jake, Zeddy, and Ray. Jake is drawn back to Harlem from abroad by its night life, its Baltimore, Goldgraben's, and Congo bars. But while Harlem's dark-eyed women, its "couples…dancing, thick as maggots in a vat of sweet liquor, and as wriggling," dominate his desires, he rejects the role of "sweetman": "Never lived off no womens and never will. I always works." By contrast, Zeddy is always out for the main chance, arguing against Jake's refusal to scab: -346-

On the other side, the educated Ray envies Jake's natural spontaneity and his capacity for happiness: "I don't know what I'll do with my little education. I wonder sometimes if I could get rid of it and go and lose myself in some savage culture in the jungles of Africa." The underlying ambivalence of Ray's views suggests that McKay (who slightly differentiates himself from Ray when the latter reappears in Banjo) has not altogether worked through the political dimensions of his deep attraction to the "primitive" and presumably exotic qualities of black life. McKay clearly differentiates Jake's natural decency and sense of proletarian solidarity from Zeddy's comic and sometimes ugly blundering, but the roots of that difference, personalities aside, remain unclear. Nor does there seem to be any real way of reconciling Jake's desire for some of Ray's Western "edjucation" and Ray's need for the resources of Jake's earthy happiness. Robert M. Greenberg has suggested that Jake's virtues are "essentially preindustrial ones, qualities that can only foster a marginal life for an individual in the urban North." The characters of Home to Harlem are marginal in another sense, too: they are able to pick up jobs, gigs, money because, though the novel seldom touches on it, times are still flush in the white world.

In Banjo (1929) the ideological drift of Home to Harlem is more fully worked out. Ray meets Banjo — Jake without traces of workingclass ideology — comes to reject the Western civilization that has been taking "the love of color, joy, beauty, vitality, and nobility out of his life," and decides to throw in with Banjo's marginal and dangerous but joyful style of living. What distinguishes black life on the Marseilles waterfront in Banjo is its specifically African quality, defined by the variety of African and diaspora characters who populate the Ditch. Marginality emerges here not as a crushing burden or, at best, a temporary declivity from which people will eventually climb but as a soulful, rhythmic space within which an alternative life to that of white culture can be enacted. It is, perhaps, a differently romanti-347- cized, and equally problematic, version of the "muck" in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

One may read in the changes from McKay's earlier stories to Banjo and his later Jamaican novel, Banana Bottom (1933), a movement from a fundamentally class to a largely racial basis of solidarity, a movement opposite to that dramatized in Richard Wright's powerful novella "Bright and Morning Star." Jake's commitment to worker solidarity is limited: while he will not scab, neither will he join a union — like most "bottom dogs," though he is "no lonesome wolf," he is suspicious of all forms of entanglement — especially if they come in white. In "Bright and Morning Star" Sue, who is suspicious of virtually all whites, ultimately sacrifices her own life to protect her Communist son's comrades, white as well as black, and also to exact some vengeance for his lynching. The stories of Uncle Tom's Children (1938), of which "Bright and Morning Star" is the last, move from African American protagonists who are victims toward those who increasingly embrace radical struggle. In the process, they also seem to move away from the black folk culture (especially religion) associated with the rural South, as well as with the Caribbean or ultimately Africa, that sustains McKay's central characters. In Native Son (1940) that has disappeared; indeed, James Baldwin complained of the book that it lacked "any sense of Negro life as a continuing and complex group reality." There is, of course, a good deal of truth in that criticism. But it misses precisely the sense in which Wright's title links Bigger Thomas to the long line of utterly marginal men who populate proletarian novels of the thirties — especially those written in Chicago by men from mid-America. Bigger is the most thoroughly dispossessed victim of the social processes also dramatized by Algren, Kromer, and Conroy, among others, the processes by which Depression Americans were finally, wrenchingly cut off from earlier, mostly rural sources of traditional value and set adrift in the urban jungles of capitalism. In Native Son the American dream of freedom and flight passes overhead as an advertising gimmick while Bigger and Gus play out the distance in harsh laughter.

At the same time, the ending of the novel focuses Wright's doubts about the ability even of a developed class analysis to account for such thoroughgoing alienation. What emerges in Bigger's final encounter with Max is much the same problem that William Attaway -348- confronts in Blood on the Forge (1941). Like hundreds of thousands of African American people in the decade after 1914, Attaway's three Moss brothers, Mat, Chinatown, and Melody, flee from the exploitation and violence of rural Kentucky to the steel mills near Pittsburgh. As Richard Yarborough has pointed out, Attaway portrays the men's movement into the promised Northern land as, in fact, a descent into an industrial wasteland. All three are destroyed in that process: China is blinded in a mill explosion; Melody injures the hand that enables him to root himself in music; and Big Mat is killed leading strikebreakers.

From one point of view, the experience of Wright's and Attaway's characters represents at its extreme the experience of all workingclass men caught between a dying rural world and an industrial system whose humane potential is waiting to be born. But reading Blood on the Forge against Thomas Bell's novel of three generations of immigrant Slovak steel workers, Out of This Furnace, published the same year, suggests that the differences are, finally, critical. For Bell's book ends triumphantly, with an impending birth and with the victory of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee in Braddock presented as the expression of the American values embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Moreover, in Out of This Furnace African American workers like the Moss brothers are altogether invisible — except, perhaps, in the name of a particularly violent trooper called "Blackjack." Attaway wrote no novels after Blood on the Forge. What seems to me played out in these novels of African American life are a series of unresolved conflicts: between the values embodied in forms of cultural nationalism and forms of classbased solidarity; between the construction of the South as "home" and value-center and the North as "promised land"; between versions of pastoral and versions of proletarianism. Arna Bontemps perhaps tried to avoid such conflicts by setting his groundbreaking novel of African American self-assertion and rebellion, Black Thunder (1936), in the antebellum South. Still, by modeling black militance even in a historical slave revolt like that of Gabriel, Bontemps encountered the demand from the Alabama school in which he was teaching that he renounce his radical associations — mainly his friends engaged in the struggle to save the Scottsboro Boys and in support of Gandhi's nonviolent demonstrations in India. How to show his re-349- nunciation? Why, burn all the "race-conscious" and therefore provocative books in his library. African American intellectual life in the United States simply provided no refuge from the politics of race.

In a formal sense, other working-class women writers of the thirties did not follow Agnes Smedley's autobiographical lead. More fundamentally, however, Daughter of Earth was paradigmatic, for narratives of coming to consciousness and fathoming the painful contradictions of gender and class were at the heart of books by writers like Meridel Le Sueur, Olive Tilford Dargan, Myra Page, and Tillie Olsen. In The Girl — only parts of which were published in the 1930s — Le Sueur succeeds perhaps better than in any of her other work in holding together the contradictory imperatives that have marked her long, complex career as writer and Communist Party activist. These involve the tensions between sexual awakening and "political" consciousness, between modernism of style and the effort to reach a working-class audience, between the writer as seller of words or as peoples' oracle, and above all between the logic of individual advancement and the power of collective action. In her work, these are all linked. In certain ways, The Girl duplicates the pattern of other books that trace the coming to consciousness of a working-class protagonist. We meet the nameless girl as she begins waitressing in a St. Paul speakeasy and follow her developing affair with Butch, a young, marginal worker. We watch with horror as she becomes the driver for a botched bank robbery plotted by the predatory Ganz and as she and the fatally wounded Butch flee into the countryside. Pregnant, out of work, and separated from all the men who had tried to control her life, the girl returns to the city to become part of a community of "bottom dog" women, surviving through the bitter winter in an abandoned warehouse, where in the book's climax she gives birth. What the girl discovers can be seen as a version of class solidarity, especially when she communicates with a deaf girl in a scabrous relief maternity home about the Workers Alliance. But the content of that solidarity is markedly different from what Larry Donovan comes to in The Disinherited or Mickey stumbles upon in Jews Without Money. For its emotional basis is the commonality of female experience.

Le Sueur tells us that reading D. H. Lawrence first enabled her to -350- think positively about women's sexuality. She had early been taught that sex meant danger, and, as in many women's novels before and after the 1930s, it continued to be threatening: an illusion fostered by Hollywood, the trapdoor to impoverishment through repeated cycles of pregnancy and childbearing, or a commodity demanded by men as token of their power. Indeed, Le Sueur's young male characters, like Bac in I Hear Men Talking (1984) and Butch in The Girl, are often predatory individualists, strikebreakers, violent to women, intent above all on "beating." Nevertheless, heterosexuality opens a way for Le Sueur's young women to discover what "nobody can tell you," to step out of the constrictions of selfhood, finding, like the girl, not only unity among women but also a relationship to the earth itself that Le Sueur often symbolized by the Demeter and Persephone myth. Many of Le Sueur's early stories (for example, "Annunciation," "Spring Story") illustrate the intensity of her concern with women's bodies and sexuality — a concern that brought her into conflict with some Left critics and editors and, indeed, with at least some of the audiences for most Left-wing magazines of the thirties.

Ishma Waycaster, the central figure of Olive Tilford Dargan's (Fielding Burke's) Call Home the Heart, is caught in a similar set of conflicts: between her mountain home and the industrial lowland; between her passion for her husband, Britt, and her attraction to the scientific and politicized doctor, Derry; between her desire for the personal satisfactions of her own farm and hilltops and her commitment to the revolutionary struggle of the National Textile Workers' Union to organize the Winbury (Gastonia) mill workers; between irrational desire and the life of reason. These remain ideologically unresolved though humanly convincing in Call Home the Heart as Ishma, after an irrational outburst of racism, retreats from the union struggle back to mountains, husband, home. Dargan's dramatization of the persistence of racism even among enlightened white Southern workers has been praised as an honest effort to confront realistically a main barrier to worker solidarity. But, in fact, the dilemmas of racism are not central to the novel, any more than they were fundamental to the Gastonia strike. What is much more critical in the book, and what seems to me displaced onto the issue of race, are questions about gender and the relation of personal to social transformation. Gender is much more marginal in the Left discourse upon -351- which Dargan is drawing and appears at once less critical and much more intractable than racism, the solution to which is, at least theoretically, clear. As Deborah Rosenfelt comments about another novel on the Gastonia strike, Myra Page's Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt (1932), "the author [is unable] to acknowledge fully the very subversiveness of the women's issues raised. They are subversive not only of the dominant culture's sex-role ideology but also of the Left's insistence on the seamlessness and unity of the working class." But more fundamentally, perhaps, the novel is struggling with the question of what Ishma, who is so much an image of American possibility, will finally become. There is nothing fixed and predetermined about that in Dargan's book: Ishma is created and recreated in relation to the material circumstances of her life. The problem, then, is to imagine circumstances capable of energizing both her passions and her intellect — a task neither novelist nor movement accomplished. Indeed, when she tries to resolve such dilemmas in the sequel A Stone Came Rolling (1935), Dargan is much less convincing.

Le Sueur's style also seems pulled in contrary directions: a lyric, repetitive, incantatory modernist technique (influenced, perhaps, by Gertrude Stein as well as by Lawrence) sometimes jostles against the reportorial voice (influenced, perhaps, by Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway) she honed in articles like "Women on the Breadlines" and "What Happens in a Strike" (collected in Harvest Song [1990]). The lyrical, Le Sueur writes in I Hear Men Talking, could be "used as reaction to the deathly action of the economics and history of the town." But it poses a problem to the audience she seeks: "A farmer in North Dakota said to me once, 'You write too beautiful.'" So, like some critics, she came to "question the lyricism of my early stories." For if the writer's role was to become an "oracle of the people" (Linda Ray Pratt's term), like Whitman, hearing, gathering, expressing, returning to the people their own stories, she could not distance herself from them by language, as modernist writers often did. Further, to serve a political function in a communist movement, a writer could not simply reproduce the relationships of bourgeois culture, appropriating people's lives into narratives and selling them back as commodities. One can see in Penelope, the developing central consciousness of I Hear Men Talking, Le Sueur's effort to create an alternative to the portrait of the artist as young appropriator that one -352- finds, for example, in Anderson's "Death in the Woods" or Winesburg, Ohio.

The tensions about the relationship of artists and intellectuals to a social movement were not easily resolved, especially for authors of middle-class origins in the aggressively working-class movement of the thirties. Commenting on Horace Gregory's angst over his conflict between artistic individualism and Communist discipline, Le Sueur wrote in The New Masses (February 26, 1935):

But "maggoty individualism" is never so easily exterminated; indeed, it reappears here as a kind of self-hatred, which can lead to artistic paralysis or to shrill assertion of one's correct politics. Le Sueur dramatizes the effort to cast off bourgeois separateness and step into working-class solidarity in a piece like I Was Marching (1934), but a certain insecurity persists. Indeed, the question comes to be central to a significant number of novels of the time.

The work of Tess Slesinger and Josephine Herbst is not, on the whole, focused on the life of industrial workers. Slesinger's only completed novel, The Unpossessed (1934), and her collection of stories, Time: The Present (1935), concern the personal and political lives of people best characterized as middle-class intellectuals. And while she was later active in Hollywood in the long battle to establish the Screen Writers Guild, her movie scripts are not very involved with working-class struggles. The Unpossessed provides an unusually frank view of the tensions between ideological commitment and personal desires among the class of leftist intellectuals to which most writers of proletarian novels in fact belonged. Loosely based on the group around Elliot Cohen, editor of The Menorah Journal and later, having moved to the far Right, founding editor of Commentary, the novel tells about the efforts of the men in the group, and the student acolytes of one of them, Bruno Leonard, to set up a magazine that will at once express their political aspirations and satisfy their quite varied personal desires. By alternating scenes of public activities —353- meetings, fund-raising efforts, and the like — and private interactions, Slesinger suggests how the personal and the political remain in tension, how, indeed, unresolved personal conflicts come to abort expressed political commitments.

Most particularly, the men in the group seem unable to relate honestly to the women closest to them, much less to the rather callow students who help drive the magazine enterprise or to the variety of ordinary people with whom they interact daily and on whose behalf they would write. The contradictory impulses of the group are most devastatingly satirized in Slesinger's account of the lavish fund-raising party thrown for the magazine, the public climax of the novel. The parallel "private" climax is provided by the final chapter, in which Margaret Flinders, one of the book's central characters, returns from an abortion, pushed on her by her bitter, withheld husband, Miles. Probably the first widely circulated American fiction to deal in detail with an abortion, the chapter was first published in 1932 as a separate short story, "Missis Flinders." The book does mock all the protagonists at one level, playing their withdrawals from commitment against the fanaticism of Dostoevsky's characters evoked by Slesinger's ironic title. But it also presents them with a certain sympathy born of Slesinger's recognition that decent political values can, and usually do, live side by side in human beings with rather less noble motives of personal aggrandizement or sexual conquest.

Herbst's trilogy (Pity Is Not Enough [1933], The Executioner Waits [1934,], and Rope of Gold [1939]) is one of three — the others are John Dos Passos's U.S.A. and James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan — published by Left-leaning writers during the thirties. They are strikingly different: Dos Passos tries to achieve in his choice of characters, his use of "Newsreels," his capsule biographies of notable Americans, a panoramic view of the country in the decades before and after World War I. Farrell focuses narrowly on the decline of a lowermiddle-class urban family as representative of the fate of millions of other Americans, lost in ideological confusion and economic dislocation. Herbst centers her narrative on a few members of the Trexler family, a fictionalized version of her own, but tries to achieve scope by tracing them over most of a century and across much of America. Her primary protagonists, especially as the trilogy goes on, are female, which some critics have suggested may account for the trilogy's -354- lack of wide readership. But it may also be a function of its very inconclusiveness. Rope of Gold in particular suggests that the trajectory of Victoria Wendel's and Jonathan Chance's private lives as writers and political activists and that of world-changing economic and political forces are somehow converging. But a novel cannot leap out of history, especially if it is committed to historical representation, like Herbst's. And none of the novel's concerns — the rise of fascism, duplicity and male chauvinism on the Left, the distant promise of a classless society — are resolvable within it. The recent revival of interest in Herbst — partly stimulated by Elinor Langer's important biography — may suggest that the very ambivalence that kept her slightly apart from total commitments in the period's politics is appealing, in a way that forced conclusions are not, to a postmodern generation of readers.

But the proletarian writer who has most appealed to contemporary readers is, ironically, one who published hardly anything during the thirties. Nevertheless, Tillie Olsen's fiction does, in certain respects, epitomize the best of the time. Yonnondio, as it has been published, was mostly written by 1938 or 1939, and a portion of it printed as "The Iron Throat." But then the novel's manuscript was set aside for other work, child-rearing, earning a living, surviving the repressions of the Cold War, and lay in a trunk until 1972 when its bits and scraps were resurrected, painstakingly copied, reassembled into the narrative that exists. Like many of the books I have discussed, Yonnondio is a story of growing up, particularly of Mazie, daughter of Anna and Jim Holbrook. The narrative follows the family in the early 1920s from mining community to farm to packingtown in their search for decent jobs and room for children to grow. It was planned to follow Mazie's continued development beyond her early teens, perhaps into a writer who could, like her creator, "limn" the "hands" of America. For what this Mazie knows are the endless frets of too many children in too little space, the violence engendered by a father's inability to get at what is consuming him, the desperation of toil gone to waste. The last scene portrays the stifling of life in the packinghouse and at home by 106-degree heat, shifting from consciousness to consciousness to create a mosaic of pain.

What Olsen accomplishes in Yonnondio, I think, is drawing together technical strategies and thematic materials seldom unified in -355- proletarian fiction. Her methods of varying narrative voices and presenting scenes from very different points of view — now Mazie's innocent eyes, now Anna's weary glance, now a narrator's knowledgeable vision — represent one of the most successful adaptations of experimental techniques to subject matter characteristic of the consciousness of the thirties. But she also joins the work and household worlds. Thus she brings to imaginative life the intersections of these domains, which ideology and the habits of patriarchal society have largely kept separate.

What the foregoing seems to me to illustrate is the variety of the texts one can usefully think about under the rubric "proletarian." For the term does not represent merely a political prescription for cultural work — though there were undoubtedly those who preferred that it should — but an angle of vision on the art of another time. That angle of vision is, as I have illustrated, different in the 1990s from what it might have been in the 1930s. It will continue to change as our understandings of class, and particularly its intersections with other categories of social structure and of cultural analysis, develop. This work, therefore, is presented not as the definitive account of "proletarianism and the American novel" but as one among the many differing narratives that might, and undoubtedly will over time, be constructed from the variety of texts now open before us.

Paul Lauter

-356-

Popular Forms II

When Horatio Alger died in 1899, his rags-to-riches formula had already been contested by a different kind of adolescent achievement: the heroics of the athlete Frank Merriwell. First appearing in 1896 — at the hand of "Burt L. Standish" (Gilbert Patten) and at the behest of publisher Ormond Smith — Frank and his brother pitched the winning pitch in over 200 novels, which sold an estimated 126,000,000 volumes by the end of the 1920s. Alger's novels gained in popularity during the first decade of the twentieth century, and his name soon became synonymous with the American myth of self-improvement. But it was Patten's fiction in Street and Smith's "Tip Top Weekly" series that commanded the juvenile field, marking an abrupt shift in the site and the style of American success. The hero of Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York (1867) must rise to respectability and to a job as counting room clerk. In contrast, Frank Merriwell enjoys perpetual triumph outside the confines of the city and the economic order.

In its relocation of success, the sports novel escapes the specific contradiction of ideology and plot that characterizes the Alger formula: the wealthy Mr. Whitney explains to Ragged Dick that "in this free country poverty in early life is no bar to a man's advancement," that "your future position depends mainly on yourself"; but Whitney's very presence in the novel, his role as Dick's benefactor, refutes the platitude. In Frank Merriwell at Yale (1903), the platitude changes, the hero himself explains that "in athletics" (rather than in this country) "strength and skill win, regardless of money or family," -357- and he himself, all by himself, triumphs from the beginning to the end of each novel, requiring no assistance from a surrogate father. We might say, then, that in fiction, as in the American society of the era, sports established an arena of success that the economy could no longer provide. But a novel like Frank Merriwell in Wall Street (1908) actually transforms the economy into one more playing field where Frank invariably triumphs. While Alger's Luke Larkin, the "son of a carpenter's widow," must "exercise the strictest economy" in Struggling Upward (1890), Frank Merriwell, whose financial reserves appear no less vast than his strength, can exercise an economy of wild speculation in which "need" has given way to "desire." All told, the Merriwell series does not so much suppress the economic as it rewrites the economy in accordance with The New Basis of Civilization, as the economist Simon Patten understood it in 1905, where an "economy of pain" has been supplanted by an "economy of pleasure," and the primary task of education becomes to "arouse" the worker to participate in American "amusements."

Still, a simpler way to understand the disjunction between the Alger novel and the Merriwell novel is to recognize that, just as Alger's fiction once served as an alternative to the sensationalist dime novels of the 1860s and 1870s, so the baseball novel serves as a means of reestablishing the adventure paradigm that postulates "directly the inborn and statically inert nobility of its heroes," as Bakhtin says, rather than portraying any "gradual formation" of character: Ragged Dick, despite his inborn "pluck," must learn the behavior that will enable him to succeed; but Frank Merriwell's success springs from an absolute "stability of character." Describing the relation between formula fiction and American ideology can begin with this point, for the narrative in which America represents itself to itself insists on precisely such a stability. Within the dominant ideology, "America" never appears as a product of economic or social forces, but as a permanent and autonomous character, the adventure hero, as it were, confronting a series of tests. Theodore Roosevelt's imperialist rhetoric voices this heroism with especial clarity — waging war in the Philippines appears as a test of the individual's and the country's "manly and adventurous qualities" — but throughout the twentieth century both liberal and conservative rhetoric insistently portrays "America" on trial, the resolution to both domestic and international crises re-358- siding in the character of " America." Not change, but permanence, will solve the crisis at hand; not a process of becoming, but a more exact fulfillment of being, will guarantee success. The ideology of formula fiction, this is to argue, should be thought in relation to the narrative form of ideology, for if Frank Merriwell embodies the ideal of American "individualism," then "America," likewise, fleshes out the narrative grammar of adventure.

Above all, it was "adventure" and "action" that the pulp magazines promised their readers, beginning with Frank Munsey's Argosy (1896). And it was the pulps that produced the typology through which formula fiction has been displayed and consumed. In the 1920s and the 1930s, the expansion of the pulps — numbering over 200 during the Great Depression — particularized "adventure" to the point where, for instance, one could read not just War Stories or even Navy Stories, but, more exactly, Submarine Stories and Zeppelin Stories. Street and Smith published the first truly popular specialized pulp, Detective Story Magazine, in 1915, and it was detective fiction, science fiction, and the Western that claimed the most attention from both editors and readers. The serialized novels from these magazines established generic formulas; the pulp industry produced, as Marx would say, "not just an object for the subject, but a subject for the object"; and the subject produced was a new male readership. To oversimplify, we can claim that while the most popular fiction of the 1850s was written and read by women (under the auspices of male publishers), by the 1950s much of the most popular fiction, such as Mickey Spillane's hard-boiled detective novels and Max Brand's Westerns, was written and read by men. The modern emphasis on fiction's mass distribution — marked by publishing's involvement with Marshall Field and with Sears, by Robert de Graft's invention of Pocket Books (1939), by the emergence of mail-order book clubs — includes an attempt to masculinize the reading process. As Charles Madison explains in his history of publishing, the distribution of paperbacks to the armed forces during World War II developed "millions of readers who previously had seldom looked into a book." Thus, the masculine/feminine opposition that had long encoded the distinction between high and mass culture began to blur, and the hypermasculinity of the adventure hero looks not least like a compensatory reaction to this shift in literary consumption. -359-

Just as the character of the adventure hero, always on trial, resists all change, so too the adventure formula resists modernity, providing an alternative experience to what Thorstein Veblen described, in 1904, as "the cultural incidence of the machine process" — "the disciplinary effect" of the "movement for standardization and mechanical equivalence" and the insistence on "matter-of-fact habits of thought." At the same time, that alternative, to the degree that it repeats a standardized formula, perpetuates this "disciplinary effect"; like any commodity, it creates only illusory difference; and it invites the reader to submit, like the author, to the prescriptions of (the very rhythm of) the productive apparatus. Nonetheless, formula fiction is not reducible to its formula, and reading science fiction, detective fiction, and the Western amounts to encountering a perpetual renegotiation of "adventure" and "modernization" (which is to say: "adventure" and its own mode of production).

In modern science fiction, the confrontation between "adventure" and "modernization," heroic stasis and modern progress, appears as a bifurcation within the industry itself: one strain of the genre emphasizes "adventure," most simply represented by the Flash Gordon film serials (1936, 1938, 1939), based on the popular comic strip; the other emphasizes invention or "hard science," initially represented by Hugo Gernsback's Ralph 124C 41 + (1911), a novel serialized in his own publication, Modern Electrics, the country's first radio magazine. Gernsback's hero displays his technological genius in the act of saving a village girl from multiple crises, finally bringing her home to New York and the 650-foot, round glass tower that is his home. The novel takes as its task the presentation of a future metropolis and the careful description of future inventions, but this "Romance of the Year 2660" remains an adventure. The hero's genius — symbolized by the tower, technology's own phallus rising above New York — is inspired by the vulnerability of woman, the given, without which the narrative could neither begin nor end. And this point complicates the typical charge against science fiction, the claim that it promotes an unexamined and untenable myth of technological progress, as Lewis Mumford has argued. For that myth of progress inhabits a structural stasis: the stereotypical gender code makes science make sense, providing it with its very reason to be. Indeed, a second glance at the -360- genre's modern history suggests that science fiction just as assiduously perpetuates a myth of no progress; it guarantees the stability of certain social relations despite technological advance; and in this sense it typically naturalizes the technologies of gender, sexuality, and race, by casting these human constructions outside the realm of the properly technological and historical.

Tracing the nineteenth-century foundations of science fiction means looking away from America, to the work of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells, and yet a few American texts also opened up some basic avenues of enquiry. Edward Ellis's Steam-Man of the Plains (1868), a dime novel, initiates a fascination with the technological elimination of human labor that attains its most complete expression in Isaac Asimov's I, Robot (1950) and his three "laws of robotics," which adjudicate relations between the human and the technological. Edgar Allan Poe's Balloon Hoax (1844) and Hans Pfaal (1835) inaugurate an emphasis on travel that, in E. E. Smith's Skylark series, beginning with The Skylark of Space (1928), becomes intergallactic, providing writers with a new realm of exploration, made limitless with Asimov's invention of "hyper-spatial" travel in the 1940s. And Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) introduces time travel as a means of highlighting the effects of technology. In L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fail (1941), Twain's dystopian vision becomes utopian: the American hero finds himself transported from Mussolini's Rome to Justinian's Rome, where, with the reinvention of the semaphore telegraph and the printing press, he both prevents the Western Interregnum and establishes social justice. De Camp never addresses the absence of such technological resolution to the modern Western crisis, his hero remains in the safety of the past, but his novel exemplifies science fiction's increasing tendency, in the 1930s and 1940s, to address contemporary crisis explicitly before displacing it, spatially or chronologically, and providing its readers with the pleasure of scientific resolution. The splitting of the atom in 1938 realized many of the achievements and anxieties science fiction had been predicting for years, and it made the earth itself the most obvious new stage for adventure. By the 1950s, science fiction films take the 1950s as their very point of departure, developing a variety of monsters released or -361- created by atomic explosion, notably The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Them!, where ants appear as the first of Hollywood's giant insects.

In contrast, the first chapter of Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Princess of Mars (1912), serialized the same year as his Tarzan of the Apes, tries to compensate for American history: John Carter, a Virginian who fought in the Civil War and then found himself a captain "in the cavalry arm of an army which no longer existed," has ventured West and become a wildly successful prospector in Arizona, where his partner is attacked by Apaches, from whom Carter himself takes refuge in a cave. By means of psychic projection, he ends up on Mars, this planet of war becoming, as it were, the new locus of American "adventure" — American adventures, both military and economic, having all but played themselves out within the continental United States. His strength and prowess enable him to resolve the conflict between the red and green races of Mars, to liberate the greenmen from their despotic ruler, and to defend the princess he loves from repeated assault; he thus reclaims, beyond the closing Western frontier, the chivalry of the Southerner. The logic of empire that underlies Burroughs's Martian novels (eleven in all, concluding in 1942) more obviously informs his Pellucidar series, beginning with At the Earth's Core (1914) and Pellucidar (1915), in which David Innes brings both American technology and the American political system to the primitive peoples residing in the Earth's hollow center. If H. G. Wells, during Africa's partition, tried to give his readers some sense of the horror of being colonized in The War of the Worlds (1898), then Burroughs, in contrast, insisted on the heroics of colonial subjection.

It is, of course, a racist axiom that makes this heroism possible, rendering global conflict as a Social Darwinist battle of races, and insisting on the priority of the body to the point where, despite any technological marvel, the first and final sign of superiority is always physical. The warlord John Carter is 6 feet, 2 inches tall, "broad of shoulder and narrow of hip," and David Innes, American emperor of Pellucidar, is a comparable physical specimen (as is, of course, Tarzan, that noble savage whose nobility derives from his aristocratic parentage). More obviously, it is the ethnographic and biological attention to the creatures of Mars and Pellucidar that grounds Bur-362- Bur-'s fiction in the body, and in racial history: the red and green races of Mars can be traced back to one "very dark, almost black" race, and one "reddish yellow race." And in all Burroughs's work, it is the threat of interracial abduction that emerges as the most heinous crime that his heroes must prevent: Carter must save the red, almost humanoid Martian princess from the sexual assault of a bestial green jeddack. That the popularity of Burroughs's first novels occurred between the extraordinary success of Thomas Dixon's The Clansman (1905) and D. W. Griffith's filmic version of the novel, The Birth of a Nation (1915), makes obvious sense, for the Martian novels also depict a white Southern male reestablishing racial order.

Simplistic as his adventure formula may seem, the simplicity still characterizes far more substantial works. George Allen England's Darkness at Dawn (1912), the first novel of a trilogy, provides a very different type of plot, but one that manifests the same ideology. In England's first science fiction story, The Lunar Advertising Co. (1906), technological advancement takes place within the modern economy: the moon, as a giant projection screen, becomes America's premier billboard. But in the trilogy, the economy disappears along with human civilization: an engineer and a stenographer wake up in a New York skyscraper to find themselves the last two humans alive in a world that has been destroyed by an "Epic of Death." They are soon attacked by "demoniac hordes" of black, apelike creatures with a "trace of the Mongol," and Allan Stern, "the only white man living in the twenty-eighth century," must defend himself and the woman he grows to love against racial extinction. Facing a world "gone to pieces the way Liberia and Haiti and Santo Domingo once did, when white rule ceased," Stern nurtures his "deep-seated love for the memory of the race of men and women as they had once been." Finally, in the last of the novels, The Afterglow, he establishes a new social system among the other survivors they encounter, a system in which man is free at last because of the elimination of money, the proliferation of scientific thought, and the introduction of the English language, that "magnificent language, so rich and pure," its purity mimicking the racial purity achieved once the "horde" has been "wiped out." More precisely than Burroughs's work, then, England's trilogy occupies the ideology of its era, most familiar in Theodore Roosevelt's claim, from The Winning of the West (1899), that "the -363- spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world's waste spaces has been…the most striking feature in the world's history." And England's novels exhibit the same contradictions as does Roosevelt's ideal of the "strenuous life," a call away from "overcivilization" that is still a call to "civilize" the world. For only in the face of civilization's demise does Allan Stern retrieve the ideals of "labor and exploration" and transform himself from the "man of science and cold fact" into a man who can feel the "atavistic passions"; only in defending the woman he loves does the "engineer" become an "American." The triumph of civilization simply leaves "man civilized" with no "other" against which to define himself; it leaves the hero and his world in a nonnarratable state.

This nonnarratable state is the very topic of John W. Campbell's prologue to Islands of Space (1930). In the typical history of science fiction, Campbell's editorial work at Astounding, begun in 1938, appears as the moment when science proper became the subject of science fiction. But just as this history itself writes that moment as an adventure — the hero Campbell rescuing science fiction and inaugurating the so-called Golden Age — so too his own fiction foregrounds the problem of adventure despite its greater scientific realism and its location of technology within an American corporate economy. Islands of Space begins by summarizing the previous endeavors of Transcontinental Airways: having initiated interplanetary travel and landed on Venus, the corporation found that, though "similar to Earthmen," the "Venusians" had blue blood and double thumbs, making them "enough different to have caused distrust and racial friction, had not both planets been drawn together in a common bond of defense" against the Black Star, Nigra. The Nigrans, functioning as the absolute other that cements comradeship, have been defeated, making the world of science uninteresting: "The War was over. And things had become dull. And the taste of adventure still remained." While there is some possibility that "commerce over quintillions of miles of space" will satisfy this taste, the band of scientists soon find themselves involved in an interplanetary confrontation far from earth. They settle the dispute, adjudicate interplanetary relations, offer their technology to the winning side as a means of ensuring further peace, and thus establish American technocratic, neo-364- colonialist hegemony. The corporate adventure remains a fantasy of domination.

As science fiction begins to address the historical moment of its own production, the politics of such fantasies — politics per se — become more explicit and more explicitly resisted, as in When Worlds Collide (1933), a novel by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie that rewrites the Depression as a natural disaster. News of a planet's trajectory toward earth is first encountered in the papers as "something novel, exciting," but the ensuing panic requires careful governmental management: the unemployed are "corralled en masse" to build shelters in the heart of the country, away from the coasts, which will disappear in the first tidal waves. A great migration from the coasts to the plains (reversing the historical migration from the Dust Bowl) transforms even millionaires into "Oakies," driving "with their treasures heaped around them." The president shows "the good sense to kick politics in the face and take full authority upon himself," and his radio reports ("we stand now on the brink of a situation from which we cannot hide") suggest a commitment to reason abandoned elsewhere, such as Germany, where fascists have begun to execute both communists and Jews. But even such "non-political" acumen, of course, cannot forestall humanity's devastation. Outside any governmental auspices, a scientific "League of the Last Days," the focus of the novel, has secretly developed two rocket ships to take five hundred of the world's best minds to another planet, leaving "the hordes" (science fiction's ubiquitous "hordes") behind. Thus, the heroes of the novel accomplish their own eugenicist ends, but with a rational means that appears to stand fully outside politics (what the novel assesses as good and bad politics)and to stand outside economics — to stand for science itself. This account of the scientists' escape can be read as an allegory of science fiction's escapism — an effort to erase such earthly matters as fascism and depression while ultimately rewriting them.

The complications of technological resolution, which is to say technocratic domination, eventually become the object of science fiction's own scrutiny. In Fritz Leiber's Gather Darkness (1943), a "Hierarchy" rules Megatheopolis by duping "the masses" with scientific "miracles"; in Jack Williamson's The Humanoids (1947), "the virus -365- of science" appears in the form of robots who protect human beings to the point of denying them all pleasure. But these explicit challenges to science and its myth of progress may tell us less than the adventure formula's inability to understand that narrative of progress outside other narratives — of racial, economic, and national conquest. While Jean-François Lyotard, for one, has suggested that the postmodern moment is a time when the metanarrative of science (the grand narratives of speculation and emancipation) faces a legitimation crisis, that crisis already inheres in science fiction, which can find no grounds for science outside its ability to serve as an instrument and sign of power.

