Post on 04-Feb-2023
Youth of the Nation: The Evolution of the American
Bildungsroman
Tamlyn Avery
Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
School of the Arts and Media
The University of New South Wales
January, 2017
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Surname or Family name: AVERY
First name: TAML YN
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
Thesis/Dissertation Sheet
Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: STAM9000
School: SCHOOL OF THE ARTS AND MEDIA
Title: Youth of the Nation: The Evolution of the American Bildungsroman
Abstract:
Other name/s: ELOUISE
Faculty: ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
The Bildu11gsroman has come to be defined as many things: the coming of age novel; the novel of development; or novel of self-cultivation. The only consensus seems to be that "there is no consensus"; it is a "phantom" genre, an indestructible literary entity. This generic uncertainty is all the more true of the American case. By looking at the three major regions of American literary production - Chicago, New York, and the South - my thesis d iscusses various ways in which authors used the genre to respond to his torical, economic, sociopolitical, and regional realities, and how these forces in turn molded the genre into near unrecognizable shapes.
This thesis therefore analyzes ten outlying texts within these regions, following the prismatic, d ialectical schema of Walter Benjamin: "A major work will either establish the genre or abolish it," he once determined; "and the perfect work will do both." The Chicago chapter disseminates the diverse methods through which the three texts respond to the Entwicklungsroman subgenre, which I redefine in line with the nature of Chicago's highly industrialized economy as a novel of ' limitless' becoming or growth. The New York chapter assesses the impact of celebrity cu ltu re and the artist's roman ii clef upon the narrative of individual development by analyzing the aesthetic and stylistic developments of the Kiinstlcrroman (development of the artis t novel); this includes the g rowth of the theatrical, balletic, cinematic, and musica l imagination in these works. In the fi nal chapter on the South, I consider the significance of w hat I ca ll the plantation fringe Bildungsroman. I trace the complications for authors approaching the individualistic coming of age novel as it imports and challenges the social hierarchies of the atavistic Plantation structure in an unevenly modernizing South. A historicized, regionalist approach enables this thesis to construct a d iscursive laboratory for approaching the unvanquishable American Bildungsroman as a conversation beyond these presupposed borders and temporalities, where the specificit ies of each case study ultimately fac tor into that larger constellation of meaning that Bakhtin calls the unvanquis hable "creative memory" of genre.
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Acknowledgements
Many people have assisted and supported me over the past seven years, but none so
selflessly and tirelessly as my supervisor, Julian Murphet, without whom this project
would still belong to the most unproductive sense of nothingness. His expertise and
wisdom has sustained and inspired every stage of my development. I am a far better
scholar than I ever thought possible because he believed in my potential, from my
undergraduate years, during Honours, and through and beyond the final stages of
this doctoral thesis. Few can boast that the academic they look up to most in the field
is also their supervisor, mentor, and friend; for that sheer privilege, I am beyond
grateful. To try to express the extent of my gratitude would be a crude reduction
here; I simply cannot thank him enough.
Likewise, this project is indebted to Sarah Gleeson-White, who has been such an
instrumental and motivational figure to the formation of this thesis. I can’t begin to
sufficiently thank her for generously lending her expertise, patience, support, and
thoughtfulness. Her presence in the bibliography barely attests to the profound
difference her inspiring work and kind words have made to this project.
I would also like to thank my co-supervisor John Attridge, and also Sean Pryor,
whose support and invaluable comments on my drafts at formative stages of this
thesis have immeasurably improved both the quality of this project and my abilities
as a scholar. I’m very grateful for the time and patience of the respective
Postgraduate Coordinators who oversaw this thesis: Dorottya Fabian and Chris
Danta. I would also like to thank the kind staff of the UNSW English Department, in
particular, the staff at the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia. I feel
exceptionally fortunate to have spent my formative years in such a world-class
facility and research culture.
It has been my great privilege to participate in the UNSW School of the Arts and
Media Women’s Writing Group, the members of which are Baylee Brits, Kate
Montague, Helen Rydstrand, Penelope Hone, Alys Moody, and Jacinta Kelley. This
inspiring group of scholars poured over even the most embryonic drafts of my
chapters with such patience and kindness. I thank them for their camaraderie, which
has truly made all the difference to this project and to my time at UNSW. To my
other dear friends and colleagues, particularly Jasmin Kelaita, Christopher Oakey,
Kyla Allison, Diana Shahinyan, Mark Steven, Elizabeth King, Trish May, and
Alexander Howard, I extend the warmest thanks. Without their support and
encouraging words in the hallways of SAM, this project would not have been as
enjoyable or rewarding.
This thesis could not have been accomplished without the unconditional support of
Benjamin Nocelli, who has been such an inspiration to me and lived through this
entire venture without losing faith in me. I’d also thank my best friend Renee
McClenahan for always supporting me, as well as Thomas Milthorpe and Joukje
Hoekstra for their continued friendship. I dedicate this thesis above all to my family:
to my parents, Alan and Jennifer Avery, my sister Jesselind Avery, my grandparents
Margaret and Neville Hall, and to the rest of my extended family, who have all
supported and encouraged me with patience and love.
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Self-Fashioning and Self-Destruction: the Early American Bildungsroman, 1785-1899
................................................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter One: The Chicago Entwicklungsroman
Introduction: Naturalism and the Charnel House .......................................................... 28
I. A Crude Awakening: Experiencing Capital & the Bildungsromance of Female
Labor in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1901) .............................................................. 39
II. Two Tales of One City: The Valences of Mass Culture in James T. Farrell’s Studs
Lonigan Trilogy (1932-5) ........................................................................................................ 80
III. Shock Values: Self-Construction and Self-Deconstruction, or Mediation, Murder,
and Mass Culture in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) ........................................... 123
Chapter Two: The New York Künstlerroman
Introduction: The Jazz Age: Différance in the Self-Conscious Semblances of Fitzgerald
& Fitzgerald ....................................................................................................................... 160
I. The Künstler’s Theatrical Imagination in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise
(1920) .................................................................................................................................... 181
II. Balletic Bildung: the Dialectical Dance of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’s Save Me the
Waltz (1932) .................................................................................................................................................... 202
III. Atomic, Anomic Narration: the Arrested Development of the Artist in Salinger’s
The Catcher in the Rye (1951) ................................................................................................................... 228
IV. A Broken Record of Youth: High Fidelity, the Fate Motif, and the Stylistic
Education of the Late Harlem Musician in Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) .................. 252
Chapter Three: The Southern Plantation Fringe Bildungsroman
Introduction: Before and Beyond Crop Year 1936 ......................................................... 299
I. The Mulatto and the Minstrel: the Postplantation Between Laughter and Tears in
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) ......................................... 322
II. Dismembered Bildungshelde, Dismantled Plantation: The Métis and the Multiple
‚Me‛ in Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding (1946) .................................... 356
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III. Feralized Form in the Bildungsroman Bloodline: Southern Dynasticism as Eternal
Recurrence in O’Connor’s The Violent Bear it Away (1960) ............................................ 391
Primary Works .................................................................................................................. 424
Bibliography ....................................................................................................................... 425
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Introduction
Self-Fashioning and Self-Destruction: the Early American
Bildungsroman, 1785-1899
Ain’t Misbehavin’: Early American Responses to the Laws of the
Bildungsroman Genre
This project begins with the playful, self-reflexive ending of one of the most
enduring texts in American prose:
So endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop
here; the story could not go further without becoming the history of a
man. When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly
where to stop – that is, with a marriage; but when he writes of
juveniles, he must stop where he best can.1
So concludes Mark Twain’s first, 1876 Bildungsroman, The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer, the precursor to an entire series of Tom Sawyer picaresque-
Bildungsromans, including his masterwork, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1884). With tongue-in-cheek, Twain’s narrator reflects upon the novel’s
achievement, by specifying how the history of the young man genre ought to
perform, and guaranteeing his reader that this text served no more, no less
than its basic generic duties. The narrator intervenes before this unruly
youngster may overstep the borders between ‘this’ genre and ‘that’ genre.
