The Columbia History of the American Novel

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

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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