Unlike science fiction, which, with its focus on technology, necessarily confronts the idea of "modernization," the Western at its most formulaic simply preserves an unspecified American space and time within which gunslinging heroes can conquer villains and win hearts. Max Brand's first Western novel, The Untamed (1918), further delocalizes its action with references to mythology, which continued to provide him with metaphors, themes, and plots that universalize the protagonist's heroism rather than restricting it to any historical West. Proclaimed by Publishers Weekly as "the king of the pulps," so prolific as to need twenty pseudonyms, Frederick Faust, most famous as "Max Brand," accomplished such feats of productivity — writing over a hundred Western novels, working in all the popular genres (and inventing Dr. Kildare), inspiring as many as five movies in a single year (1921) — that it is little wonder his Westerns, purged of complication, have paradigmatic value. In Hired Guns (1923), for instance, Billy Buel, a gunman who loves to fight and hates to work, is hired to fight in Gloster Valley's nine-year family feud over the identity and possession of Nell (a Western Helen of Troy). His courage, gunmanship, and personal code of ethics resolve that feud and win the heart of the beautiful girl, with whom he leaves the valley. Just as the novel's isolated community stands outside time, so the hero stands outside the community, resolving its conflicts only to flee. The narrative syntax — the outsider establishes social justice, then returns to the outside — remains the staple of the adventure formula, which depicts a need for social change, but a change that must come from without, and from an individual's changeless heroism. -366-

This syntax underlies far more complex renditions of the Western, such as John Ford's, Stagecoach (1939), which, reestablished the pop, ularity of the Hollywood Western in the sound era. Based on a story by Ernest Haycox, Ford's film, displaying the desert crossing of a stage from Tonto to Lordsburg, isolates the passengers, consisting of social,outcasts, into a society of their own (a microcosm that has been read allegorically as "America," the country struggling against the natural world). The most socially disreputable of the characters (a prostitute, an alcoholic doctor, a gambler), threatened by Apache attack and faced with the birth of a child, reveal a humanity and a morality that far surpass the Victorian principles of the town, represented by the Ladies' Law and Order League. The opening scenes of the movie allow us to glimpse their lives within society, but the outlaw hero of the story, Ringo Kid (John Wayne), appears only once the. coach is well on its way: he looms up, as if from nowhere, isolated by the camera with Monument Valley as a backdrop; he appears as if from nature itself, more completely beyond the confines of the town. And once he secures the passage of the stagecoach, and, in a shoot-out, avenges his brother's death, he leaves the social order again, riding off to the Mexican border with the woman he has come to love (the prostitute), both of them "saved the blessings of civilization," as the doctor says, watching them take off. (At the same time, the doctor, who has sobered up to deliver the baby, accepts the offer of a drink, reestablishing his own exteriority.) Thus, while defending civilization against the uncivilized Native Americans, Ringo defends himself against Civilization by (as Huck Finn would have it) lighting out for the territories.

Nonetheless, in Stagecoach, as in Hired Guns, the hero's union with a woman provides the sense of closure denied by this escape; and as Laura Mulvey has said of Western films, "marriage" functions to sublimate "the erotic into a final, closing, social ritual." But the Western's resistance to society — most vociferous in its attack on business interests and Eastern decadence — is exemplified not least by the formula's tendency to exclude this "social ritual" from the plot itself, to project the possibility of "marriage" into an unknown future (the possible basis of an Edenic society elsewhere), or to idealize love outside this social institution. Points West (1928), written by "B. M. Bower" (Bertha Muzzy Sinclair, the one woman who consistently -367- worked in the genre), portrays as its heroine a "fighting cowgirl" who is very much the fighting cowboy's equal; their relationship is á based on a type of filial rivalry that negates the typical asymmetry of the gender code and thus the threat of domestication; nonetheless, as the novel closes, Billy simply has his "eye on the girl," and marriage as such (that social mark of change) remains excluded from the pages of the novel. More simply, in Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), which defines the "love of man for woman" (noticeably not between man and woman) as "the nature, the meaning, the best of life itself," the hero and heroine disappear together into the uninhabited Surprise Valley, the "nature of life" dissolving into nature. And if this marginalization of marriage suggests the thoroughness with which the Western resists society, with which it resists the idea of its hero's socialization, then the status of law, explicitly addressed in one novel after another, more clearly confirms the idea that existing social institutions stand in the way of happiness and success. The hero of Eugene Manlove Rhodes's Barnsford in Arcadia (1913) puts the matter simply: law "rouses no enthusiasm in my manly bosom," he claims; "I am endowed by nature with certain inalienable rights, among which are the high justice, the middle, and the low." It is only this endowment that enables every Western hero to establish a justice that transcends law. In Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), it is the very voice of the law, the voice of Judge Henry, who legitimizes extralegal activity, the vigilante justice of the West: "far from being a defiance of the law," the judge argues, "it is an assertion of it."

This extrainstitutional status of true law and true love converges with the extrasocietal status of the adventure hero, and the atemporal and atopian action, to make the adventure formula not just escapist but a lesson in escapism: a study in the need for the individual to get beyond society. But this is true only of the Western at its most formulaic. In fact, Wister's novel, which marks the advent of the modern Western, finally suggests an altogether different emphasis — not on the separation of the hero from society, but on his integration. The Virginian, indebted less to the dime novel and more to Cooper's Leatherstocking tales and the American historical romance (as Wister suggests in his preface), provides the modern formula with its basic semantic elements (above all the cowboy, a loner, a "handsome un-368- grammatical son of the soil") and the ideology of Anglo-Saxonism and individualism. But its plot concludes by locating the hero within society, the family, and the economy. Furthermore, Wister locates the story in a specific time and place, Wyoming, between 1874 and 1890, and implicitly addresses a moment in recent history: the Johnson County War (1892) between cattlemen and homesteaders. The love story between the cowpuncher and the Eastern schoolmarm resolves the antinomies that structure every Western (East/West, civilization/ nature, society/individual), and just as she learns the necessity of the West's code of violence ("how it must be about a man"), so too he learns the beauty of Shakespeare and Scott. Both characters change before their marriage, and the Virginian himself rises within the cattle industry: he begins as a hand on Judge Henry's ranch, advances to manager, becomes the judge's partner, and, with the coming of the railroad in the 1890s, ultimately establishes himself as "an important man, with a strong grip on many various enterprises and able to give his wife all and more than she asked or desired," the sort of "important man" who will later serve as the formula's embodiment of evil. Wister reports these last two stages of success hastily, in the closing pages, but they serve to foreground the fact that The Virginian is an economic novel: its central dispute, between the Virginian and Trampas, is a dispute between management and labor; by serving Trampas "an intellectual crushing," the Virginian suppresses the organization of men against the judge's interests. Thus, the outsider (who, as a Virginian, is actually an outsider to the West) serves to stabilize an economic "civilization" within which he occupies a central place.

The point, then, is that The Virginian finally insists not on the exteriority of the West and the Western hero but on their centrality, their pertinence to modernization's advance. In a Wyoming "as wild as was Virginia one hundred years earlier," Wister's hero, as a latterday Thomas Jefferson, exemplifies for the Eastern narrator the central point of American democracy: "It was through the Declaration of Independence that we Americans acknowledged the eternal inequality of man"; "true democracy and true aristocracy are one and the same thing." The fact that true aristocracy finds itself confirmed by economic hierarchy makes the origin of America coincide with its turn-of-the-century corporate end. In contrast to Brand, who ignores -369- the "modern world," Wister implicitly confirms it, and Zane Grey, who did more than anyone to establish the popularity of the genre, confronts the problem of modernization explicitly, and most compellingly in those novels where the West serves to rejuvenate an individual from the misery of modern warfare. In The Call of the Canyon (1924), The Shepherd of Guadaloupe (1930), and 30,000 on the Hoof (1940), shell-shocked soldiers return to America physically and emotionally depleted, ignored by their government, misunderstood by their friends. But despite grim prognoses from their doctors, a trip West initiates a slow recovery, one in which men learn above all the pleasures of physical work and the superficiality of Eastern life.

The very sight of the Western landscape can inspire change, but the fact that such sights had become a part of Eastern culture turns visualization itself into a point of contest. By 1900, William Henry Jackson was mass-marketing his photographs of Yellowstone; in 1910, D. W. Griffith shot Ramona in Ventura, the very locale of Helen Hunt Jackson's novel (as the film reminds us); in 1917, John Ford included a dramatic mountain pass in Straight Shooting and closed the film with his signature shot of the sunset. But while modern technology had brought the West to the East with an "authenticity" that surpassed the paintings of Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt, for Grey such representations would not do. In The Call of the Canyon, Carley Butch, having ventured to Arizona to see her fiancé, but returning East without him, finds that she hates "the motion pictures with their salacious and absurd misrepresentations." In The Vanishing American (1925), Marian Warner finds that motion pictures have little to do with the truth of the West. The dichotomous imagination of the Western novel here incorporates the Western film into its schemata — East vs. West can be read, likewise, as Western film vs. Western reality — and literature's Sisyphean task of debunking the literary (hardly a task confined to realism) is now compounded by the job of having to debunk the cinematic. And yet, by 1922, when the novel was first serialized, Grey had written sixteen Westerns, and already twelve of these had been made into movies, beginning in 1918 with Samuel Goldwyn's six-reel version of The Border of the Legion. Which is to say: Marian Warner's "impressions of the West" are, in the plot's historical moment, impressions most likely derived from Grey. This irony extends somewhat further: while the cinema, -370- like jazz, can typify the "speed-mad, excitement-mad, fad-mad, dressmad" decadence of the East in The Call of the Canyon, Grey himself was introduced to the far West, in New York in 1907, when he saw the films of Yellowstone produced by "Buffalo" Jones. He then accompanied Jones on a trip to Arizona, recounted in The Last of the Plainsmen (1908), during which he himself served as cameraman.

The Call of the Canyon, for all its romantic antimodernism, situates itself within this modern visual culture, trying to share in what Griffith called the "universal language" of moving pictures. Appearing serially in the Ladies' Home Journal (1921-22), in the midst of full-page ads for Paramount Studios and articles on Griffith's latest success (Way Down East), the novel tries to teach "modern woman" the Western lesson of antimodernity through the image alone, restricting the meaning of the West to the "visual." It is "mere heights and depths, mere rock walls and pine trees, and rushing water" — these mere sights — that transform the "modern young woman of materialistic mind" into an "American woman," dedicated to a life in the home. Grey's "purple prose," in competition with cinematic culture, might be understood foremost as a way of arresting the image, keeping it within the reader's "view" in order to effect a transformation such as Carley's. While science fiction adheres to the logic of adventure despite its espousal of modernization, the Western's most explicit antimodernism all but abandons that logic: only the land itself, an enduring frontier, stands as the unchanging hero.

While the objective in and of The Call of the Canyon is to redeem modern woman, in the hard-boiled detective novel she appears unredeemable, threatening the very life of the hero. Only the rejection of women, as opposed to any union with them, provides the sense of an ending. Even in more classical versions of the genre, a "really good detective never gets married," as Raymond Chandler said, with characteristic bluntness. In part, this results from the seriality of the form, the need to maintain the static character of the hero from one adventure to the next: Erle Stanley Gardner, who wrote voluminously for the pulps in the 1920s, created Perry Mason in 1933, with The Case of the Velvet Claws, and the extraordinary popularity of the novel prompted eighty-one further cases (more than fifteen bestsellers in the 1930s), most of which portray the lawyer defending a young and naive woman. They thus present a paternal figure who can -371- protect female innocence against crime, the idiosyncrasies of the legal system, and the general chaos of the Depression. Obviously, being married would complicate Mason's physical attraction to his clients, just as any romantic involvement beyond that attraction would compromise his role as the good father who rescues his clients from the wiles of bad men. To survive, the Perry Mason formula mandates its hero's celibacy.

The hard-boiled detective novel brought "adventure" to the heart of the modern city in the 1920s, and it transformed the cerebral art of classical detection into physical action. In a world of gambling and drinking, political corruption and organized crime, it is female sexuality, "woman" as signifier of sex, that functions to generate peripeteia, distracting the hero and thus retarding the process of detection, conflating the pleasures of reading with the hero's sexual pleasure. Only the renunciation of this sexuality can prompt a satisfactory denouement, the end of desire, most severely represented by Mickey Spillane's late contributions to the hard-boiled formula. In I, the Jury (1947), the title of which proclaims its hero's monomania, Mike Hammer finds himself the irresistible object of women's lust; he falls in love with, and he hopes to marry, Charlotte Manning, the woman who turns out to have murdered his partner. The novel's famous closing pages syncopate his sequential revelation of the crime to her, on the one hand, and, on the other, an account of her "selfrevelation" to him, a striptease performed before the.45 he points at her, that performance, the relationship, and the novel itself reaching their consummation as she reaches out to him and he shoots her in the stomach. The scopic regime of the detective formula has become violently scopophilic. Pathological as I, the Jury may seem, it has remained one of the most popular American detective novels, a fact that may stem from its very celebration of an erotics of reading, or its simple, pornographic equation of knowledge and power. But this is only the most extreme version of a misogynist gender code that pervades both the hard-boiled detective novel and Hollywood's film noir, where the crisis of the city is ultimately locatable in the chaos that is "woman."

Before discussing the emergence of this code in the 1920s, I want to point out that "hard-boiled" detective fiction — admired by Sartre and Camus, associated stylistically with Hemingway, and champi-372- oned for its urban realism — has virtually become synonymous with "American" detective fiction and has thus obscured important variants. Mary Roberts Rinehart, for instance, one of the century's most prolific and popular writers, produced the first American best-selling detective novel, The Circular Staircase (1908), quickly followed by The Man in Lower Ten (1909) and The Window at the White Cat (1910). The spinster who assumes the role of amateur detective in the first of these foreshadows Agatha Christie's Miss Marple (English, of course, and considerably older), but she herself harks back to Amelia Butterworth, the heroine of Anna Katherine Green's That Affair Next Door (1897), a "lonely and single" woman, living in Gramercy Park, who "discovers herself" by joining the murder investigation headed by Detective Ebenezer Gryce. While solving the mystery, Rinehart's heroine rescues her sister's orphaned children from suspicion, enables them to marry the individuals they love, and secures their (matrilinear) inheritance. As a vicarious mother, she preserves the components of the familial institution while asserting an ego that does not depend on that institution but on her public rivalry with male professionals. Not only does The Circular Staircase provide an alternative to such celebrations of motherhood as Kathleen Norris's Mother (1911), indebted to Louisa May Alcott and Susan Warner; it also foregrounds its heroine's status as an independent and rational woman by intertextually embracing other genres of "women's fiction," providing, for instance, a miniature sentimental plot in one woman's "sad and tragic" story of being abandoned, pregnant, by her worthless husband. The single woman's independence from men, which is an independence from that story, grounds her ultimate power over them.

Despite the proliferation of detective pulps in the 1920s (Flynn's, Clues, Dragnet Magazine, Detective Tales), the original venue for hard-boiled detection, Black Mask (1920), began eclectically, not specializing until the end of the decade, at which point it emerged not only with a generic focus but also with a recognizably spare style, cynical hero, and sordid urban scene. The stories of Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett inaugurated these features in 1923, and their private investigators, Race Williams and the unnamed Continental Op, eventually appeared in serialized novels that took book form in Daly's The Snarl of the Beast (1927) and Hammett's Red Harvest (1929). Unlike the aristocratic amateur — who remained a -373- best-selling favorite in the 1920s, in the form of S. S. Van Dine's scholarly Philo Vance, "sedulously schooled in the repression of his emotions" and "aloof from the transient concerns of life" — the hardboiled private-eye works for a living, talks tough, carries a.45, and typically tells his own story. In The Simple Act of Murder (1950) Raymond Chandler locates this new hero, who "talks the way the man of his age talks," within a democratic vision: "He is a common man or he would not go among common people." And in The Big Sleep (1939), Chandler's detective, Philip Marlowe, must explain this new, pedestrian heroism to a client: "I'm not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance…. If you think there's anybody in the detective business making a living doing that sort of thing, you don't know much about cops." Likewise, in Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930), Sam Spade must explain that his "way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery." The detective formula's faith in the powers of reason finds itself abandoned for an urban existentialism. "It's what you do," Race Williams concludes.

The lack of narratological distance (of the sort provided by mediating commentators like Holmes's Dr. Watson) combines with an effacement of cultural, psychological, and class distance to the point where the hero's very distinction from the criminal world he inhabits becomes suspect — this, despite his fidelity to individualism. In Red Harvest, the Op enters "Poisonville" (Personville) in the aftermath of labor hostilities that the city czar (owner of the mills) has resolved only with the help of organized crime, and this class conflict (the novel's "past") gets transposed into the detective's refusal to obey both his client's commands and the detective agency's regulations. But this violation of the rules readily becomes absorbed into a world without rule: rather than trying to "swing the play legally," the Op finds it both "easier" and "more satisfying" to provoke the gangsters to kill one another until the city erupts into a "slaughterhouse." Foremost, the transcription of "Personville" into "Poisonville" signifies this disappearance of "the person," the hero's inability to establish his own autonomy.

His opening description of Poisonville — "an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains," with "a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelter's -374- stacks" — is generally taken to crystallize the distinction between hard-boiled and classical detective fiction. But, more exactly, it is the difference between this opening panorama and the rest of the novel that makes those distinctions clear, for once the Op enters the city, the very possibility of vision, of a perspective that depends on exteriority, disappears: the hotel lobbies, hospital rooms, and abandoned warehouses produce a claustrophobic interiority from which there is no relief. The pursuit of crime continues to take place according to a logic of the gaze, but a logic where intense perception prompts no totalizing vision. The "iron-legged, tile-topped tables outside under the striped awning," the "quilted gray chenille" of a Packard interior — these remain part of the accumulation of detail without gestalt. Chandler triumphantly described the new American style as "emotional and sensational rather than intellectual," expressing "things experienced rather than ideas." But the style triumphs only at the traditional formula's expense: while Poe's Dupin explained, in the 1840s, that "the necessary knowledge is that of what to observe," no such discretion controls the proliferation of detail in the hard-boiled novel. And the most salient feature of Chandler's prose, its obsession with the simile — a cigarette tastes "like a plumber's handkerchief," a handrail is "as cold and wet as a toad's belly," Marlowe feels "like an amputated leg" — rhetorically marks the same dilemma. For synecdoche and metonymy are the figures "proper" to the art of detection, which understands the whole from the part, the cause from the effects; instead, Marlowe's figure (Chandler kept a separate notebook of similes) registers an incessant, flickering likeness of parts that fit no whole, a world of mere effects.

The absence of totalizing knowledge extends more fully to the hard-boiled novel's account of the human body. Classical detective fiction, even such precursors as Oedipus Rex and Poe's The Man of the Crowd, attends to the idiosyncrasies of physique; like Poe's narrator, it regards "with minute interest the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance"; and it peoples the fictional world with cripples, invalids, grotesques. But this attention serves foremost to render the body legible, to incorporate physiognomical explication within the art of detection. In contrast, Red Harvest, resisting the sort of typology provided by Poe, creates a world of resemblances: the corrupt chief of police "is gray, -375- flabby, damp, like fresh putty," the Op's fellow agent is "a big slob with sagging shoulders," and the Op himself is described by Dinah Brand as "fat" and "middle-aged." In this morass of likeness, the body disappears as a site for psychological or moral symptomatology. Similarly, physical gestures in The Maltese Falcon seem to resonate with significance and erotic overtones — he "rearranged his hands on his lap so that, intentionally or not, a blunt forefinger pointed at Spade" — but they remain opaque. And this inability to regulate somatic semiosis has its correlative in the detective's apparent alienation from his own body: it is not "Sam Spade," but "Spade's thick fingers" that make "a cigarette with deliberate care," as though the body operates on its own. In Farewell, My Lovely (1940), Philip Marlowe's self-representation reflects a comparable disjuncture: "The hand jumped at the inside pocket of the overcoat." We might expect moments of instinctual action to resolve this alienation of the self from itself, but the descriptive hyperspecificity permits no such resolution: "Spade's elbow went on past the astonished dark face and straightened when Spade's hand struck down at the pistol." Man remains a mere sum of body parts.

The resolution comes instead under the sign of "woman." It is in relation to the desired but deceitful femme fatale that the detective exerts a self-control that produces a coherent self, displayed most clearly in the closing pages of The Maltese Falcon. Sam Spade, though he has slept with Brigid O'Shaughnessy and though he admits to loving her, refuses to protect her from the police. While he reveals to her his knowledge of her crime — the murder of his partner — he is able to reveal himself to himself, to articulate a personal code of ethics, to enumerate seven reasons why, despite her pleas, he can neither escape with her nor let her escape on her own. The very process of numbering these reasons reflects the sudden triumph of reason in the midst of this irrational world. But just as the need of "woman" to define the "hero" tarnishes any ideal of self-reliance, so Spade expresses the most pedestrian anxieties: above all, he's afraid of being "played the sap."

More women appear in Chandler's novels, and their perpetual interest in the tall and handsome Philip Marlowe (Hold me close, you beast) more completely infiltrates the detection of crime with desire. His client in The Big Sleep (1939), General Sternwood, an old -376- man confined to a wheelchair, centralizes the figure of the body in the novel by describing the business of detection as the "delicate operation" of "removing morbid growths from people's backs." While Marlowe finds one woman after another almost unbearably attractive, he is able to transcend their sensuality, though "it's hard for women — even nice women — to realize their bodies are not irresistible." And this ability to control himself stands in obvious contrast to the uncontrollable excesses of the novel's rich and liberated women, not just drinkers and smokers but exhibitionists and nymphomaniacs. It is the younger Sternwood daughter who has committed the initial murder that prompts the novel's escalating crime. In the midst of an epileptic fit, she shot the brother-in-law who would not sleep with her. Only the physical reenactment of the crime with Marlowe (her gun now loaded with blanks) provides the solution to the mystery, one where woman's body exposes itself as monstrous: "Her mouth began to shake. Her whole face went to pieces. Then her head screwed up towards her left ear and froth showed on her lips. Her breath made a whinnying sound." While Marlowe solves the mystery, he can hardly resolve the problem; he simply insists that the girl be taken "where they will keep guns and knives and fancy drinks away from her." Unable to put a stop to the pornography and blackmail rings that have involved the Sternwood daughter, he can only perform the medicalized task of detection as her father initially defined it, removing a morbid growth, the girl's body, from social circulation.

In Farewell, My Lovely, the figure of the seductress, in contrast to this almost innocent girl, appears as a rich and ruthless woman. And in James M. Cain's hard-boiled mysteries, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936), beautiful, predatory women seduce men into a world of crime. Even outside the hard-boiled version of the genre, desire now appears as a complication to be reckoned with. Rex Stout's obese detective, Nero Wolfe, remains aloof from the world and from women — "I carry this fat to insulate my feelings," he explains in Over My Dead Body (1939) — but his assistant, Archie, remains immersed in a world that includes beautiful women, the division of labor in Stout's novels reflecting the division between classical and hard-boiled detection. In turn, the film noir of the 1940s and 1950s, indebted thematically to the Black Mask school, stylistically to German Expressionist cinema, portrays a -377- shadowy and claustrophobic world of the city, a world of perpetual night, in which the ruthless female predator embodies the modern world's threat to modern man. The long opening shot of Billy Wilder's version of Double Indemnity (1944) provides a memorable image of this man: an obscure figure in the fog…a coat and a hat…a man alone, hobbling along on crutches. But it is Mickey Spillane's Vengeance Is Mine (1950) that, for all its simplistic hypermasculinity, finally complicates the threat of "woman." Mike Hammer finds himself desperately attracted to Juno ("the best-looking thing I ever saw"), the powerful manager of an advertising agency, the heart of modern culture's manipulation of appearance and desire. Revealing her, too, as a murderer, he must shoot this woman he longs for, only to discover that — she is in fact a man. Not "woman," then, but a man and the very opposition between "woman" and "man," along with the tough guy's own sexuality, now constitute the center of uncertainty.

In the trajectory of modern "adventure" as I've drawn it (not chronologically but generically), the most visible transformation occurs — while the locus of adventure moves from Mars, to the West, to the modern city, back to Alger's urban scene — in the shift from "woman" as a figure to be saved (from dark men) to "woman" as the dark figure to be fought off. At the same time, the hero shifts from being wholly self-sufficient to someone struggling to construct a coherent self. Of course, this look at formula fiction has looked away from many popular novels — notably, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1936) — novels that bear a less recognizable relation to the narrative paradigms stabilized by modern shifts in the mode of literary production and distribution. And investigating this fiction as a site of negotiation between "adventure" and "modernization" has meant isolating only a dominant thematics — the relation of male heroism to social change. But that negotiation provides an exemplary instance of the "transformational work" of the popular text, as Fredric Jameson understands it, the text's ability to express but neutralize social anxiety, providing symbolic satisfaction for genuine emotional needs. In this light, Tania Modleski, writing about such forms as the Harlequin Romance (invented in 1958, and quickly stabilizing a very different formula), has argued against simply denigrating the work as delusive, and for appreciating its ability to satisfy "real needs -378- and desires." For his part, Max Brand, that king of the pulps, simply reminds us that "the sadness of life" does not "appeal to the hornyhanded sons of toil," but only to "those who eat strawberries and cream." The fiction that attained mass appeal still registers that sadness, helping to make the desires of that sadness explicit. It also constrains those desires by configuring heroism within a cultural code that relies foremost on race and gender to generate meaning, no matter where or when the adventure occurs. The adventure, even as it strives to project a hero unchanged by the world, protects that world from change.

Bill Brown

-379-

Ethnicity and the Marketplace

Immigration to the United States occurred in two waves: the "old migration" of 1820 to 1860, which numbered about 3.5 million persons, and consisted mainly of Northwestern Europeans including the British, the Irish, and the Germans, who settled primarily in rural areas, building the railroads (along with Chinese working from the West), manning the mines, supplying domestic labor, and opening up the homesteading regions of the far Midwest; and the "new" or "great" migration, from 1870 to 1913, which entailed close to 25 million immigrants, including many of British and German descent, homesteaders from Scandinavia and Bohemia, and increasingly large percentages from Eastern and Southern Europe-Russian-Polish Jews, Austrian and Rumanian Jews, Catholic Poles, Southern Italians, Slovaks, Serbs, and Croatians — who came as wage laborers to build and work the industrial Northeast and Midwest and who settled in urban enclaves that were called, pointedly, "colonies" of the Old World. Of marked cultural distinction but far less conspicuous in number were 23,000 Japanese and 85,00 °Chinese immigrants as well as those of Spanish-Mexican, FrenchCanadian, or French-Creole descent who had been incorporated by annexation and territorial expansion. By the onset of World War I, the United States had been transformed, in Werner Sollors's phrase, from "a British-dominated, triracial country" into a "modern, polyethnic, and also increasingly urban nation."

Compared to the antebellum immigrants, the newcomers of the great second wave were far more numerous, more concentrated in the -380- cities, and — above all — more distanced from the English Puritanism out of which had been woven much of the country's cultural fabric. Their arrival provoked national fascination, at first curious, but increasingly resentful and obsessive. Why had they come and what did they want? What were their folkways, their habits, their concerns — their religions, especially? Didn't they want to become "like us"? Were they going to be able to succeed, and if so, what then? What would be the future of the "American way of life" if it was to be rewoven by hands not of Anglo-Saxon extraction?

From the onset of the great migration through at least the early 1920s, the debate over the ethnic transformation of America was carried out more saliently by writers from established Anglo-Saxon families and their cultural allies of Northwestern European descent. The dominant genre was sociological journalism, running the gamut from xenophobia to pluralist philosophy and from tenement reformism to cross-cultural interpretation: from Charles Loring Brace's The Dangerous Classes of New York (1872), Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890), and Henry Pratt Fairchild's The Melting-Pot Mistake (1926) to Hutchins Hapgood's The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902), Jane Addams's Twenty Years at Hull House (1910), and the essays of Josiah Royce and Randolph Bourne. But the most resounding assessment of the new ethnic presence came by deed, not word. In 1924, the United States Congress completed passage of a series of laws that drastically reduced immigration, favoring Northwestern Europeans, restricting Southern and Eastern Europeans, and excluding the Chinese entirely as well as all but the tiniest numbers of other Asians.

Well after the golden door of immigration had been closed to a bare crack, the door of ethnic literary mediation remained open to anyone with a claim to the authority of an "insider." The marketplace beckoned to immigrant intellectuals, some of whom had been educated in Europe and most of whom had already established themselves in the foreign-language presses; and it beckoned to the offspring of immigrants raised in the United States, many of whom had risen from poverty and even illiteracy to achieve some form of American higher education and most of whom had already been guided toward letters by an old-stock literary mentor, often of national repute. Whatever their institutional credentials, writers from immigrant backgrounds schooled themselves in the national "ethnicity" debate, -381- with particular attention to prevailing formulas that denigrated their peoples or equated the pursuit of economic self-determination with assimilation and Anglo conformism. It was natural that they were provoked by the stereotypes and the typifying conventions; natural that they would be interested in righting the portraits of the communities left behind and in exploring for themselves developing ethnic agendas.

For those seeking to depict immigrant experience for a mainstream audience, three major genres were available — autobiography, the social science treatise, and fiction in the realist tradition — each requiring varying credentials and offering varying kinds of cultural impact. The classic ethnic novel was an effort, roughly speaking, to split the difference between populist autobiography and hard-core sociology: to exercise the authority of personal experience, yet to make the story speak to a group history; to reach a considerable public, but to reveal to them unexpected, often unhappy, truths. Told at a more or less autobiographical proximity, the classic ethnic novel ranged from reconstructing the earlier years of settlement ("the ghetto" narrative and its rural equivalents) to depicting more recent dramas of passage out of the colony into the middle classes (the "up-from-the-ghetto" narrative and equivalents), drawing upon the writer's memories of those left behind and the writer's continuing struggle for cultural rapprochement. It was created by reworking the established nineteenth-century genres of realism, naturalism, and regionalism — the literary conventions with which, in decades past, the quest for upward mobility had been depicted. Of the many dozens of books of ethnic fiction that were produced by mid-century, almost all had as their primary motive setting the record straight: to tell representative narratives that either countermanded or contextualized stereotypes, to acknowledge the opportunities but protest the obstacles facing newcomers, and to introduce the public to the debate within ethnic homes and communities over alternative American dreams.

If not best-sellers, most of these narratives circulated conspicuously enough; they were published by respected houses, previewed and promoted in popular magazines and highbrow journals, favorably reviewed by important critics, given literary prizes, purchased for use as screenplays, reprinted by the Book-of-the-Month Club or the Modern Library, and (then as now) anthologized alongside the -382- canonical high modernists. With singular exceptions, the best of these novels have either remained in print steadily since publication or been granted republication as part of renewed academic interest: a process of recovery that began as soon as the mid-century drew to a close (with the earliest efforts of Isaac Rosenfeld, Harold Ribalow, Leslie Fiedler, and others concerned with Russian Jews) and became a central business after the mid-1970s with the opening up of the canon and the growing effort to recover works depicting the social margins.

From the beginning, immigrants of Anglo-Saxon origin, no matter the desperateness of their working or living conditions, were thought to be too much of a piece with the mainstream culture to warrant special concern except as a kind of picturesque footnote, exemplified in such long-buried narratives as Helen Reimensnyder Martin's Tillie, a Mennonite Maid (1904) and Arnold Muller's Bram of the Five Corners (1915). Immigrants from certain little-known places of Eastern Europe were occasionally depicted in autobiographical and biographical narratives — Czech Simon Pollack's The Autobiography of Simon Pollack (1904), Croatian Victor Vecki's Threatening Shadows (1931), Slovakian Thomas Bell's Out of This Furnace (1941), and Edith May Dowe Minister's Our Natupski Neighbors (1916), about Polish Catholic immigrants. Yet these books did not attract much attention because the groups they depict remained amorphous in the national imagination and did not seem to pose too much of a cultural threat (for various reasons having mainly to do with patterns of settlement and interaction). The first accounts of immigration from outside of Europe appeared by the end of the 1930s — most notably, by Jamaican-born Claude McKay, Korean-born Younghill Kang, and Armenian-born William Saroyan — but the novelistic portrayal of these peoples and those of the incorporated Hispanic Southwest remained largely the work of outsiders until after World War II.

Commentators ranging from Malcolm Cowley to Daniel Aaron have noted that writers with immigrant backgrounds began to appear in mainstream letters — journalism, poetry, drama, criticism, sociopolitical commentary — a short time after settlement had begun in earnest and that they did so in numbers reflecting each group's rate of upward mobility, its pursuit of higher education, and its embrace of secular letters. What seems not to have been observed is that ethnic -383- fiction — particularly the novel of cultural mediation (the phrase is Jules Chametzky's) — developed at an alternative pace. The major novels between the wars came from the Jews (especially those from the Russian-Polish Pale), the Scandinavians (especially the Norwegians), the Irish, and the Southern Italians (including the Sicilians), roughly in that chronology, which is not the order of settlement and is accountable only in part by the demographics of mobility. Between the wars the classic ethnic novel was written by and about these four immigrant populations, who were taken to present the most serious cultural and social challenges to the nation at large.

During the years of the migration itself, the national appetite was for testimonials from inside working-class precincts, reflecting the increasing assumption, in the words of a Chicago clergyman in 1887, "that every workingman is a foreigner." The market for insider tales of ethnic labor inspired New England-descended and Yale-educated Hamilton Holt, the managing editor of The Independent of New York City, to solicit and publish some seventy-five autobiographical sketches, sixteen of which later appeared in a single volume, The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves (1906; reprinted 1990). Tellingly, the reviewers focused on the contributors who were representative of the four central populations of the great migration, all in stereotypical occupations — a Jewish garment worker from Poland, a Swedish farmer, an Irish maid, and an Italian bootblack — even though Hamilton included alongside the classic types oral histories of such non-European immigrants as a Syrian who clerked in an "oriental goods" store, a Chinese laundryman, and a Japanese servant, as well as that of an Igorrote Chief (representing the 237,000 surviving Indians).

The first popular series of immigrant novels — The Yoke of the Thorah, Mrs. Prexiada, and several others — treated German Jewish merchants and were published with much fanfare in the 1880s; they appeared to be experientially based and were signed by "Sidney Luska," a writer whom almost everyone (including the Jewish American press) took to be a German Jew. In a pattern that would reappear, Luska was unmasked as an Anglo American, Henry Harland. Ernest Poole released his novel about Italian immigrants, The Voice of the Street (1906), under his own name, having hired Joseph Stella, an American-trained artist born in Italy, to provide illustrations; in -384- his preface, Poole admitted to his status as an interested outsider yet wielded the figure of Stella to imply an Italian American seal of approval. The earliest novels written by ethnic insiders, little remembered now, were often investigations focused on the workplace. The title character of the first Italian American fiction, Luigi Donato Ventura's Peppino (1886), was a bootblack befriended by an aspiring writer. Elias Tobenkin presented East Side street peddlers in the first of the Russian Jewish best-sellers, Witte Arrives (1916).

In the teens and twenties, national concern began to shift from life among the foreign workers to whether or not they could or would "assimilate," an idea that (like the melting pot itself) vibrated between an enforced Anglo conformism and a more generous sense of achieving sufficient economic and educational mobility to participate in national public life. By this time, many immigrants had in fact climbed from obscurity to prosperity and thus could supply success stories that were reassuring on the question of whether immigrants could "make it" or not; indeed, they often sang the praises of the United States and of "100 percent Americanism" to loud public applause. The prevailing ethnic genre in terms of sheer numbers was the undisguised and unimaginative ethnic autobiography. These life stories of more "distinguished" Americans fused Benjamin Franklin's autobiography with the Horatio Alger tales and were given titles indicative of how little open to reinterpretation was "genuine Americanness": Edward Bok's The Americanization of Edward Bok (1920), Riis's The Making of an American (1901), Angelo Patri's The Spirit of America (1924), Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1912), M. E. Ravage's An American in the Making (1917), Edward Steiner's From Alien to Citizen (1914), and Michael Pupin's From Immigrant to Inventor (1923).

In 1894 William Dean Howells caught sight of an early story by Abraham Cahan — a labor organizer and co-founding editor of the Jewish Daily Forward — and encouraged him to produce a fuller narrative. Two years later Cahan published Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, which Howells reviewed alongside another novella, Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), as allied portrayals of the customs and domestic tragedies of the migratory proletariat. Cahan's principal achievement was to delineate the growth and evolution of difference within what was too easily taken to be a -385- homogeneous Yiddish-based subculture. Cahan used the device of an immigrant couple growing apart (the novel ends with a divorce) to dramatize divergent philosophies of advancement and cultural accommodation: Jake's assimilation to American consumerism, admirably energetic yet neglectful of the past, versus Gitl's preferences for cautious accumulation and a homelife more respectful of Orthodox Judaism and Yiddish folk culture. Today Yekl is respected as an innovative rendering of the immigrant's perspective (much as it was originally), though it may be better known by the film version of 1974, Hester Street.

Cahan's masterpiece, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), began as a four-part series commissioned in 1913 by an editor at McClure's, who was looking for a muckraking exposé of Russian Jewish success in American business. Cahan agreed to take on the assignment, in part because he was aware of the potential anti-Semitism that could be unleashed if McClure's was to put the assignment in less conscientious hands. With realistic detail reminiscent of Howells, Dreiser, and the European Russian tradition, Cahan tells how Levinsky, a former student of the Talmud, becomes a major garmentmanufacturer worth millions: not only through hard work and ingenuity but also through cynical manipulation of his workers and their faith. Yet Levinsky becomes more sympathetic than his actions warrant as he comes to recognize that he has betrayed Judaism and isolated himself from his people. Undermining the Shylock stereotype, Cahan attributes Levinsky's entrepreneurial energy not to blood but to the internalization of mainstream American values, his success not to inheritance but to innovative applications of modern business skills.