But has Tom Sawyer behaved appropriately?
1 Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, ed. Peter Stoneley (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), p. 203.
2
To answer this deceptively straightforward question, we would firstly need to
define what constitutes a Bildungsroman. If we approach genre from a strictly
formal point of view, we must isolate how a text is ‚framed‛ and ‚lineated,‛
in the words of John Frow. 2 Its salient formal features must indicate the
work’s generic destination; its situation of address, structure of implication,
rhetorical function, and the physical setting of the text play important parts in
easily determining why Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796)
furnishes a case, if not the case, of a quintessential Bildungsroman, as anyone
from Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich Schiller and Hegel, to Georg Lukács and
Mikhail Bakhtin has stressed.
An entire constellation of both general and specialized scholarship already
surrounds the Bildungsroman. Theorists have mapped out the different
subfamilies: the Künstlerroman, the development or ‚orientation‛ of the artist
novel; the Erziehungsroman, which emphasizes ‚the youth’s training and
formal education‛; the Entwicklungsroman, or novel of ‚general‛
development or ‚growth rather than his specific quest for self-culture.‛3 Of
the latter, Katrin Komm argues that the term encompasses ‚all novels
following the young hero or heroine from innocence to maturity through a
series of formative experiences *<+ against the backdrop of a specific cultural
period‛; notwithstanding, the representation of these ‚maturation
process[es]‛ can ‚differ dramatically.‛ 4 This leads to twentieth century
exemplars of the subgenre focusing on ‚psychological‛ rather than ‚socio-
historic aspects of the heroine’s maturation process.‛5 Feminist theory has
2 John Frow, Genre: The New Critical Idiom (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 8.
3 Jerome Hamilton Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 13.
4 Katrin Komm, ‘Entwicklungsroman,’ in The Feminist Encyclopaedia of German Literature, eds.
Friederike Eigler and Susanne Kord (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997), p. 116.
5 Ibid.
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differentiated these models from the co-emergence of the female ‚growing
down‛ Bildungsroman. Rita Felski maps two mutually inclusive feminist
types of female novels of self-discovery, organized through the ‚degree of
emphasis given to either the inward transformation of consciousness or to
active self-realization‛ within certain texts; where the resolutions of these
feminist Bildungsroman ‚reveal significant differences,‛ a ‚common starting
point‛ is often shared: ‚the stage when the traditional plot of women’s lives
break off, with the attainment of a male sexual partner.‛6
Very few other genres or forms seem to excite such widespread and
politically charged dispute within the discipline. In his well-recited preface to
Season of Youth, Jerome Buckley concludes that,
If the word [Bildungsroman] ultimately escapes precise definition or
neat translation, its meaning should nonetheless emerge clearly from
an account of the novels themselves and the steady recurrence of
certain common motifs in them.7
A majority of the large-scale theoretical research in the field canvases the
many Eurocentric literary developments of the Bildungsroman and its
hermeneutical borders. However, since the seventies, a trend in American
intellectual life has demonstrably emerged which makes it susceptible to
particularization, with no large general studies emerging that scope the full
development of the American Bildungsroman. This presently leaves us with a
long tradition of deviant American Bildungsromans, with an inability to
historically or hermeneutically configure them, unless as Moretti (somewhat
6 Rita Felski, Beyond Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1989), p. 128.
7 Buckley, Season of Youth, p. viii.
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sardonically) suggests, we expand this conceptual horizon to speak of ‚failed
initiation‛ and ‚problematic formation.‛8
Something indeed seems lost in ‚translation‛ to compare the climate of
German Enlightenment to the nascent American literary ‘clericy’ that
produced a work such as Huck Finn, which marks the emergence of the first
person vernacular narrator in American letters. ‚You don’t know about me,
without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,‛
Huck drawls in the declarative opening of his narrative; ‚but that ain’t no
matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth,
mainly.‛9 ‚Giving voice to a child to narrate an entire novel was something
new but also using his voice as one would hear it in person, in other words
using the vernacular, was an especially groundbreaking feature in literature,‛
Connie Ann Kirk argues.10 No author prior to Twain ‚entrusted his narrative
to the voice of a simple, untutored vernacular speaker – or, for that matter, to
a child,‛ Shelley Fisher Fishkin concurs; her syntactical analysis of Huck’s
language concludes that the American vernacular of Huck’s speech act is
plausibly both white and black in derivation. 11 Huck as both picaro and
ingénue, an undereducated Irish American child of the racist antebellum
South, ‚makes his way down the heartline of America’s Mississippi River,‛
and by doing so, ‚comes to know and see his black friend Jim as a man.‛12
8 Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London:
Verso, 1987), p. 15.
9 Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, eds. Walter Blair and Victor Fischer (Berkeley,
Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988), p. 1.
10 Connie Ann Kirk, Mark Twain: A Biography (Westport, Connecticut, London: Greenwood
Press, 2004), p. 72.
11 Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 13.
12 Kirk, Mark Twain, p. 71.
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Twain’s idiom boils down to this salient gesture: Huck’s Bildung only occurs
in the emancipation, in other words the Bildung, of his black companion, an
unconscious acceptance that the black and white have always coexisted in the
establishment of the American voice. The novel of ‘the individual,’ the
singular, ‚truthful‛ history of a young man genre – as many of these early
Bildungsromans claimed to be – renders itself a kind of fool’s gold from the
outset.
Yet James Caron emphasizes that the ‚basic tenets of bourgeois culture‛ and
Enlightenment values in the European Bildungsroman ‚dominated‛
American nineteenth century ‚social behaviour,‛ manifest in ‚concepts such
as ‘self-made man’ and including significant portions of narrative practice,
both fictional and nonfictional.‛13 Twain’s parodic Bildungsromans, in this
sense, belong to a wider body of exemplars that demonstrate the American
ideological rejection of these bourgeois cultural ‚tenets‛ privileged in the
Bildungsroman, such as ‚learning, progress, science, the truth of facts, the
reliability of narration, the freedom of implied ‘individuality’*.+‛ 14 Hegel
cynically summarized of these tenets: ‚For the end of such apprenticeship
consists in this, that the subject sows his wild oats, builds himself with his
wishes and opinions into harmony with subsisting relationships and their
rationality, enters the concatenation of the world and acquires for himself an
appropriate attitude to it.‛15 Caron argues that the American post-Civil War
‚rags to riches‛ myth only ever really distorts those same individualistic,
bourgeois values that formulated the nineteenth century Bildungsroman.
13 James E. Caron, ‘The Comic Bildungsroman of Mark Twain,’ Modern Language Quarterly vol.
50, no. 2 (June, 1989), p. 146.
14 Ibid.
15 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume One, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1988) p. 593.
