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
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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