In 1922, Carl Van Doren proclaimed The Rise of David Levinsky "the most important of all immigrant novels"; a decade later, Albert Halper concurred that it was "the first and only skyscraper among the early work of Jewish-American writers." Through the mid-1930s, mainstream critics such as Van Doren and Carter Davidson often praised more popular East Side novelists — including Elias Tobenkin, Konrad Bercovici, and Fannie Hurst — for working in Cahan's shadow. In contrast, critics of Jewish extraction such as Halper and Lionel Trilling favored the more aesthetically ambitious works that began to appear in the late 1920s, including two by German Jewish -386- men of letters — Ludwig Lewisohn's The Island Within (1928) and Paul Rosenfeld's A Boy in the Sun (1928) — as well as Charles Reznikoff's By the Waters of Manhattan (1930).

The most important of the Jewish American headliners of the 1920s was Anzia Yezierska, a sometime schoolteacher and housewife turned creative writer, who between 1920 and 1932 published two collections of short stories and four novels about the trials of Russian Jewish immigrants fighting the economic and social circumscriptions of the East Side. In 1919, her second published story, "Fat of the Land," which revisited Cahan's theme of the loneliness of the successful immigrant from the perspective of a Riverside Drive housewife, was nominated Best Story of the Year by Edward J. O'Brien. The story typified Yezierska's most general agenda, which was to challenge what she regarded as the marketplace's sentimentalization of her "own people." Throughout her work, she demonstrated that in the United States there had been and still were Jews without money, that the struggle against poverty was always enervating and often futile, and that ties of family and community were being destroyed as self-determination was achieved: "It's black tragedy that boils there, not the pretty sentiments that you imagine!" one of her protagonists tells an East Side sociologist, who seems to be a compendium of the scholars, social reformers, and literati with whom Yezierska had worked — including John Dewey, Amy Lowell, and William Lyon Phelps (Yale professor and popularizer of Yeats). Yezierska's first novel, Salome of the Tenements (1923), while ostensibly a fictionalized account of Rose Pastor's seduction of philanthropist James Phelps Graham Stokes, can also be read as an allegorization of the dangers of ethnic self-marketing.

"Fat of the Land" took up the particular perspective of female immigrants, following in Mary Antin's footsteps (Houghton Mifflin published both Antin The Promised Land and Yezierska first short-story collection, Hungry Hearts [1920]), but with a feminism honed on the issues of the "new womanhood" of the 1920s. A committed student of Emerson, Yezierska demonstrated how the quest for self-determination drove women beyond the "uptown" compromises between Old World patriarchy and New World domesticity that most of the men she knew took for granted and to which most of the women she knew — daughters as well as mothers — were un-387- happily resigned. Yezierska's best novel, Bread Givers (1925), looked back at East Side mobility through a feminism that may have been self-referential — in the mid-1910s she left her husband and daughter for rooms of her own — but was tutored as well: it was no coincidence that Bread Givers was published almost simultaneously with The Home-Maker (1924), a brilliantly didactic role-reversal novel scripted by Yezierska's close friend and mentor, Dorothy Canfield.

Bread Givers narrates in the first person the bitter rebellion of young Sara Smolinsky from her tyrannical father, a failed Hebrew teacher and sometime grocer who greedily and disastrously intervenes in the marriages of Sara's three older sisters. After flirting with making an upscale marriage of her own that would reconcile her to the family, Sara accepts being ostracized and works her way through night school and college to become a schoolteacher. Unfulfilled and lonely, Sara agrees at the novel's end to marry the principal of her East Side grammar school, who is a "new man" of nearly identical origin as Sara and who inspires her to ask her father, now widowed, into their future home. A Freudian figure of incest, articulating Sara's sense of obligation to return to the paternal fold, governs the conclusion. This conclusion has proved troubling, for it seems to dismiss Sara's hard-won, and in many ways elegant, rapprochement between culture and opportunity as a pyrrhic victory. Although the nascent Russian Jewish critical establishment was originally supportive of Yezierska, Alter Brody, Yosef Gaer, and Johan Smertenko expressed dismay at Bread Givers, questioning its unflattering stereotypes (of men especially) and its seeming commitment to a radically Emersonian "freedom" beyond community.

Public interest attached itself less to Yezierska's books than to the figure of the author. To counteract the disappointing sales of Hungry Hearts, Yezierska recruited innovative publisher Horace Liveright, who staged a publicity banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria where, it was claimed, she had once been denied work as a chambermaid: by excising her education and twenty-year sojourn among the middle classes from the public record, Liveright was able to market Yezierska as "Cinderella of the Tenements," an overnight success story, fairy-godmothered into professional authorship. On an even more popularizing front, Samuel Goldwyn purchased Hungry Hearts and Salome for filming, and in the first instance brought Yezierska to Los -388-, ostensibly to collaborate with dialect humorist Montague Glass on the screenplay but also for the purpose of parading her before the Hollywood gossip columnists. The double publicity for the book and the films turned Yezierska into a Sunday Supplement celebrity through the mid-1920s. Although her sketches were occasionally anthologized in the 1930s, and Charles Scribner's Sons published her autobiography in 1950 (Red Ribbon on a White Horse) with an introduction by W. H. Auden, her books were invisible from midcentury until the mid-1970s when Alice Kessler-Harris edited four volumes for republication, including Bread Givers, arguing for their importance as documents of the immigration of working women.

With something of the fervor if not the cosmopolitanism of the Jews, Scandinavians who had settled in the states and territories of the Northwest Plains built for themselves, language-group by language-group, strong periodical presses, sectarian schools and universities as well as churches, and organizations for the promotion of their Old World literatures and cultures. Despite the institutional commitment to their native tongues, writers were soon using English to treat Old World themes, and those that won national attention were, time and again, of Norwegian background: from the early novelist Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen to the historian Marcus Hansen, who set forth the principle of "third generation return." The first Norwegian American novel, Boyesen's Gunnar (1874), was written in English, though its material was, in the words of one critic, "all Norwegian," meaning not only that it was set in Norway among goatherds but also that it featured a mermaid and several trolls. Boyesen's subsequent books were realist novels in the progressivist tradition, without Norwegian themes; so that the depiction of the Scandinavian migration and settlement actually was not achieved until the mid-1920s — with the translation into English of a novel written by a Norwegian, Johan Bojer, for the Norwegian market and with the release of competing works by two Norwegians, O. E. Rölvaag and Martha Ostenso, who had been immigrants themselves and who had been educated in the Norwegian North American community.

Born in 1876, and having settled in the United States at age twenty, Ole Edvart Rölvaag had dedicated the better part of his life to Norwegian American affairs, as a prized student at St. Olaf College, a cofounder in 1910 of the Society for Norwegian Language and -389- the author in 1912 of the semiautobiographical Amerika-Breve (Letters from America). Rölvaag's I de Dage (In Those Days) was published in Oslo in two parts in 1924 and 1925; the translation, which Rölvaag did with Lincoln Colcord, was published by Harper and Brothers in 1927 as Giants in the Earth, then rereleased two years later with a special introduction by Vernon L. Parrington, a major scholar and promoter of early twentieth-century realism.

Giants in the Earth narrates the settling of the South Dakota frontier by a small community of Norwegian pioneers. In Book One of the novel, we see the work of clearing the land, of coming to terms (not always honestly) with the native inhabitants and with Irish settlers who had laid prior claim, and of fending off the fierce Dakota winters; in Book Two, we see how, despite such scourges as locusts and disease (including the mental disease of great isolation), the pioneers moved steadily from bare sustenance to lucrative cash farming, established a school, "civilized" their living conditions, and, perhaps most difficult of all, reached a genuinely productive balance between competition and community among themselves. For Rölvaag, however, and in marked distinction to Cahan, the drive for "kingdom building" is as much "Norwegian" as it is "American" — Scandinavian Lutheran in its origin, and American to the extent that it contributes to and participates in the general Protestant spirit of United States capitalism. Yet the force of resistance to this spirit on the Dakota frontier is also Norwegian in origin: a countervailing energy of self-vigilance within Scandinavian Lutheranism itself. It is a spiritualism among the pioneers (especially the women) that comprehends as ungodly the mania with which they (especially the men) have pursued personal kingdoms beyond established society. The fear of having radically individualized and hence subverted God's mission drives the novel's central female protagonist — Beret Holm — to the edge of insanity as it drives her husband, Per Hansa, into a suicidal act of contrition.

Buoyed in part by the novel's critical acclaim both in Norway and in the United States, as well as by his own missionary zeal to depict more recent developments, Rölvaag completed two sequels focused on the maturation and adulthood of Beret and Per Hansa's son: -390- Peder Victorious (1919) and Their Fathers' God (1931). In Peder Victorious, he narrated the boy's break from Lutheranism to a less vigilant modern secularism and from the Norwegian farm community to a "melting pot" of varied Northern European origins. In Their Fathers' God, Peder marries an Irish Catholic woman and together, as entrepreneurial farmers in their fathers' tradition, they face the boom-or-bust cycles of both nature and the increasingly nationalized farm economy, which threatens not only to bankrupt individuals but also to destroy the forward-looking alliance between his Norwegians and her Irish. Although both these books put in short appearances on best-seller lists, and are worth reading as continuing chapters in the settling of the frontier, they are in the final analysis unhappily schematic.

Martha Ostenso was born in Norway and raised from the age of two in various small towns in Minnesota and South Dakota. When she was fifteen, her family moved north to the farmlands of Manitoba, Canada — conditions there approximating those of Minnesota and South Dakota thirty or so years earlier, in the immediate postpioneer period — where she went to high school and began college. From 1921 to 1922, she studied fiction writing at Columbia University, not three years after Anzia Yezierska's studies there, and became interested for a time in the Lower East Side. From 1925 to 1958, Ostenso published sixteen novels, three of them set in the Canadian frontier, the rest of them in Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Wisconsin. Her first novel, Wild Geese, won a 1925 competition — against 1300 entries for a prize of $13,500 — sponsored by the Pictorial Review, Famous Players — Lasky Corporation, and Dodd, Mead and Company, who immediately published it. Though also published by McClelland & Stewart of Toronto, the novel was scarcely noticed in Canada. In the first year alone it went through twelve printings in the United States, where she resettled permanently.

In The Immigrant Strain in American Literature (1936), Carter Davidson of Carleton College cited Ostenso, after Rölvaag, as the most notable of Scandinavian American writers. In recent years scholars have suggested that Ostenso's novels were in significant measure ghostwritten by her Anglo-Saxon Canadian husband, Douglas Leader Dirkin. If one then wonders why they were released under her name -391- only, consideration must go to the marketing of her maiden name, which authenticated the authorship of her books as doubly "other": Norwegian and female.

Wild Geese, set in Manitoba, is Ostenso's best-known and most respected work. It narrates the rebellion of willful and forwardlooking Judith Gare against her brutal father, who blackmails Judith's mother into submission and whose continuing success as a multicrop farmer continues at the expense of the labor and lifechoices of his three children. With the help of a young female schoolteacher, Judith learns to take herself and her desires seriously, ultimately defying her father and jettisoning his bloodless Protestantism to run away with her lover (with whom she has conceived a child) to the city. As Mary Dearborn has pointed out, Ostenso's plot is remarkably close to that of Yezierska's Bread Givers. The engagement that concludes Wild Geese is also haunted, but it is understood as a flight rather than a partial return, and therein lies a difference that Western readers (especially Canadian readers) have found significant: for the doom that hangs over Judith Gare is not that of an imperfect Emersonian autonomy (as it is with Sara Smolinsky) but that of being torn from the farm and displaced to an urban modernity, civilization at the cost of primal woman-earth ties to the land.

Like the popular autobiographies of the teens and twenties, the major novels of Cahan, Yezierska, Rölvaag, and Ostenso all examined "making it" in America. With the onset of the Great Depression, the Levinskys and Per Hansas as well as the Gatsbys and Buchanans receded from sight, and the nation at large renewed its interest in economic and social marginality: the naturalist novel came back in ethnic and proletarian form as an interrogation into the forces behind mass poverty, and the local color novel came back in ethnic and urban form as a testament to the power of folkways in America's economic backwaters. For ethnic writers — who had made their own personal journeys out of wage labor and the poverty of the uneducated — the marketplace premium shifted from the middle-class dilemmas immediately bearing down upon them to the ghetto environs of those they had left behind. The shift of emphasis energized writers whose imaginations, for all their social and cultural dislocation, remained steeped in circumscribed childhoods, be they haunting -392- or nostalgic; and it placed in especially high demand the depiction of those groups that had, in fact and in the popular imagination, come to represent either the near-hopeless underclasses or the honest laboring classes now tragically frustrated.

During the 1930s, Jewish Americans published a number of novels offering insightful, good-humored reconstructions of immigrant experience in an anthropological vein: among them, Daniel Fuchs's Williamsburg trilogy (1934-37), which has a mélange of characters; Vera Caspary's Thicker Than Water (1932), portraying a Portuguese Jewish family in Chicago; Meyer Levin's The Old Bunch (1937), about a cohort of Chicagoans coming of age; and Sidney Meller's portrait of a saintly California rabbi, Roots in the Sky (1939). Yet even these novels, for all their remembrance of transplanted folkways, placed Jews squarely on the rise, assimilating. Marcus Klein, Morris Dickstein, and other recent critics have shown that the more representative of the Jewish writers of the 1930s were those identified with the proletarian literature movement: Tillie Olsen, whose Yonnondio: From the Thirties was not published (except for one chapter) until 1974 and, more to the point, does not focus on Jews; and Michael Gold and Henry Roth, whose novels, despite the proletarian tag, spoke more strongly, then as now, as novels of ethnic cultural mediation.

The leading spokesman for Communist aesthetics in the United States, Mike Gold (né Itzok Granich), began his call for a proletarian art in the February 1921Liberator, but the novel that embodied his praxis, Jews Without Money, did not appear until 1930. With great expectations, Horace Liveright published the novel in a handsome first edition, with woodcut illustrations, and its sales met those expectations, earning Liveright and Gold fair sums. Carroll and Graf republished it in 1984. Less a novel than a set of dark vignettes, Jews Without Money revealed poverty and lives of desperation among East Side Jews, foregrounding the social types once favored by the yellow journalists and the naturalists: pimps and prostitutes, boy gangs and thieves, bloodsucking landlords and bereft tenants predominating. Given the stereotype of the rich Americanized Jew that had been generated throughout the preceding decade, the novel set forth even more starkly than had Yezierska the underside of the Jewish American success story. Yet Gold's hyperrealism was undercut by an -393- equally hyperbolic romanticism — part Socialist, part Russian-Polish, and part Gold — in which the goodly innocent of the shtetl-based Old World are understood to have fallen into the clutches of urban modernity, vague in detail but Satanic and fatal.

Under the tutelage of N.Y.U. professor Eda Lou Walton, Henry Roth found in the work of the three giants of Anglo-American modernism — Joyce, Eliot, and O'Neill — courage to return to the scene of his troubled East Side boyhood and techniques of narrative inquiry to exorcise its ghosts. Within the framework of immigrant naturalism, Roth produced a lyrical stream-of-consciousness novel — Call It Sleep (1934) — focused on the Oedipal struggles between David Schearl, from age six to nine, and his father, Albert, an immigrant from rural Austria earning a precarious living as a sometime printer's helper and sometime milkman. Insecure and, for most of the novel, impotent, Albert Schearl stirs in David shockingly precocious fantasies of patricide and sexual displacement. David pushes these fantasies to near fruition by provoking his father to violence (giving his mother little alternative but to alienate her husband and embrace her son), a recurrent cycle that climaxes with David brandishing a crucifix and declaring his real father to have been a Gentile.

When the novel was originally published, Roth's supporters fended off the charge of his sacrificing social realism to sexual prurience by underscoring the stunningly sensual rendering of the East Side (which the novel makes the reader see, hear, and smell in all its fiercesomeness and occasional glory) and by insisting that the political agenda of literature is better served when the truth, whatever its makeup, is told without ideology's prepackaging (an implied criticism of Gold et al.). Since the 1960s, what has most interested critics is Roth's 60page penultimate chapter, in which David strives for a symbolic cessation of his Oedipal battles against the backdrop of a cacophony of lower-class voices, who are at once down-'n'-dirty and rhapsodically spiritual. Prose poetry modeled after Eliot and reminiscent of Hart Crane's The Bridge, chapter 21 of Call It Sleep yields an orgy of ethnic multivocality partly for its own sake, a lyrical envisioning of intergroup toleration and solidarity, and partly for the sake of the novel's protagonist, realizing in high modernist artistry David's yearning for mercy and redemption.

The vicissitudes of Call It Sleep's reception reflect the novel's un-394- usual combination of high modernist structure (it is arguably the most Joycean of any novel written by an American) and ethnic themes, a combination that continues to embarrass our terms of critical inquiry. In its Ballou edition of 1934, Call It Sleep did not find an enthusiastic readership beyond the coterie of New York intellectuals then coalescing around the Partisan Review, whose reviewer praised it as the best first novel since James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In 1956, long out of print, it was proclaimed "the most neglected book of the past 25 years" by Alfred Kazin and Leslie Fiedler. In 1964, Avon released a paperback edition that was heralded in a front-page review by Irving Howe in the New York Times Book Review (the first ever for a paperback), which initiated a resuscitation of the novel: over a million in sales, translation into several languages, and some salience in modern American fiction courses. By 1973, its reputation seemed to have been secured — R. W. B. Lewis proclaiming it "incomparably the best of those novels which, from the perspective of the thirties, looked back on the ghetto life and the immigrant Jewish community." Yet the half-dozen stateof-the-art anthologies released in the late 1980s and early 1990s have passed over Call It Sleep and chosen instead selections from Cahan, Yezierska, and Gold.

From the 1870s through the 1920s, Irish materials were a stockin-trade for important creative journalists such as Finley Peter Dunne and Fitz-James O'Brien as well as for major figures of the American stage including Edward Harrigan and, of course, Eugene O'Neill himself. Yet the country's most notable novelist with an Irish surname, F. Scott Fitzgerald — half "black Irishman" and "half old stock American," scion to an alliance of wealthy, educated families — had chosen to depict neither the Irish settlement nor the American Catholic Church that set the Irish apart. Similarly, in the mid-1930s, John O'Hara began a well-received series of novels in the tradition of Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis that also avoided foregrounding Irish themes. In 1928, an Ohio-born writer of Irish background, Jim Tully, published a semiautobiographical novel, Shanty Irish, that by its focus on a poor Irish family set the theme and by its title's ugly epithet set the tone for the breakthrough of Irish Americans into the fiction of cultural mediation.

From 1932 to 1978, James T. Farrell published forty-seven books -395- of fiction. In 1941, he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters; and in 1979, the year of his death, he received the Emerson-Thoreau Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his lifetime achievement. Despite his prolificness, Farrell's reputation stands on a trilogy of novels that recalled the South Side of his Chicago boyhood and that focused on "a normal American boy of Irish-Catholic extraction"; not on Farrell, who had made the long cultural journey to the University of Chicago, but on the young men he had left behind, trapped by and among themselves. Farrell's famous 800-page saga, written proudly in the tradition of Theodore Dreiser, began with his very first book, Young Lonigan (1932), and was completed with two sequels, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934) and Judgment Day (1935). Critical acclaim from the beginning was high. A Guggenheim fellowship and selection in the Book-of-the-Month Club followed immediately; and the Modern Library canonized the trilogy only three years after the publication of the third volume. Of the work that followed, a second trilogy and some of the short stories, focusing on Farrell's alter ego Danny O'Neill, are occasionally read by scholars for their insight both into the adolescent preoccupations fueling Farrell's writing and into the origins of those preoccupations in the Irish American community itself.

In 1929, while a student at the University of Chicago, Farrell wrote a short story, "Studs," in which a South Side Chicago street gang gathers at the wake of their buddy, the title character, who has died of double pneumonia at the age of twenty-five. Two of Farrell's teachers, James Weber Linn and Robert Morss Lovett, waxed enthusiastic and urged him to expand the narrative, concentrating on Studs's "social milieu." The resulting trilogy opened with Studs graduating from grammar school at age fifteen in 1916 and closed with his death (later than the original story) at age twenty-nine in 1931. Not quite progressivist in the manner Professors Linn and Lovett probably expected, the novel told how an intelligent and decent boy, born to industrious petit-bourgeois parents, talked himself out of high school into the poolhalls and onto the street corners — where he participated in interethnic gang warfare, alcohol abuse, and a gang rape for which he is nearly imprisoned.

Farrell found his account of Studs's typicality in the immaturity of -396- men who sought womenfolk to save them from themselves, and in the immaturity of women who wished to see their men (even Studs!) only as priests; in a Northern European Catholic Church marked less by the transubstantiation of the flesh than by a repressive Victorianism (a sex-denial that may have been of some use in the food-scarce Irish countryside but that was grotesquely inadequate to desire and its opportunities in the modern polyethnic city); and in an ethos of male Irish camaraderie that, for all its occasional attractiveness, was melancholic to the point of individual paralysis and bigoted to the point of communal immolation. However stereotypical the characterizations, Farrell revealed the social forces that produced them, attributing the unhappily familiar to neither an Irish legacy nor consumer capitalism per se but to a disastrous evolutionary intercourse between them. Although the first volume of the trilogy is most often taught and analyzed and the third volume probably comes in second, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan is the most acute and speaks to issues not just of the Irish in the early twentieth century. In this second volume, Farrell focused on the formation of violent urban gangs out of lower-class youth, whose energy of self-determination is admirable but whose strategies are self-defeating; presciently, the novel concludes in a replay of a crucial earlier scene, replacing its Irish American protagonists with incidental characters whose names sound Southern and whose skins are black.

Mary Doyle Curran was the first strong voice of Irish American women. The youngest child of an Irish-born woolsorter and his American-born wife, she worked her way through the Massachusetts State College and then took a Master's degree at the State University of Iowa, where she studied with Norman Foerster, René Wellek, and Austin Warren. Her one book, The Parish and the Hill (1949), is a memoir of familial vignettes, elegiac, loosely structured, and narrated by an authorial surrogate, young Mary O'Connor. It covers the settlement, long struggle, and qualified successes of O'Connor's kinfolk, who migrated in fits and starts from County Kerry, Ireland, to an unspecified central New England mill town. The Parish and the Hill tells a representative tale of intergenerational mobility — slow, painful, costly, but ultimately fruitful — and thus serves as an important historical corrective to Farrell's far more familiar portrayal of a bigcity Irish American underclass. Crucial to Curran's account are the -397- O'Connor women, who envision gaining security and comfort without assimilating to the "lace curtain" materialism and individualism of the "Hill" and who take the lead in bringing that vision to reality (while several O'Connor men fall prey to alcohol, violence, crime, or suicide). Little noticed in its own time, The Parish and the Hill did help to win its author positions at Queens College, where she founded an Irish Studies program, and at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

One of the better kept literary secrets of this century is the literature of Italians and their descendants in America. From the late teens through the early thirties, novels treating the immigrant colonies and Italian memory, twenty or so in number, were published by Bernardino Ciambelli (in Italian), Silvio Villa, Giuseppe Cautela, Garibaldi Marto Lapolla, John Antonio Moroso, Louis Forgione, and Frances Winwar (Francesca Vinciguerra, the first Italian American woman novelist). These novels by writers most of whom were educated in Italy did not stir the imagination of the American reading public (many were published by small presses) and provide little of nonhistorical interest to us today — with the exception perhaps of Forgione's Men of Silence (1928), a forerunner of both the mafia novel and hard-boiled detective fiction (predating Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest by two years). Of greater import in the earlier decades were several immigrant autobiographies by men of humble background who rose to some prominence after migrating: Antonio A. Arrighi's The Story of Antonio, the Galley Slave (1911), Constantine Panunzio's The Soul of an Immigrant (1920), and Pascal D'Angelo's Son of Italy (1914). Yet, for all the contributions to the archive before the mid-1930s, it was not until the maturation of the children of immigrants that Italian Americans produced a risorgimento of fiction about immigration. Around 1940, as if on cue, there arose a coterie of second-generation writers: John Fante, Pietro DiDonato, Jo Pagano, Guido D'Agostino, Jerre Mangione, Michael DeCapite, George Panetta, and Mari Tomasi. They produced two dozen novels and collections of shorter fiction, a majority of them works of considerable historical insight and emotional force.

Fante's Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1937) depicts adultery among Abruzzi immigrants in Boulder, Colorado, when a despondent stonemason compounds the humiliation of poverty with the shame of -398- transgressing family and faith. The title character of DeCapite's Maria (1940) is a Cleveland-born woman who accepts a marriage arranged by her immigrant parents and suffers the consequences with an inarticulate sensitivity that comes, by novel's end, to speak for itself. Mari Tomasi, the first significant Italian American woman novelist, published in 1940 a novel looking back to her ancestral town in the Piedmont Hills, then wrote a second treating her own childhood. A local color tapestry of Piedmontese granite workers and their families in Vermont, Like Lesser Gods (1949) examines the interaction of three forces: the impassioned artistry of the men, the marketdriven callousness of the business in which they are employed, and the quest for security and a sense of cultural belonging by the women they love. Of these minor classics, only Bandini has ever been reprinted (by the arts press Black Sparrow), and it is better known in Europe than in North America (as is often the case with United States immigrant literature). In contrast, two of the writers from this period — Pietro DiDonato and Jerre Mangione — won national attention right from the start and retained some measure of salience as spokesmen for Italo-America.

In 1937, DiDonato, the son of an Italian bricklayer and one himself for fourteen years, published a short story in Esquire telling of an Italian bricklayer who is buried alive on Good Friday when a wall he is building collapses. Proclaimed the Best Story of 1938 by Edward J. O'Brien, Christ in Concrete was greeted with a level of enthusiasm unrivaled for the short form. In the image of brick and mortar crushing the life out of a man who knows what is happening to him (and thus to his loved ones), the story tallied the horrendous toll enacted on those who had little choice but to earn their wages with their backs; in illuminating the fact of unnecessary suffering it lays blame not on capitalism but on shameless profiteering and on corruption within the political and legal systems. What made the story most effective, however, was the rendering of the consciousness of its protagonist, Geremio. In a way unprecedented, at least for Italian Americans, DiDonato made manifest how intelligent and sensitive was this man, whatever his lack of literacy and formal education. "Christ in Concrete" also challenged popular Marxist romanticisms of the centrality of the workplace. Although the business of laying brick and pouring concrete left an impression on Geremio, especially -399- on his tactility, the work did not determine his being: Geremio's soul was of a piece with humanity in general (as his faith dictated), and his particular sensibility — a consciousness rendered in Joycean Italianate English — was interwoven from Latin Marianist Catholicism, the peasant earthiness of the Italian South, and the pleasures and burdens of the large extended family.

At a time when proletarian fiction seemed by its formulas to have worn out its welcome, the public clamored that DiDonato give them more, and what emerged two years later was a novel, as it were, by popular demand. DiDonato let the original story serve as a first chapter, then focused on Geremio's son Paul, who must fill his father's shoes though only twelve years of age. Although distended in places, Christ in Concrete (1939) expands upon what made the story successful: its rendering of the impact of the job upon those immersed in peasant Italian culture. DiDonato was praised for rendering real Italians rather than, as Louis Adamic put it, working-class "puppets" manufactured according to "intellectuals' notions of synthetic Marxians." On the one hand, we see Paul's uncle lose his leg in another accident, the court back the construction company in welching on Geremio's death benefits, and Paul be underpaid, forced into kickbacks, and refused a rightful bonus. On the other hand, we are reminded of what motivates Paul: we are treated to his mastering of the bricklaying craft, to his prideful support of the family, to his passionate participation in the family rites of the Catholic calendar, and to his sexual initiation. The Book-of-the-Month Club — by 1939 the most influential institution in the middlebrow press — chose Christ in Concrete as its main selection over what was then judged to be a more predictable, more ideologically tainted protest novel, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

DiDonato's reviewer in The New Republic was Jerre Mangione. Mangione had made his way out of working-class surroundings to Syracuse University, was currently serving as national editor of the Federal Writers' Project, and would later join the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1942, he released Mount Allegro, subtitled "A Memoir of Italian American Life." MountAllegro was set among a network of extended Sicilian families in Rochester, New York, where the construction market was more hospitable to the skilled than in DiDonato's New Jersey. It was narrated by a boy about the -400- age of Paul, Gerlando Amoroso, who unlike Paul enjoyed moderate security, including the luxury of school. Mangione jettisoned most of the darker sides of the immigrant experience to explicate the comshy; munal life that centered on the Amorosos' dining room table: storyshy; telling, operatic quarrels carried over from the Old World, the sexual intrigues of two generations, innovative shortcuts to serviceable Engshy; lish, and the expression of a Catholic sensibility tempered by supershy; stition and a disdain for Church authority.

By giving us a young narrator, Mangione produced the effect of a "native informant" who is happy to explain the perceived signifishy; cance of phenomena within his culture but is loath to pronounce broad generalizations. Folklore sans sociology exposed the narrative to criticism, including a charge by Isaac Rosenfeld that Mangione was encouraging a condescending readership marked by "the tourshy; ist's mentality" and a comparison by Diana Trilling to Life with Father. Rosenfeld and Trilling were right that the book lacked a certain ambition; Mangione hadn't even conceived of his memoirs as a novel, but his publishers, Houghton Mifflin, had insisted on a ficshy; tionalization for marketing purposes. Yet the book does have a critshy; ical edge. "In Sicily," Gerlando is recurrently reminded, "people are so poor they will follow a donkey, hoping he will move his bowels, and will squabble over the manure the moment it hits the earth" shy; which is, as Gerlando later sees for himself, scarcely exaggerated. In the hill towns and seaports outside of Palermo, where Gerlando's relatives still live, the institution of the family is the primary weapon of survival. The historical lesson haunting the otherwise playful MountAllegro was that the attractive communality of these immishy; grants had not been transported from the Old World but was fashshy; ioned here through the relative largesse of wage labor.

World War II was a watershed in ethnic literature because it was a watershed in the national social imagination. The campaign to unify the country, discredit the Nazi race theory, and celebrate deshy; mocracy led to a redrawing of the boundary between desirable and suspect ancestries: the circle of cultural anxiety that had once desigshy; nated the descendants of Northwestern Europeans as "American" but Southern and Eastern Europeans as "other" shifted outward to embrace a melting pot of Europeans — "Protestant-Catholic-Jew" in -401- the title of Will Herberg's central book — at the expense of those whose ancestors were not European and/or not "Judeo-Christian." On Columbus Day, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt lifted the "enemy-alien" designation from Italian Americans to national applause — barely six months after the government had begun the war-long process of interning guiltless Japanese Americans. Symbolic of European ethnics generally, the Italians had through the twenties if not the thirties been understood to be of a different "race" (that is the word that was used) than that of Anglo-Saxon Americans, but were now incorporated under the general designation of the white mainstream. This redefinition authorized European Americans to susshy; pend much of their ethnic consciousness and Americans at large to regard the depiction of European Americans — especially middle-class ethnics — as reflections, more or less, of themselves.

As early as 1940, a celebrated symposium on "American Literashy; ture and the Younger Generation of American Jews" (held by the forerunner of the magazine Commentary) pronounced an end to Jewshy; ish self-consciousness in American writing: "they are spectators no longer but full participants in the life of this country." The symposhy; sium was prophesying a major shift in the identities and writing agendas of American Jews, a shift to be facilitated by wartime and postwar prosperity and that was to apply as well to other Europeanshy; descended ethnic groups. Even if assimilation was often pursued less vigorously than economic security, and even if some institutions (the boardrooms of many Fortune-500 firms, much of the Ivy League, and so forth) remained closed to them, still for the public at large the long-standing association of urban poverty with foreign accents had been laid to rest, and the invitation was open to writers from such backgrounds to forgo emphasizing difference in favor of developing more central voices.

Jewish American novelists led the way in developing middle-class and upper-middle-class scenarios, with or without an ethnic cast. Budd Schulberg's Hollywood novel, What Makes Sammy Run?, was published in 1941, and its expression of suburban Jewish alienation as a North American malady was soon echoed in major novels by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and a small host of darkly comic writers (Stanley Elkin, Bruce Jay Friedman, Canadian Mordecai Richler). Imshy; mediately upon their heels came portraits of other ethnic middle -402- classes, including the excellent novels of Edwin O'Connor focusing on Irish American politics and of J. F. Powers focusing on the clergy and laity of comfortable American Catholic communities. Into the 1970s arose writers who had been raised in first- or secondshy; generation homes — Norman Mailer, J. P. Donleavy, Don DeLillo — and who occasionally created protagonists with one or another ethnic awareness, yet who managed to create the overreaching effect of havshy; ing transcended ethnic consciousness themselves.

For all their acuity about the long-term direction of ethnic Euroshy; pean writing, contributors to the 1940Commentary symposium could not but have underestimated how large the need would soon be to put the question of Jewish identity (which seemed from the pershy; spective of the United States comfortably on the wane) in global perspective. The postwar novel of the Holocaust constituted a special flooding of the mainstream, some of it in Leslie Fiedler's words "proshy; foundly sentimental" (especially when written by Gentiles). Yet other novels were devastating in examining the aftermath of surviving the death camps, for instance Edward Lewis Wallant's The Pawnbroker (1961) and Bernard Malamud's Fidelman stories, or provocative in rebalancing the equilibrium between Jewish particularity and the sufshy; ferings of humankind, such as Bellow's The Victim (1947) and Malshy; amud's The Assistant (1957).

Post-Holocaust novels were by no means the only sign of renewed ethnicity in American writing after the war. Already by mid-century, and increasingly through the next quarter-century, the prewar expeshy; rience of immigration reasserted its hold over the imaginations of certain writers: this time because European ethnics no longer felt the stigma of otherness and could revisit their recent origins on their own terms, without having to be, first and foremost, cultural mediators. While too late to intrigue mass audiences, yet written with the adshy; vantages of historical, political, and psychological distance, these later works often outstripped their better-known prewar forerunners in accuracy and evocativeness. Yet the primary business of these narshy; ratives was far less a matter of intergroup representation and far more a matter of intergenerational tribute and reconciliation. In reshy; hearsing the settlement experience, postwar novelists bore witness to the generation of immigrants who had dared to initiate cultural revshy; olution, who had suffered not only the physical burden of overcomshy; -403- ing poverty but also the deeper damages of self-recrimination for rupturing inherited traditions and of double estrangement from their homelands and from their Americanized offspring.

Mangione's MountAllegro and Curran's The Parish and the Hill typified the local-color family narratives of the 1940s, which in effect bridged the generic shift from mediation to memory. Children of Russian Jews produced similar memoirs, including two by symposhy; sium participants that seemed in direct defiance of its recent mandate: Isaac Rosenfeld's Passage from Home (1946) and Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City (1951), the first in a trilogy. In subsequent years would come many minor texts by members of almost all European ethnic groups, verging upon an industry around 1970 as part of "white ethnic" pride (which imitated and responded to the rise of African American self-consciousness). A few major treatments of the great migration and settlement brought smaller European groups to the fore for the first time — Elia Kazan's America! America! (1962) on the Greeks, David Plante's The Family (1978) on French Canadians in New England, Chaim Potok's The Chosen (1967) on the Hassidim. A few others revealed wonders within material thought too familiar: including Tillie Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle (1961) on Russian Jewish women, Mary Gordon's several novels on the Irish Catholics, and Mario Puzo's The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964), which is the consumshy; mate narrative of the postwar period and possibly the most powerful immigrant novel of them all.

Focused on a fictional version of Puzo's mother, The Fortunate Pilgrim narrates the struggles of Lucia Santa, an illiterate peasant woman from the south of Italy burdened with six children in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. As an heir to la miseria, Lucia Santa cannot understand her children's clamoring for something they call "happishy; ness" when the family's centuries-long search for "bread and shelter" has not yet been achieved. Mesmerized by Hollywood films and lishy; brary books, the children do not understand that their Americanshy; wrought dreams — of romantic love and intimate friendship, of work that is ethical and engaging, and of life lived in general according to dictates of the imagination — may threaten the very process of obshy; taining the wherewithal to begin to countenance such dreams. As a young man coming of age, Gino, the eldest of the three younger children and Puzo's alter ego, has the greatest case of wanderlust and -404- the largest insensitivity to the reasoning of his mother: he comes to hate Lucia Santa for consigning his father to the asylum, for approvshy; ing his sister's abandonment of school and his brother's transformashy; tion into a petty gangster, and for driving yet another brother (harshy; nessed to a railroad clerk's desk) to suicide. The novel ends in separate, bitter victories: Lucia Santa and the rest of the family move to the Long Island suburbs while Gino enlists in the army vowing never to return home.