6
For Lawrence Buell, America’s involvement in the Western shift from the
ancient epic and medieval romance, ‚tales of legendary heroism,‛ to ‚stories
about more recognizably familiar persons,‛ was a contribution both
‚peripheral and central.‛ 16 It stems from the ‚coevolution of liberal
individualism and ‘democratic’ institutions‛ that sublated the ‚focus on the
lifelines of more ordinary people‛ operating ‚within and/or against a cultural
collectivity that in some sense also defines him or her.‛17 Whilst American
literature was in its ‚infancy‛ at the moment of Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on
the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), British America had already ‚generated
its own paradigmatic narrative of individual formation, more egalitarian and
also more utilitarian than Schiller’s, for whom personal flourishing implied
the highest pitch of intellectual refinement and sociality.‛18 This home-grown
script or mythic Bildung narrative outlined the ‚story of remarkable rise from
humble origins. It became *America’s+ single most defining mythic narrative
both at home and abroad.‛19
Where the genre’s ur-Bildungsheld, Wilhelm Meister, achieves Bildung, his
self-cultivation through a series of socialized rites of passage, Huck Finn by
comparison reluctantly returns from his exceptional voyage and becomes
‚sivilized,‛ or folded back into coenobitic life. Ernest Hemingway’s
excessively aped claim that ‚All modern American literature comes from one
book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn‛ 20 illuminates the central
difficulty motorizing my thesis: to propose that no original referent or ur-
Bildungsroman exists in American literary history. The American cultural
16 Lawrence Buell, The Dream of the Great American Novel (Cambridge, MA and London: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 105.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., p. 106.
19 Ibid.
20 Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (New York: Scribner Classics, 1998), p. 23.
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economy is one where the American writer is ‚destroyed,‛ by which
Hemingway means ‘corrupted,’ under the auspices of literary production and
circulation under capitalism. For Hemingway, all writers serve one of the two
following enterprises: they either attempt to capitalize upon the profitability
of generic fiction; or they attempt to ‚save their souls with what they write.‛21
In a literary economy divided between soul and profit, we must instead
persist in historicizing the dialectical emergence of the American
Bildungsroman, how it responds to these market and social forces, in order to
understand how this ‚phantom‛22 genre in all its manifest forms was both
absorbed by and shaped American society.
As Joke Kardux observes, the turn of the nineteenth century gave rise to the
Bildungsroman as a model that served several types of ‚nation building
canon-formation.‛ 23 Political figures such as Benjamin Franklin, his
Autobiography as an exemplar, used the Bildungsroman template to
foreground a shift in American thinking about the relationship between
industry and young manhood as ideological conservatism; the genre was
used ‚to promote,‛ in Franklin’s words, ‚a greater Spirit of Industry and
early Attention to Business, Frugality and Temperance with the American
Youth.‛ 24 Early nineteenth century American historians, such as George
Bancroft and Moses Coit Tyler, otherwise traced ‚the inception, development,
and coming to maturity of the young American nation and its literary
tradition‛ by reconstructing the national and literary past as if they were
21 Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa, p. 24.
22 Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 42.
23 Joke Kardux, ‘The Politics of Genre, Gender, and Canon-formation,’ in Rewriting the Dream:
Reflections on the Changing American Literary Canon, ed. W. M. Verhoeven (Amsterdam and
Atlanta: Rodopi, 1992), p. 179.
24 Quoted in ibid.
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engaged in writing an (unusually) lengthy Bildungsroman.‛ 25 ‘Novelists’
themselves, on the other hand – Kardux offers the examples of Herman
Melville (Redburn) and Elizabeth Stoddard (The Morgesons) – ‚radically
subvert the Franklinian Bildungsroman by exposing the genre’s covert political
agenda.‛26
As James Hardin outlines in introducing a collection of essays on the
European history of the genre, the Bildungsroman increasingly reflects a
‚type of novel more talked about than understood.‛ 27 This type of novel
possesses ‚no consensus of meaning,‛28 a statement that proves all the more
true of its American branches. I propose that the American Bildungsroman
resists classification, that it does not want to be understood as ‘one’ entity so
much as multiple entities, competing in an economy of genre. The American
Bildungsroman always already anticipates its own decay, its own mortality as
a form; it estranges itself from tradition. The task to observe the evolution of
the American Bildungsroman only commences in accepting that this
investigation searches for an origins story of generic products in conversation
with one another – products that evolved in response to national, political,
cultural, and economic climates, rather than from a specific material ancestor
(an ur-Bildungsroman). This project considers whether the mediating Geist of
Hegel’s aesthetics vis-à-vis the Bildungsroman might therefore better
translate to an unsynthesizable Haint in American Bildungsromans, a drive to
overcome or improve what has come before, even as it remains hampered by
the nimbus of tradition and the false unity of a ‘national’ literary culture.
25 Kardux, ‘The Politics of Genre, p. 177.
26 Ibid.
27 James Hardin (ed.), Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman (Columbia, SC:
University of South Carolina Press, 1991), p. x.
28 Ibid.
9
Still, the nineteenth century American Bildungsroman, along with poetry,
philosophy, and prose variants, invests language into the creation of an
American idiom – and an adventurous one at that. American literature, and in
no instance more consummately than the American Bildungsroman, seeks to
produce something ‘new’ and ‘youthful.’ If this trend against containment
begins anywhere, it surely issues from the document that declared itself free
of the yoke of the nation’s European ancestor, in the most astonishing
political doctrine of American Bildung ever put to paper: The Declaration of
Independence. Conjoining the Declaration’s ‚pursuit of Happiness‛ to
Moretti’s investigation of the ‚place of happiness as a value in the European
Bildungsroman,‛ the apex of freedom and individuality, Stella Bolaki describes
how this rhetorical economy of the individual’s right to self-reliance falls
short in American narratives that engage with the traumatic histories of
postcolonialism. The Bildungsroman upholds ‚myths of health and wellbeing
that America sustains by encouraging its citizens to protect themselves from
painful feelings (such as anger) to avoid examining the reality of their lives,
implies blindness to suffering and a ruthless individualism.‛29
When Mikhail Bakhtin sketches the affinities of literary genre, he determines
that ‚its very nature‛ mirrors ‚the most stable, ‘eternal’ tendencies in
literature’s development.‛30 A genre is underscored by ‚undying elements of
the archaic,‛ yet these atavistic features ‚are preserved in it only thanks to
their constant renewal‛ or ‚contemporization.‛ 31 Bakhtin’s generic
methodology for analyzing the Bildungsroman as something always already
29 Stella Bolaki, Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s
Fiction (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), p. 219.
30 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 106.
31 Ibid.
10
new yet already inert, particularly its relation to the chronotope, proves more
fertile than attempting to cast American texts into his specific (if
overdetermined) typology of form.
A genre is always the same and yet not the same, always old and new
simultaneously. Genre is reborn and renewed at every new stage in
the development of literature and in every individual work of a given
genre. This constitutes the life of the genre. Therefore even the archaic
elements preserved in a genre are not dead but eternally alive; that is,
archaic elements are capable of renewing themselves. A genre lives in
the present, but always remembers its past, its beginning. Genre is a
representative of creative memory in the process of literary
development. Precisely for this reason genre is capable of
guaranteeing the unity and uninterrupted continuity of this
development. For the correct understanding of a genre, therefore, it is
necessary to return to its sources.32
Let us briefly ‚return to‛ a few more of these sources. The ‘early’ American
Bildungsromans of Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, even Edgar Allan Poe,
Harriet Jacobs, Louisa Alcott, Frances Harper, and Herman Melville, all
destabilize the unity and continuity of genre in a period where generic
formulation became irreversibly linked to capitalism and the impulses of the
‘free’ market. The diverse methods through which they each withhold generic
stabilization cannot be understated. These outlying American
Bildungsromans do not want to be read by the same method with which we
might read Wilhelm Meister, A Sentimental Education, or a ‘boyhood’ novel by
Dickens. Consider the template of David Copperfield (1850). Chapter One,
entitled ‘I Am Born,’ opens in an ‘autobiographical’ mood: ‚Whether I shall
turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by
32 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 106.
11
anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of
my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe on a
Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to
strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously,‛ David famously intimates,
foreshadowing his fated life of tragedy.33
Let us contrast this pattern against the following introduction to a young
slave boy, Frederick Bailey, destined to become the inspirational pro-
abolitionist, orator, and author, Frederick Douglass:
I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles
from Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland. I have no accurate
knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record
containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their
ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters
within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant.34
So we see, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave
(1845) likewise opens with a mirror image of the narrator’s self-reflection
upon his youth. However, something is amiss. The indicative utterance of the
black subject performs a remarkable, powerful generic paradox: bound under
the Constitution to a state of ignorance and legally disavowed from the act of
reading or writing, the author Frederick Douglass admits that he cannot give
those facts – to borrow J. D. Salinger’s 1950s vernacular, ‚all that David
Copperfield kinda crap‛35 – required to ‘obediently’ perform to the generic
33 Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Nina Burgis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008),
p. 1.
34 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written By
Himself (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009),
p. 15.
35 J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (London: Penguin Books, 1994), p. 1.
12
expectation, such as date of birth, age, the identity of his father, or even what
his mother was like after their emotional bond was forcibly severed. The
inability for the Bildungsroman to accommodate and encompass a
representative ‘American’ subjectivity here signals the far greater failings of
the political system that violently reduced millions of its members to the
status of chattel, to dehumanized numbers and figures on a ledger, whilst
defining its nationhood by the script of liberal democracy that declared ‘any
man’ capable to rise up and represent his fellow citizens.
Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave and an entirely self-fashioned subject in
that the law itself precludes him from literacy and by extension subjectivity,
finds emancipation in literacy and education – a variation of the
Erziehungsroman, in that Fred Bailey improvises his own educational setting
by bribing and tricking the local white children into teaching him letters. The
act of writing and distributing the Bildungsroman itself becomes both the
achievement of the generic requirements, in that the protagonist comes to
maturity through his self-emancipatory act of narration. Yet Douglass
skilfully sharpens the political tool of the genre against its own inherent
essentialism to accommodate the reality of the contradictory American
democracy under slavery. One of more than eighty ‘slave narratives’ written
between 1825-1865, Douglass does more or less fulfil what Minden argues of
the Germanic Bildungsroman, if only to chafe against its aesthetic hypocrisies
of universal experience: ‚The Bildungsroman proceeds by disowning personal
experience, and making this the first step towards universalizing it. Instead
*<+ the Bildungsroman makes the shortcomings of the individual – the very
13
‘false starts and wrong choices’ of the dictionary definition of the genre – the
driving force of its narratives.‛36
This same era, leading into the short-lived American Renaissance, also
produces Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of
Nantucket (1838), yet another astonishing text in its own right that notoriously
risks and defies generic classification. Whatever remains of the high octane,
first person picaresque-Bildungsroman by the final chapters suffers an
unusual cardiac arrest worthy of remark. The last chapter, written as a
fictionalized ‘post-script,’ begins:
Note. The circumstances connected with the late sudden and
distressing death of Mr. Pym are already well known to the public
through the medium of the daily press. It is feared that the few
remaining chapters which were to have completed his narrative *<+
have been irrecoverably lost through the accident by which he
perished himself.
In an extraordinary narratological twist, Poe kills off his first person
Bildungsheld narrator before the novel ‘finalizes’ in its generic sense,
returning to a third person narrator who Arthur Pym claims in the Preface is
Poe himself. As Toni Morrison recognizes, Poe’s prose ‚samples of the
desperate need of this writer with the pretensions to the planter class for the
literary technique of ‘othering’ so common to American literature: estranging
language, metaphoric condensation, fetishizing strategies, the economy of
stereotype, allegorical foreclosure; strategies employed to secure his
characters’ (and his readers’ identity.‛37 In Pym’s voyage into the heart of
36 Michael Minden, The German Bildungsroman: Incest and Inheritance (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), p. 5.
37 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA
and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 57.
14
darkness, he succumbs to cannibalistic ritual ‚before he meets the black
savages,‛ that he escapes, witnesses the death of a black man, and ‚drifts
toward the silence of an impenetrable, inarticulate whiteness.‛38 In a second
sense, Poe violently erases the Bildungsroman back to a blank page, where
only the faint, palimpsestic imprint of tradition remains detectable upon this
white slate.
We could conduct similar readings of Melville’s experimental Bildungsroman
romance hybrids: the extraordinary example of Pierre; or The Ambiguities
(1852), a searing satire of the Künstlerroman in an increasing age of mass
production; or even the less extraordinary case of Redburn (1849). Buell goes
so far as to argue that Melville’s first eight books, driven by the constraints of
a professional writer’s pecuniary motivations and achieving various
successes, ‚are all more or less male initiation stories, but either told as
delimited episodes in lives scarcely otherwise developed or as downright
repudiations of the youth’s progress plot that equate initiation with
victimization.‛ 39 We could likewise consider his interlocutor Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s vexed attempts to reformulate aspects of the Bildungsroman
with the historical romance and familial sagas, such as in The Scarlet Letter
(1850).
Regardless, to continue on in this vein, following Bakhtin’s ‚return to the
sources‛ method, our argument falls short if we do not consider the
commercial market that drove the production and distribution of these
sources. To move beyond America’s Gilded Age into the twentieth century,
the risk of genre sublates as the American economy becomes increasingly
financialized. The commercial success of sentimental Bildungsromans,
exemplars being Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850), Maria Susanna 38 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, p. 57.
39 Buell, The Dream of the Great American Novel, p. 113.
15
Cummin’s The Lamplighter (1854), or Fanny Fern’s The Life and Beauties of
Fanny Fern (1855), set a template for a gendered shift in rhetorical economies
of the literary Bildungsroman, and one which did not want women to
participate in its elite clericy at the level of generic definition. The rise of the
‚damned mob of scribbling women,‛ as Hawthorne’s famous vitriol letter to
his editor summates, 40 most of whom were writing in a sentimental or
romantic form of the Bildungsroman scaffold, more broadly spoke to how
mass cultural tastes and the means of production were reshaping the
production of texts, rather than fostering the capabilities of the authorial
imagination or genius. Hawthorne revised his position after reading Fanny
Fern’s Ruth Hall, expressing admiration for Fern’s ferocious overturning of
‚emasculated‛ conventions of female writing – ‚*throwing+ off the restraints
of decency, and *coming+ before the public stark naked,‛ as Hawthorne
describes. These scribbling women had the potential to achieve what Fern’s
novels had pioneered in his estimation: to ‚possess character and value.‛41
This bestseller cause-and-effect was not a ‘new’ constraint upon literary
production; but it certainly bourgeoned over the first half of the nineteenth
century, fostering a state where the quality of production did not always, or
even often, reflect a novel’s ability to sell. No genre seemed to thrive so well
as the delicious escapism and chimera offered by the Bildungsroman
template. The lucrative individualistic scripts of sentimental realism and
melodrama alike responded to early forms of the British novel, such as Pamela
or Moll Flanders, novels in which a naïve Bildungshelde (young female
protagonist) risked sexual downfall, tales where ‚vice, however prosperous in
40 Quoted in John T. Frederick, ‘Hawthorne’s ‚Scribbling Women,‛’ The New England
Quarterly vol. 48, no. 2 (June, 1975), p. 231.
41 Quoted in Joyce W. Warren, Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman (New Brunswick and New
Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. 121.