In composing The Fortunate Pilgrim, Puzo made manifest in 1964 what Gino could not have seen twenty years earlier. He credited his magnificent protagonist, Lucia Santa, with the vision and courage to conquer poverty, with indirectly legitimating the pursuit by her younger children of dreams not her own, and with comprehending in almost insupportable pain the "crimes" she has committed against her family along the way. What made The Fortunate Pilgrim a repshy; resentative postwar narrative was this hidden agenda — to enact in writing a reconciliation between the generations that was not possible in fact. Its cutting edge came not from the politics of ethnic represhy; sentation, as mediated by a marketplace skeptical of Southern Italian otherness, but from the repercussions of intergenerational cultural transformation, in which an ethnic son felt the need to wage battle against his own suspicions of the past. Although noted as a "small classic" by the New York Times Book Review, The Fortunate Pilgrim in its first edition did not sell beyond its first printing and netted Puzo, after nine years of work, $3000. Since then, the unrivaled sucshy; cess of The Godfather (1969) and its film versions has prompted three different publishing houses to rerelease The Fortunate Pilgrim in mass paperback and NBC-TV to produce a mini-series with Sophia Loren in the title role.

As writers of European background like Puzo began the work of second- and third-generation recovery, the business of cultural meshy; diation fell upon writers associated with "the new ethnics" — those with ancestries in the Caribbean, the Spanish Americas, and the Far East. Soon after the war a diversity of Asian American writers — Carlos Bulosan, Monica Stone, John Okada, Diana Chang, and Louis Chu among them — followed in the steps of Younghill Kang, the Korean-born writer whose East Goes West (1937) is credited with rising above conventions of Asian and Asian American exoticism. At -405- the same time there appeared the first works by immigrants from the Caribbean Rim including Mexico — by Paule Marshall, José Antonio Villarreal, John Rechy, and Piri Thomas. These two coteries of early writers were pioneers in the second era of the literature of cultural mediation.

The year 1964 marked the beginning of a new period in United States immigration and racial politics that completed this transfer of the ethnic literary mantle. In that year, Congress democratized the immigration laws, repealing after almost fifty years the Chinese exshy; clusion and related acts and thus inviting migration from East Asia, Mexico, and the Caribbean as well as, increasingly, from the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. The recent influx may or may not reach as large a percentage of the total United States population as the great migration once did, but the new ethnic groups are of course as distanced from the still-dominant European heritage of the United States as the immigrants of the great migration Southern were from Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. To answer the need for cultural mediashy; tion, there have arisen formidable writers and coteries of writers, who have produced narratives of the new "new migration" while at the same time (many of them activists and/or scholars) working to defend civil rights, to promote cultural pluralism, and to reclaim nonshy; European contributions to the history of the Continent. Among those of Asian descent, the more prominent have included several Chinese Americans — Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Shawn Wong, Amy Tan, and others — as well as Japanese Canadian Joy Kogawa. Among those to the south, the prominent have ranged from Chishy; canos, including Luis Valdez, Rudolfo Anaya, Richard Rodriguez, and an impressive array of poets, to émigrés from the islands such as Paule Marshall of Barbados, Edward Rivera of Puerto Rico, and Osshy; car Hijuelos of Cuba. Over the past fifteen years or so, these writers have achieved national and sometimes international acclaim as individuals — garnering literary prizes, support for continued work, and honor for their respective communities. Taken together, they are just now receiving widespread identification and praise for penning a new chapter in the history of the American novel: the literature of immigrant "peoples of color."

Thomas J. Ferraro

-406-

Race and Region

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the range and experience of writers in the United States broadened. No one literary center predominated, but urbanization and industrialization contributed to large cities remaining the focal points of writerly activity. In the East, New York, long a major center for book and magazine publishing, grew rapidly as a cultural capital attracting men and women of literary ambition from across the nashy; tion. A transforming second city, Chicago functioned as a magnet for talented writers from throughout the Midwest, so much so that by 1912 the converging of artists coalesced in the Chicago Renaissance. In the West, San Francisco continued its rise of literary prominence begun after the Civil War. The South, from upper to lower, began to generate coteries of writers with publishing outlets in its old centers of culture — Richmond, Charleston, Atlanta, Nashville, and New Orshy; leans. By the period of World War I, not only was an expansive literary culture anchored in separate regions apparent but also a genshy; eral movement toward redefining American experience within literary production.

A proliferation of little magazines and literary groups in the Midshy; west, the South, and the Northeast during the postwar years gave greater visibility to an increasing number of aspiring authors, who emerged from diverse socioeconomic levels and who were intent upon writing from their own experiential perspectives. Their perspectives, however, had been substantially altered by a world at war and by an awareness of America in international contexts. Their larger referenshy-407- tial context was a social and political modernity propelling the nation and its regions away from isolation and simplicity and into interdeshy; pendence and complexity.

No small part of the emergent modern experience and its comshy; plexity was the issue of identity — individual, regional, national, the same triumvirate that had in various guises characterized much of the country's history. However, the issue assumed a renewed urgency with the contemporary resituation of the United States, viewed from abroad as an international political power and a world leader in industry and technology, and with a concomitant transformation at home, particularly in population shifts, foreign immigration, and rashy; cial distribution. Industrial and technological advances fueled ecoshy; nomic growth and opened additional marketplaces, but also proshy; pelled the movement from rural to urban areas, the influx of people from other nations, and the migration of African Americans from the South to the North and West. Conventions and habits gave way under the pressures of mobility and motion to new modes of behavshy; ior, language, and dress. Dislocations and disruptions were inevitashy; ble. Old relationships to communal values, to moral codes, to hiershy; archical social positions, and to familiar patterns came under stress and were decentered.

In literature, different sets of external identifications and more varied markers of identity were not only more visible but more viable as well. Racial heritage, regional affiliation, ethnic background, class position, political inclination, gender identity, and sexual orientation appeared more frequently within texts by authors who understood that a writer in the United States no longer had to subsume personal identification into a vision of the artist as male, white, Anglo-Saxon, native-born, upper middle class, and Protestant. For some writers the result was exhilarating, because they were free to explore the new and the modern within themselves and society. A Gertrude Stein deshy; coding the psychology of language, a Sherwood Anderson examining sexual repression, an F. Scott Fitzgerald heralding the "Jazz Age," a Djuna Barnes exploring gender boundaries, an Ernest Hemingway testing the limits of masculinity, all were stimulated by societal reshy; arrangements. For others, like the Fugitives and later Agrarians in Nashville, the transformations were troubling, because they could neither easily nor quickly replace their sense of past, of tradition, of -408- stability. For still others, like the "New Negroes" in Harlem, the fluidity meant that they could assume for the first time an authorishy; tative space in the literary landscape.

One aspect of identity that reconfigured differently during this period was that of race. Not only was race construed as a marker of individual identity, but it was also a way of representing transforshy; mations in the larger society. For some writers, authentic and meanshy; ingful American experience could best be approached through an understanding of the "other," and more typically a racialized other. Though the United States was becoming more multiracial and mulshy; tiethnic with increased immigration from Asia, Central and South America, two racial groups, and the two most oppressed in American society, became the center of these representations. Native Americans and African Americans, both largely marginalized in literature as in the political and social economies, functioned as racialized embodishy; ments of the modern, of the traditional, or of the primitive, and of the contradictions and tensions among them. In the face of dramatic changes and mechanization, the existence of Native Americans was conflated to represent an unchanging simplicity, an untroubled comshy; munication with nature and the spirit. Oliver La Farge, born in the Northeast and a Harvard graduate who studied and taught anthroshy; pology and ethnography, received a Pulitzer Prize for his novel of Navajo life, Laughing Boy (1929). Mabel Dodge Luhan encouraged attention to Native American subjects in her New York salon and later at Taos, New Mexico. Racialized others represented one way of countering the perceived failure of the dominant group to sustain a fixed center of existence.

Even more than Native Americans, African Americans became symbolic of otherness. Their increased visibility outside of the closed South, their continuance of folk customs, practices, and beliefs, and their contribution to the rhythmic "new music" of jazz and its acshy; companying dances attracted some writers to their potential as litershy; ary subject. The early modern writer Gertrude Stein in Melanctha (Three Lives [1909]) had rendered the subjectivity of an African American female in a text devoted to the psychology of three working-class women. Following Stein's groundbreaking, but brief, attention to the African American, Sherwood Anderson considered the race one of the richest sources of subject matter for the American -409- literary artist, as he put it in "Notes Out of a Man's Life": "If some white artist could go among the negroes [sic] and live with them much beautiful stuff might be got. The trouble is that no American white man could do it without self-consciousness. The best thing is to stand aside, listen and wait. If I can be impersonal in the presence of black laborers, watch the dance of bodies, hear the song, I may learn something."

Anderson, like others of his generation who had attained adultshy; hood before World War I, perceived that motion, the fast pace of contemporary life, mobility, and the increased ease of traveling far from home combined with the knowledge of mechanical power and impersonal destruction to produce individual fragmentation and spirshy; itual malaise. From the perspective of an Anglo-American from the Midwest, Anderson observed in the novel Dark Laughter (1925) a "consciousness of brown men, brown women coming more and more into American life." With this consciousness of "the dark, earthy," America in Anderson's formulation could return to an elemental conshy; nection with the earth, nature, human feelings and emotions, and thereby stave off the debilitating emotional complexity of the postwar modern world or what he perceived as "the neuroticism, the hurry and self-consciousness of modern life." Anderson was seeking a means to represent continuity and essence in the face of enormous changes in the conception of a "good Life." Anderson attempted, as did others, to distill an essential difference between peoples on the basis of racial characteristics. Though not suggesting a racial hierarshy; chy on the basis of right, power, or intellect, he relied upon a pershy; ceived and inescapable difference attenuating emotional complexity in whites and blacks. African Americans for him were the extreme other yet unsoiled by modern complex civilization. Though he figured the other as positive, he did not examine the stereotypical assumpshy; tions beneath the surface: the African as primitive, simple, sexual.

Carl Van Vechten, who like Anderson was a Midwesterner and a novelist during the 1920s, also appropriated the experience of the African American other to symbolize not merely the perceived failshy; ures of modernity but the contradictions and contradictory impulses of emergent areas of expressive culture. While Anderson sought a black folk essence in rural settings, Van Vechten explored the newly urbanized African American's assimilation into a blandly homoge-410- nized society with the complicating difference of an African heritage that he construed as rhythmic, sexual power. In New York, Van Vechten observed the growth of the black population from 152,467 in 1920 to 327,709 in 1930, and as a music and drama critic he witnessed the development of a "Negro Vogue" in Manhattan, particularly after the arrival of the musical revue Shuffle Along on Broadway in 1922. From that point on, Van Vechten promoted and cultivated the talent and the difference within black New York. He helped launch the careers of novelists Walter White, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen. In his own novel Nigger Heaven (1926), he ventured into the cabarets of black New York, where music and dance marked freedom and abandon from everyday constraints. Basically, he delved into the "primitive" underside of an emerging black middle class concerned with propriety, morality, and upward mobility. The ground for his representation of a larger societal problem, however, functioned not only to stratify and offend the vulnerable African American community but also to codify and extend the negative implications of an uncivilized racial other lurking beneath the veneer of finery, education, and manners. Van Vechten, who was a supporter of African Americans, did not fully appreciate the dangers of attributing racial characteristics to one side of the warring impulses of modernity.

Despite the well meaning of sympathetic observers, such as Van Vechten or Anderson, the exploration of the racial other was not necessarily contingent upon concern for the subordinate position of minorities in society or upon a belief in the desirability of increased racial understanding or harmony. C. Vann Woodward has remarked that the post-World War I years witnessed the "greatest stratification of the races and widespread enactment of ' Jim Crow' laws." Segregationist practices hardened into fresh restrictive codes and laws designed to delimit the position of African Americans within the society, and with the tacit approval of the presidential administration of Woodrow Wilson these modern segregation laws became widespread throughout the nation, not merely in the South where old grievances against African Americans as responsible for the region's economic woes surfaced in overt efforts to keep African Americans in their "place" (which meant keeping them subordinate to whites in the social and economic structures). As Lillian Smith, one observer of the -411- rigidity and intent of segregation in the South, recalled an African American woman saying to her: "We cannot ride together on the bus, you know. It is not legal to be human down here." In the aftermath of World War I, returning African American veterans, by and large, refused to accept racist practices restricting their humanity and their participation in a world they had fought to keep safe for democracy. Much of white America, however, was not yet willing to concede a new era in race relations. During the summer of 1919, twenty-five race riots occurred across the nation, in urban and rural areas, such as Washington, D.C., Chicago, Omaha, Longview, Texas, and Elaine, Arkansas. By the end of the summer, eighty-three African Americans had been lynched and scores of others injured. Race relations deteriorated, and conditions generally worsened for all people of color.

Race, in both its positive and negative implications, was posited as a way of focusing cultural issues in literary, social scientific, popular, and scholarly discourses. It was more persistently visible in writings about the American South, perhaps because implicit in the burgeoning of racial matter in literature is a focus on region, on understanding and representing the land, the people, the customs and manners, the history that together distinguish one part of the nation from another. In the South, though clusters of Native Americans still lived in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia and though smaller tribal groups were dispersed from Mississippi to Florida, the primary racedefined peoples were Caucasians and African Americans. These two, interconnected in history and culture because of the existence of chattel slavery until after the middle of the nineteenth century, were long familiars in the region and antagonists on the issue of race. Thus, it is not surprising that during the first fifty years of the twentieth century, according to Howard Odum's study of Southern culture and writing, 800 nonfiction works on African American life, 400 on nature and the folk, and 100 on socioeconomic studies appeared. Simultaneous to being prominent in writings about the South, race has been an insistent, though not always audible or explicit, presence in texts emanating from other regions, in multiple forms of expressive culture, and, most often, in reference to African Americans. Increasingly throughout the twentieth century, African Americans were positioned as referential structures for whites, and within the dominant -412- cultural constructs they became more visibly operatives, if limited, as opposed to being merely respondents. By mid-century, Richard Wright would reflect that "the Negro is America's metaphor," by which he intended to conflate the African American's moral and political struggle for parity and recognition with the nation's grasp of its ideals of equality and freedom. Whether or not Wright formulated an exaggerated claim for the position of the African American within a reading of the American condition, he nonetheless identified race as a major point for accessing meanings about twentieth-century America.

Race is in part a metaphorical construction, as Wright may have implied in his statement. The dominant group usually does not construct its own identity by delineating its specific racialism. Race as a classification is more typically used against others — those who are different from the majority, different from those in control of language and tradition. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has observed: "Race has become a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific belief systems which — more often than not — also have fundamentally opposed economic interests. Race is the ultimate trope of difference because it is so very arbitrary in its application."

Whether arbitrary or not, the apprehension of race and racial ideologies marks much of the writing of the early twentieth century. W. E. B. Du Bois exposed the problem of the twentieth century as the problem of the color line in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). He suggested that race as a sociocultural construct was the battleground for the delineation of a modern self within society. Debilitating views of racial inferiority not only constricted the potential of people of color, those within the veil, but also limited the development of people who, by reason of their Caucasian ancestry, could only view the world in hierarchical terms, with themselves at the higher end of intellectual, moral, and cultural achievement. Undergirding Du Bois's notion of the color line is his conception of the centrality of race: "The history of the world is the history, not of individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of races, and he who ignores or seeks to override the race idea in human history ignores and overrides the central thought of all history."

For writers in the American South, racial identity was one of the -413- givens of their literary and cultural perspectives. Owing to a shared regional heritage with slavery as a major component and a present existence with segregation as a legal practice replete with "For Colored Only" and "For Whites Only" signs in public places, few Southern authors of any race could ignore the idea of race in social history, though not all chose overtly racial matter for their writings. Flannery O'Connor, who recognized that one source of tension in human existence had very much to do with belonging and not-belonging, was nevertheless uncomfortable with representing the other, the African American, in her rural world. In a letter she observed her discomfort with African American subjects, making her perhaps one of the few Southern writers of her generation to acknowledge the difficulty of entering into the consciousness of characters of a different race: "The two colored people in 'The Displaced Person' are on this place now…I can only see them from the outside. I wouldn't have the courage of Miss Shirley Ann Grau to go inside their heads." O'Connor was responding to Grau's collection of short stories, The Black Prince and Other Stories (1954), that announced her entry into the field of Southern fiction linking race and region (New Orleans and Louisiana for Grau), and that anticipated her Pulitzer Prize novel The Keepers of the House (1964), which treated a dynamic family saga against a Louisiana backdrop of interracial marriage, miscegenation, and racial prejudice. Interestingly enough, unlike Grau, O'Connor was not at all comfortable with her native region though she depicted it almost exclusively as setting, background, and force in fiction.

Neither of O'Connor's novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), treats race as a significant aspect of region; however, in several of her short stories published in the posthumous volume Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), she turned to an exploration of racial interaction just as the Civil Rights movement began to change the face of the South. In altering her perspective, O'Connor was much like Robert Penn Warren, one of the Nashville Fugitives during the 1920s and one of the Southern Agrarians in the 1930s.

In 1923, Robert Penn Warren began publishing poetry in The Fugitive, the little magazine founded by a group of Vanderbilt University professors and Nashville intellectuals who showed little interest in race as configured in the South. After graduation from Vanderbilt -414- in 1925, Warren studied at the University of California (M.A., 1927), at Yale University (1927-28), and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at New College, Oxford University (B. Litt., 1930), where he completed a biography, John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (1929), and wrote "The Briar Patch," an essay defending segregation on economic grounds for I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by Twelve Southerners (1930). His earliest writings suggested that he had wider areas of interest than the majority of his Fugitive or his Agrarian cohorts.

Although known as a poet and scholar throughout his long career, Warren was also one of the major novelists to emerge from the modern South. His first novel, Night Rider (1939), evolved out of his long story Prime Leaf (1931), a treatment of the early twentieth-century tobacco wars in Kentucky's Cumberland Valley, and established his concerns with issues of class and conscience. At Heaven's Gate (1943), World Enough and Time (1950), The Cave (1959), and A Place to Come To (1977), all reflect a characteristic tendency in his fiction to combine philosophical meditation, individual idealism, and deterministic naturalism. Jed Tewkesbury, the poor white in search of happiness along with material success, discovers in A Place to Come To, "It is not that I cannot stand solitude. Perhaps I stand it too easily, and have been, far beyond my own knowing, solitary all my life." Jed's conclusion in Warren's last novel is comparable to Jack Burden's in Warren's best-known novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning All the King's Men (1946), which traces the rise and fall of a New South self-made politician, Willie Stark, whose story is based on Louisiana governor Huey P. Long. Jack Burden, Warren's prototypical protagonist, proceeds from an ironic vision of an alienated self in a mechanized world to a compassionate, yet terrifying understanding of human and cosmic interdependence: "…and soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time."

Warren's meditations on history and the individual's relationship to historical process invariably brought him to a consideration of slavery and its impact on the individual, particularly the white Southerner. The historical novel Band of Angels (1955), with its focus on the Civil War and the consequences of miscegenation, and the experimental Brother to Dragons (1953; rev. 1979), with its imagina-415- tive exploration of Thomas Jefferson's response to his kinsmen's ax murder of a slave, demonstrate Warren's commitment to untangling the complicated racial heritage and conflicted moral agency of individuals functioning within a closed social and political system. Both texts revealed his increasing interest in race relations in Southern history, which he attended to explicitly in an analysis of the region's "separate but equal" educational system, Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (1956), in a discourse on the 1960s Civil Rights movement, Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965), and in a final book of poetry, Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé (1983). Warren's associates from the Nashville groups of his youth, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, and Andrew Lytle among others, would not have anticipated his empathetic turn to race-specific materials and issues.

Yet, as James Weldon Johnson observed in the novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912; 1927) of the omnipresent race question: "It would be safe to wager that no group of Southern white men could get together and talk for sixty minutes without bringing up 'the race question.' If a Northern white man happened to be in the group, the time could be safely cut to thirty minutes." Johnson collapsed the debates about race into a dialogue between representatives of the different possible positions. Removing the discussion from a fixed landscape in either the North or the South, he utilized as setting for the dialogue the neutral territory of a train, yet in his portrait even the mobile, contained site could not foster a conciliation of the multiple, antagonistic threads of racial discourse. Johnson suggested that the problem of race is grounded in individual and group perspectives and within specific historical moments, by which he attempted to show that the problem is static and, thus, subject to change.

For white and black Southerners writing in the first half of the century, communal perspectives and historical contexts were not so easily disengaged from the individual's position within the society and at a fixed point in time. W. J. Cash in The Mind of the South (1941) attempted to chart the psychological history of the upper South. In unraveling the threads of racial dependency and domination, Cash stated: -416-

Cash's delineation is both personal and relative, but he attempted to account for one result of racial interaction in the South as he perceived it.

White Southern writers, such as T. S. Stribling, Julia Peterkin, and DuBose Heyward, depicted African Americans in a central space in their novels, perhaps out of recognitions comparable to those Cash identified. They may also have written racial portraiture out of an awareness of cultural shifts and of H. L. Mencken's attack on the South as a literary wasteland in "The Sahara of the Bozarts," published in the New York Evening Mail (November 13, 1917) and collected in Prejudices, Second Series (1920). Editor of The Smart Set (1908-24) and of The American Mercury (1924-33), Mencken saw a vacuum in literary production in the South and issued a challenge to Southerners to explore the realities of their region and to create a viable art. While his influence cannot be linked directly to all Southern creative literature treating race after the appearance of "The Sahara of the Bozarts," his prominence in the literary world and his strident call for new voices from the South surely impacted upon the nature of subsequent novels issuing from the South. Mencken specifically aided the developing careers of both Julia Peterkin and DuBose Heyward by praising their work for its more complex treatment of Southern blacks.

Peterkin drew upon her observations of Gullahs from coastal South Carolina to create the stories and sketches of Green Thursday (1924) and the novels Black April (1927), Scarlet Sister Mary (1928), -417- and Bright Skin (1932). Peterkin's attention to the beliefs and practices of the Gullahs helped to legitimize folk portraiture and to identify a viable market for unsentimental fiction treating Southern blacks. Her portrayal of an African American female, who struggles to sustain herself in a debilitating world and who triumphs by using her wit, sexuality, and strength, earned Peterkin a Pulitzer Prize for Scarlet Sister Mary, but her study of a mulatto in the novel Bright Skin was not well received.

DuBose Heyward attended to another aspect of race in South Carolina, the urban African American community struggling against poverty and marginalization. In his best-received novel, Porgy (1925), he explored the interactions among the black residents of Charleston's Catfish Row. Following the success of Porgy and its adaptation for the Broadway stage, Heyward wrote Mamba's Daughter's (1929), which, though continuing the focus of his first novel, was less well received, in part because by the end of the 1920s African Americans were producing more complex portraits of their own people and culture.

Significantly, Mencken's identification of the South as a field for fiction awaiting discovery can be linked to the turning to racial material in writers outside the South. Waldo Frank and Jean Toomer are two of the writers who turned for the matter of their fiction to the richness of the South and to race as a complication in realistic explorations of the region. Frank and Toomer traveled together through the South with the intention of gathering materials for their writing. Frank's novel Holiday (1922), tracing the interracial attraction and the psychological dimensions of Southern life that culminate in lynching, appeared first, but its mild success could not have predicted the impact that Toomer's Cane (1923) would have. While not a financial success, Toomer's avant-garde novel combining prose, poetry, and song in three large sections was a major breakthrough in the conception and representation of Southern blacks, particularly in their relationship to the soil and their heritage. Toomer captured in Can e the emotions he had recognized during a three-month sojourn in Sparta, Georgia: "Georgia opened me," he remembered of his "initial impulse to an individual art" based in the soil. In pointing to "the soil every art and literature that is to live must be embedded in," Toomer also identified a folk spirit that he thought was "walking in to die on -418- the modern desert." He responded to the folk songs and to the landscape itself, so much so that he believed "a deep part of my nature, a part that I had repressed, sprang suddenly to life." Cane recovered both the beauty and the pain of African American life in the South, and as a celebration of racial self-discovery it recuperated an identity that had been undermined and distorted by racial oppression and economic victimization.

In three interconnected sections, Toomer traced the social, moral, and psychological limitations of Southern folk life along with its creative power and spiritual essence. The first section concentrates the dual edge of black Southern existence imaged in pine needles, cane fields, and cotton flowers and in the stories of women who are victims of religious hypocrisy, social rigidity, and sexual oppression. The women, ripened too soon, like the men destroyed by bigotry, feel their way through racist economic and cultural forces that would mute and crush them. Brief, imagistic poems and lyrics function to underscore the thematic idea of a people who have the strength and determination to change their own lives, but who have little chance of transforming themselves or their environment; for example, in "Cotton Song," men at work sing: "We aint agwine t wait until th Judgment Day!…Cant blame God if we dont roll,/ Come on, brother, roll, roll." The second section utilizes the urban environment of the North to underscore the dilemma of Southern blacks alienated from their roots in the soil. Conspicuous materialism, bourgeois consumerism, class snobbery, and color consciousness all function to impede interaction and communication. In the third section, entitled "Kabnis," a return to the South is a harbinger of transformation. The ritualized search for identity and meaning evident in the first two sections has its greatest opportunity for completion in the survival strategies of religion and education characterizing the Southern folk. In the text as a whole, however, Toomer insisted that the Southern folk existence and oral heritage were essential for representing the complex truth of African American life. In doing so, he foreshadowed the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance and illustrated how the past, including the African cultural homeland and Southern chattel slavery, might be envisioned so that modern African Americans could reclaim their history and heritage yet maintain personal dignity and racial pride. -419-

Cane appeared a year after the watershed of 1922 in which the publication of fiction positioned at the intersection of region (the South) and race (the "Negro") proliferated. For example, Hubert Shand's White and Black, T. S. Stribling's Birthright, Clement Woods's Nigger, and Ambrose Gonzales's Black Border are only a sampling of the texts appearing in 1922. From that point to the end of the decade, the thematic intersection of race and region, along with writerly interconnections, would become a major part of the flowering of modern American fiction.

Interconnections were perhaps inevitable at a time when both Southerners, situated as a regional minority in cultural achievement, and African Americans, marginalized as a racial minority in literary achievement, were rewriting the dominant views of their insignificance. Stribling's novel Birthright, for example, provoked a discussion among Mencken, Walter White, and Jessie Fauset regarding who could best portray the reality of African American life in fiction. In asking White to review Stribling's novel, Mencken had not anticipated objections to its sympathetic treatment of race and Southern race relations. As African Americans, White and Fauset, along with Nella Larsen, pointed to the shortcomings of a white outsider's perspective on African Americans, and accepted Mencken's challenge of writing their own novels. Of the three, only Walter White was a Southerner, and only his The Fire in the Flint (1924) of those novels initially produced by the three was confined to the South as setting. In responding to Stribling's novel, White, Fauset, and Larsen were not only confronting the issue of authenticity regarding African American materials in fiction but were also seizing authority and agency by shifting the dominant perspective inside the racial group and by acquiring control of the representations and the stories told. Each, of course, assumed a different subject position in the resulting novels. White's The Fire in the Flint traces the idealism of an African American physician, Dr. Kenneth Harper, who returns to practice medicine in the South and learns that an educated person of color and conscience cannot exist impervious to racism or outside a coalition of African Americans from all social classes. Jessie Fauset's There Is Confusion (1924) centers on the experiences of a middle-class African American female in New York who also comes to a recognition of racism but within gender discrimination. Fauset's Joanna Marshall, -420- the daughter of a Virginia slave who rises to economic prosperity and social prominence, however, insists on the exemplary individual's ability to overcome the structural barriers and personal attitudes that restrict the development and achievement of African Americans. Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928), the last of the three racial novels responding to Stribling and encouraged by Mencken, assumes a more complex stance toward both race and gender identification and the limitations of both. Larsen's Helga Cane, similar to Kenneth Harper and Joanna Marshall, is positioned within the African American middle class, but her situation is more tenuous, because Larsen attends to the matter of Helga's heightened consciousness of gender and sexuality, along with race.

White, Fauset, and Larsen functioned as part of the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance, in which African Americans, acting out of race consciousness and self-determination called a "transformed and transforming psychology" by Alain Locke in The New Negro (1925), initiated a literary and cultural movement based upon taking artistic control of their own images and representations. The novels of White, Fauset, and Larsen, appearing during the high point of literary activity in Harlem, combined with Toomer's groundbreaking Cane to chart the course for the modern African American novel in its struggle to emerge from the margins of literary enterprise and to assume the centrality of its vision of self, race, and society. Langston Hughes in Not Without Laughter (1930) and Arna Bontemps in God Sends Sunday (1931) and Black Thunder (1936) were part of the development of the African American novel inspired by the revisioning of a racial self and an assumption of authorial control articulated by the first novels to issue from a New Negro consciousness.

One of the major voices first heard during the Harlem Renaissance in short stories and plays was that of Zora Neale Hurston, who like Toomer had an affinity for the folk. Hurston had come of age in Eatonville, Florida, where she had listened to the stories and talk of her relatives, friends, and neighbors. When she left the South, she was already grounded in the language and the nuances of folk existence. After having worked and studied in Baltimore and Washington, she settled in New York where she began to study anthropology with Dr. Franz Boas. "I was glad," Hurston recalled in Mules and Men (1935), "when somebody told me, 'You may go and collect Negro folk-421- lore.'" She was already familiar with folklore, having listened to and absorbed the stories and customs of her all-black hometown:

The talk and the folk of Eatonville made their way into The Eatonville Anthology (1926), a series of short sketches in which she recognized the value of folk such as Mrs. Tony Roberts (the Pleading Woman), Joe Clark, Mrs. Joe Clark (the prototype of Janie Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God), Coon Taylor, and Sister Cal'line Potts. These Eatonville characters were preparation for the people of her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), and her most accomplished novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

Novelist, anthropologist, folklorist, and storyteller, Hurston remained both an insider and an outsider throughout her rich life. When she arrived in New York in January 1925, she had exactly $1.50, but "a lot of hope," and the advice of her dead mother Lucy, who had urged her to "jump at de sun" and "to have spirit," so that she would never become "a mealy mouthed rag doll." Fun-loving, free-spirited, and sassy, Hurston was an audacious "natural," a down-home Southerner whose bold antics embarrassed her more high-toned African American associates in her Harlem. Her storytelling, or "lies" as she termed it, made the uncultured, primitive black folk of the South all too vivid for the cultured New Negroes who, with the exception of Rudolph Fisher, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer, preferred to intellectualize and idealize life in the South and the Southern folk. Hurston was too ethnocentric even for the new racial awareness marking the literary movement in Harlem. Wallace Thurman satirized her antics in his novel about the Harlem Renaissance, Infants of the Spring (1932); the Hurston character, "Sweetie May Carr," is an opportunistic young artist frequenting Niggeratti Manor who is not embarrassed to manipulate white patrons with dialect tales of down South.

Precisely because she had "spirit" and was not "a mealy mouthed rag doll," Hurston could take full advantage of her insider-outsider -422- position. She accepted not only the difference of her cultural heritage but also its validity. Through the folk she found a means of expressing a culturally grounded self and racial identity. She could therefore create images of African American life that are among the most powerful expressions of the strength and promise of African American culture in the United States. Jonah's Gourd Vine is an exploration of that culture based upon the position of Hurston's parents within it. The Reverend John Pearson and his wife Lucy are the central characters, who shape a marriage and a life out of different social backgrounds and values. Pearson is a mulatto whose sharecropping family function on a subsistence level; Lucy Potts is the daughter of landowners who object to her marrying beneath her. The difference in their socioeconomic status contributes to Pearson's feelings of inadequacy, manifested in his adultery, and to Lucy's attempts to conceal her husband's weaknesses. In telling their story, Hurston revises the picture of the African American minister and, though leveling his exalted position in the communal hierarchy, humanizes him. The concern with folk religion in the text anticipates the novel Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), in which Hurston employed humor and satire to render the legend of Moses and the Hebrews in the folk tradition and dialect of Southern African Americans, who connected their plight in slavery to that of the Hebrews.

While Jonah's Gourd Vine is a skillful treatment of the conflict between social classes and between religious and secular impulses contextualized by a vibrant folk culture, Their Eyes Were Watching God is a masterpiece of that culture. Janie Crawford Killicks Stark Woods is Hurston's testimony to the proud unselfconscious black folk, especially black womenfolk, who achieve a meaningful synthesis of self. Written in seven weeks in late 1926 when she was in Portau-Prince, Haiti, collecting folklore, the novel is a result partly of what she discovered, "a peace I have never known anywhere else on earth." This peace enabled her to see even more clearly the meaning of African American life as it was lived in Eatonville. The novel is a culmination of her knowledge of the folk, of her faith in folklore and folklife, and of her consciousness of a woman's right to selfhood and self-definition, so that it is an expression of freedom from the constrictions of black folklife even while it celebrates that life.

Because in Haiti Hurston also confronted the end of a love affair -423- that meant personal liberation and reconciliation of her artistic career and her personal emotions, she could represent through Janie's development and maturation the unpacking of multiple layers of domination and oppression operating upon the woman of color: "the colored woman is de mule of the world." Janie Crawford realizes that male domination exists in a world where only men sit on the porch and swap tales, where men view wives as property. She goes through three marriages — to Logan Killicks, to Joe Stark, and to Teacake Woods — but in the process she earns her freedom to speak, to express her own female self, her independence from subjugation, and her acceptance of her own life. Janie affirms herself because she has the courage and the verbal techniques to position herself in something other than a dependent relationship. Janie's strength lies in her recognition of power in language and the ability to speak for oneself. In telling Janie's story of learning to love self, Hurston reckons the value and the costs of being fully female in a society that would oppress on the basis of race and gender, and she introduces a discourse on female autonomy, agency, and power.

Hurston's novels, published after the concentrated activity of the Harlem Renaissance and during the Great Depression, generated limited audiences for her inscriptions of self and folk. In recent years, however, her novels — Their Eyes Were Watching God, in particular — have been reevaluated not in the context of race and the folk but rather in the contexts of gender identifications and feminist readings of her strategies for female liberation and autonomy.

In a sense, Hurston addressed in fiction the concerns with gender oppression in a regional society that Lillian Smith would explore in Killers of the Dream (1946). Smith, best known for the novel treating interracial love, Strange Fruit (1944), attacked the sexual basis of racial discrimination in the South. Smith also transfigured the commonly held assumptions about a white girlhood and womanhood in the region to include racial indoctrination and oppression as part of the cultural constraints upon women, "pushed away on that lonely pedestal called Southern Womanhood," as she observed: "We cannot forget that their culture had stripped these white mothers of profound biological rights, had ripped off their inherent dignity and made them silly statues and psychic children, stunting their capacity for under-424- standing and enjoyment…. In many ways there was a profound subservience; they dared not question what had injured them so much. It was all wrapped up in one package: sex taboos, race segregation….the duty to go to church, the fear of new knowledge that would shake old beliefs, the splitting of ideals from actions — and you accepted it all uncritically."

Although white Southern women authors did not write prose fiction as explicitly confrontational as Smith about the debilitating racial customs and gender conventions of the region, they did engage in the discourses on race and gender within their fictional texts. Katherine Anne Porter drew small portraits of evolving awareness of how one fits into spaces and families, into history and region, and into categories such as race and gender, while attempting to grasp the meaning of memory and imagination. In "The Old Order," a sequence of stories in The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944), Porter depicts two old women, one black and the other white, who emerge from the period of slavery to survive husbands and children. The portrait of the elderly black woman Nannie in "The Last Leaf," a subsection of "The Old Order," is significant because in it Porter subverts sentimental views of the black mammy in the South: "The children, brought up in an out-of-date sentimental way of thinking, had always complacently believed that Nannie was a real member of the family, perfectly happy with them." While Nannie and Sophia Jane, the children's grandmother and Nannie's former owner, are both victims of patriarchal power and hegemony, Nannie is also delimited by her racial identity. Married to another slave for the purpose of producing marketable children, she performs her duties, but as soon as she is beyond childbearing years she dismisses her husband, Uncle Jimbilly, from her life. Similarly, once she is too old to perform the duties of mammy to the children of the white family, she severs her ties with them and moves to her own house without explanation or regret: "she was no more the faithful old servant Nannie, a freed slave: she was an aged Bantu woman of independent means, sitting on the steps, breathing free air." Porter, however, did not develop her awareness of the links between race and gender oppression in a full-length novel.