16
the beginning, in the end leads only to misery and shame.‛42 The British-
American writer Susanna Rowson had long before published perhaps the first
case of this trend, Charlotte, a Tale of Truth, in 1791,43 a seduction melodrama in
the Pamela tradition, in which a naïve British adolescent is seduced, brought
to America, impregnated, and abandoned in New York. Hawthorne’s
misogynistic diatribe therefore reflects how the internal aspirations of the
American literary scene asphyxiated under the demands of the capitalist
market for male and female writers alike at this particular moment; this
climate, torn between Calvinist morals and capitalist values, in turn signifies
an ideological fissure in the function of the Bildungsroman as well as its
subsistence to the demands of the market.
Sentimental realism was a lucrative enterprise – as the bestselling text of the
nineteenth century, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among
the Lowly (1852) might attest. Yet it is entirely misleading to suppose that this
negative gearshift in literary culture was ‘gendered’ or engendered by the
increasing numbers of women who managed and distributed literary journals
with domestic audiences in mind. The rise of sentimental fiction as well as the
romance both resulted from American capitalism where financialization, the
rise of the ‘self-made’ tycoon as the exemplary American individual,
supplemented the nation’s perceived ‘cultural lack’ in relation to Europe.
Donald Grant Mitchell, writing under the pseudonym Ik Marvel, achieved
near instantaneous bestseller status with his 1850 Reveries of a Bachelor; or, A
Book of the Heart (a favourite of Emily Dickinson),44 a strange soup of non-
42 Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1986), p. 120.
43 Charlotte Temple was first published in England, and did not see publication in America
until 1794.
44 Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World, 1963), p. 198.
17
fiction prose and meditation upon Bildungsroman themes: boyhood,
marriage, country life, travel.45 Whatever status the ‘Young American’ writer
faced against commercial demand, ‚the past was not dead,‛ as Hawthorne
had already declared in his introductory Custom House preface to The Scarlet
Letter. In fact, ‚the past‛ proved to be his most lucrative exploit. ‚Once in a
great while, the thoughts, that had seemed so vital and so active, yet had been
put to rest so quietly, revived again.‛46 Hawthorne’s optative nostalgia, his
determination to recover the great relic of culture lost to the past tense,
prevails as a means of refashioning genre against the scribbling literary
present. He tasks the Bildungsroman, in this sense, to return to the source of
high literature, back to the Edenic beginning of white, masculine American
culture and the fount of its youth, to start again.
By 1868, the American market already displayed inter-generic tensions
between high literature and popular or kitsch fictional enterprises as
‚bestsellers.‛ Such ‚commercial fiction resembled extended fairy tales more
than novels, however. Unlike novelists, who shared their personal insights
into human nature, those who wrote books to please the multitudes built
plots around archetypes,‛ Paulette Kilmer argues of this shift towards a
‚people’s press.‛47 1868 was the year of publication of both Horatio Alger’s
commercial blueprint for the rags-to-riches history of young man genre,
Ragged Dick (he published over one hundred novels ‚about hard-working
protagonist who overcome formidable odds to attain middle-class status‛).48
It was also the year Louisa May Alcott published Little Women, a more
45 Frederick, ‘Hawthorne’s ‚Scribbling Women,‛’ p. 232.
46 Nathanial Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (London: Collins Classics, 2010), p. 29.
47 Paulette D. Kilmer, The Fear of Sinking: The American Success Formula in the Gilded Age
(Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1996), p. 8.
48 Ibid., p. 11.
18
complex variant of the female sentimental Bildungsroman. By this point, the
generic motivation cleaves between three ideological camps of ‚successful‛
literature: firstly, those texts that internalize the aspirations of the capitalist
market, the pulp fiction exercise which sold the wish-fulfilment of the rags-to-
riches myth where American democracy sublimates as a meritocracy.
Secondly, those that committed the novel to art pour l’art, to fill the supposed
void of American culture. Lastly, some saw how the Bildungsroman
apparatus might be effective in changing the rules of the social system as a
kind of social or protest fiction. At times, the line drawn in the sand between
commercial fiction, works of high literature, and politically motivated
narratives is barely visible. The Bildungsroman, boiled down to the perfect
generic formula, rests uneasily in this industrial creative space, a strange
tissue connecting such alien generic ligaments as Pierre to another such as
Ragged Dick; or Alcott’s positivist feminist sentimental realism exemplified in
Work: A Story of Experience (1873) to Harriet E. Wilson’s tragic sentimental
slave narrative, Our Nig (1859).
As Fredric Jameson discusses, ‚older generic categories do not, for all that, die
out, but persist in the half-life of the subliterary genres of mass culture,
transformed into the drugstore or airport paperback lines of gothics,
mysteries, romances, bestsellers, and popular biographies<.‛49 To discourse
on the Bildungsroman in the terms I have outlined risks a paradoxical
practice of generic inclusion and exclusion: the temptation to consider almost
all works of individualism as by-products of the genre; or to abandon the
neutrality of genre by ignoring the ‚half-life‛ products altogether.
Acknowledging this risk actually reveals one persistent pattern in this generic
Bildungsweg (formative journey): the need for the American Bildungsroman to
49 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London and
New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 93.
19
saturate its market, to relentlessly self-destruct, and to rebuild itself, in a
seemingly limitless conveyor belt of generic reproduction both familiar and
unfamiliar. Whilst the Janus-faced American Bildungsroman upholds the
individual as representative of certain classes or institutions, it urgently
condemns them to ‚go under‛ in Nietzsche’s sense; 50 yet the more brilliantly
it continues to regenerate from the ashes of its self-destruction, producing
some of the most fascinating, provoking, scandalous, and intelligent novels in
the English language. These powerful variations brightly illuminate against a
steady backdrop of commercialized and popularized variants that appeal to
the selling-power of genre’s base formula.
It becomes clearer and clearer, in attempting to historicize the emergence of
the American Bildungsroman and map the movements of its development,
that periodization alone cannot coherently describe even the most major
developments without finessing the operation of discursive rhetoric. Jameson
outlines the tendency of generic analysis ‚to prolong its operations to the
point at which the generic categories themselves *<+ are once more dissolved
into the historical contradictions or the sedimented ideologemes in terms of
which alone they are comprehensible.‛ 51 When texts, in both form and
content, respond consciously and unconsciously to modernity’s rapidly
changing technologies, market conditions, political climates, it seems
increasingly unviable to cast one Bildungsroman against another published
only twenty years earlier. For Jameson, the aspersive operations ‚in which the
working categories of genre are themselves historically deconstructed and
abandoned, suggests a final axiom, according to which all generic categories,
even the most time-hallowed and traditional, are ultimately to be understood
50 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York and London:
Penguin Books Ltd, 1969), p. 41.
51 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 131.
20
(or ‘estranged’) as mere ad hoc, experimental constructs, devised for a specific
textual occasion and abandoned like so much scaffolding when the analysis
has done its work.‛52 From region to region, varietals of the form perform
utterances of tendencies and trends responding to the local and national
mode of production; yet we must continue to emphasize the relativity of the
sources.
Generic Method: Regionalism
The ten close readings that comprise this revisionist genre study, considering
texts published from 1900 to the 1960s, propose a new discursive method for
approaching the American Bildungsroman from a contemporary critical
climate – one that is mindful of the commercial, artistic, and political
consciousness and unconsciousness that underscore each work and their
relationship to one another. These ten texts alone cannot ‘prove’ in any
absolute sense how the American Bildungsroman evolved as a typology, even
within the specific regions; and whilst I have surveyed the dominant trends in
Bildungsroman production within three major literary ‘centres’ – Chicago,
New York, and the South – centralization is not the methodological object or
aim of my investigation. There are obvious limitations with a project of this
size, which must be noted. What has been inevitably left out of this present
project, primarily the absence of the Bildungsroman of the West, would have
given us the opportunity to examine vastly different features of the genre
from the trends which shall become evident in the three chosen centres. The
valuable formations in Native American and Chicano Bildungsromans in the
North and South West, or the California Bildungsroman, for instance, could
be analyzed in future projects using this method in order to portray a fuller,
52 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, pp. 131-2.
21
more acute picture of the American Bildungsroman’s evolution. Perforce, the
ten texts comprising the following three chapters are configured as such
merely to illustrate and demonstrate the paradigmatic diversity of methods in
discussing the Bildungsroman within specific regions of American literary
production, and in line with shifts in sociological, philosophical, aesthetic,
and historico-political thought. Some of these critical and theoretical
inspirations are American, some imported, demonstrating how the
Bildungsroman responds not only to the modernizing concept of nationhood
and region, but to the increasing globalization of ideas itself.
Rather than aim for generic unity or continuity, I will demonstrate how these
twentieth century texts fragment or isolate themselves from the dominant
generic apparatus of the Bildungsroman, observing their dialectical and
contradictory relationship to one another, before restoring them into certain
regional and periodical ‘chapters’ of the genre. In mapping the emergence of
the American Bildungsroman, tracing its development throughout the major
regions of literary production from 1900 onwards, my approach has followed
the prismatic, dialectical schema of Walter Benjamin: ‚A major work will
either establish the genre or abolish it,‛ he determines; ‚and the perfect work
will do both.‛53
Jacques Derrida’s essay on genre also provides a sound method for a project
that aims to destabilize the familial relation of the American Bildungsroman:
53 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso,
2009), p. 44.
22
[A] text cannot belong to no genre. Every text participates in one or
several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and
genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging.54
Frow understands this as the setting up of a logical paradox or ‚folding in of
the set upon itself,‛ which Derrida entitles invagination. Frow’s understanding
of invagination understands that the ‚mark that designates membership‛
does not itself belong to the set, existing within and outside of the textual
space. Frow detects how the novel, or by extension the Bildungsroman,
would ‚thus occupy a position at once ‘outside’ the text, as a designation of
its class, and ‘inside’ it as a content which is reflected upon.‛55 To nominate a
genre is already a preconscious attempt to internalize and transform its rules;
therefore, Derrida’s logic suggests that it is at once impossible to critically
study genre with the purity its limits entail, and yet impossible to ignore the
inevitable ‚perversion,‛ ‚impurity,‛ ‚contamination,‛ ‚deformation,‛ or even
cancerization.‛ 56 Structurally, as well as thematically, these inevitable
paradoxes between form and content, between fulfilment or alienation, of
miscegenation, impurity and contamination, renders the American
Bildungsroman so compelling, contributing to its ‚magnetism‛57 and auretic
status in literary studies.
54 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre,’ trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry vol. 7, no. 1
(Autumn, 1980), p. 65.
55 Frow, Genre, 25.
56 Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre,’ p. 57.
57 Moretti, The Way of the World, p. 15.
23
Regionalism and the Twentieth Century Bildungsroman
My thesis identifies and pursues two critical gaps in the field of
Bildungsroman studies in American literature: one national, the other
regional. The first gap I have already outlined: that no extensive scholarship
examines the extensive historical development of the American
Bildungsroman. Research into American novels of the genre relies upon
Eurocentric discourses and typologies in order to situate these texts
generically, formatively, and socio-historically. This might generate
productive conversations regarding seminal ‘American’ texts, but does rather
undermine the inherent variant features of genre: its formal ‘local’ idioms, its
versatility, conversability, and adaptability; as well as the pressurization of
local sociological forces, that is, how a text responds to, represents, and
reflects how regional institutions govern the structures of gender, class, and
race. Scholarship simply settled that the American form either accepts or
differs from the European tradition, all the more so in the twentieth century,
without identifying why, when, or even how this unfolded as a serious
project in the elaboration of American literature.
Subsequently, scarce research considers the implicit effects of American
regionalism upon the development of the American Bildungsroman form as
its own generic conversation; for instance, capitalism and metropolitan
urbanization, and its ongoing tension with the agrarian or non-urban sectors,
and how these historical tensions shape form and aesthetics. Underpinning
the logic of American nationhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
was ‚the idea that the nation-state and its regions mobilize fundamentally
different and temporally coded forms of affiliation,‛ argues Leigh Anne
24
Duck. 58 Duck contends that the ‚dominant national time‛ after the Civil War
‚was understood to be that of capitalistic modernity – a linear, progressive
temporality allowing new mobility and opportunity; thus the United States
was represented chiefly as an administrative or economic unit rather than as a
collective based on shared customs.‛59 If the American Bildungsroman does
not want to be classified as ‘one thing,’ the diverse variations of the
Bildungsroman between regions intensifies this claim. Following a regionalist
approach may circumvent the misleading corollary of an ‘American
exceptionalism,’ whilst enriching the interrelation of radically diverse texts
that at times only thinly share a common generic denominator.
A lot of excellent research into specific periods of regional American literary
developments already paves way for this task; the Harlem Renaissance has
been chronicled at length;60 the Chicago Renaissance has likewise received
considerable interest.61 Southern regionalism thrives as a compelling research
58 Leigh Anne Duck, The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism
(Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2006), pp. 4-5.
59 Duck, The Nation’s Region, p. 5.
60 There is an enormous amount of critical research in this field; however, standout works
since the 1980s include: Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987);
Cheryl A. Wall’s Women of the Harlem Renaissance (1995); Maria Balshaw’s Looking for Harlem:
Urban Aesthetics in African-American Literature (2001); Nathan Irvin Huggins’ Harlem
Renaissance: Updated Edition (2007); Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s
Harlem Renaissance Lives (2009); and Jay Garcia’s Psychology Comes to Harlem: Rethinking the
Race Question in Twentieth-Century America (2012).
61 Works of note include: Carl Smith’s Chicago and the American Literary Imagination (1984); Lisa
Woolley’s American Voices of the Chicago Renaissance (2000); Mary Hricko, The Genesis of the
Chicago Renaissance: Theodore Dreiser, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James T. Farrell
(2009); and Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage, The Muse in Bronzeville: African American
Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932-1950 (2011).
25
field.62 Remarkably, studies into these regions only display skirting interest in
the Bildungsroman as the locus of discussion, despite the fact that almost
every one of America’s most eminent authors, from all regions, at some point
engaged with coming of age themes and structures – from the earliest
America’s literary attempts at appropriating the genre, certainly to the end of
the twentieth century.63
Having already set the stage for this discussion in canvassing the trends and
concerns of the early American Bildungsroman, my method now moves to
frame a selection of pivotal texts within the major locations of Bildungsroman
production in the twentieth century: Chicago, New York, and the South.
However, it is not my intention to exclusively contain the significance of these
texts and the generic developments they reveal to regional or periodical
chapters. Many of the conversations I raise in the following chapters carry
across these imagined chronotopic lines, demonstrating a thread of generic
continuity that transcends the order in which these texts appear. Within this
62 Recent standout works are: Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson’s collection of
critical essays, Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts (1997); Leigh Anne Duck’s The
Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism (2006); Jennifer Rae
Greeson’s Our South (2010); Scott Romine’s The Real South (2008); and Jay Watson’s Reading for
the Body: The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction, 1893-1985 (2012).