In "The Old Order" and several of her other stories appearing in -425- The Leaning Tower, as in Old Mortality, from Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels (1949), Porter took on issues comparable to those Lillian Smith outlined as her subject:

In presenting the "dissonant strands" in "a terrifying mess," Smith paused to consider how she had learned "the bitterest thing a child can learn: that the human relations I valued most were held cheap by the world I lived in," and "that in trying to shut the Negro race away from us, we have shut ourselves away from so many good, creative, honest, deeply human things in life."

While white authors such as Stribling, Peterkin, and Heyward garnered contemporary recognition for their efforts on racialized subjects, they did not achieve the lasting significance of the major novelist to emerge from the American South during this period, William Faulkner, of Oxford, Mississippi, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950 and who did not follow the pattern of shutting himself "away from so many good, creative, deeply human things in life" that Smith had observed. In assuming a racial heritage based on dominance and difference, Faulkner understood himself and his work in both racial and regional perspectives. The situating of race in his thinking was complicated by his position within a closed and traditional regional society. As a Southerner, he tapped the richness of his region for creative writing, but he also functioned under the dominant ideology of a biracial hierarchy in the South. "We were taught," Smith recalled, "to love God, to love our white skins, and to believe in the sanctity of both." For Faulkner, the hierarchy was a way of life, one that he had not instituted and one that he could not comfortably challenge from his position within the majority and dominant culture. While he struggled with the implications of a biracial society for the creative writer throughout his career, he could not -426- satisfactorily resolve the issue. At the beginning of his career, however, he acknowledged how Southern African Americans had helped to shape his fiction:

In fiction published between 1926 and 1962, Faulkner found the incorporation of race into his vision of subject a necessary aspect of his creation of "people" invented or reimaged from the oral tales of the African Americans figuring in his youth. Beginning with Soldiers' Pay (1926), a first novel centering on returning World War I veterans, he utilized African Americans as part of the landscape, physical, imaginative, and moral, of his fiction. Though initially given to stereotypical representations in Soldiers' Pay, Faulkner moved farther than almost any other white Southern fiction writer of his generation in portraying people of color, African Americans and Native Americans, with a measure of sympathy and dignity. In fact, he moved away from the existing discourses on race in the South by extracting an alternative vision of life offered by Southern African Americans, in particular, as a major part of the tensions about being, existence, and place that characterized the dialectic of much of his work as a modernist and fictionist.

In both Sartoris (1929) and the uncut version of it, Flags in the Dust (1927; published 1973), and in The Sound and the Fury (1929) he portrayed African Americans as contrapuntal to white Southerners and the moral and social malaise of their lives. His portrait of Dilsey Gibson, the enduring and sustaining force for a deteriorating white family, is representative of his view of the moral superiority of African Americans who retain hope and faith in a world collapsing under the strain of moral degeneracy and cultural despair. In Light in-427- August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Faulkner treated race as the unacknowledged social construction undermining the lives of white Southerners and constricting the lives of black Southerners. Joe Christmas of Light in August, who never knows his racial identity in a society built upon racial certainty, moves outside of race until he can no longer sustain his own isolation. His literal castration and symbolic lynching culminates his acceptance of an identity as a black man. Quentin Compson of Absalom, Absalom! combines a search for himself with a reconstruction of a myth of the Southern past, and in the process confronts the racial hierarchy and abuse that shapes both the actual and the imagined historical South. In Go Down, Moses (1942), Faulkner explored the ways in which attitudes of racial superiority and enslavement functioned to destroy a family and confound its efforts to perpetuate itself. Ike McCaslin, who operates as the conscience of his family and society, ultimately discovers in old age that he can neither atone for the racial sins of his fathers nor free himself from their prejudices. Despite his initiation into the world of nature and the wilderness by the part Indian, part black Sam Fathers, Ike cannot transpose the values of the natural, primitive world to the divided racist world of civilized Mississippi. Lucas Beauchamp, who figures in Go Down, Moses as the black male descendant of the founder of the McCaslin dynasty, reappears in Intruder in the Dust (1948) as a mentor to Chick Mallison, a white youth who, like Ike McCaslin, confronts the bigotry of his society and the racism within himself. Lucas enables Chick to transcend artificial boundaries separating the races and to restore a measure of justice in the interactions between blacks and whites. In all of these novels, Faulkner, though unconcerned with rendering African Americans outside of their relationships to white Southerners, nonetheless created a large number and a fairly diverse range of people of color, not all of them sympathetic representations.

Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald, his contemporary from the Midwest who married a Southerner, Zelda Sayre of Alabama, Faulkner did not fear the rising up of people of color. Faulkner sought to explain and perhaps expiate the white South's destructive racial positions. Whereas Fitzgerald, heralded as the writer of the Jazz Age, removed his interest in the rhythms of jazz from that of the African Americans who first created it, Faulkner did not. While black characters are -428- noticeably absent from Fitzgerald's novels and negative racial views presented go unexamined, his notions about race were clear: "The negroid streak creeps northward to defile the Nordic race…. My reactions [to Europe] were all philistine, antisocial, provincial, and racially snobbish. I believe at last in the white man's burden. We [Americans] are as far above the modern Frenchman as he is above the Negro." Faulkner, on the other hand, while sharing his culture's traditional views of race, did not dismiss the centrality of race and the legacy of African Americans in that culture. Whatever his failings in representing race in his novels, Faulkner did not set out a simplistic assertion of the racial superiority of whites or a conflated representation of "the Negro" as scapegoat for the vicissitudes of regional identity in a modernizing South. He attended to the problems and dynamics of race relations, caste privilege, and agrarian reform within the contexts of industrialization and urbanization in a region reluctant and resistant to change. Race, then, was one of the facets of regional continuity and regional transformation that he could not deny and would not ignore.

Faulkner's attention to African Americans in the maturation of white Southerners is one of his legacies to writers who followed him. In The Member of the Wedding (1946), Carson McCullers brought to bear her insights as a modern female within the culture who, in the process of revisioning the maturation of a young white female, Frankie Addams, considered as well the relationship of the African American surrogate mother, Berenice Sadie Brown, to that process. McCullers outlined the maturation of a young Southern girl in her season of budding awareness of self and difference. In portraying Frankie Addams, who grew too tall too quickly and who faced the puzzling problem of relating to her home and community when she longed for other worlds, McCullers valorized the role of the African American woman charged with Frankie's care by showing how Berenice represented difference and experience useful to maintaining a selfhood within a society expecting conformity. In the popular play adapted from the novel and also entitled The Member of the Wedding (195 1), however, McCullers draws weaker, less racially positive African American characters in a manner duplicating the myths and stereotypes of their lives; for example, the men are weak, dishonest, sexually aggressive, and drug-or alcohol-addicted, while the women -429- are superstitious, servile, and promiscuous. More recently, Kaye Gibbons in Ellen Foster (1987) concentrates not on the older nursemaid or housekeeper in the development of the white girl character but on the peer, the African American of the same age whose friendship functions to foster and to complicate the maturation process for the white friend. These novels suggest that though the cultural, racial, and gender dynamics have changed since Faulkner created Dilsey, Lucas, and Sam Fathers, his vision in rendering one of the major points of interaction in the black and white South has not gone unnoticed by subsequent writers seeking to portray in human terms the complexities of their region.

Though Faulkner remained in the South for most of his career, the exception being a few brief stints in Hollywood as a scriptwriter for motion pictures, white Southern writers like Katherine Anne Porter, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and, for a time, Flannery O'Connor more often fled their region because of its inadequacies for the development of their careers as professional writers. African American Southern writers fled out of another set of imperatives. Restricted to second-class citizenship, when their citizenship was acknowledged at all, blacks lived on the edge in their native region. Legally constricted by the resurgence of Jim Crow laws after World War I when black soldiers returning from Europe sought full access to the democracy they had fought to preserve on foreign soils, modern blacks found themselves no better off than their forebears at the end of the nineteenth century. Segregated in housing, education, employment, transportation, and every other social aspect of their lives, they found themselves marginalized and, if at all visibly resentful of their unequal treatment, endangered. The external codes and customs of a separated society deposited internally led to a dual vision of self within two sets of limitations; the one, that of the oppressive white society, and the other, that of the repressive black society. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and their contemporaries writing of the South from the perspective of the race traditionally seen as other struggled against the projected negative self-representations embedded in the ideology of race and racial difference used by whites to uphold their legal policies, moral beliefs, and literary practices. Simultaneously, they struggled with the social fragmentation and psychical fractures emanating from the accommodations made by African Americans to -430- retain their humanity and dignity. Separated from their white cultural and literary counterparts by what Richard Wright labeled "a million of psychological miles" in "The Man Who Killed a Shadow," black writers in order to exist as creative beings felt compelled to leave the South in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Richard Wright's experience is perhaps paradigmatic. Born into a sharecropping family in Mississippi, Wright came to prominence as a writer during the 1930s when he both assumed and rejected a racial heritage based on subordination and difference. For Wright, the inescapable necessity was to distance himself from a humiliating, inferior position in a biracial hierarchy. Rage in his response to the South exacerbated fragmentation and division, emphasized it to a maximum and almost unbearable degree; nonetheless, rage, righteous and focused, was also the source of integrated action. Wright prevented his own disintegration by the process of remembering, despite the pain and shame of reenvisioning himself within the racist structures of his native region. He states in Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945):

As a result of this recognition, in his fictional texts Wright was able to ward off personal disintegration by creating powerful protagonists who are "stripped of the past and free for the future," as he asserted in White Man, Listen! (1957). Rather than transcendence, his aim was to control the rage so that it became creative energy, directed toward exposing the sources of his rage and toward expung-431- ing his individual sense of guilt for not having been able to do more in the literal rather than the literary world to change his condition.

At the same time, Wright transformed his shame at having been the victim of humiliations, perpetrated both by the external society of whites and by his immediate family of blacks attempting to survive. Survival has its costs, as he recognized in distancing himself from his family, his parental relatives and their heritage and folk culture, as well as from his maternal relatives with their dependency upon religion and their emphasis upon upward mobility within the land of the oppressors and in terms acceptable to their oppressors. None of his novels affirms folk culture and the African American family for their capacity to sustain the individual. In his fiction, Wright was the explosive in attacking all institutions (family, political parties, Southern segregation, economic systems, and racial hierarchies) that would deny his individual manhood. He refused to celebrate racial survival at all costs, as white writers such as Faulkner did with representations of exemplary black servants (Dilsey Gibson in The Sound and the Fury or Lucas Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust). Like the contemporary writers Alice Walker in The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) and Ernest Gaines in A Gathering of Old Men (1983), Wright insisted that survival is not enough. Walker's Grange, for instance, lives the life of a black Southerner emasculated by his environment but eventually struggles to regain his manhood through the next generation, specifically that of his granddaughter Ruth. Grange Copeland expresses his hard-won knowledge in the end when he says that it is not survival, but survival whole, that is the key to being and meaning. Gaines's old men rise from a lifetime of survival by means of subjugation and passivity to a stance for personal wholeness; in a concerted front of resistance and autonomy, they seize control of what is left of their lives and, with guns in hand, confront not only the white power structure but also their own past acquiescence to it.

Unlike these later configurations of the possibilities of black Southern existence, Wright emphasized neither survival nor wholeness within the lifetime of his characters. Like Bigger Thomas, the scared colored boy from Mississippi in Wright's Chicago novel Native Son (1940), they more often die without the recognition that their actions are integrally connected to that of their people and progeny, which is -432- Grange's final achievement. Yet it is clear that even a Grange or the old men are similar to Wright's characters in that they suffer from the malformations that the environmental factors of the South create as pressures and restrictions on the lives of African Americans and that their own consequentially dehumanized and demoralized acts partly account for the shame and the humiliation of their lives.

Wright's parables in the novels Native Son, The Outsider (1953), The Long Dream (1958), and Lawd Today (1963) ultimately strike out at the white world, by taking revenge for the ills suffered through generations, and breaking the boundaries of codes and laws that would legally and practically circumvent the ambitions and the dreams of blacks. Bigger Thomas kills for what he ultimately believes is a valuable but inexpressible part of himself. The intellectual Cross Damon exists outside the parameters of societal law, and from that alienated position he explores a murderous, raceless freedom, but acknowledges "it was…horrible." Jake Thomas, the protagonist of Wright's posthumously published first novel, Lawd Today, reacts in a naturalistic manner to his entrapment in the urban environment. These men all become indifferent to violence in the process of rejecting external authority over their lives. In representing their attempt to alter the power relationships that determined them impotent, Wright circumvents the dominant discourses on African American subserviency and creates a different reading of power, its manifestations and its limits.

Wright identifies women with codifying the behavior of blacks according to the dictates of whites. He understands the strategies and concessions devised to exist within the oppressive and restrictive world of the South, as indicated by his essay "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," his fictionalized autobiography, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, the short stories collected in Uncle Tom's Children (1938; 1940) and Eight Men (1961), and particularly his novel The Long Dream. More pronounced, however, is his understanding of the legacy of paralyzing wounds to the psyche of succeeding generations that functions in his texts as a gap between generations that can neither be removed nor bridged. Divisions between fathers and sons might be expected, given the integral relationship of Wright's biography as a son of the segregated South to his fictional vision. The absence of the father in Native Son is not surprising, and -433- the deceptive, obsequious father feigning power in The Long Dream is equally predictable; however, the division between mothers and their sons is also present, and, unexpectedly, the mother is often more of a liability than the father, because she cannot be protected by the male son and her motives and her methods of protecting her offspring are even more detrimental than those of the father.

In this aspect Wright is similar to Faulkner in Light in August, in which the character Joe Christmas comes to expect the cruelty and the strict discipline of male father figures, but cannot fathom or tolerate the seeming weakness of the female mother figures, who seem impenetrable, incomprehensible, and, above all, unpredictable, which is the main key to the mothers in Wright. Paradoxically, though the mothers stand by the sons to the best of their ability, they are often held more responsible than the fathers for the conditions under which the sons exist and come to manhood. The situation is the same in Savage Holiday (1954), Wright's "white" novel in which Erskine Fowler's damaged psychological state is attributed to the mother, whose promiscuity and neglect of the son in favor of lovers is the memory that the adult Erskine must confront and that he must unravel in order to understand his rage against a young woman and his identification with her son Toby; he kills the son accidentally, but predictably so in the context of his having to call up the memories of his own childhood and youth in order to exorcise the ghost of his mother and his literal and symbolic childhood illness.

A comparable childhood illness figures prominently in both Black Boy and The Long Dream. In Black Boy, it is brought on by a beating inflicted by the mother on her son for fighting with white youths instead of deferring to the codes of survival that she and her kind insist upon in order to "save" the lives of black youths, but in the process she and they severely damage the internal life and psyche of their male children. As maternal figures, they resultingly do not emerge as loving individuals who teach the sons to be strong and to be men, as does the mother in Ernest Gaines's short story "The Sky Is Gray" (from Bloodline [1968]). In Gaines's representation, the mother acknowledges her son's manhood and teaches him by her example, rather than with her words, what it means to be a black man in a hostile environment. Similarly, in The Long Dream, the illness, brought on by Fishbelly's brief imprisonment for a transgres-434- sion that is not unlike that of Big Boy and his cohorts in "Big Boy Leaves Home," but brought on also by the father's response, marks the indelible strain between the mother and the son, who is no longer able to respect his mother or to submit to her authority. His manhood means that she becomes irrelevant to his existence and that she can teach him nothing that he feels he needs to know. Mothers who leave sick children for whatever reason, whether the rationalization is positive, that is, to visit the sick or to attend church or to go to work, are somehow guilty of abandoning their sons to nightmares, literally and symbolically. Their waking reality will thereafter have the marks of the dream, dark and threatening, frightful and debilitating. The break in the relationships between mothers and sons is crucial for understanding the generational conflict underscoring Wright's subtexts and permeating his thinking about the maturation processes of his Southern black youths. The break is long remembered and little understood, but it is paradigmatic of the alienation from family and heritage, from comfort and kin, from childhood innocence and adult awareness, all of which combine to mark the unhinged maturity of the Southern black male child.

Wright's novels pointed the direction for Ralph Ellison in his major work, Invisible Man (1951). Ellison re-visioned the ground of Wright's fiction and, concomitantly, the history of modern African Americans. He charted a fresh course for making race a viable metaphor for the condition of the human being entrapped in circumstances beyond individual comprehension and yet moving toward a full realization of self and significance. In the background of Invisible Man is Booker T. Washington, whose Tuskegee Institute figured prominently in discourses on racial uplift and progress in the early twentieth century and whose autobiography, Up From Slavery (1901), set an agenda for individual success to overcome racial barriers. Ellison's oratorical novel responds to the notion of the separation of the races and to the ideology of racial cooperation popularized by Washington. In speaking for and to the problematics of race, Ellison envisioned that, despite Washington or perhaps because of him, in the early decades of the twentieth century, resolutions to raciality as a basis of individual identity were not yet apparent. Economic self-sufficiency was no guarantee of racial acceptance or cultural assimilation for African Americans. He also foresaw, as Wright -435- had, no immediate reconciliation of the private and the public in matters of racial identity or of the relationship between race and region.

Race and region, once considered inseparable in the case of the South, are now two distinct and discrete areas of inquiry. Yet the association of the two in novels during the early modern period gave rise to much of America's major writing.

Thadious M. Davis

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Fiction of the West

The richly varied novel of the West has a long and complex history. Its formulaic version — the popular Western — maintains such a strong hold on the national imagination that all other cultural expression in the West falls under its shadow. Yet the West has always had a literature that does not follow any popular formulas; and the "literary Western novels," those that go beyond popular formulas, have offered readers a distinctive ontology and point of view, particularly since the 1930s. Although this chapter begins with the novel of the frontier and traces the history of both popular and literary Westerns through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its main focus is on the literary Western from 1955 to 1990. During the last thirty-five years, most Western novelists have articulated in their art the conviction that we must stop exploiting not only other human beings but also the natural world that sustains all life.

The novel of the West developed from narratives of exploration and settlement and from the novel of the frontier, a subgenre initiated by Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798) and made internationally famous by James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales (1823-41). Among other early frontier novelists, James Kirke Paulding wrote The Dutchman's Fireside (1831) about upper New York during the French and Indian Wars; Timothy Flint, author of The Shoshonee Valley (1830), depicted a Far West he had never seen; and Robert Montgomery Bird created a fictional Indian-hater in Nick of the Woods; or, The Jibbenainosay (1837). -437-

Frontier novels sometimes include such detailed descriptions of the landscape that the land assumes an importance as great as the characters, who are drawn from the European and Native American cultures that clashed on the frontier. Since such violent clashes generally attended the process of settlement, the novel of the frontier offered tales filled with action and adventure. Women played limited roles in these tales, but their gentle presence drove farther west frontiersmen such as Cooper's Natty Bumppo, a white who had been raised by Native Americans and who thereafter tried to live by the best of his "red gifts" and "white gifts." Most frontier novels and many novels of the West exhibit these features developed by Cooper and his contemporaries: (1) an emphasis on the land; (2) action and adventure; (3) cultural clashes; (4) a hero who champions good, fights evil, and deplores the passing of the wilderness; and (5) a world either without women or with women in only minor roles.

In 1860, a little less than a decade after Cooper's death, the House of Beadle and Adams published the first dime novel, Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter, by Ann S. Stephens. A flood of pulp fiction soon followed, and for the next seventy years, dime novels (most of them Westerns) reached an audience of millions and portrayed the famous types of the westward expansion: the plainsman, the outlaw, and the cowboy. Even more adventure-packed than the frontier novels of Cooper, dime novels glorified the exploits of frontier heroes such as Daniel Boone and Kit Carson and reduced the elements of frontier narrative to a simple formula. Prentiss Ingraham, Edward L. Wheeler, E. Z. C. Judson (pen name "Ned Buntline"), and other dime novelists also wrote works that created popular heroes such as Buffalo Bill Cody.

While dime novelists busily created the West that won the popular imagination, other post-Civil War authors recorded a different sort of West in novels of local color, realism, and naturalism. Bret Harte, Mary Hallock Foote, E. W. Howe, and Helen Hunt Jackson gained a national audience with novels that looked at the West not only as a wild frontier but also as a place of settlement. Yet in spite of Foote's honesty, Howe's pioneering psychological portraits, and Jackson's feminism and defense of Native Americans, The Led-Horse Claim (1883), The Story of a Country Town (1883), and Ramona (1884) seem freighted with much Victorian melodrama and exhibit many of -438- the flaws of apprentice efforts. Less melodramatic and more polished are Frank Norris's McTeague (1899), and The Octopus (1901); Jack London's The Sea-Wolf (1904) and Martin Eden (1909); and Andy Adams's The Log of a Cowboy (1903). Although no school of Western fiction yet existed, and Wallace Stegner may be right in saying that no such school has ever existed, writers such as London and Adams probably shared Norris's view that "the Westerner thinks along different lines from the Easterner and arrives at different conclusions. What is true of California is false of New York."

Despite the truth of Norris's observation, it was an Easterner who wrote what came to be regarded as the model for the novel of the West. Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902) "presents Wyoming between 1874 and 1890" and laments the passing of that "vanished world," brought to an end by the closing of the frontier with the last of the free land. Although Wister extols the cowboy as "a hero without wings" and "the last romantic figure upon our soil," The Virginian subtly promotes elitism. The Virginian is no common cowboy; he is, rather, one of nature's aristocracy, a born leader that Wister portrays as having the right to circumvent the law in order to obtain justice. Wister's novel enjoyed considerable popularity, but not so much because of its elitism as because the Virginian courageously fights the evil Trampas and because the Virginian's marriage to Molly Wood, a transplanted New England schoolmarm, symbolized national reconciliation and union. What works against Wister's better purposes is his effectism — that is, the attempt to awaken vivid and violent emotions in the reader without respect for the truth. As Edwin H. Cady has written, The Virginian and its progeny teach "the fatally false lesson that violence does not really matter; that it has no real consequences because the good guy is invulnerable and the bad guy is 'a creature.' In the 'effectist' world, violence is not real."

Among the many writers whose works follow the pattern of The Virginian, Zane Grey became the most famous. In dozens of Grey's novels, the good guy invariably defeats the bad guy, simultaneously saving the beautiful heroine and winning her hand. Dozens of Grey's imitators, some more prolific than Grey, copied his formula and flooded pulp and slick magazines and paperback racks with adventurous tales of the Old West, some of them actually based upon real-life incidents. Generalizations about popular Westerns should be -439- suspect, partly because it is unlikely that any critic could read them all, but mainly because all sorts of popular writers have varied the pattern, and some have occasionally broken out of the formula. Consider the variety apparent in a random selection from the hundreds of novels by some of the most popular Western writers: Will Henry's From Where the Sun Now Stands (1960) recounts the history of the Nez Percé War from the Native Americans' point of view; Louis L'Amour sometimes gives mini lectures on events such as Custer's Last Stand; Matt Braun's Mattie Silks (1971) depicts a notorious Denver whore; Max Brand shows sympathy for Mexican peons in his Montana Kid series (1933-36); and Luke Short's Rimrock (1955) is set during the uranium boom in Colorado and Utah.

Moreover, many popular authors let their publishers market their novels as Westerns, although their works have been shaped less by the formula than by the results of historical research. Judy Alter's Mattie (1988) is full of authentic details about the life of a woman doctor. The real-life experience of Cynthia Ann Parker, captured by Comanches in 1836, forms the basis of Benjamin Capps's novel A Woman of the People (1966). Max Evans's The Rounders (1960) takes a typical Western subject, a New Mexican cowboy, but creates a tragicomedy from his experiences. Of her several dozen Western novels, Jeanne Williams says: "I like to take little known events and dramatize them so that readers will get a picture of the many influences that shaped the West…and [of] man's responsibilities to other creatures and the earth that supports us all." Like many popular Western writers, Williams visits the places she writes about and then conducts research in libraries with information about Western life and lore.

Library shelves constitute the only West that some popular Western writers ever see, for since the nineteenth century, Westerns have been written in such faraway lands as Germany, England, Norway, Italy, Turkey, Japan, and Czechoslovakia. Since the 1960s, many popular Western writers, including some in foreign countries, have doubled their novels' effectism by adding gratuitous sex to the formula of violence. Moreover, the violence and sex often seem twice as stimulating — and appalling — when conveyed by other media. Even before Edwin S. Porter's one-reeler movie The Great Train Robbery (1903), movies capitalized on the Westerns' popularity, and Holly-440- Holly- has continued to milk profit from the genre. Radio Westerns filled the airwaves during the 1930s and 1940s; and since the 1950s, television series such as "Gunsmoke," "Wagon Train," "Bonanza," and "The Young Riders" have brought "the West that wasn't" to millions of living rooms.

The widespread and long-lasting influence of the popular Western has overshadowed the artistic achievements of those who have written about the West that was and is. Although she was a Westerner and a contemporary of Zane Grey, Willa Cather avoided the formula of the popular Westerns. And although she wrote about the frontier West and its passing, she looked to the ancient classics and to the masterpieces of English and American literature for models and inspiration. Her subject matter, however, was usually Western.

In O Pioneers! (1913), Cather wrote: "The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes." In The Song of the Lark (1915) the land inspires Thea Kronborg to be a great artist. In My Ántonia (1918), a drama of memory, the land helps sustain and in some measure compensates the title character. In A Lost Lady (1923), The Professor's House (1915), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Cather lamented the loss of the frontier's early potential. She gave her novels an apparent simplicity that masks an underlying complexity of style, structure, and material.

Many of the West's immigrants wrote novels about their experiences, often in their native languages. The best-known works of this immigrant fiction (much of it still untranslated) include Ole Rölvaag's Giants in the Earth (1927), Sophus K. Winther's Take All to Nebraska (1936), and Herbert Krause's Wind Without Rain (1939). By mid-century, these works, as well as other pioneer-prairie novels such as Herbert Quick's Vandemark's Folly (1922), had created a literary West more akin to Greek tragedy than to the melodrama of Hollywood's silver screen.

The only Western novelist awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, John Steinbeck drew inspiration primarily from the Bible and Arthurian legend, rather than from Greek tragedy. As its title (taken from a line in Milton's Paradise Lost) suggests, Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle (1936) depicts the hell of self-hatred, a parable ironically set in Edenic California, where Communist organizers battle rich farmers -441- and where both the Party and the farmers exploit migratory fruit pickers. Of Mice and Men (1937) focuses on two itinerant workers whose dream of having their own Western ranch falls victim to uncontrollable instinct and passion. The Grapes of Wrath (1939) follows the Depression wanderings of the Joad family, who are "tractored off" their farm in Oklahoma and have to travel across the Southwest to seek work in California — a westering saga with parallels to the Book of Exodus.

Often labeled "protest novels," Steinbeck's works do protest against injustice, but like Cather's novels they also lament the lost potential of the frontier. Long after Steinbeck had received the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes, some critics continued to fault him for his optimism and his "apple-pie radicalism." In expressing these sentiments, they seem to have forgotten his East of Eden (1952) and his evident commitment to Jeffersonian democracy.

How could a writer as competent as Steinbeck be so misread? Because the view of ontology held by Western novelists of the 1930s and 1940s is often not understood by people from other regions. In his landmark study of Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Max Westbrook explains the Western ontology:

In a letter written in 1959, Clark said the stereotypes had blocked his way, "So, in part, I set about writing The Ox-Bow Incident [1940] as a kind of deliberate technical exercise. It was an effort to set myself free in that western past by taking all the ingredients of the -442- standard western (which were real enough after all) and seeing if, with a theme that concerned me, and that had more than dated and local implications, and a realistic treatment, I could bring both the people and the situations alive again." All that and more comes to life in The Ox-Bow Incident, the psychological tale of a lynching, and in Clark's other two novels: The City of Trembling Leaves (1945), a Künstlerroman set in twentieth-century Reno; and The Track of the Cat (1949), the story of a hunt as richly symbolic as the one in Moby-Dick. Clark's novels and those of like-minded Western artists show, says Westbrook, that "both a capacity for naked purity and a capacity for brute murder are within each one of us."

What did some reviewers on the Hudson see in The Ox-Bow Incident? Just "another cowboy story." So, too, well into the 1970s did otherwise good critics misread and mislabel H. L. Davis's Honey in the Horn (1935, Pulitzer Prize) and Winds of Morning (1952); Harvey Fergusson's Grant of Kingdom (1950) and The Conquest of Don Pedro (1954); Vardis Fisher's Dark Bridwell (1931) and In Tragic Life (1932); A. B. Guthrie's The Big Sky (1947) and The Way West (1949, Pulitzer Prize); Paul Horgan's Far from Cibola (1938) and Whitewater (1970); Frederick Manfred's The Golden Bowl (1944) and Riders of Judgment (1957); Conrad Richter's The Sea of Grass (1937); and Frank Waters's The Man Who Killed the Deer (1942) and The Woman at Otowi Crossing (1966). Writing sometimes of mountain men and pioneers, cowboys and Indians, these authors, like Clark, often found themselves ranked with Zane Grey and B. M. Bower, which is a good deal like placing William Faulkner in the same artistic category as Margaret Mitchell on the ground that they both wrote about the South.

Wallace Stegner and Wright Morris, two other Western artists whose novels began to appear before 1950, have earned national acclaim partly because Western ontology is not the dominant force in their work, but also because they are among the most skillful literary artists of our time.

Three of Stegner's novels had been published before The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), an autobiographical novel about his family's moves throughout the Northwest to Saskatchewan in search of the American dream. In that novel, feeling he should "have lived a hundred years earlier," Bo Mason (Stegner's fictional portrait of his -443- father) eventually moves his wife and two sons to Salt Lake City, where he supports his family on what he can make selling bootleg whiskey. Stegner says that a dozen years after he wrote the novel, "I began to realize my Bo Mason was a character with relatives throughout western fiction. I could see in him resemblance to Ole Rölvaag's Per Hansa, to Mari Sandoz's Old Jules, to A. B. Guthrie's Boone Caudill, even to the hard-jawed and invulnerable heroes of the myth. But I had not been copying other writers. I had been trying to paint a portrait of my father, and it happened that my father, an observed and particular individual, was also a type — a very western type."

Trying to understand his father, Bruce Mason writes: "A man is movement, motion, a continuum. There is no beginning to him. He runs through his ancestors, and the only beginning is the primal beginning of the single cell in the slime. The proper study of mankind is man, but man is an endless curve on the eternal graph paper, and who can see the whole curve?" In all of his work Stegner traces as much of the curve as will reveal a connection between past and present. Yet it is not mere historical facts or ideas that Stegner seeks to convey. Rather, as he puts it, "The work of art is not a gem, as some schools of criticism would insist, but truly a lens. We look through it for the purified and honestly offered spirit of the artist."

One of Stegner's kindred spirits is surely Wright Morris, seven of whose novels had been published before The Field of Vision appeared in 1956 and won the National Book Award. Like Stegner, Morris writes mostly about the middle class, revealing the wonder of what is uncommon in the commonplace. Like Cather's, his narratives have an apparent simplicity that masks complexity. Like Hemingway and Faulkner, Morris makes his readers piece together a story from fragments that come from different points of view. The Field of Vision ostensibly centers on a Mexican bullfight, but the memories of five of the characters range far back into the past, dredging up bits of narrative that, taken together, tell the story of much of their lives. As in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, the characters' thoughts reflect their temperament, education, and intelligence; and they show, too, that, as the novel's epigraph from Paradise Lost puts it, "The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." Morris also shares Faulkner's ability to create a mythic territory cot-444- responding to the actual home country of his memories. The Field of Vision, Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960), and other Morris novels include characters who have lived in or had some connection with Lone Tree, Nebraska.

Critics have noted that Morris's view of life darkens in his later novels, particularly Plains Song (1980). Throughout many of his nineteen novels runs an irony sometimes so subtle that even so astute a reader as Wayne C. Booth admits to difficulty in understanding it. Referring specifically to Love Among the Cannibals (1957), Booth says: "I can be certain that I sometimes judge when judgment is not intended, sometimes fail to judge when Morris expects me to, and sometimes judge on the wrong axis: Morris may intend undercuttings that many readers will overlook, yet many a reader may make moral and aesthetic judgments against Morris that he in fact intends to be made against the narrator." But Booth also points out that reading more than one of Morris's works helps readers correctly identify and gauge the ironies.

Complex irony also pervades the novels of William Eastlake, a native New Yorker who as a young man moved to a New Mexico ranch. In a series of three novels set in Indian Country — Go in Beauty (1956), The Bronc People (1958), and Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses (1963) — Eastlake undercuts virtually every stereotype of the popular Western. For example, instead of being bloodthirsty fiends or taciturn Noble Savages, the Native Americans often function almost as a sophisticated Greek chorus, wittily commenting on the other characters. However, Eastlake's novels offer much more than ironic undercuttings. He probes the psychological and emotional sources of conflict between brothers, between races, between cultures. His persistent irony strips away the stereotypes people use to conceal their real motives. And like Faulkner and Wright Morris, Eastlake presents many of his novels as a series of seemingly separate stories or sketches, thereby making the reader piece together the narrative fragments.

Eastlake's symbolism shows the dualities that split the American mind and divide American society. Yet the chorus of Indian comments reminds us that from the Native American perspective those dualities matter very little, since they constitute the yin and yang of a world view that continues to "civilize" the continent. Because of its -445- tonal complexity and its penetrating critique of American civilization, critics Delbert Wylder and Gerald Haslam have rightly called The Bronc People a classic in the literature of the West.

Another novel of the 1950s, Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), drew national attention because it seemed a paean to the controversial Beat movement. Consisting of Sal Paradise's account of his transcontinental journeys with or in search of his buddy Dean Moriarity, On the Road seemed to some of its first readers only a picaresque travelogue. Initially denounced by many critics as non-art and an irresponsible glorification of Bohemian irresponsibility, On the Road nevertheless was heralded by a New York Times reviewer as a "major novel," and it hit the best-seller lists. A decade later, another wave of critics saw Kerouac's work not as random ramblings in his notorious "spontaneous prose" but as a carefully structured love story. Although Kerouac's characters only crisscross the West, seldom staying in one place for long, On the Road deserves classification as a novel of the West not because it recounts Bohemian antics in the region but because it depicts at least one undying notion about the West: that it is a land of possibility.

Westerners live "out where the sense of place is a sense of motion," as Stegner puts it; and On the Road shows mid-century Americans pulled by this aspect of the westering impulse as the pioneers in Emerson Hough's The Covered Wagon (1922) and the Okies in The Grapes of Wrath are pulled by it. Yet Stegner and other Westerners disapprove of Bohemianism like Kerouac's. Was this Beat a martyr to the truth, savagely attacked for trying to reveal the hollowness and decadence of the American Wasteland? Or was he a latter-day Pied Piper who led thousands to forsake responsibility in exchange for lives eventually ruined by promiscuity and the drug culture? Some Westerners answer "yes" to the first question, some "yes" to the second. Their differing responses show that the Beat movement and On the Road helped create a counterculture within the West, further fragmenting an already complex society.

Whatever their differences, contemporary Western novelists stand united in their opposition to the rape of the land. They know that the frenzied rush toward ecocide will not abate until we gain a new consciousness of our relationship to the earth and its creatures. Most contemporary Western authors try to fashion the beginnings of the -446- necessary new consciousness. Westerner Gary Snyder, the subject of Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums (1958), writes poetry infused with Native American and Far Eastern thought that sees wilderness as a source of spiritual sustenance, not as a source of maximum profits. Don Berry, who once roomed with Snyder around the time when they were students at Reed College, shares Snyder's outlook. In a remarkable trilogy — Trask (1960), Moontrap (1962), and To Build a Ship (1963) — Berry probes the psychological forces that impelled whites to settle the Oregon Coast in the years from 1848 to 1854.

Trask takes for its title character a mountain man who has married and settled near Astoria. Stirred by a restless desire to possess new lands, he sets out with two Native American guides to chart a route to Murderer's Harbor, where he hopes to establish a new settlement. As Glen A. Love has noted, a brief plot summary makes Trask sound similar to formula Westerns. But like other Western authors (most notably Fergusson, Fisher, Guthrie, Manfred, and, most recently, Bill Hotchkiss) who have written novels about the mountain men, Berry sees the natural world as sacred and he deplores the forces within us that have driven us to attack and destroy so much of that world. Trask's journey goes beyond the pioneering of a Natty Bumppo, because Trask's experiences force him to explore his own psyche. Indeed, the novel's ambiguous ending starts with Trask's vision quest, or Searching — terms for the Native American rites of passage to spiritual awareness. Because Trask captures so vividly the process of enlightenment, it belongs, as Love says, "among the small group of works by which Northwest literature will be enduringly defined."