63 Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, Edith
Wharton, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Frank Norris, Thomas Wolfe,
Kate Chopin, Margaret Mitchell, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Gertrude Stein, Zelda and
F. Scott Fitzgeralds, Ernest Hemingway, Jessie Fauset, James Farrell, Richard Wright, Saul
Bellow, J. D. Salinger, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes,
Zora Neale Hurston, Truman Capote, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor,
Sylvia Plath, Cormac McCarthy, Alice Walker, Jack Kerouac, Toni Morrison, as well as later
postmodern authors, such as Kathy Acker or Bret Easton Ellis and the Blank Fictionists, are
just some of the literary heavyweights who have diversely contributed to the evolution of the
American Bildungsroman and the American coming of age conversation.
26
scaffold, I am indebted to the existing works of criticism that examine striking
trends in the production of the American Bildungsroman after 1900 – in
particular, those works that attempt to scope the sociopolitical climates that
enter the Bildungsroman. Such works include: Barbara Foley’s taxonomy of
the ‚proletarian bildungsroman‛; 64 Stella Bolaki’s account of ethnic American
women’s Bildungsromans; 65 Geta LeSeur’s gendered analysis of African
American and Caribbean Bildungsroman; 66 Martin Japtok’s nationalist
investigation of the commonalities between African and Jewish American
Bildungsromans; 67 and Jed Esty’s broader investigation of the persistence of
the Bildungsroman as a trend in modernist and colonialist fiction.68
In the Chicago chapter, I firstly observe the diverse methods in which the
three texts respond to the Entwicklungsroman, which I redefine in line with
the nature of Chicago’s highly industrialized economy as a novel of ‘limitless’
becoming or growth. In the New York chapter, I consider the impact of
celebrity culture and the artist’s roman à clef upon the narrative of individual
development; I discuss the tendency towards an intermediality of the
individualistic novel form by analyzing the aesthetic and stylistic
developments of the Künstlerroman: such as the theatrical, balletic, cinematic,
and musical imagination of the select authors. In my final chapter on the
64 Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993).
65 Stella Bolaki, Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s
Fiction (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011).
66 Geta J. LeSeur, Ten Is the Age of Darkness: The Black Bildungsroman (University of Missouri
Press, 1995).
67 Martin Japtok, Growing Up Ethnic: Nationalism and the Bildungsroman in African-American and
Jewish American Fiction (Iowa City: The University of Iowa Press, 2005).
68 Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (Oxford
Scholarship Online, 2011).
27
South, I consider the significance of what I call the plantation fringe
Bildungsroman. I trace the complications for authors approaching the
individualistic coming of age novel as it imports and challenges the social
hierarchies of the atavistic Plantation structure in an unevenly modernizing
South in the long wake of Reconstruction. My thesis constructs a discursive
laboratory for approaching the American Bildungsroman as a conversation
beyond these presupposed borders and temporalities, where the specificities
of each case study ultimately factor into that larger constellation of meaning
that Bakhtin calls the unvanquishable ‚creative memory‛ of genre.69
69Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 106.
28
Chapter One: The Chicago
Entwicklungsroman
Introduction: Naturalism and the Charnel House
This chapter contains three studies, which represent the diverse regional
development of the Chicagoan Bildungsroman during the early to mid-
twentieth century, as well as its co-dependent affiliation with aspects of the
American City Novel. As outlined by Blanche Gelfant and reiterated by Mary
Hricko, the American City Novel exhibited three particular formulae: the city
as a catalyst to a series of ‚educating instances‛; the personification of the city
as a symbol of the universal forces of virtue or vice; and thirdly, the ecological
parable.1 Chicagoan Bildungsromans demonstrably draw upon one, two, if
not all three of these patterns within in the first wave of the city’s lauded
cultural Renaissance.
The label given to the ‘Chicago Renaissance’ encompasses the fertile tenure of
creativity between 1890-1920, generated by a competitive circuit of publishing
opportunities and a nascent media industry. The sui generis of the Chicago
style of writing was forged within an industrialized ‚atmosphere that
challenged the traditional approaches to feature writing,‛ 2 with writers
producing literature that ‚astonish*ed+ readers with descriptions of strikes,
1 Blanche Houseman Gelfant, The American City Novel (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1970), p. 11; and Mary Hricko, The Genesis of the Chicago Renaissance: Theodore Dreiser,
Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James T. Farrell (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 13.
2Hricko, The Genesis of the Chicago Renaissance, p. 4.
29
slaughterhouses, railroads and poverty.‛ 3 As critics such as Hricko, Lisa
Woolley, and Paul Angle have emphasized, a second wind then occurred
between 1930 and 1950 which should not be understated; 4 the second
generation precipitated an increasing emphasis on revealing a chorus of
previously marginalized voices. Robert Bone and Steven C. Tracy, in an
attempt to disrupt the accepted regional and generational axes of African
American expression and what these assumptions might neglect, cast this
second Renaissance as the focal point of a ‚Black Chicago Renaissance,‛5 a
shift in the modus operandi of Chicagoan literature from the ‚Dreiser school‛ to
the ‚Wright school‛ of American Naturalism.6
In in the first model of the City Novel, the juxtaposition of the agrarian past
against the metropolitan present initiates the Bildungsheld’s transformation;
space both produces and informs characterization, where individuals embody
and replicate the city’s Geist. This model supports Donald Pizer’s re-
introduction to American literary naturalism, particularly in the fin de siècle
works of Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. In these
novelists’ works, he observes the mutual ‚journey from the known to
unknown, from lightness to darkness, from peace to clamor, and finally and
in all encompassing terms, from life to death.‛ 7 These authors and their
protagonists ‚entered worlds of pain, anguish, and despair which they didn’t
3 Lisa Woolley, American Voices of the Chicago Renaissance (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois Press,
2000), p. 9.
4 Hricko, The Genesis of the Chicago Renaissance, pp. 5-6.
5 Robert Bone, ‘Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance,’ Callaloo vol. 28 (Summer, 1986),
p. 48.
6 Steven C. Tracy (ed.), Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance (Champaign, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 2011), pp. 1-3.
7 Donald Pizer, ‘Late Nineteenth-Century American Literary Naturalism: A Re-Introduction,’
American Literary Realism vol. 38, no. 3 (Spring, 2006), pp. 192-3.
30
know existed in America,‛ Pizer argues; ‚they wish their readers to share in
these emotions.‛8 In this sense, the relocation of the provincial Bildungsheld
allegorizes the fullest arrival of industrialized modernity and the metropolis,
along with all the ‚lightness and darkness‛ urbanity entails.
Sidney H. Bremer’s definition of the ‚standard Chicago novel‛ fits into
Gelfant’s second criterion: embodying ‚*r+eckless individualism‛ in the city’s
built environment.9 The following portrait he offers summarizes the affective
response to space produced in the Chicago style of literature:
[s]kycrapers flaunt individual ambition, while street-car monopolies
deepen social divisions by oppressing labor and segregating
residential districts. The upwardly and outwardly expanding
structures induce psychological distress. Skyscrapers and streetcar
lines create a sense of powerlessness. Their enormity dwarfs ordinary
people, despite being manifestations of humankind’s soaring
imagination and technological know-how. Their physical extension is
unsettling, pointing toward a future of ‘indefinite continuation,’ of
constant expansion ‘in anticipation of rapid growth.’ Most
importantly, they seem to defy natural laws without expressing any
alternative, communal order.10
The diverse emergent voices that manifested from behind these spatial and in
turn psychological divisions signify the voices of the periphery, those
‚ordinary people‛ who are ‚dwarfed‛ by skyscrapers, darting in and out
from between crowded streetcar lines, as the symbolic scaffolds of industrial
capitalism. The Chicago Bildungsroman seeks out ordinary, powerless
8 Pizer, ‘Late Nineteenth-Century American Literary Naturalism, p. 192.
9 Sidney H. Bremer, Urban Intersections: Meetings of Life and Literature in United States Cities
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. 75.