That small group of works also includes Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962). Set in an Oregon insane asylum and narrated by an escaped inmate (an Indian named Chief "Broom" Bromden), Kesey's novel exposes the repressive institutions of modern industrial societies that demand sterile conformity. Into a ward of "loonies" comes Randall Patrick McMurphy, a convict who has opted for a stretch in the asylum rather than a term of hard labor at the state prison farm. When McMurphy notices how cowed and hopeless his fellow inmates are, he tries to revivify them. Frustrated when his efforts are opposed by Big Nurse Ratched, who represents and defends the "Combine" (the Establishment), McMurphy tries to strangle and rape her. His violent attack gives her an excuse to have -447- him lobotomized. Although she successfully destroys his mind, his free spirit lives on in Chief Bromden, who in mercy kills what is left of McMurphy and then escapes from the asylum.

In the first half of Cuckoo's Nest, McMurphy swaggers onto the scene like a hero from a Hollywood Western and spins yarns like a frontier rip-tail-roarer. His weapon against Big Nurse and the Combine initially is nothing more nor less than a laughter that seems to burst forth inexhaustively from his boundless energy. His initials, R.P.M., which in machinery stand for "revolutions per minute," reveal his quintessential Westernness, for his free spirit comes from the sense of place that in the West is a sense of motion. But by novel's end McMurphy has been transformed from a confidence man into a cowboy Christ who willingly sacrifices himself for the good of others. He is, as Jerome Klinkowitz has observed, "the first fictional hero to practice that key strategy of sixties leadership: raising the consciousness of the people," and he also invents "a new way of perceiving reality, which is nothing less than a new reality itself." And who is the Ishmael of Kesey's modern Moby-Dick? Significantly, a Native American who has learned from McMurphy that the Combine will never capture his spirit if he tries McMurphy's new way of perceiving reality.

During the 1960s, novelists outside the American West also used the Western donnée to show the power of language to shape reality. A native New Yorker, E. L. Doctorow wrote Welcome to Hard Times (1960) after reading screenplays of Westerns for CBS Television and Columbia Pictures. The novel consists of a chronicle written by a dying man who has witnessed the destruction and then the rebuilding of a settlement, only to see it destroyed again. Doctorow undercuts or inverts elements of the traditional Western in order to create a novelistic version of the Theater of Cruelty, twentiethcentury plays intended to exorcise erotic cruelty by depicting it in virtually religious rites.

Another Easterner, Thomas Berger, composed a novel of the West after reading some seventy books of Western autobiography, history, and anthropology. But Little Big Man (1964) has a narrative structure more complex than that of Doctorow's novel, for Berger uses the framing device characteristic of the humorous tall tales of the Old -448- Southwest. The main narrator, Jack Crabb, tells us that after Native Americans had killed his pioneer father, they raised Jack. Crabb says he reentered white society and then returned to the Indians, a cultural seesawing repeated throughout the novel. Most amazingly, Crabb says he rode with Custer at the Little Big Horn and survived to the overripe age of III to tell his tale.

Clearly, Crabb's literary lineage starts with Natty Bumppo, but with a twist explained by Brooks Landon: "Jack's achievements are Cheyenne, his aspirations are white, and therein lies a kind of captivity against which his shiftiness has no power." However trapped by a language that will not release him from his white cultural bias, "Jack Crabb," according to French critic Daniel Royot, "is no radical dropout keeping Without Marx or Jesus in his pocket, but an American picaro teasing his reader out of conformity and confirming once more America's saving grace which is to laugh at herself."

Yet no one laughs at two of the "nonfiction novels" set in the West: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1966) and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song (1979, Pulitzer Prize). One of the murderers in Capote's book has a Native American mother, and parts of In Cold Blood remind one of a bloodcurdling Indian captivity narrative. Likewise, Mailer's "true-life novel" overflows with authentic details of contemporary Mormon life, but the structure of The Executioner's Song resembles that of a Bret Harte story in which a bloody killer eventually reveals a heart of gold. Just as romanticized but more concise, Mailer's earlier novel Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) takes us bear-hunting in Alaska.

Other Eastern novelists have also used the West as a setting for one or two of their novels. Bernard Malamud based A New Life (1961) on his experiences as a professor at Oregon State University, and place plays a role in that novel, though mostly as a target for Malamud's satire. John Updike sets A Month of Sundays (1975) and S. (1988) in the West, mainly to shock his protagonists into serious reflection on their Eastern lives.

Former Easterners who have moved west have had greater success in writing novels of the West. The Western works of Thomas McGuane, Richard Ford, and John Nichols have generally improved as these writers have come to a deeper understanding of their adopted -449- region. See especially McGuane's Keep the Change (1989), Ford's Wildfire (1990), and Nichols's American Blood (1989), a powerful example of a novelistic Theater of Cruelty.

Before his apparent suicide, Richard Brautigan had lived near McGuane in Montana, although Brautigan had also taken to spending part of each year in Japan. Born and raised in the Northwest, Brautigan moved to San Francisco in the mid-1950s when the Beat movement was under way. He first found print as a poet, and some critics argue that his masterpiece, Trout Fishing in America (1967), should be read not as a novel but as a serial poem like those of Jack Spicer, Brautigan's friend and mentor. Although knowing Spicer's work can help a reader to understand Brautigan, Trout Fishing should be classified as a novel, for its author intended it to be one, as he indicated when he published "The Lost Chapters of Trout Fishing in America" in Esquire (October 1970).

Allusions abound in Trout Fishing, providing necessary clues to the novel's meaning. The first chapter, for example, alludes to Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, to Tom and Jerry cartoons, to Dante's Paradiso, and to Franz Kafka's Amerika. This hodgepodge of allusions alerts the reader to the book's mixture of wit, humor, irony, idealism, and angst.

Other novels by Brautigan fall short of his achievement in Trout Fishing, although The Hawkline Monster (1974), The TokyoMontana Express (1980), and So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (1982) also provide an interesting mix of postmodernism with a Western sensibility. No one has yet equaled Trout Fishing, although Ishmael Reed's Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Tom Robbins's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), Gino Sky's Appaloosa Rising (1980), and Gerald Locklin's The Case of the Missing Blue Volkswagen (1984) join Brautigan's best to form what half a century ago would have seemed an unlikely tradition: Menippean satire of the West.

Fifty years ago the West did have the novels of Dashiell Hammett. His The Maltese Falcon (1930), James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1935), and Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939) explored the seamy side of urban life. Yet such tough guy writers omitted truly shocking details of crime, sex, drugs, and violence. -450-

Now such details can be found in John Rechy's City of Night (1963) and Charles Bukowski's Ham on Rye (1982). In the late twentieth century, parts of some Western cities have become more violent and dangerous than the old frontier.

The novel of Los Angeles already constituted a subgenre of American fiction when Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays appeared in 1970. The novelists who created that subgenre rank among the most important of the early twentieth century. Besides the tough guy and detective writers, they include F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O'Hara, Nathanael West, and Budd Schulberg. To that list must be added British exiles Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, and Evelyn Waugh. As these names indicate, "any discussion of the Los Angeles novel must begin with the observation that it is chiefly the work of the outsider — if not the tourist, then the newcomer." David Fine, who makes that observation in his introduction to a collection of critical essays titled Los Angeles in Fiction (1984), also notes that "the displacement experienced by the writers fostered a way of writing about the region that differed qualitatively from the way other regions have been written about."

Most Los Angeles novels satirize Hollywood and southern California, pointing to the wasteland that lies behind the Disneyland facade. On one level, Play It as It Lays tells a story of the real heartbreak and despair in such a wasteland; but "at another level," as Mark Royden Winchell says, " Didion seems to be writing a parody of the novel of despair." Didion's husband, John Gregory Dunne, is a transplanted Easterner whose True Confessions (1977) and Dutch Shea, Jr. (1982) match Didion's satirization of California life. Many of Didion and Dunne's contemporaries — Alison Lurie, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Stone, to name a few — have also written Los Angeles novels.

Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose (1971, Pulitzer Prize) not only debunks Hollywood's myth of the West but also links past to present and explores universal themes such as integrity and love. The firstperson narrator, Lyman Ward, has suffered both the loss of a leg from a crippling bone disease and the desertion of his wife, who has run off with the bone surgeon. A retired history professor, Lyman retreats to his grandparents' old home in Grass Valley, California. There, to keep his son from moving him to a nursing home, Lyman -451- proves his mental fitness by researching his grandparents' papers and writing a book about them. Stegner created the portrait of Lyman's grandparents by using as models an actual nineteenth-century Western novelist, Mary Hallock Foote, and her husband Arthur. In fact, up until the last third of the novel, so closely does Stegner recreate the details of the Footes' lives that he quotes and paraphrases passages from Mary's letters and novels. Between chapters of Lyman's biography of his grandparents, Stegner dramatizes Lyman's inner struggle to overcome bitterness and loneliness, along with his caustic reaction to the counterculture of the 1960s.

Appearing predisposed to side with his grandmother, Lyman eventually assumes the worst about her and imagines his grandfather to have been a kind of demigod like the hero of The Virginian. Under his professorial demeanor, Lyman tries to conceal from himself his view of women as ultimately weak and faithless. He also tries to hold on to his self-image as blameless victim, but a shocking nightmare forces him to consider a reconciliation with his ex-wife.

Stegner's use of the nightmare is a brilliant and significant tour de force. He initially presents the nightmare as if it were an actual event. Such a dream sequence with its Freudian implications seems similar to a passage from a modernist novel, but Stegner has argued that "the kind of western writer who writes modern[ist] literature immediately abdicates as a Westerner." In appropriating a modernist technique, however, Stegner should be seen not as abdicating his regional identity but as taking a necessary step toward the recognition of a conflict concealed in the Western psyche.

In that conflict, which is both personal and social, desire clashes with responsibility. Lyman's nightmare reveals the conflict and parallels the scene of infidelity that he imagines must have happened if his grandmother was guilty of adultery. He admits there is no proof of her guilt, but he imagines the infidelity as taking place during the summer of 1890. A watershed date in Western history, 1890 marked not only the official closing of the frontier but also what Stegner has said, in his "Wilderness Letter," was the beginning of a decline in American optimism and idealism. In short, the forces at war within Lyman Ward's psyche are the same ones battling within the minds of most other Americans, especially those in the West.

Like Western American literature in general, as Forrest Robinson -452- has described it, Angle of Repose is "characteristically American in its often complex, if frequently indirect, negotiations of difficult questions of value." Recognized as a classic novel of the West and a masterpiece of American fiction, Angle of Repose appeared during the height of the Vietnam War. Many Westerners saw in that war parallels with our westering experience, marked as it was by our nearly genocidal treatment of Native Americans and by our oppression and exploitation of minorities and women, all of which are directly or indirectly present in Stegner's benchmark novel.

By the early 1970s, women and minorities increasingly spoke for themselves. Although Mexican Americans have a literary tradition that goes back to the colonial era, the first Chicano novel to gain much attention from Anglos — José Antonio Villarreal's Pocho — did not appear until 1959. Over the next two decades other writers helped to create a new subgenre: the Chicano novel. Portraits of migrant farmworkers or of barrio residents appear in Floyd Salas's Tattoo the Wicked Cross (1967), Richard Vasquez's Chicano (1969), Raymond Barrio's The Plum Plum Pickers (1969), and Tomás Rivera's "…y no se lo tragó la tierra" (1971).

Sometimes militant in espousing the cause of la Raza ("the people"), the Chicano novel helped inform Anglos about Mexican American culture at the same time that it instilled pride in and raised the consciousness of Chicanos. Rudolfo A. Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima (1972) does all that and more, and its use of some Spanish words and of narrative passages derived from Chicano cuentos and corridos shows readers the need for cultural relativism. Arturo Islas's The Rain God (1984) also uses the techniques employed by Anaya; and both novelists probe the tensions and divisions within the Mexican American family. Narrated from a woman's point of view, Lucha Corpi's Delia's Song (1989) tells the story of a Chicana who has to struggle against both her male-dominated family and the dominant Anglo culture in order to create her own identity.

Like Chicanos, Native Americans have had to struggle against an Anglo culture that tried to deny them a separate sense of identity. They have long been among those most alienated by modern urban life; nevertheless, extreme poverty and anomie have given members of many tribes no choice but to leave reservations for the cities. Parts of N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1968, Pulitzer Prize) -453- take place in a Los Angeles that is representative of most urban centers. Not only Native Americans suffer from isolation in such an environment: one of Momaday's Euro-American characters "had been in Los Angeles four years, and in all that time she had not talked to anyone…. No one knew what she thought or felt or who she was." Although she meets Abel, the Indian protagonist, and their friendship seems to promise an end to their isolation, a brutal beating by a policeman sends Abel back to the Indian society from which he was outcast.

In his summary of House Made of Dawn, Momaday identifies its sociological and psychological levels of meaning:

The Indian world of Abel's childhood provides some of the other levels of meaning. A circular structure, reflective of the Native American's sense of time as cyclical, encloses the narrative units arranged in Euro-American linear chronology; and Indian mythology and ceremony influence Abel and other characters. Like other literary Western novels, House Made of Dawn uses irony to shape a new perception of reality. Momaday's irony, however, surpasses that of his contemporaries, for he creates a character who preaches an ironic sermon that includes verbatim passages from The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), Momaday's moving account of the beliefs of his Kiowa ancestors.

Added to that complex self-reference is an even more provocative passage on language:

In 1970s novels about Native Americans, alternatives to the miseries of reservation life and urban alienation seem possible, if at all, only after great suffering. Of Anglos who wrote about Native Americans after House Made of Dawn, historical novelists Oakley Hall and Douglas C. Jones treated them sympathetically. Dee Brown had used the Native Americans' own words in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), his nonfiction account of the Old West's Indian wars; but his novel Creek Mary's Blood (1980) is not as successful at presenting the Native American point of view. Thomas Sanchez's Rabbit Boss (1973) shows the weaknesses of the Washo Indians and thereby, according to Sanford E. Marovitz, "implies that with similar myopia America on the whole has abandoned its heritage and promise." Frederick Manfred delighted readers with The Manly-Hearted Woman (1975), a hilarious mock epic that is, in Robert C. Wright's words, "essentially religious in tone," providing "a kind of bible explaining the community life and mystical religion of the Indians."

Foremost among contemporary Anglo interpreters of Native American life is Tony Hillerman, whose detective novels offer more than popular conventions. Born in Oklahoma, Hillerman moved to New Mexico in 1952 and wrote his first Navajo police procedural novel, The Blessing Way, in 1970. He has since written almost a dozen more detective novels, all with Navajos as protagonists. Hillerman's early reading of Arthur W. Upfield's Australian detective stories undoubtedly heightened his sensitivity to cultural differences, a sensitivity reflected in his fictional treatment of Native American cultures. In his latest novels — A Thief of Time (1988), Talking God (1989), and Coyote Waits (1990) — Hillerman has focused increasingly on the influence of the past. Of the rich texture of his recent novels, Fred Erisman says: "Weaving myths of the past and problems of the present into police procedural novels, he dramatizes the intri-455- cate intermingling of cultures that shapes the region's life." In enriching the mystery novel beyond the popular formula, many other contemporary Western novelists have joined Hillerman. Eminent among these are James Crumley, Ridley Pearson, and M. K. Wren (Martha Kay Renfroe).

Among 1970s novels by Native Americans, James Wetch's masterpiece, Winter in the Blood (1973), has comic elements but it also depicts Montana's reservation life with its drinking, fighting, death, pain of loss, and solitude. Although it deals with experiences so bleak and painful, "Winter in the Blood challenges us," Stephen Tatum says, "to recognize how experience is defined, like language, as a system of relations of difference, and to recognize that the ambiguities, paradoxes, and contradictions inherent in both desire and language undo the promise of closure and the potential solace of transparent, self-evident, and final meanings."

When Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977) appeared four years after Winter in the Blood, those two novels along with Momaday's House Made of Dawn soon came to be viewed as the trio that established the renaissance of Native American literature, one of the most notable developments in the recent history of the American novel. Like Welch, Silko shows the poverty, drinking, violence, and heartache endemic on many reservations. Like Momaday, she creates a mixed-blood protagonist psychologically and emotionally wounded by his combat experience in World War II. Restored to sanity by native stories and ceremonies, Tayo, the combat veteran, realizes that "he was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time."

Referring to Silko's use of native tradition to restore Tayo to harmony, Italian critic Laura Coltelli says: "Myth and reality have a skillfully constructed interdependence and they interact in Silko's narrative very much in the same way as the oral transmission and the written act of storytelling: they form complementary, dynamic, dialogical connections which are a meeting ground for past and present, oral performance and fiction strategies, Western [European] aesthetics and Native mythopoesis, engaging the reader and the critic in a new way of reading and listening."

Starting in the late 1970s, many new authors contributed to the -456- Native American Renaissance inaugurated by Momaday and sustained by Welch and Silko. Gerald Vizenor's Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (1978) employs irony in a self-reflexive novel that Paula Gunn Allen has said is "one of the more adventurous excursions of modern Indian fiction writers into bicultural prose," an assessment that applies as well to her own novel, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983). The new writers also include a pair whose novels have been highly praised by reviewers and critics and who happen to be husband and wife: Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich. Both create portraits of twentieth-century Native Americans, Dorris in A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987), Erdrich in Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), and Tracks (1988). To these achievements have been added more works by the initiators of the renaissance. Silko has published a collection of stories and poems titled Storyteller (1981), and Momaday a second novel, The Ancient Child (1989). But the most remarkable of the first-rate Native American novels of the I98os is James Welch's Fools Crow (1986).

The story of a band of Blackfeet Indians in 1870, Fools Crow recounts the exploits of eighteen-year-old White Man's Dog as he joins a war party, receives his new name (Fools Crow), marries, and tries to help his people when they encounter the whites and are decimated by a smallpox epidemic. Welch's historical novel gives us a rich portrait of Native American life on the eve of its devastation by the encroaching Euro-American civilization. Moreover, Fools Crow has visions in which animals speak to him, and so skillfully does Welch weave these episodes into the narrative that the effect surpasses the achievement of Latin American "magic realism," a novelistic form of surrealism. Welch's "magic realism" brings us so much closer to understanding Native American culture that his characters seem neither wild nor noble savages but believable human beings. In its fusion of the novel and Native American myth, Fools Crow satisfies the desire for a full, entertaining, and substantial narrative.

Like Native Americans and Chicanos in the late 1960s, women began expressing their concerns in the novel. In the process, they found many precursors. Feminists rediscovered Western women novelists such as California's Gertrude Atherton, Texas's Dorothy Scarborough, Idaho's Carol Ryrie Brink, Montana's Dorothy Johnson, Minnesota's Meridel Le Sueur, Nebraska's Mari Sandoz, Utah's Vir-457- Vir, Colorado's Jean Stafford, and Iowa's Ruth Suckow. Long ignored or marginalized, these authors faced formidable obstacles in their efforts to create a women's fiction, obstacles that are movingly described in Tillie Olsen's Silences (1978), a collection of essays and lectures. Olsen's own novel, Yonnondio (1974), stands as a classic example of the tradition she describes.

Begun in 1932, the novel could not be completed because Olsen lacked the necessary time and support. In the 1970s she chose to publish the unfinished manuscript from the thirties "to tell what might have been, and never will be now." Told from a woman's point of view, Yonnondio depicts Western life during the Great Depression; and along with Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Frederick Manfred's The Golden Bowl, it helps convey the raw emotion of that era's human misery. Olsen's critique of capitalism in the American West also bears some resemblance to the earlier social protest novels of Upton Sinclair, Robert Cantwell, and James Stevens.

Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1981) is not a protest novel, but it ranks among the best works of contemporary women's fiction. The novel requires a new way of reading and listening, for it reshapes American literary tradition by presenting a female protagonist, Ruth, who lights out for the territory with the same autonomy and selfreliance usually reserved for male characters such as Cooper's Natty Bumppo, Twain's Huck Finn, and the eponymous hero of Jack Schaefer's Shane (1949). Not only does Housekeeping give to a woman the heroic role, but it also sustains a poetic lyricism within the novel's prose format, as though Emily Dickinson had been reborn a north Idaho novelist. With the kind of self-reliant spirit advocated by Dickinson and Emerson, Robinson's Ruth achieves an authentic selfhood but at the same time binds herself, in love, to her aunt Sylvie.

After the two women attempt to burn their family's home, they begin a life of riding the rails as transients. "The frontier in this contemporary novel is not," Martha Ravits says, "a geographic or historic construct but the urge to move beyond conventional social patterns, beyond the dichotomy of urban and rural experience, beyond domestic concerns and physical boundaries into metaphysics." Viewed from the metaphysics to which Housekeeping transports us, -458- buildings and social conventions seem less important than relationships forged from love.

Of great importance to many Westerners is wilderness, and efforts to save the remaining wilderness gave rise to a new form of protest in the West of the 1970s: environmental activism. Environmentalists found a spokesman in Edward Abbey. He had written several Western novels at the start of his career — Jonathan Troy (1954) and The Brave Cowboy (1956) — but by the early 1970s he was best known for Desert Solitaire (1968), usually classified as nature writing. Abbey scholar Ann Ronald has argued, however, that "in many ways Desert Solitaire is more a work of fiction than of nonfiction"; and she maintains that Abbey designed each of his major books "not like a romantic Western but like a formal romance."

However classified, Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) changed the course of Western American history. A "mock-heroic" late twentieth-century picaresque tale that borrows some elements from the popular Western, The Monkey Wrench Gang recounts the exploits of four characters: Doc Sarvis, an Albuquerque surgeon; Bonnie Abbzug, his receptionist; Seldom Seen Smith, a jack Mormon river-runner; and George Washington Hayduke, an ex-Green Beret. Uniting to stop the destruction of the Western environment, this unlikely quartet uses ecotage, the sabotage of any machine that damages ecology. The four ecological anarchists do nothing that would endanger human life, but they use any other form of outlawry that will help them save the natural world. Often hilarious, sometimes ironic, occasionally philosophic, The Monkey Wrench Gang divided opinion among those in the West's environmental groups and inspired a new movement that calls itself Earth First!

Abbey and other nature writers would continue to warn about imminent ecocide, and Abbey gave The Monkey Wrench Gang a sequel: Hayduke Lives (1989). Despite its flaws, which are "those of exuberance," The Monkey Wrench Gang remains the classic environmental protection novel — in Ronald's words, "a rollicking testimony to non-violent violence." Most other Western novelists have also been outspoken in opposing the destruction of the environment, and some of them have been especially ingenious in imagining alternatives to our present ecocidal course, most notably Ernest Callen-459- Ernest Callen- with Ecotopia (1976) and Ursula Le Guin with Always Coming Home (1984).

While Abbey and other novelists imagined alternatives to our ruinous lifestyle, Larry McMurtry focused on the Western myth's destructive effects on personal relationships. Acclaimed for his early novels — Horseman, Pass By (1961), Leaving Cheyenne (1963), and The Last Picture Show (1966) — McMurtry expressed his ambivalence about rural and small-town Texas, hating its crudity, violence, and bigotry, wistfully eulogizing the free spirit and self-reliance of the cowboys who had been crude, violent, and bigoted. With Moving On (1970), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972), and Terms of Endearment (1978), McMurtry created the "urban Western," a novel that reveals the hollowness at the core of the late twentiethcentury urban West.

As if seeking the very heart of urban darkness, McMurtry picked Hollywood, Washington, D.C., and Las Vegas as the respective locations for his next three novels — Somebody's Darling (1978), Cadillac Jack (1982), and The Desert Rose (1983). Although his novels of the 1970s and early 1980s show McMurtry experimenting with different points of view and with varying levels of realism, his next work established him as one of the masters of American fiction.

Lonesome Dove (1985, Pulitzer Prize) not only dominated the best-seller lists for months but was also recognized as "a masterpiece in the genre of trail-driving novels," as Jane Nelson put it. As long and sprawling as a real trail drive, Lonesome Dove keeps us interested by making us care about the two principal characters: Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae. Former Texas Rangers, Call and McCrae decide to drive a herd of cattle to Montana, where they plan to claim land and start ranching. They reach their goal, but not without encountering dozens of life-threatening dangers along the way.

McMurtry's description of a nest of snakes attacking a hapless cowboy is one of the most bone-chilling scenes in contemporary fiction. Indeed, so much violence fills the novel that it seems as if McMurtry was trying to drive a stake through the heart of the Hollywood myth that the good guys always rode off unharmed into the sunset. Paradoxically, Lonesome Dove resuscitates interest in the Old West by making it more believable. McMurtry's trail drive includes passages of metaphysical questioning and angst as well as scenes of -460- sex and violence — all of which make the novel palatable to late twentieth-century taste. More important, Lonesome Dove satisfies the desire for a sustained narrative that creates the illusion of "the real thing."

A complete history of the novel of the West will have to include dozens of other authors who have not achieved fame as great as McMurtry's but who have nevertheless influenced the development of the West's fiction, usually with one or two "small masterpieces." Such a reputation attaches to William Goyen, William Humphrey, and Tom Lea, Texas writers from the generation preceding McMurtry's. Of novels written by McMurtry's contemporaries, Diane Johnson's The Shadow Knows (1972) depicts the terror of a victimized California woman; Larry Woiwode's Beyond the Bedroom Wall (1975) portrays several generations of a North Dakota family; Robert Flynn's North to Yesterday (1967) beautifully describes the human comedy of a trail drive; and Charles Portis's True Grit (1968) tells with comic genius the story of a frontier lawman and an adolescent girl who join forces in their pursuit of justice. Although McMurtry overshadows many of his contemporaries, recent novels by Clay Reynolds, Tom Spanbauer, Douglas Unger, and Norman Zollinger have shown that these writers might eventually match McMurtry's achievement.

In its scrupulous authenticity, Lonesome Dove reflects extensive authorial research. By itself, authenticity does not, of course, make a novel first-rate. But when serious novelists make authenticity one of the primary qualities of their art, the basis of fact can help to create the illusion of reality, and the best of such authentic fiction serves not only as satisfying literature but also as a form of history. Many contemporary Western novelists might be classified as "neorealists," but some of them place an especially high value on authenticity. In John Keeble's Yellowfish (1980), the characters reflect on the history of the Chinese in the Old West. Pete Dexter's Deadwood (1986) follows Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane in the South Dakota of 187678, and Frank Bergon's Shoshone Mike (1987) is based on an actual Indian-white conflict in early twentieth-century Nevada. Research into later twentieth-century Western history enriches Craig Lesley's Winterkill (1984), about a Northwest Indian rodeo contestant, and also Levi Peterson's The Backslider (1986), about a Mormon cow-461- boy's struggles with desires of the flesh. Women have also enhanced their novels by a similar dedication to authenticity. Gretel Ehrlich's Heart Mountain (1988) depicts a Wyoming-Montana relocation camp that held Japanese Americans during World War II; and Molly Gloss's The Jump-Off Creek (1989) portrays a single woman homesteader in the Oregon mountains during the 1890s.

Of all the Western neorealists, Ivan Doig has seemed the most likely to become heir-apparent to Wallace Stegner. This House of Sky (1978), Doig's memoir about growing up in Montana, was nominated for a National Book Award and is reminiscent of Stegner's Big Rock Candy Mountain and Wolf Willow. Doig's Montana trilogy — English Creek (1984), Dancing at the Rascal Fair (1987), and Ride with Me, Mariah Montana (1990) — recasts in fiction his memories of his family, his childhood, and his home place. If the late Richard Hugo was right when he said that "the place triggers the mind to create the place," then what sort of place emerges from the work of Ivan Doig? No Eden, Doig's Montana can almost match the violence of McMurtry's Texas. But Doig's characters, although no angels, seem generally less hopeless or hollow than McMurtry's. Strong sentimentality marks Doig's characters and passages of his prose, but the sentiment is genuine and balanced by his account of over a century of unremitting losses. Ride with Me not only celebrates Montana's centennial and the West's first post-frontier century, it also articulates the view of most contemporary Western authors that we must change our minds and our lifestyle in order to save the planet.

Most recently, the novel of the West has been significantly enriched by the outstanding first novels of Asian Americans Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. Asian Americans have lived in the West since the California gold rush of 1849, and their experiences have been those of a minority excluded for decades from landownership and confined to Chinatowns. Their literary tradition has developed in stages similar to those marking the traditions of the region's other minorities. At first, like other minorities, Asians appeared in Anglo literature as stereotypes. Eventually, authors arose from among each ethnic group.

After World War II, Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart (1946) depicted Filipino immigrant workers, Toshio Mori's The Woman from Hiroshima (1980) told about Japanese American life -462- before World War II, and John Okada's No-No Boy (1957) portrayed a Japanese American who refused to be drafted. Tan and Kingston are the first Asian American novelists to achieve great popular and critical acclaim. Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989) consists of related stories and anecdotes told by different female characters who are all united by their Chinese background and by their membership in the same social club.

Usually classified as nonfiction but including many fictional elements, Kingston's Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1980) had earned for her recognition as "America's first major writer of Chinese ancestry." With Tripmaster Monkey (1989), Kingston established herself as one of the American West's leading novelists. Naming her 1960s protagonist Wittman Ah Sing (in a witty allusion to that most American of poets, Walt Whitman), Kingston tells the story of a young Chinese American college graduate who refuses to conform. Like Kesey's McMurphy, Wittman first clashes with authority, loses his job, then tries to set up a community within an advanced industrial system that splinters communities. Unlike McMurphy, Wittman has more than his natural intelligence upon which to rely. He also draws upon all he learned as an English major at UC Berkeley and all he knows about China's centuries-old cultural tradition.

During one of the novel's first scenes, Wittman reads out loud to fellow bus passengers, and he then imagines himself starting a tradition of such readings on all public transportation, leading "to a job as a reader riding the railroads throughout the West," regaling passengers with works by John Steinbeck, William Saroyan, Jack Kerouac, Mark Twain, John Muir, Jack London, Wallace Stegner, and John Fante. The world of Tripmaster Monkey consists not only of character and place but also of all that the main character reads and thinks. Kingston has said she will write a sequel depicting an older and more mature Wittman, so we may eventually see how the contemporary West looks to an Asian American who has learned from the past, his own as well as humanity's.

A century after the official closing of the frontier in 1890, the novel of the West needs that more mature vision promised by Kingston. Notwithstanding that need, the western part of the United States now has a rich and varied tradition of regional fiction. But because of its great variety, few generalizations can be made about that tra-463- dition. For example, Thomas Pynchon's long-awaited fourth novel, Vineland (1990), is set in the West, but the characters' minds seem more an amalgam of mass popular myths and stereotypes than individual perspectives shaped by a particular place. But if Lewis Thomas is right in saying that one of the ways by which we rapidly "transform ourselves" is by exchanging "codes disguised as art," it is worth noting that since the 1920s the West's best novelists have encouraged not only cultural relativism, tolerance, and magnanimity but also a deep respect for the earth and other living creatures. Encoded in the art of these Westerners is the message that if we are ever to live in harmony — if we are indeed to survive, if we are to avoid ecocide and nuclear annihilation — we must begin to respond to the novel of the West by transforming ourselves. And we must do so not only as individuals but as a society, whole and complete and with unyielding purpose.

James H. Maguire

-464-

Technology and the Novel

Engines and wheels were everywhere in Ezra Pound's 1910s, with the automobile ascendant, rail lines ubiquitous, and large-scale images of machinery available even to the most rural of Americans who subscribed to a monthly magazine like Harper's or got the Sears, Roebuck catalog. Yet Ezra Pound radically redefined the novel when he invoked the analogy of the machine. In effect, he removed the novel from its lineage in print texts. From the 1700s, as is well known, American writers had allied novels with established genres, including history (for example, James Fenimore Cooper's "Indian history"), moral philosophy (Charles Brockden Brown), romance (Nathaniel Hawthorne), biography (Herman Melville's Israel Potter [1855]) — all rubrics embedded in the tradition of print.

Invoking the machine, however, Pound disrupted that formulation in ways that invite inquiry. Shuttling the novel to a new rubric, one intended to seize the twentieth-century industrial moment and instate the prose fiction narrative in it, Pound assigned the novel a defamiliarizing relation to culture. He asserted that the novel could perform its traditional function — social disclosure — insofar as it met engineering standards.

Pound's statement, particular to the high modernism of the 1910s, additionally serves to focus the relation of the novel to technology throughout the history of the United States. In fact, his analogy assumes the "long foreground" of machine technology dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when industrialism brought into -465- visibility the machines and structures identifiable from their gear wheels, pulleys, belts, pistons, ball bearings, etc., which were displayed to the public on railroad passenger platforms and at expositions and amusement parks, not to mention the numerous woodcuts and etchings of machinery appearing weekly and monthly in the periodical press. But Pound's statement, bonding the novel to contemporary technology per se, also implies the extension of the technological relationship into futurity. It suggests a time line through modernism into the postmodern age of telecommunications, during which the novel has continued to evolve according to technological developments. In this sense, over some three centuries, fictional narrative carries forward — and is carried forward by — a dynamic range of technologies from the American hand ax of Daniel Boone to the computer simulation of the cybernetic age.

Technology, at least since the 1960s, has attracted the attention of students of the American novel, who have recognized opportunities for explication in its very artifactual state, its presence as part of the material culture. In the literary text, technology thus can be seen to function at a base level for verisimilitude, say, when late nineteenthcentury New York is materialized by the representation of elevated transit lines (in William Dean Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes [1890]), or when the United States of the 1970s is evoked in the presence of portable TVs (in Mona Simpson's Anywhere but Here [1987]). In this way, technology assists in furnishing the fictional world or in establishing shared assumptions between text and reader.

One step up, interpretively speaking, technology has been approached as a sign or symbol representationally revelatory of the culture, for instance, the ax in James Fenimore Cooper's The Chainbearer (1845), which exalts "the American axe [which] has made more real and lasting conquests than the sword of any warlike people," or Mark Twain's utilitarian machinery of the contemporary late nineteenth century, say, the armaments and bicycles in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). In fiction published one century after Connecticut Yankee, it is the electronic technology of television that can be recognized as a central subject matter, for instance, in Meg Wolitzer's This Is Your Life (1988), with television in limousine backseats, with wristwatch design like a TV screen, with a picture window-sized television. The dominant figure in Wolitzer is a -466- TV comedian, just as Twain's protagonist is a factory foreman. For purposes of social criticism, Twain's text exploits the arms factory as a comment on violence, just as Wolitzer's text exploits the TV sitcom to consider familial dysfunction.

Explicating technological signs and symbols in the American novel, scholar-critics have often proceeded to what seems the reasonable next step, namely, discerning the subject position taken toward the particular technology at hand, then generalizing about which attitudes toward technology prevail in the novel and constitute the presumptive views of the author. It might seem possible to say, for instance, that because John Dos Passos portrayed fatigued industrial assembly line workers as "gray shaking husks" and scorned popular, that is, hack, writers as daydream artists "feeding the machine like a girl in a sausage factory shoving hunks of meat into the hopper," then his novels The Big Money (1936) and Three Soldiers (1921) are antitechnological. Similarly, Melville can apparently be judged as hostile to industrial technology because his narrator, Ishmael, in the "Try-Works" chapter in Moby-Dick (1851), comments on the process of rendering whale oil: "the smoke is horrible to inhale," having "an unspeakable, wild Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres," then adds that "it smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit." These kinds of local passages can appear to be emblems of the whole, and readers, self-identified as humanists in an adversarial relation to technological values, have understandably inferred an intratextual hostility to technology in the American novel over the past two centuries.

From this late twentieth-century vantage point, however, with cultural studies revealing ways in which technology is but one part of a larger cultural process, it is possible to reconsider the relation of technology to the novel, in part by surveying the ideological role of technology in national narratives dating from the seventeenth century, and in addition by taking Pound's statement as a factual, not a metaphoric, one when considering the relation of fiction to technology of the twentieth century.

Not surprisingly, technology was integral with representations of the New World before it found expression in the American novel. Colonial New England writers had particular millennial motives to -467- privilege technological power in their writings, since they thought it a means of expediting the Christian Millennium. While the Puritan minister Increase Mather was denouncing "vain romances," meaning novels imported into the colonies, his Puritan cohort Edward Johnson, a Massachusetts town clerk and engineer, wrote The Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Saviour in New-England (1653), a historical narrative in which the Christian army, called to the New World, prepares for the Second Coming of Christ by carving farms and villages from the North American wilds. Technology — of carpentry, smithing, masonry, oenology, and every branch of artisanry — becomes the means for the development of the millennial New Earth prophesied in the New Testament Book of Revelation.

Narrative in the form of the epic poem continued in the Revolutionary and Early National periods to be invested with technological themes. Joel Barlow's Vision of Columbus (1787) and his subsequent revised version, The Columbiad (1806), both advanced the idea of an imminent secular millennium achievable via technology. Barlow's envisioned American empire encompasses the North and South American continents united in a vast transportation and communications network of engineers' flood-proofed rivers and canals, and to that end the poet formed a friendship with the inventor Robert Fulton, with whom he planned a collaborative poem, "The Canal: A Poem on the Application of Physical Science to Political Economy." The extant fragment of the uncompleted verse shows the heroic couplet pressed into the service of technological vision ("Canals careering climb your sunburnt hills,/ Vein the green slopes and strow their nurturing rills"). Barlow's narrative of American development is one in which "new engines" will enable limitless moral and material progress.

Texts like Johnson's and Barlow's augured the deployment of technology in prose fiction of the United States because they reveal the presumption that there is a national American story to narrate, and that the national narrative is largely enabled by technological impetus for environmental and sociocultural change.

And the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson so sustained that position that he, too, must be a part of any discussion of technology and the American novel. "Let every man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down -468- with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him" — this in Emerson's Self-Reliance (1841).

Emerson's position ramifies directly into the human relation to technology. For of course the relation of the individual to place is of paramount importance when one considers the prerogatives to shape and reshape the world, and to exercise the authority to assign meaning to the acts of formation and reformation of the material environment. The authority to act and to interpret is predicated on possession of self and of place. Emerson identifies the "man in the street [who] finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower…feels poor when he looks on [it]," and enjoins that man to "take possession."

In Emerson's view, the imagination in America is already fully participant in these very historical processes. In The Young American (1844), Emerson talks about "improvements" in America, waxing warm about the new America of internal improvements (surveying, planting, building the railroad, farming, etc.). Emerson's America is asserting itself "to the imagination of her children." Some of the statements in this essay are most familiar in Emerson, for example, "Railroad iron is a magician's rod" and "The land is the appointed remedy for whatever is false and fantastic in our culture." He writes, "This rage of road building is beneficent for America…not only is distance annihilated, but when, as now, the locomotive and the steamboat, like enormous shuttles, shoot every day across the thousand various threads of national descent and employment, and bind them fast in one web, an hourly assimilation goes forward."

Emerson, it is true, dismissed the Etzlers, as he called them, meaning the technocratic utopians like the German-born Johann A. Etzler, who in 1842 had published the first part of his The Paradise within the Reach of All Men, without Labour, by the Powers of Nature and Machinery, a text Henry David Thoreau criticized for its materialism and neglect of metaphysics. And yet, from the late twentieth-century vantage point, Emerson's position can be seen as that of the white imperialist, and self-evidently dangerous with its dual assurances of power and innocence. Technological modernization is open solely to white men as a birthright, virtually as a mandate insulated against error or any kind of transgressive act. "Every line of history inspires -469- a confidence that we shall not go far wrong," said Emerson, "that things mend." In affirming the progressive "hourly assimilation," Emerson does give credence to the intrinsic importance of the technological development of the North American continent in ways that ramify into the novel. He goes on, "I hasten to speak of the utility of these improvements for creating an American sentiment….railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water," and he praises engineering, architecture, and scientific agriculture.

Emerson thus continues and reaffirms American technology in the tradition established in the Colonial and Early Republican eras. Assuming the white American male to be the center of the universe, he celebrates the forces that would, in the twentieth century, become those of modernism. Emerson, in whom transcendentalism means the transcendence of history, nonetheless marks and legitimates the very civilizing processes that would appear in the two American novels most closely associated with technology, Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888). The railways and telegraph, telephone, bicycles, efficient factories, together with the versatility and resourcefulness and centrality of the engineer (whether Twain's Hank Morgan or Bellamy's unnamed research-and-development group) — these are put into place by Emerson precisely because he presumed that the young American possessed the continent. "Nature is the noblest engineer," he wrote, but the young American participates in nature, embodies it — and we remember Emerson's bitter lamentation about Henry David Thoreau, that he led a berry-picking party when he could have undertaken engineering for all America.

As for historical process, " America is the country of the future," proclaims Emerson, and the young (male) American participates in that destined future via democratizing trade, innovative governmental forms, and utilitarian reformation of the continental environment. The utilitarian reform is subsumed under the reassuring rubric of destiny. It is true that Emerson, as scholarship has shown, favors the pastoral ideal for American life. He complains that cities "drain the country of the best part of its population," and urges the formation of gardens over the entire North American continent. But the pastoralizing process is to be accomplished by ingenuity and the tech-470- nology it manifests. In Emerson, there is no fundamental antagonism between machine and garden. On the contrary, the machine is requisite to the garden. And the machine, which would become central to modernism, is privileged as an integral part of the vivified imagination.

This brief survey argues the need to reevaluate the ways in which technology has been understood in the literary tradition. The interpretation of the representation of machinery cannot confine itself to binary divisions for or against technology. Ideologically, it is the case that until the turn of the twentieth century, roughly the point at which Pound called the novel a machine, technology was deployed as a means by which to measure national aspirations and anxieties. Through the nineteenth century, machinery was present in the novel to test and measure sociocultural national status, especially in the realm of the ineffable, including such abstract ideals as liberty, justice, equality. Within the text, technology was the heuristic means by which to investigate the degree to which the nation was moving toward these ideals or regressing into such retrograde states as greed, violence, anarchy. Thus the Cooper who celebrated the hand ax as the tool of civilization also loathed the gun that was fired skyward, in Home as Found (1838), to decimate the pigeon flocks for a townspeople's momentary novelty. And the railroad in the corporatecapitalist era of Frank Norris's The Octopus (1901) becomes, not a transit system, but a plutocratic-oligarchic "ironhearted monster…its entrails gorged with the lifeblood of an entire commonwealth," while the mechanized meatpacking plant of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) proves so dangerous to its immigrant workers that it is represented as an industrial-age inferno. These pejorative representations of technology really indict the nation for heedlessness, squandering of resources, greed, indifference, and cruelty. They become quotidian symbols indicating sociocommunal failure.

It is the polar possibilities of technological utopianism and dystopianism, accordingly, that would recur virtually obsessively in nineteenth-century American novels. The social anxiety about human shortcomings haunts the novel of dystopia, while the potential for the attainment of social and national ideals proves irresistible to the utopian. At the former extreme lie such titles as P. W. Dooner's Last Days of the Republic (1880), The Fall of the Great Republic (1885), -471- by Sir Henry Standish Coverdale (a pseudonym), and Ignatius Donnelly's Caesar's Column (1889), a fascist technological nightmare of advanced weaponry turned against the American populace as a small band struggle for survival.

In this sense, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is also a dystopian text, and one worth review here precisely because it is the American novel most prominently associated with technology. Readers initially encounter the humor of anachronism as Mark Twain thrusts Hank Morgan, his practical, technologically sophisticated late nineteenth-century Yankee, into a twelfth-century Arthurian England mired in superstition (including that of the Church) and frozen in aristocratic hierarchy. We cheer as the Yankee engineers a new society based on technological efficiency and democratic values — then experience the anguish of the Church-State vendetta against Hank just at the point at which he is distracted, preoccupied, along with his wife, by the grave illness of his baby, Hello-Central (named, technologically, for a telephone exchange), whom, on doctors' advice, Hank and wife Sandy have taken to France, hoping that the better climate will "coax her back to health and strength again." But from the sickbed watch, the Morgans reenter the world only to find Hank's technocracy in shambles: the entire nation under a papal interdict, an ecclesiastical death sentence on his head. King Arthur is dead, the queen in a convent after a horrible internecine war. "Our navy had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared! Also just as suddenly and as mysteriously, the railway and telegraph and telephone service ceased, the men all deserted, poles were cut down, the Church laid a ban upon the electric light!" Hank's protégé, Clarence, has recruited fiftytwo loyalist boys, and thereupon Hank and Clarence make their plans for the war of modern technology against the benighted, this the horrific, climactic Battle of the Sand-Belt.

It seems altogether inevitable, this rush to technological armageddon. In a few strokes, Mark Twain has demolished the Yankee's England and, as if by predetermination, moved him into the rationalized madness and obsession with mechanized warfare and megadeaths. The passages of text that move us from Hank's departure from wife and baby into war plans with Gatling guns and mass electrocution seem, in fact, so seamless and inevitable, so much predestined (especially as readers begin to graph Hank's hankerings for -472- power and his violent impulses), so much a given in the story that one scarcely thinks to ask, Why not go back to France? Why not return, that is, to Sandy and the baby? — and therefore, on Twain's part, reclaim and reaffirm the most deeply felt and recurrently reinscribed values in the novel. For scenes of separated lovers and sundered families recur throughout A Connecticut Yankee and form its emotional center. The injustice of Arthurian England is personalized as injustice to human beings in their bonds of kinship and domesticity. The. model of and the ideal for human relationships in the novel are family bonds of love and enduring devotion, emphatically affirmed whenever threatened by mortal illness and the vagaries of politics and economics.

This ideal of familial love, moreover, has come to Hank Morgan in his marriage and fatherhood, as he tells us in recounting the very sequence of events that separates him from his wife and baby. Sandy is "a flawless wife and mother….a prize." Hank says, "I became her worshipper; and ours was the dearest and perfectest comradeship that ever was. People talk about beautiful friendships between two persons of the same sex. What is the best of that sort, as compared with the friendship of man and wife, where the best impulses and highest ideals of both are the same?"

Why not, then, return to France, seeing the shambles in England? (For Hank has realized that the "church was going to keep the upper hand and snuff out all my beautiful civilization…my dream of a republic to be a dream, and so remain.") Yet for him, as we have learned, another dream, that of familial bliss, has become a reality. And so — why not return?

Implicitly, of course, Twain has attempted to foreclose that possibility. The doctors who prescribed the journey for the baby's health, we learn — the very captain and crew in whose care the Morgans sailed — were agents of the church in service to the scheme for interdiction. Hereafter no site in Christendom is safe for the Yankee.

Yet what is significant here is the absence of the posed alternative, the posed consideration of domesticity affirmed in a return to Sandy and the baby. From his command post inside the magician's, Merlin's, cave, Hank tells us he could sit by the hour evoking a surrogate family scenario by writing the unmailable letters that enable him to -473- pretend to be in the midst of his loved ones. "It was almost like having us all together again….it was almost like talking; it was almost as if I was saying, ' Sandy, if you and Hello-Central were here in the cave, instead of your photographs.'" The husband-father summons them in self-referential narratives and in photographic signs but does not once consider slipping away (with or without Clarence and the fifty-two boys) to rejoin them. The Yankee does not pose the possibility of this alternative. Much less reject it, he does not bring it to conscious consideration.

In fact, Mark Twain's omission of this alternative — even of consideration of it — is deeply rooted in the technological eschatological tradition extending from Colonial texts through Emerson. For Mark Twain's decision in this novel to enter into the world of contemporary technology virtually precluded the domestic-familial alternative that, by the late nineteenth century, was identified with the women's sphere. In trying to claim both technological and domestic American culture within one realm, Twain inevitably discovered that he could not have both but must choose between them. The ostensible choice, however, had really been made for him, predetermined as a millennial-technological legacy extending from Puritan colonialism through Emerson. For Mark Twain's Yankee was Emerson's young American, a white man in and of the New World, in full possession of it. And that world is constituted on masculine terms of precise calibration in the survey, and of engineering, of construction, of design. When Twain's predetermined adherence to the masculine technological world leads him to take leave of domesticity, Hank Morgan becomes himself the incarnation of positivist, rationalist technological values gone mad. He becomes a deformed figure, monomaniacal and monstrous. Readers are caught in the Emersonian realm inverted into madness by this agent of holocaust. The national technological narrative thus takes dystopian form.

Contrarily, however, American utopian technological novels also have abounded, undergirded by belief in inevitable progress. Their advocates have believed in societal perfection attainable by changes in material conditions and focused on the heightening of the general welfare, which is to say that they rely on the expertise increasingly attributed to the engineer. These novels include King Camp Gillette's The Human Drift (1894), Henry Olerich's A Cityless and Countryless-474- World: An Outline of Practical Co-operative Individualism (1893), Herman Brinsmade's Utopia Achieved: A Novel of the Future (1912).

Though the gendering of technology as a mainly male sphere has militated against its exploitation by women in the American novel, one prominent women's technological utopia is feminist reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), which presents a women's civilization in a mountainous, remote region so difficult to reach that it has evaded discovery even in the great Victorian era of exploration. Herland, begun two thousand years ago with a slave revolt, is a civilization of "clean, well-built roads, attractive architecture, ordered beauty" hidden beyond "a desperate tangle of wood and water" over craggy mountains. Sustained by single-sex reproduction, Herland locates its ideological basis in maternal love ("Maternal Pantheism") and sisterhood extended for "Beauty, Health, Strength, Intellect, Goodness." Knowledge and expertise are shared and disseminated. Gilman's narrators, a group of male explorers, come technologically equipped with machinery from a "big steam yacht" to an airplane, to discover a world solely inhabited by women: "old women and young women and a great majority who seemed neither young nor old, but just women." Herland becomes Gilman's vehicle for criticism of contemporary industrial America, its barbaric exploitation of women workers, cruelty to animals, economic inequities, military aggression, separation of home from work. Herland's industrial attainments (including eugenics) are presupposed, though its readers encounter a discourse that is mainly pastoral, for example, of the babies growing "just as young fawns might grow up in dewy forest glades and brook-fed meadows." Herland propounds the values of a rationalized, egalitarian society asserted to be technologically advanced but pastoral in practice. Its geographic remoteness suggests Gilman's anxiety about masculine appropriation of women's sphere.

Sharing Gilman's outrage at the human misery concomitant with capitalist economics, Edward Bellamy wrote the best known of all American technological utopian novels, Looking Backward, 20001887. Bellamy, a newspaper journalist, determined to combine popular romance with a vision of the engineered, utopian American future. His protagonist, a Bostonian named Julian West, falls into a trance-sleep and awakens in the year 2000 to find that his late -475- nineteenth-century Boston, a synecdoche for the United States, no longer suffers from the socioeconomic instability that precipitates human tragedy — orphanage, destitution, crime, insanity, suicide. These he terms "prodigious wastes" that are susceptible to correction in the rationalized system of human planning and design. In short, Bellamy's protagonist awakes to learn that social amelioration has been accomplished by the engineering of society and its means of production. Certain inventions, such as radio, pneumatic transfer, central heat and ventilation, and electric lighting, increase human comfort and health and remind one that technology is a part of the discourse of this novel. But the ethos of the engineer is uppermost, with the valuation of efficiency and the means for its achievement. Looking Backward is a celebration of efficient America and of the engineers entrusted to plan and sustain it. It is a reprise of the millennialist technological visions extending back to the seventeenth century.

The reliance upon engineering enters into Ezra Pound's identification of the novel as an engine with precisely positioned wheels. His definition of the novel as machine shifts emphasis from story to functional design, from narration to construction. The values of modernism, as he and others knew, claimed kinship with those of engineering — functionalism, efficiency, stability, utilitarianism, design, and construction.

Nor was the linkage to engineering a recondite or high-culture relation, for early twentieth-century America saw the engineer become a popular culture hero for the industrial age, just as the cowboy had symbolized the era of westward expansion. Engineers, as one writer said, were now "true poets, makers whose creations touch the imagination and move the world." One manifestation of this socially broad-based engagement in engineering was the so-called efficiency movement of the 1910s, when one engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor, disgusted by the wasteful inefficiency of industrial work practices rife with superfluous movements, analyzed workers' motions down to the smallest components and, working with a stopwatch, reconstituted work motions into the most efficient patterns. He developed a "science" of efficient management and, as a result of a widely publicized court case, became a kind of media celebrity and initiated a Progressive Era national fad for efficiency, one that extended from high school curricula to home economics. Throughout American cul-476- ture, all the while, engineering was increasingly evident in bridges, tunnels, aquaducts, skyscrapers, and the figure of the engineer became the hero of boys' books, such as the Tom Swift series, of such toys as the Erector set, of best-selling novels like Richard Harding Davis's Soldiers of Fortune (1897), Rex Beach's The Iron Trail: An Alaskan Romance (1913), and Harold Bell Wright's The Winning of Barbara Worth (1911), which became a motion picture starring Ronald Colman. As Richard Harding Davis wrote, "The civil engineer…is the chief civilizer of our century."

Under the aegis of engineering, the American novel of the early twentieth century conceptually changed. The lineage of the narration yielded to one of construction, as such avant-garde novelists as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos reformulated the basis of the novel in accordance with the new paradigm of the engineered machine. Of course, readers, then as now, recognized certain traditional elements of the novel. Readers of Dos Passos's trilogy U.S.A. (The 42nd Parallel [1930,], 1919 [1932], The Big Money [1936]; collected 1937) encounter fictional characters whose lives can be followed throughout, just as Hemingway's In Our Time (1925) and The Sun Also Rises (1926) present the kinds of scenes and characterizations customary in fiction.

Yet the basis for novelistic design changes conceptually in the work of these two novelists, as the notion of fictional story yields to the engineering values of design and construction. The engineering value of efficiency, for instance, directly influenced Hemingway's much-discussed style. As a cub reporter on the Kansas City Star, he was tutored from a style sheet prepared at the height of the efficiency movement, its directives focused on short sentences and opening paragraphs, and on the elimination of adjectives. And one confronts that value in the opening pages of The Sun Also Rises, in which the narrator, Jake Barnes, repeatedly describes Robert Cohn in the adjective "nice." In college Cohn was "a thoroughly nice boy…a nice boy, a friendly boy…who married the first girl who was nice to him." Later, with the publication of Cohn's successful novel, says Jake, "several women were nice to him….and he was not so simple, and he was not so nice." One sees Hemingway wring multiple meanings from that one-syllable word, which ramifies to include purity, geniality, good manners, sexual favor, consideration for others — as if -477- Hemingway had moved resolutely through each dictionary definition for the one word. Like a fuel, the term "nice" is utilized and reutilized until it is exhausted, and this becomes Hemingway's efficiency of diction.

Far from being a mere word game, this kind of verbal economy meant power, and Hemingway's characteristic declarative sentences became the equivalent of the engineer's steel beams. The Hemingway style is essentially the twentieth-century, machine-age diction and syntax advocated in The Elements of Style (1959), the rhetoric book for college students coauthored by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White. White attributed the following statement from the year 1919 to his coauthor: "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts." Vigor was the goal, achieved by the work or functioning of every word, with each to be considered a working component of an overall design. Hemingway's fiction is the exemplum of industrial-age writing.

In Dos Passos, too, the novel itself becomes a designed construction. Committed to the representation of twentieth-century American life in its sociocultural entirety, resolved to incorporate the diverse elements of popular culture from music to diners to train travel and movies, insistent upon a vertical cutaway view of caste and class, and determined to work on a continental scale, Dos Passos needed an innovative model for fiction. Lacking belief in an omniscient deity and inhabiting a modern world he believed to be loosed from traditional bonds of kinship and community, Dos Passos nonetheless felt committed to the all-encompassing fictional purview, the very one traditionally in accordance with the omniscient viewpoint. Had he proceeded to cast his novels from techniques of narrative omniscience, however, he would have found himself in an untenable state of artistic hypocrisy.

It was in machine technology that Dos Passos discovered the path out of his representational quandary. He found the structural paradigm for fiction in the complex machine. Dos Passos's genius lay in grasping the paradigmatic possibilities for fiction as these were displayed in machine parts. Seeing that he, like the engineer, could combine these component parts into an overall complex design, Dos Pas-478- Dos Pas- realized the opportunities for a new kind of fiction. It could be likened, say, to the structure of the automobile, with its electrical system, cooling system, braking system, engine, etc. Dos Passos organized his materials accordingly, systematizing them in subsystems within his panoramic design. The subjective consciousness would be presented in sections entitled "The Camera Eye," while biographies of representative, prominent Americans constituted another system (the efficiency expert Frederick Taylor was one biographical subject, along with Henry Ford, the Wright brothers, the silent-film star Rudolph Valentino, the dancer Isadora Duncan, and numerous others). Dos Passos's fictional characters constituted yet another subsystem, all of them American social types, as if prefabricated parts in an off-the-shelf inventory of the national population. A fourth system, the "Newsreels," included popular songs and slogans, together with newspaper headlines Dos Passos clipped (again, with the precedent of the prefabricated part assembled on site) and formed into a montage intended to capture the temper of the time. All these were coordinated within the novel as a whole, the text in its entirety a complex machine.

Readers of Dos Passos learn virtually immediately that this writer found corporate capitalism and its vast industries anathema to human interests. He detested powerful organizations of the corporate state with a vehemence matched, say, by that revealed in Frank Norris's The Octopus. Dos Passos's hostility, for instance, toward the corporate titan Henry Ford is palpable and, together with the kinds of antitechnological imagery noted earlier in this discussion, would seem to locate the author of U.S.A. as a novelist locked in firm opposition to technology.

It is, however, in the structure of his texts that Dos Passos reveals his inadvertent compliance with the machine age, just as Hemingway's novel about American expatriates of the "lost generation" proves in its very sentence structure to be consonant with its industrial moment although it shows no more overt technology in the fictional scenes than a bus and a fly rod.

From these examples, in fact, it seems possible to hearken back to the mid-nineteenth century to ask whether Moby-Dick, whose author served a short stint in an engineering course, may have augured the industrial-age novel in ways we have failed to appreciate. Recent -479- work on the insurgence of an industrial economy in the midnineteenth-centuryUnited States has opened literary study to questions about the ways in which the canonical writers of the American Renaissance were participants in the newer means of production rapidly supplanting agriculture. It is possible now to notice that Melville's roll call of production workers on the whaleship compares them to "the engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and Railroads," and to speculate that Moby-Dick not only shows the factory ship processing whales into oil but also discloses the ways in which the literary raw material is processed into a finished product, a symbol. The cetological chapters, "Extracts," "Cetology," the chapters on representations of whales, become, in this light, the writer's raw material that he converts, in full view of the reader, into the literary symbol. Viewed in this way, it becomes clear once again that technology bears a very complicated relation to the novel and the novelist, that antitechnological discursive remarks and negative images cannot, by themselves, suffice to answer hard critical questions about the part technology plays in the American novel.

To discuss the relation of technology to the novel is to understand that in any given era there exists a dominant technology that defines or redefines the human role in relation to the environment, that within the span of some three centuries technological orientation has shifted from a technology of visible moving parts, which is to say the technology Pound understood as one of gears and girders, to an electrical technology of broadcast radio (which Stanley Elkin exploits in The Dick Gibson Show [1973]) and thence to the micro-circuitry in which the cathode-ray screen has instigated fictional innovation. Bearing in mind that the history of American fiction is correlative with the history of technological development, it is necessary to indicate the ways in which broadcast television is currently affecting the American novel.

The novel itself has taken up arms against television, notably in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1950), which pits a totalitarian television culture against one of books and learning, and more recently in John Gardner's October Light (1976), which again positions the book against TV. Still, a generation of younger writers have grown up with television and the cognitive processes characteristic of it. -480-

They reject the binary oppositional division between the worlds of television and literature. The narrator of a William Warner story remarks, without embarrassment, on "some writers first trained by reading Dickens or Fitzgerald. . others by watching TV." Warner and others reject the position that television is alien, even inimical, to the literary imagination. They simply refuse those terms of engagement and the hierarchy explicit in the terms. One recent novel, Jill McCorkle's The Cheer Leader (1984), presents at length the holistic relation of television and literary texts. It mixes the two freely, even promiscuously, to represent the contemporary consciousness of the writer, who reads Proust and Emily Dickinson but also watches sitcoms and reruns ("I Love Lucy," "Then Came Bronson") and plans to continue doing so in adult life.

The ways in which television affects the form of the novel in the 1980s and 1990s may be approached through theorists of the video medium, especially Raymond Williams, who in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974)cautioned that television reviewers were misguidedly, anachronistically operating like drama or film critics or book reviewers, approaching individual programs as "a discrete event or a succession of discrete events." Williams, the British Marxist social analyst with particular interests in the cultural institutions of print, had been a BBC television reviewer between 1968 and 1972, and he became convinced that forms of broadcasting in the TV age were altering perceptual processes. Prior to broadcasting, Williams observes, "the essential items were discrete. . people took a book or a pamphlet or a newspaper, went out to a play or a concert or a meeting or a match, with a single predominant expectation or attitude." The fundamental expectation was of a discrete program or entity.

But increasingly, Williams finds, in the era of television broadcasting the discrete program has yielded to a structure far more fluid. "There has been a significant shift from the concept of sequence as programming to the concept of sequence as flow." He goes on: "there is a quality of flow which our received vocabulary of discrete response and description cannot easily acknowledge."

Williams's identification of "flow" has proved a benchmark in differentiating the experience of broadcast television from other narrative forms. Conceding that vestigial elements of discrete programs -481- remain intact in the timed units of a "show," he argues nonetheless that the intervals between these units have disappeared. In American broadcast television the advertisements are incorporated into the whole, so that "what is being offered is not, in older terms, a programme of discrete units with particular insertions, but a planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of programme items but this sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence, so that these sequences together compose the real flow, the real 'broadcasting.'"

Turning to a group of writers cognitively informed by this kind of flow, writers who from childhood belonged to a world that has spent untold hours watching television, the analyst of televisual form can prove heuristically helpful. The concept of flow, applied to the TVage novel, can help us understand the new fictional structures that otherwise draw censure for their apparent defection from form itself. By implication, Williams and others enable readers to understand that the experience of flow, enacted cognitively in fiction, makes certain formal traits become virtually inevitable.

These will not be narratives of the beginning-middle-end structure. Flow enables entry at any point. The narrative of flow is continuous, open, apparently without end. Thus it is unsurprising that a school of novelists, including Ann Beattie and Bobbie Ann Mason, begin to "violate" a onetime cardinal rule of fiction writing, namely, that the principal fictional tense be the simple past. Instead, in the 1970s and 1980s, they began to cast narrative in the present tense, the tense that best enacts the experience of flow and the primacy of the present moment within it. The television-age novels, one is made to feel, could start anywhere. They are not a version of in medias res, a concept that presupposes the Aristotelian structure of beginningmiddle-end. They do not work to show symmetry and proportion. Ideas of the bounded text change in the television era, when the primacy of flow takes precedence. Fluidity supersedes boundary. Indeed, these texts do not begin, they simply start, as if turned on or come upon. And they can now exploit the accelerated flow of the channel-changing remote, as the African American novelist Trey Ellis does in his satirical Platitudes (1988), in which an entire chapter is structured according to a ten-second-interval change of channels through all cable stations. -482-

One TV characteristic dominates all others — the screen itself, by now so naturalized in the culture that it has become an environment susceptible to incorporation in the novel. And the contemporary fiction writer has been quick to exploit the potential of the TV screen for his or her own work. An onscreen moment represented in a novel can take the place of the excursion into characters' minds usually signaled by the speech tags "he thought," "she felt." It can supplant the often awkwardly triggered flashback into past events. The televised scene can reveal new dimensions of the fictional characters' lives directly in the moment, as Richard Ford shows in one scene in his novel The Sportswriter (1986), in which the protagonist and his girlfriend watch championship ice skating on TV, an occasion that ramifies to include the sportswriter's musings about his own life by interpreting the onscreen event. Ford's novel shows how the televised scene can reveal new dimensions of the fictional characters' lives directly in the moment. The screen becomes the locus of the bared psyche. If the onscreen images seem at first unrelated to the fictional scene in progress, readers must understand that the writer positions the two — the images onscreen and off — in a kind of fictional haiku, in which two seemingly unrelated sets of images are juxtaposed, the reader challenged to discover their apposition.

One additional TV-era trend is insurgent in recent fiction, that of the hyperreal or virtual reality. At this point we necessarily revert to Umberto Eco's paradox that says the "completely real" becomes identified with the "completely fake." This is the realm also addressed by the French anthropologist Jean Baudrillard, who argues that categories like real/unreal, authenticity/imitation, firsthand/ vicarious, and actual/illusory are now superannuated, persisting in our discourse because we invoke them from unexamined convictions inherited from a previous age. These categories, Baudrillard says, no longer pertain to the condition of things in a media age. Even such terms as imitation or reduplication are now beside the point, he says, are in fact invalid. Baudrillard writes: "It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself. . simulation is. . the generation of models of a real without origin or territory: a hyperreal." And the contemporary American novel participates in that hyperreal, one case in point being Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My-483- Gastroenterologist (1990), a blatantly hyperreal fiction self-evidently indebted to TV:

Disjunctive, flaunting discontinuity and simulation, this kind of writing evidently finds an audience who welcome the print text that can ratify their TV-age cognitive reality. This is the simulation of the hologram, the 3-D instead of the fully dimensional. This kind of technological trend will probably continue in the American novel as the computer screen merges with the TV screen and the simulated space of cyberpunk fiction, formerly engaging principally to a coterie of computer amateurs, becomes more culturally widespread. In due course, finally, a generation growing up with the video game will doubtless take its turn in the innovation of the American novel.

Cecelia Tichi

— 484-

Society and Identity

Between the violence of World War II and Vietnam lay the relative calm called the American 1950s. The period is not popular with modern critics. From our current vantage, the postwar generation seems most notable for its isolationism, consumerism, conformity, and apathy. The rise of competitive individualism may have been a natural reaction against the compulsory cooperation of the New Deal and war years. It may have been a response to the evolving socioeconomic structure of a postindustrial culture, as detailed in such contemporary classics of sociology as David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (1956), and C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite (1956). Or it may have been psychological fallout from advances in technology, as argued in such popular accounts as Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd (1960) and Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962). Yet whatever the sources of fifties alienation, we tend today to remember the age of Eisenhower as repressive and anaesthetized — the generation of the Mouseketeers and "Leave It to Beaver."

Most representative of the new conservatism of the postwar period were the collapse of radical politics and the reentrenchment of gender stereotypes. Throughout the first half of the century there had been strong support for various forms of socialism in America, and intellectualism and Marxism often went hand in hand. During the war, the intellectual support for Marxism and for Russian Communism was reinforced by the United States military alliance with the -485- Soviet Union against fascism. But in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a political disaffection with the Communist Party that had been growing since the late 1930s reached a head. In The God That Failed (1949) a number of influential intellectuals and literary figures announced their rejection of the socialist principles they had earlier espoused. This early disaffection turned into a wholesale exodus from the Party when in the mid-1950s the excesses of Stalinist persecution were publicly revealed. Contemporaneous with the defection of Party members was the rise in national influence of the anti-Communist movement, climaxing with the ascendancy of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the first half of the decade. The climate of betrayal and recrimination that characterized the HUAC hearings, and more covertly discriminatory practices like blacklisting, reinforced the general paranoia of the Cold War and the age's retreat into a politics of naive pro-Americanism.

Equally distressing were the losses in the movement toward women's rights. The first quarter of the century saw a slow but steady growth in equality between the sexes, largely focused on the issue of the vote. The war accelerated these advances by opening job opportunities for women. With the men called overseas, women were actively recruited to take their places on the job market, especially in munitions factories. At the war's end, however, women were forced out of their jobs to free positions for returning veterans. With this shift in economics came a shift in gender propaganda. During the war "Rosie the Riveter" was a widely touted model for women's role in the defense effort. In the postwar period, however, the model reverted to the more traditional one of the housewife. Manual labor in particular was deemed unfeminine, a threat to women's supposedly delicate physiologies and to their domestic duties as mothers. Even those women not literally ousted from their wartime positions found the sudden redefinition of female excellence disorienting. This attempt to reinstitute the discarded cult of domesticity resulted in the creation of what Betty Friedan in 1963 called "the feminine mystique," a sociopsychological theory constructed to protect male access to power by restricting women's place to the home.

The conservative tone in politics and gender stereotyping was reinforced by the individualistic bias of the age's dominant intellectual -486- trends. Existentialism defined the generation's conception of self and society. Rebelling against traditional notions of authority, dogma, and political ideology, the existentialists spoke instead of an individual's "being" in or "engagement" with the world, in such European works of philosophy as Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) and Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943). As a philosophical movement, existentialism critiqued the falsely scientific tone of certain analytic schools of thought and rejected metaphysicians' pursuit of foundational truths. When translated into a popular idiom, however, the philosophy tended to encourage individual selfabsorption over social involvement. What began as an attempt to explain and overcome the absurdity of modern life at times seemed to support and celebrate it. Alienation became not a symptom of the general malaise but a mark of one's superiority to the conformist mentality of the masses.

A similar devaluation attended the popularization of the age's other great school of thought — the psychoanalytic movement, most closely associated with Sigmund Freud. Freud's insights into the unconscious and the anxieties attending creativity and sexual maturation were among the central enabling insights of modern culture. Yet the general conclusions drawn from his theories (frequently without close examination of the actual texts) often moved in directions antithetical to Freud's own. Slavish adherence to the specifics of any theory tends of course to distort its underlying truths. In the case of psychoanalysis, such distortions were intensified by its therapeutic dimension. In treating psychological abnormality, postwar therapists unintentionally supported the age's "idolatry of the normal" — its fanatical pursuit of uniformity. Psychoanalytic practitioners were not always sensitized to problems of economic or social inequity. As a medical treatment available primarily to the wealthy, analysis tended to reinforce class distinctions. The psychiatric characterizations of certain group-specific problems — like "housewife syndrome" or "homosexual panic" — did not overcome the culture's discriminatory practices; they internalized them. Even apart from the excesses of specific postwar formulations, the preoccupation of psychoanalysis with the individual and the internal may have reinforced the age's more general tendency to divorce questions of personality from those of history and politics. -487-

The conservative character of society and thought was echoed in the academic community, especially in its conception of literary value. Truth was thought to be universal, the essential core that remained after the layers of cultural particularity were peeled away. Historians like Richard Hofstadter and Clinton Rossiter saw this universality in terms of "consensus," an optimistic vision of nationally shared goals. Literary scholars tended to speak more generally about "reality," "culture," or "tradition." Such accounts as The Great Tradition (1948) of British scholar F. R. Leavis or The Liberal Imagination (1950) of American Lionel Trilling located excellence in moral realism, a neo-Arnoldian concern with stylistic and psychological richness that implicitly rejected the ideological criticism of the 1940s.

This general turn from politics was institutionalized in America in the school of New Criticism. Combining political conservatism with nostalgic agrarianism, the New Critics emphasized the separation between the social and the literary. Developing ideas implicit in earlier theories of T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and E. M. Forster, such critics as John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks saw literature as different in kind from scientific writing. Literary language was a multilayered one of paradox and ambiguity, more concerned with connotation than denotation. Literature, the New Critics argued, was eternal, to be studied apart from the social conditions and even authorial sensibilities that created it. Although the main focus of such criticism was on poetry and the English literary tradition, the influence of the New Critics on all scholarship of the postwar period cannot be overestimated. New critical values informed literary history, in René Wellek's famous distinction between the "intrinsic" and "extrinsic" characteristics of a text. In Americanist scholarship, New Criticism surfaced in the repeated claim that American literature was more romantic and less socially engaged than its European counterpart. American authors effected, in Richard Poirier's seminal phrase, a stylistic escape to "a world elsewhere."

The explicit ahistoricism and apoliticism of the New Critics was matched less obviously in the development of a new interdisciplinary study of Americanness. American literature had begun to be an object of scholarly work as early as the 1920s. Departments and programs in American literature were widely instituted in the academy in the 1930s and 1940s. After the war, however, the study of Americanness -488- began to cross departmental boundaries, especially those between literature and history — in such works as Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land (1950), R. W. B. Lewis's The American Adam (1955), and Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden (1964). The purpose of these and other works in the developing field of "American Studies" was to overturn (New Critical) standards of literary excellence, which judged American works linguistically unsophisticated. Such scholars argued instead for the historical importance and imaginative power of the myths that organized supposedly "unliterary" texts. In their willingness to mix history and literary analysis, and to break down the artificial barriers departmentalizing thought in the university, the proponents of American Studies were clearly involved in politicizing postwar aesthetic paradigms, and even in restructuring the academy. Yet in its concern with overarching symbols and its preoccupation with a uniquely "American" experience — which, as always in the 1950s, took the United States to represent all the Americas — American Studies itself reflected as well the homogenizing and isolationist tendencies of culture in the 1950s.

Novelists reaching their intellectual maturity in the postwar period, then, faced a culture (and literary establishment) not predisposed to consider the novel as a product of social conditions, let alone as an instrument for social change. The tradition of socialist literature that had flourished during the previous two decades — and acclaimed the writing of Richard Wright, John Steinbeck, and John Dos Passos, among others — did not survive the anti-Communism of the 1950s. Freudianism and existentialism recognized the importance of human agency, but conceptualized that agency as individual activity, being more skeptical about the possibility of large-scale social reform. And the prevailing standards of literary excellence reinforced this individualism by emphasizing the stylistic and psychological subtlety of texts over their narrative scope, thematic significance, or variety of characterization.

As a result, much literature of the postwar period intentionally minimized its social situation, aspiring instead to the kind of timeless universality applauded by the New Critics. Even those authors who saw themselves as social critics had to confront an essential paradox of postwar individualism — the conflict between the private demands -489- of self-realization and the public ones of group activity. One species of "problem" novel tended to isolate a social issue and solve it through the efforts of enlightened individuals. The role of institutions in maintaining and even aggravating the problem remained largely unexamined; their potential for alleviating it, wholly unexplored. Laura Z. Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement (1947), for example, exposed the conspiracy of silence surrounding anti-Semitism, but trusted that right-minded liberals would be able to teach the masses to abandon their discriminatory practices. In The Ugly American (1958), authors William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick criticized the failure of American foreign policy in Southeast Asia to consider the character and needs of the cultures it addressed. Yet even this fierce attack on American ethnocentrism conceived the solution in terms of isolated achievements by empathetic field workers, much along the lines later implemented in John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps.

Often this paradoxical faith in the individual was epitomized by the representation of the judicial system, whose practices were depicted as inadequate, even corrupt, while its practitioners were celebrated as moral exemplars. Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny (1951) and Robert Traver's (John D. Voelker's) Anatomy of a Murder (1958) both recounted the trials of morally suspect defendants, whose acquittals were in some respects legal miscarriages; yet both applauded the verdicts as indications of the defense attorneys' moral superiority. Similarly the upbeat ending to Allen Drury's Advise and Consent (1959) contradicted the novel's more generally negative assessment of legislative amorality: the seediness of the backroom politics surrounding the Congressional ratification of a mediocre Cabinet nomination was transcended in the miraculous last-minute appointment of a qualified candidate. Harper Lee's prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) dissected Southern racism in a richly textured variation on the traditional coming-of-age novel. Yet here too the narrative subordinated the inequities of the legal system and the malignity of community prejudice to the moral integrity of the heroine's father, the courageous (though unsuccessful) defense attorney, and to his belief that most people are "real nice" when viewed on their own terms.

Tensions between radical individualism and group morality were occasionally played out in an explicitly religious context. Both J. F. -490- and Flannery O'Connor were best known for their short fiction. Like their stories, however, their novels — his Morte d'Urban (1962) and Wheat That Springeth Green (1988) and her Wise Blood (1952) — set individual idiosyncrasies against an unironic background of Catholic orthodoxy: Powers's worldly priests and O'Connor's gothic grotesques found meaning in a potential for grace and moral depth that caught them unawares. And in Walker Percy's string of comic novels — most notably The Moviegoer (1961), The Last Gentleman (1966), Love in the Ruins (1972), and The Second Coming (1980) — his heroes confronted existential dread and entertained annihilation only to pull back from the abyss to reaffirm the traditional values of Christian community as epitomized by marriage and the nuclear family. Whatever the nature of their specific social criticisms, such religious works tended to an otherworldliness that unintentionally reinforced the status quo.

For those dissatisfied with religious consolations, existentialism offered a popular secular model for engagement with and revolt against social convention. One common form of such rebellion grew out of novelists' attempts to deal with the experience of World War II. In the traditional neorealist war novel, like James Jones's From Here to Eternity (1951), the conflict between personal authenticity and the army's need for conformity was reinforced by the contrast between the everyday tedium of military life and extraordinary events, like the attack on Pearl Harbor, from which an official history of war is constructed. In a more experimental text, like Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961), the struggle between individualism and authoritarianism was depicted through hyperbolic black comedy, which used military incompetence as a symbol for the absurdity of all modern existence. Despite differing literary techniques, however, at the heart of such narratives lay a fundamental contradiction: the war whose very existence was explicitly criticized as a failure of political community was implicitly valorized as a proving ground for individual integrity, usually conceived in narrowly masculine terms.

The anxiety fostered under fire continued into the postwar period as a more general uncertainty in the face of shifting moral values. Removed from his military battleground, the existential hero in the 1950s warred against society in general. Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky (1949) combined a Hemingwayesque narrative of expatriates in -491- Africa with a New Critical awareness of the poetic qualities of prose to characterize crises of self-identity resulting from the confrontation with an alien culture. In Bernard Malamud's early novel The Natural (1952) and Mark Harris's chronicles of pitcher Henry Wiggen — especially The Southpaw (1953) and Bang the Drum Slowly (1956) — the national pastime of baseball became a metaphor for American society and for the difficulty with which an individual accommodates his own moral standards to the needs of the team.

Most representative of the virtues and limitations of such popularized existentialism, however, were the works of J. D. Salinger — Franny and Zooey (1961), Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1963), Seymour: An Introduction (1963), and the extraordinarily successful The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Through the Glass children and especially Holden Caulfield, Salinger captured the voice of adolescent anxiety; and Holden, along with film characters portrayed by James Dean and Marlon Brando, came to symbolize the disorientation of a generation searching for authenticity in a culture deemed (by Holden's dismissive reckoning) "phony." Yet Salinger's own solutions to alienation were incomplete. Holden's youth might excuse the sentimentality of the novel's depiction of him as a twentieth-century Huck Finn. Yet the suicide of the more mature Seymour Glass, and perhaps even Salinger's own refusal to publish after the mid-1960s, suggested that the elevation of the individual over society did not lead to a constructive program for growth or change.

A more influential model for rebellion was seen in the work of the "Beats," antiestablishment poets and novelists of the late 1950s and early 1960s. These countercultural figures were revolutionary not only in their personal philosophy and politics but as well in their prose style and means of publication. Eschewing the rule-bound traditionalism represented by Lionel Trilling or The New Yorker, the Beats sought to convey the transcendental experience of grace in an unrestrained prose that seemed unpolished, even automatic. Such underground classics as John Clellon Holmes's Go (1952), John Rechy's City of Night (1963), and Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) celebrated bohemian culture — jazz music, recreational drugs, and unconventional sexuality — as an alternative to the institutionalized mediocrity of middle-class experience. The greatest of these -492- novels — like William Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) and especially Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) — combined unusual subject matter with an incantatory use of language that recalled the prophetic cadences of Walt Whitman and the Puritan jeremiads. Yet for all their revolutionary fervor, the Beats were unable to overcome fully their white middle-class roots, which surfaced in an implicit classism, racism, and sexism that weakened even the strongest of these narratives.

The stylistic innovations and political rebelliousness of the Beats were reincorporated into establishment fiction in novels like Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) or Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers (1974). But perhaps the best summary of the whole tradition of postwar individualism was the career of Norman Mailer. Like Jones, Mailer began in a neorealist mode, with his war novel The Naked and the Dead (1948). He soon, however, forsook the literary mainstream to become a spokesperson for the counterculture. In his essay The White Negro (1957; reprinted in 1959 in Advertisements for Myself), he celebrated the beatniks as "hipsters," whose life on the existential edge approached the degree of authenticity that Mailer (with little racial sensitivity) thought "natural" to African Americans. Mailer compounded the error of his racial primitivism in An American Dream (1965), where a white male's search for personal integrity seemed to depend on his sexual violence against women. Mailer finally acknowledged the limitations of radical individualism in his masterpiece, The Armies of the Night (1968). Here, combining the techniques of nonfiction and the novel, he satirized his own persona as existential hero to suggest that although true political activism might arise in conjunction with individual rebellion, it could never result from it.

In voicing reservations about postwar conformity and the attendant loss in moral intensity, the literature of individual rebellion stood as one of the few audible protests from a generation otherwise preoccupied with maintaining the status quo. Its fervor carried over into the more radical decades that followed, and figures like Kerouac, Kesey, and Mailer were hailed as precursors and mentors by the youthful rebels of the late 1960s. Yet the very individualism of this critique worked against its ability to translate intellectual rebellion -493- into practical reform. The existential hero confronted his fate alone, and discontent was expressed not through revolution but through transcendence and acceptance.

A more wide-ranging social change was effected, ironically, in narratives superficially more traditional. Throughout the postwar years appeared what might be called "novels of identity," works that explored the new conditions of modern life. These novels were not always politically self-conscious or even technically sophisticated. By shaping its audience, this literature functioned as an agent of social control, reconciling its readers to the oppressive stereotypes of the age's political and sexual conservatism. Yet for all their traditional character, these works played as well an important transitional role in the literature of social change. In speaking to an audience already established but as yet unrepresented, even the most conventional of these accounts were liberating. Through their concern with the particularity of cultural experience they introduced into the novel facts and scenes that had not before been deemed sufficiently important for literary treatment. The interests of specific minority groups became acceptable subject matter for fiction, and the environments of the home and the workplace received more attention than they had since the mid-nineteenth century. But most simply, in writing on such special concerns, this literature fostered a sense of group identity, a spirit of community lacking in the more individualistic novels of rebellion. And the rebirth of group identity begun in these novels paved the way for the possibility of group activity that characterized later decades.

The most sophisticated novels of identity were the works dealing with problems specific to a particular race or ethnicity. All minority writers confront the debate between particularity and universality. Postwar critics, however, tended to judge work focused on a single cultural group as too narrow to embody general human truths or values. This conservative aesthetic evaluation had its practical side as well. Minority writers addressing the widest audience often had to compromise the very subcultural specificity they sought to portray, while those attending closely to the details of community existence confused (even lost) many readers unfamiliar with these cultural traditions. Political considerations as well governed the narratives. Within minorities, it was hotly debated how much the general readership should be told about the community, and particularly how -494- much of their people's flaws should be paraded before an audience not predisposed to admiration. Those fearing that accurate representation would reinforce stereotypes urged writers not to wash the community's dirty linen in public. Even so apparently sympathetic a literary device as the imitation of speech patterns through dialect could be read by insensitive readers as a mark of a group's ignorance and inferiority.

Such debates were less pronounced in those works, like the African American and the Jewish American novels, that built on longestablished literary traditions. Yet here too authors made their peace with the universalizing literary standards of the time. African Americans had to confront the powerful but problematic influence of their immediate predecessor Richard Wright, whose best-selling Native Son (1940) was both the most celebrated black novel of the age and the one least likely to appeal to New Critical sensibilities. Ralph Ellison met the challenge with his prize-winning Invisible Man (1952), a novel as ambiguous and verbally inventive as Wright's is direct and visceral. Arguably the finest American novel of the postwar period, and certainly one of the most technically accomplished, Invisible Man followed an unnamed protagonist's picaresque search for identity in a racist culture with a symbolic intensity recalling the best work of Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Conrad, Dostoevsky, and Dante. Even as he annexed the techniques of modernism to the African American literary tradition, Ellison never lost sight of the political underpinnings of his racial protest. Yet the very range of his literary references allowed readers to distance themselves from that critique and to admire the poetic qualities of the narrative apart from the political project that underwrote it. Unlike Wright's polemic, Ellison's multifaceted representation of the African American experience inspired in its white audience admiration and even guilt, but never fear.

Other writers responded differently to the conflicting demands of their white readership and of the post-Wright literary tradition. Chester Himes began very much in imitation of Wright, with his protest novel If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945). Yet in such later works as The Real Cool Killers (1959), Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965), and The Heat's On (1966), Himes adapted accurate and brutal depictions of the Harlem community to the generic conventions of the hard-495- boiled detective novel of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Such African American "mysteries" allowed him to portray negative aspects of uptown culture without charges of racism; the detective story had since Poe been preoccupied with the lurid. Moreover, the popularity of detective fiction afforded Himes an audience that might not otherwise have been attracted to so un-universal a depiction of a minority subculture.

James Baldwin, like Himes, wrote primarily in a neorealist mode. Yet Baldwin's identification of an audience was complicated by his doubly disenfranchised status as a black homosexual. Early in his career he addressed these issues separately. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), dealt exclusively with familial strife within the context of black pentecostal preaching. His second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956), examined white expatriates in the gay subculture of Paris, in imitation of the "lost generation" motif of Hemingway and, to a lesser extent, of Wright and Himes. Later works — especially Another Country (1962) and his final novel, Just Above My Head (1979) — treated more ecumenically the pressures that generated both racism and homophobia. Adopting the prose rhythms of the Beats to characterize the variety of bohemian experience, Baldwin presented differences of race and sexual preference as forms of a more general cultural alienation that he sought to overcome. The assimilationist urge that in Ellison occasionally resulted in a tension between style and content surfaced at times in Baldwin as a contradictory advocacy for racial separatism and universalizing love.

The postwar novels of African American women seemed not so informed by the conflicting demands of black politics and white readers. Although favorably reviewed, their work was less well marketed and, after a first flurry of sales, frequently passed out of print, only to be republished in the feminist revival of the late 1970s and 1980s. This relatively slim chance of commercial success may ironically have afforded female writers greater freedom of expression; denied a wide audience, they escaped the concomitant fears of inaccessibility and overparticularity. Ann Petry's The Street (1946) depicted ghetto experience in terms of a naturalist determinism recalling Native Son. Yet despite the novel's apparently neorealist account of the environmental factors leading inevitably to murder, Petry did not reproduce in her heroine the individualist search for identity characteristic of -496- male authors like Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin. Instead she presented, in chapters largely constructed out of interior monologues, fully realized members of a community, seeking for the practical means to achieve their already well-defined goals.

Although lacking the sociological detail of Petry's novels, Maud Martha (1953), the sole novel of poet Gwendolyn Brooks, developed further the interior life of its protagonist. As critic Mary Helen Washington has remarked, the novel's very structural innovations — its brief chapters, discontinuous narrative, and elliptical prose — imitated structurally the silencing that Maud Martha experienced sociologically, and that previous authors had represented thematically. Responding explicitly to the richness of Maud Martha's consciousness, Paule Marshall in her Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) combined Brooks's psychological subtlety with Petry's sense of place to depict the coming-of-age of a Barbadian woman in Brooklyn. Her characterization of the West Indians' aspirations to middle-class status, epitomized in the ownership of house and land, distinguished her work from the customary focus on ghetto experience. Yet the very particularity of her interests permitted Marshall to introduce into that tradition a cultural specificity and density less evident in the more universalizing work of the males.

The same conflicts between the universal and the particular informed postwar Jewish American fiction. Many writers, like Heller, Mailer, and Salinger, worked within this tradition only implicitly, borrowing elements of Jewish intellectual life (especially its sardonic humor) without attention to their cultural origins. Those writers selfconsciously examining Jewish life in America faced specific problems of audience and accommodation. Among Jewish American writers Saul Bellow stood, like Ellison among African Americans, as the novelist most interested in representing his cultural tradition through the literary conventions of modernism and the American faith in liberal humanism. In a large body of work from the early picaresque The Adventures of Augie March (1953) through the valedictory Humboldt's Gift (1975), Bellow explored the tensions between individual self-expression and social responsibility, often focusing on a hyperbolic Emersonian individualist at odds with his environment. Yet Bellow was not always able to balance ethnic themes with a more universalizing humanism. In his most powerful novels — like Seize the-497- Day (1956), Herzog (1964), and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) — philosophical debate took place within the carefully delineated context of Jewish culture in America. In others, like Henderson the Rain King (1959), the range of address became so broad and the issues so cosmic that the narrative fell victim to the very cultural imperialism and tourism it critiqued.

If Bellow rehearsed humanist issues for the widest possible audience, other writers limited their focus (and readership) to allow for greater cultural particularity. Isaac Bashevis Singer's decision to publish both his stories and novels in Yiddish made unlikely any widescale commercial success. Yet by narrowing his audience, Singer was able — in such novels as The Family Moskat (1945-48) and Enemies: A Love Story (1966) — to draw extensively on the historical, religious, and folk traditions of East European Jewry, material alien to a general readership in postwar America. The position of Bernard Malamud was more vexing; he was pronounced both the least "Jewish" writer of the postwar period and the most. Not all his work had Jewish themes or even characters, although the mature novels — especially The Fixer (1966) and The Tenants (1971) — located the narrative within specific sociological and historical situations. Some readers regretted his tendency to reduce Jewishness to passivity and victimization. Yet in its flirtations with the supernatural, its dark vision of the redemptive dimensions of suffering, and perhaps even its late preference for the actual over the mythic, his work embedded characteristics of Jewish American culture deep in narratives whose focus was superficially universal.

In the controversial work of Philip Roth the Jewish American novel reached a turning point, both for its pursuit of universalizing truths and for its representation of the subculture. A generation younger than Bellow or Malamud and less aligned with modernism than with the experimental techniques of postmodernism, Roth rejected the older writers' attempts to filter general issues of high moral seriousness through the lens of Jewish culture. He focused instead on phenomena specific to the culture, especially its particular problems with familial strife and upward mobility. In early works like Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and the notorious Portnoy's Complaint (1969), his negative evaluations were read as a form of Jewish antiSemitism. As reformulated in the later, self-reflexive Zuckerman -498- saga — The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983); collected with the epilogue The Prague Orgy as Zuckerman Bound (1985) — these criticisms juxtaposed the limitations of middle-class Jewish American experience against the thorniest characteristics of Freud, Kafka, and the Holocaust writers to offer a broader (and finally more positive) account of his cultural inheritance.

The debates within the traditions of African American and Jewish American literature were comparatively sophisticated. For less established ethnic literatures, the problems were the more preliminary ones of finding publishers and an audience. The autobiographical character of previous Asian American literature reflected its readers' need to imagine Asians as isolated individuals within American culture. In the postwar years fictional representations of a more complex communal experience began to appear, perhaps in response to soldiers' growing interest in these cultures encountered during the war. As a result of Chinese war efforts against Japan, Chinese American authors were given greater freedom of expression. Yet what these novelists could say was limited by the preconceptions of their audience. The most popular novels, like Lin Yutang's Chinatown Family (1948), viewed Chinese society with anthropological remoteness and condescension. Names were Anglicized and cultural traditions stigmatized as "charming" and "exotic." Anti-Communist and assimilationist, such accounts celebrated America as a land of economic opportunity and minimized problems of employment, racial discrimination, and social readjustment. Not until Louis Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961) did a book address the psychological and sociological implications of ghettoization and immigration quotas. The first accurate account of the Chinese American community, Chu's exploration of marital problems resulting from the "bachelor" society in New York's predominantly male Chinatown received poor reviews and passed silently from sight until its reprinting in 1979.

Although before the war Japanese American writers were more prolific than Chinese Americans, anti-Japanese feeling severely limited their audience throughout the 1950s. Familiar problems of assimilation — often represented through the generational conflict between foreign-born issei and their American-born nisei children —499- were intensified during the war by the internment of Japanese Americans, a policy that disrupted community structures and made ethnic identification a public issue rather than a personal one. Scheduled for publication in 1941, Toshio Mori's Yokohama, California did not appear until well after the war in 1949. Despite good reviews this collection of interconnected stories depicting a Bay Area community was even then commercially unsuccessful, and some of Mori's novels still remain unpublished. John Okada powerfully portrayed the aftermath of internment, imprisonment, and ambiguous wartime patriotism in No-No Boy (1957). Yet his grippingly honest account of strife within the postwar community was treated harshly by critics and his remaining unpublished manuscripts were destroyed after his death in 1971. Only since the novel's republication in 1976 has he begun to receive the critical attention he deserved.

In such a climate of surveillance and implicit censorship, Asian American writers in the postwar period still managed to offer significant critiques of American cultural imperialism. Even the most accommodating accounts asserted the literary value of ethnic materials, educating Anglo audiences and reinforcing in Asians a sense of group identity and pride. C. Y. (Chin Yang) Lee's popular The Flower Drum Song (1957) exoticized San Francisco's Chinatown in a way that modern readers find offensive. Yet the novel's apparent proAmericanism was subtly undermined by its oblique references to the problems of bachelor society and its use of generational conflict to characterize the cultural sacrifices attending assimilation. Similarly, despite its tone of passive acceptance, Monica Sone's autobiography Nisei Daughter (1953) actually inverted the traditional themes and structure of the second-generation narrative of assimilation, established in Jade Snow Wong's more conventional Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950). By detailing her discovery of a racial identity in the very process of repressing it, Sone turned an apparently upbeat account of Americanization into a mournful record of the destruction of the Japanese American community, symbolized by the narrative's progression from the opening hospitality of her parents' hotel to the final isolation of the camps.

Like other minority writers, Mexican American authors experienced problems with publication and audience. Not until the formation of the Quinto Sol publishing house in 1967 did authors have a -500- means of addressing directly readers knowledgeable about and sympathetic to their culture. During the postwar period, most found it easier to place short stories than novels. Focused on the Mexican experience, Josephina Niggli's Mexican Village (1945) intertwined ten stories about a small community to depict her American-born hero's attempt to integrate himself into this culture without losing his American qualities, especially his individualism and skepticism. The strengths of the work lay in its combination of a romantic depiction of the folk traditions with a realist recognition of the sociological limitations of the community, especially its racism and sexism. Mario Suarez examined with power and dignity the "Chicano" experience in a series of short stories. The sole Chicano novel of the period, José Antonio Villarreal's Pocho (1959), sympathetically portrayed the sacrifices necessary for cultural assimilation. Yet, to win an Anglo audience, Villarreal felt the need for extensive explication and a final rejection of Chicano culture. As a result Pocho, like the more assimilationist of Asian American novels, seems today a necessary but preliminary stage in the delineation of Chicano experience.

In the postwar period, gay men and women did not experience social and economic discrimination so directly as other persecuted groups. Those gay men willing to mask their sexuality, in fact, were afforded relatively complete access to traditional forms of male power. At the same time, however, homosexual behavior was officially deemed pathological by the religious, legal, and medical establishments. In the popular imagination sexual preference was lumped with other forms of social and political deviance as threats to the national security. Literary treatments of sexuality, like all public expressions on the topic, were carefully regulated. Lesbian fiction had enjoyed a renaissance in the first half of the century, in such high modernist classics as Gertrude Stein's Three Lives (1909) and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (1937). In the decades after the war, however, lesbian novels were more discreet. Bantam Press published a highly successful line of mass-market lesbian paperbacks, of which the most notable was the interconnected series of conscious-raising works by Ann Bannon. In more prestigious publications, like the sexually ambiguous thrillers of Patricia Highsmith and her pseudonymous The Price of Salt (1952), however, the sexual references tended to be coded and indirect. Only after the rebirth of feminism in the early -501- 1960s did fiction regularly represent lesbians as other than deviants or martyrs, most notably in Jane Rule's Desert of the Heart (1964).

Gay male fiction was more mainstream. Gay writers like Burroughs and Rechy held positions of authority in the counterculture. Large commercial houses published such gay love stories as Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar (1948), and Fritz Peters's (Arthur Anderson Peters's) Finistere (1951). The price of such publicity was capitulation to heterosexual stereotypes. These novels depicted gay love as pathological, gay life as criminal, gay culture as nonexistent. The plots were deterministic and most ended in violence, often with the death of the protagonist. Although the self-loathing of such narratives cannot be denied, gay readers probably did not take seriously their melodrama and sentimentality. The value of these novels in forging a gay identity resided instead in those neutral moments when they reassured isolated homosexuals of the existence of others like themselves, even hinting subtly how such others might be met and identified in the straight world.

A more indirect strain in gay male writing avoided homosexual themes or situations altogether. Instead it presented straight plots in a gay style of parodic writing usually called "camp." Patrick Dennis (Edward Everett Tanner) wrote a string of wildly successful comic novels, most notably Auntie Mame (1955), that used extravagant female characters as mouthpieces for a gay critique of heterosexual behavior. Dennis's domestication of camp entered into the establishment tradition in the work of Truman Capote. His novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) obscured the sexual dynamics between its male narrator and female protagonist to afford to both a gay sensibility only slightly less flamboyant than Dennis's Mame. Similar sexual undertones informed all his subsequent work. In his uncompleted final novel Answered Prayers (1987), Capote acknowledged the explicitly sexual character of his more discreet narratives through controversial stories about a gay hustler and the straight rich women he entertained.

As a sophisticated form of the literature of identity, minority novels tended to face directly questions of assimilation and cooptation. Yet in the problematic work of such popularizers as C. Y. Lee and Patrick Dennis we can begin to sense a more covert attempt to define -502- group identity. For while some commercial works did not treat seriously the moral and political dilemmas facing a subculture, they nevertheless studied community dynamics with sociological precision. Though not significant additions to the literature of ethnic sensibility, these novels might be said to have contributed to a related subgenre — the literature of environment — which defined cultural identity less in terms of who or what one was than in terms of where one lived and worked.

Novels of environment rarely experimented with the technical innovations of the age. The fractured time scheme and unreliable narrators favored by modernist authors in the first half of the century were largely rejected. Nor was it a literature of high sensibility and fine moral distinctions. The narrative voices were matter-of-fact rather than ruminative. Characters were stereotypes, and their moral dilemmas relatively straightforward. The authors avoided ambiguity and frequently displayed an explicit hostility to psychological explanations of human motivation. While not, like the Beats, in conscious revolt against academic criticism, they ignored traditional aesthetic criteria and valued as antecedents works little admired by the New Critics.

In some respects, the novels of environment looked back to the proletariat fictions of the 1940s; their prose was simple and declarative, crafted to reach the widest audience possible. They recalled as well the work of the turn-of-the-century naturalists, especially Norris and Dreiser, in their precise attention to the minutiae of everyday experience. Yet they possessed none of the reforming tendencies of these earlier traditions: neither the socialist underpinnings of proletariat novelists nor the philosophical pessimism, sexual candor, and social outrage of the naturalists. These works tended instead to be politically conservative, celebrating middle-class mores. In this conservatism, their truest antecedents were perhaps the English Victorian novel, especially the chronicles of Anthony Trollope, and its American counterpart, the sentimental novel of domesticity. Like their three-volume ancestors, these postwar popular fictions were often leisurely works, rich in descriptive detail, and overflowing with characters and plot. And like them, they coddled rather than challenged the bourgeois expectations of their readers.

The success of these commercial novels can be understood socio-503- logically. There had long been popular fiction — indeed, the novel as a genre was sometimes understood as a middle-class alternative to more elite literary forms like poetry. During the 1930s, however, technical advances in printing and binding made possible the publication of large printings of inexpensive texts. These advances culminated in the rise of the paperback edition in the final years of the decade and the shifts in production and marketing policy associated with that development. Drugstores and bus stations replaced bookstores as the primary sites for these new paperbacks. To maximize sales potential, editors sought work that was familiar, even formulaic, in nature. Such traditionalism was probably augmented by Broadway's and Hollywood's interest in optioning popular novels whose characters and plot lent themselves most readily to dramatic treatment. In postwar authors' response to these developments, the modern best-seller was born.

Such commercialized accounts had only a rudimentary interest in the political and psychological realities of ethnic identity. Leonard Q. Ross's (Leo Rosten's) The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L *A *N (1937) reduced problems of acculturation to the low comedy of the dialect tradition. Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar (1955) and Chaim Potok's The Chosen (1967) and My Name Is Asher Lev (1972) simplified the problems of Reform and Orthodox Judaism examined more fully by Bellow and Roth. Wouk's Marjorie Morgenstern, for example, fought off threats to her virtue and career goals for four hundred pages only to capitulate on both counts in her final retreat into middle-class domesticity. And Potok's Asher Lev was merely Roth's Portnoy recast as a "nice Jewish boy." Similarly stereotypic and inspirational were Betty Smith's account of Irish Americans in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) and Kathryn Forbes's (Kathryn Anderson McLean's) reminiscences about Scandinavian San Francisco in Mama's Bank Account (1943). Yet even as they pandered to the sentimentality and self-satisfaction of their readers, they did get on the record some of the sociological details essential to the process of identity construction. Although Hyman Kaplan was a baggy-pants comic, he had a better feel for living language than the smug WASP teacher who narrated the novel. If Wouk's understanding of Marjorie's libido was weak, his depiction of Jewish teenagers on the Upper West Side was precise. And while it left un-504- examined a whole set of family stereotypes, Forbes's sentimental portrait of a community of urban-dwelling Norwegians at least overturned the clichéd representation of Scandinavian Americans as stoic Midwestern farmers.

The function of such a popular "literature of environment" as a necessary preliminary to social change could be best seen in postwar women's fiction. Even after the reinstatement of oppressive models of female domesticity, some women writers continued to work valiantly against gender stereotyping. Carson McCullers examined the alienation of African Americans, children, the handicapped, and especially women in such works as The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943), and The Member of the Wedding (1946). Her lyrical prose and her interest in the isolating aspects of love strongly resembled those of males writing in the same tradition of Southern gothic. Yet her sexual candor, eye for domestic detail, and focus on the female viewpoint made her narratives proto-feminist (and implicitly lesbian).

Late in the postwar period the generalized sense of female unrest received a name and a focus from the publication of Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique in 1963. Even such universalizing writers as Mary McCarthy began to admit the existence of experiences uniquely female. In her best-selling The Group (1963), McCarthy directed at a circle of Vassar graduates the same jaundiced eye with which she analyzed all her characters. While hardly a feminist reading, the novel's very willingness to single out women's experiences as qualitatively different from men's suggested a growing public awareness of women as a group. This awareness received its most sympathetic public statement with the publication the same year of poet Sylvia Plath's only novel, The Bell Jar. Not published in America until 1971, Plath's moving account of her attempt to conform to traditional models, as taught by the woman's magazine where she was a teenage editor, and her ensuing mental breakdown was the decade's most detailed indictment of the psychological inadequacy of the age's assessment of women — and its most tragic.

Such preliminary statements of defiance stood as immediate antecedents to more explicitly feminist (in some cases lesbian) novels by such contemporary writers as Joyce Carol Oates, Alison Lurie, Joanna Russ, and Toni Morrison. Despite these courageous excep-505- tions, however, much postwar women's literature accepted uncritically the generation's gender stereotypes. This acquiescence need not be judged too severely. In her study of domesticity in the nineteenth century, Nancy Cott argued that conservative ideologies can have liberating social consequences. According to her famous play on words, the "bonds of womanhood" that bound women to a repressive ideology of hearth and home also bound them together as women. It is in a similar light that we should read the domestic fiction of the postwar period. From its opening characterization of women as "ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle," Grace Metalious's Peyton Place (1956), the period's best-selling novel, seemed calculated to reaffirm every sexist stereotype of the generation. Yet its willingness to treat clinically such topics as abortion and menstruation marked its interest in naturalizing the then sensational topic of female sexuality. More subtly, its depiction of successful women at work belied its own tendency to represent women as ruled by emotions. Whatever its debts to the male-dominated traditions of regional literature and the revolt against the village, Peyton Place situated women at the economic foundation of the community as fully as at its emotional center.

Similar undercurrents of rebelliousness were seen in the period's workplace novels. Rona Jaffe's best-selling The Best of Everything (1958) characterized the career girl as someone merely marking time while waiting for the right man, without considering the role that employment discrimination and sexual double standards played in women's choice of marriage over career. Yet despite the book's conventional morality, its workplace setting implicitly returned to its characters some of the autonomy that their love lives denied them. However passive Jaffe made these women in their relations to men, she showed them savvy and assertive in handling their workload (and their bosses). In her heroine Caroline Bender, Jaffe offered a protofeminist revision of Theodore Dreiser's "Sister" Caroline Meeber. Unlike her literary namesake, Jaffe's Caroline did not recite male writing, she edited it. And rather than succumbing to general transcendental longing as did Sister Carrie, Bender focused her dissatisfaction on the specifically female conflict between career and domesticity.

Even highly conventional literary treatments of the housewife -506- functioned unintentionally to increase female awareness. Shirley Jackson was best known for her gothic accounts of dysfunctional families in We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) and matricide in the short story The Lottery (1949). It was not surprising, then, that her comic account of her own family, Life Among the Savages (1953), should view skeptically the joys of suburban existence with four "savage" children. But less well crafted works — like Jean Kerr's wisecracking Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1957) and The Snake Has All the Lines (1960) — played as well a role in identity formation. All suburban novels reinforced clichés about the importance of the family and of the mother's role as nurturer and moral exemplar. Yet their comic tone established a conspiratorial relation to their audience. The author wrote not to indoctrinate readers but to dramatize experiences she assumed they shared with her as homemakers. Such narratives implied that commonplace domestic events — like measles, the car pool, or the selection of wallpaper — were worth an individual's attention. In so defining "housewife" as a job (and subject of literature), these novels set the stage for Friedan's subsequent critique of society's evaluation of that job. Only after readers recognized they were housewives could they decide whether or not "housewife" was something they wanted to be.

A comparable liberalizing function was served by male novels of environment that examined the morality of the marketplace and of suburbia. Max Shulman's Rally Round the Flag, Boys! (1957) and John McPartland's No Down Payment (1957) offered respectively parodic and earnest accounts of the sexual tensions resulting from the claustrophobia of modern suburban housing. Cameron Hawley's Executive Suite (1952) focused on the immorality of big business, while Sloan Wilson's more ambitious The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) represented the two worlds of Connecticut domesticity and Manhattan business as complementary threats to individual authenticity. None of these novels seriously challenged middle-class assumptions about the work ethic or the sexual division of labor. Even the most sensitive — Wilson's critique of the flannel business suit as "the uniform of the day" — embodied the self-satisfaction of 1950s morality, complete with a crusading liberal judge. Yet like their female counterparts, these novels at least attended to the details of business and community life. Today Wilson's account seems less striking for -507- its final rejection of the organization man than for the implicitly loving precision with which it recorded the process of his depersonalization.

It is in the context of this popular tradition of the male novel of environment that one must view the work of two of the most honored authors of the period — John Cheever and John Updike. These writers have been attacked for their stylistic traditionalism and lack of interest in social issues, characteristics associated with The New Yorker, where both men first published much of their work. Yet the error lay less with the authors' material than with readers' tendency to read their WASP suburban characters as representative of some generalized American ideal. Cheever's Wapshot novels examined skeptically the very WASP privileges presupposed by the genre of the family saga. In The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), the frequent shifts in story line and the mythologizing tendency of the narrative voice called into question the reliability of any such unifying account. Its sequel The Wapshot Scandal (1964), less mythological and more focused on social issues and characters only indirectly related to the Wapshots, used global settings to reveal the provinciality of its characters. Cheever addressed explicitly the cultural specificity of his customary material in his revisionist Falconer (1977), where he presented sexual fulfillment through an idealized homosexual experience; evidently even his previous focus on straight love had been merely conventional, without meaning to affirm the normative quality of heterosexuality.

The same self-consciousness about his WASP identity increasingly informed the work of the highly prolific John Updike. Concerned like Cheever with the shallowness of modern life as evidenced in the commercialization of culture and the difficulty of marital relations, Updike differed from the older man in his sexual explicitness and his extended use of unifying symbolic patterns. After experimenting with mythological metaphors in The Centaur (1963), Updike constructed in Couples (1968) both an apotheosis of the suburban sex novel and its reductio ad absurdum. This intricate burlesque of novels like Peyton Place or No Down Payment not only used a more imaginative sensual language than its models but also hinted at the historical underpinnings of middle-class promiscuity in the Kennedy years. The social setting implicit in Couples became central in Updike's -508- masterpiece — the four books treating Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. The earliest, Rabbit Run (1960), seemed to present its protagonist's sexual crisis in the broadest existential terms. Yet with each subsequent reencounter — Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990) — Rabbit's anxiety was more fully related to its temporal setting, and especially the conflict between middle-class Protestant mores and a society whose values lay elsewhere. Although occasionally the novels allowed Rabbit to pontificate on the general failure of America, at their best they used the peculiarity of Rabbit's cultural position to doubt the very existence of a single, homogeneous "America."

The issue of social change in the novel is a complex one, involving questions about the desirability and effectiveness of the novel as an agent of change, and even about the nature of change as such. The position of postwar literature in this debate is uncertain. It is nevertheless necessary to challenge the traditional view of such novels as apolitical and elitist. Most of these works did not have social reform as their primary goal. And in embracing the universalizing aesthetic criteria of the generation, postwar authors often left unexamined some of the discriminatory implications of middle-class liberalism. Yet the literatures of identity, especially minority literatures and the literature of environment, fostered a sense of group solidarity at odds with the pronounced individualism of the times. And if such identities at times themselves reinforced the age's cultural stereotypes, they were at least the necessary precursor to what would become in subsequent generations a more truly oppositional literature.

David Van Leer

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