10 Ibid., pp. 75-6.
31
members of the working masses within these scaffolds, and renders them
exceptional, the literary representatives of communities drawn to the summit
of industrialization, for better or worse.
I now seek to complicate this accepted allegory relating the individualistic
Bildungsroman to the imaginative reproduction of the ‘collective’ experience
of space. To open this case requires some brief mapping of the material
development of the city itself. The creolized social tectonics and dynamic
industrial conditions in Chicago were produced by the city’s rapid
industrialization and self-acclaimed unique disposition of resilience and
‚transformation,‛ particularly after the Great Fire of October 1871 razed a
significant portion of the city’s infrastructure. 11 The precipitous
industrialization in the rebuilding of the city led to a population density crisis.
Chicago itself grew from a modest town of two hundred in 1833 to a fully
realized metropolitan population of 1,099,850 by 1890; a demography
comprised of ‚young farm and small town people,‛ an ‚influx of freed
American blacks,‛ and foreign diasporas of ‚Germans, Irish, Scandinavians,‛
as well as ‚Poles, Czechs, Italians, and other Europeans and Asians‛ who had
been promised the keys to a city of economic opportunity.12
Of this workforce, 300,000 men and women belonged to trades unions in
1872, although membership fell to only 50,000 members by 1878 ‚due to
unemployment, wage cuts, union busting, and hard times‛: the cause of the
great 1877 mass worker’s strikes.13 Changes to the daily temporal division
between work and leisure slowly came into effect, underscored by violent
11 Hricko, The Genesis of the Chicago Renaissance, p. 1.
12 David D. Anderson, ‘Chicago as Metaphor,’ The Great Lakes Review vol. 1, no. 1 (Summer,
1974), pp.4-5.
13 Carolyn Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons: An American Revolutionary (Chicago: Haymarket Books,
2012), p. 18.
32
struggle; the residual vibrations of the labor rally of May 4, 1886, resulting in
a deadly confrontation between workers and policemen and the Haymarket
Square bombing, strengthened the backbone of America’s labor movement,
and subsequent international May Day rallies marking the onset of years of
city strikes towards the eight-hour working day.14
Echoing Fredric Jameson’s enquiry, raised in an attempt to strategize a means
of thinking through the possibility of ‚nonideological, transfigured, Utopian
space,‛ I ask the following question of the three Chicago authors selected for
this chapter: ‚How can space be ‘ideological’?‛ 15 How do these authors
respond to Chicago’s dynamic industrial character; how do their
‚perspectives‛ (what Richard Wright defined as ‚that part of a poem, novel,
or play which a writer never puts directly upon paper‛)16 manifest through
space as a means of transfiguring the ‚quintessentially ideological‛ discourse
of the Bildungsroman tradition into something altogether more ‘realistic’ than
bourgeois realism?17 This chapter considers how the socioeconomic conditions
of industrial capitalism, and the diversification of subjectivity produced there
before the mid-twentieth century, profoundly restyled the form and content
of Bildungsroman literature emerging from that literary scene. These authors’
works respond to a crisis of subjectivity concentrated in Manfredo Tafuri’s
14 See: David R. Roediger and Philip S. Foner, Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and
the Working Day (London and New York: Verso, 1989), pp. 124-177.
15 Fredric Jameson, ‘Architecture and the Critique of Ideology,’ in Architecture Theory Since
1968, ed. K. Michael Hays (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press, 1988), p.
442.
16 Richard Wright, ‘The Blueprint For Negro Writing,’ reprinted in The Norton Anthology of
African American Literature, eds. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay (New York and
London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997), p. 1385.
17 Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 321.
33
claim that ‚the whole phenomenology of bourgeois anguish lies in the ‘free’
contemplation of destiny‛; the metropolis activates and perpetuates the
‚experience of shock‛ and ‚anguish.‛18 Many of the crises of urban life in
modernity replaced the former constituents of the American Bildungsroman
to suit the new mode of production and subsequent shifts in the division of
labor; this stylistic revolution transformed the Bildungsroman almost beyond
recognition in many instances, three of which I shall presently consider.
Chicago established itself as the alternative literary centre to the hub of
cultural activity occurring in New York during the late nineteenth and the
twentieth centuries. Promoting Chicago’s sudden will to culture, journalists
such as J. William Hudson declared Chicago’s literature to be ‚the story of
America‛; H. L. Mencken likewise declared Chicago as the ‚literary capitol of
the world.‛19 The subsequent two chapters shall elaborate upon the extent to
which these cities differed in their formal evolutions of the Bildungsroman,
yet they represent two sides of the same coin: that is, probing the possibility
of achieving individuation in the face of industrial capitalism and its limitless
conveyer belt of reproduction.
In Chicago, the Bildungsroman genre evolved alongside the interrelation of
sociological thought and formal characteristics common of artistic expression
within the naturalist movement, which became the primary custom of the
twentieth century novel there, as reflected in the works of Upton Sinclair,
Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser, and later James Farrell, Richard Wright,
and Saul Bellow. Certainly in the first two decades of the twentieth century,
Chicago authors were profoundly influenced by the thinking of the Decennial
Publications of the School of Chicago, led by John Dewey. As William James
18 Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara
Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1976) p. 1.
19 Quoted in: Hricko, The Genesis of the Chicago Renaissance, p. 2.
34
proudly identified in 1904: ‚The rest of the world has made merry over the
Chicago man’s legendary saying that ‘Chicago hasn’t had time to get round to
culture yet, but when she does strike her, she’ll make her hum.’ Already the
prophecy is fulfilling itself in a dazzling manner. Chicago has a School of
Thought!‛20 American literary naturalism, glancing back across the water to
Emile Zola’s example in The Experimental Novel, 21 tends to prioritize the
reflection of unpleasant and disharmonious aspects of the human condition;
appealing to the local sociological schools of thought, it addresses the crises of
urban modernity, responding ambivalently to the face of a new stage
American capitalism.
The naturalist Bildungsroman’s function became antithetical to the
enterprises of the bourgeois, realist Bildungsroman in the century of
Enlightenment; naturalism presented disharmonious and darkly allegorical
visions of the city, such as the condition of the proletariat, through the
representation of marginalized, often anti-heroic voices. More importantly,
here, individuals are eclipsed by external forces of the city space. This radical
shift crystallizes in the words of Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), what we might
pre-emptively refer to as a ‘proletarian Bildungsroman’:
Here is a population, low-class and mostly foreign, hanging always on
the verge of starvation and dependent for its opportunities of life
upon the whim of men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the
old-time slave drivers; under such circumstances, immorality is
20 William James, ‘The Chicago School,’ The Psychological Bulletin vol. 1, no. 1 (January 15,
1904), p.1.
21 Donald Pizer, ‘The Problem of American Literary Naturalism and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister
Carrie,’ American Literary Realism vol. 31, no. 1 (Fall, 1999), p. 1.
35
exactly as inevitable, and as prevalent, as it is under the system of
chattel slavery.22
As Sinclair’s image here demonstrates, the proletariat had always been
treated as ‘the masses’ in literature; a population, rather than a group of
individuals. The dialectics of human power relations under capitalism
replaced the chattel slavery prior to Emancipation with wage slavery that
continued to suppress individual agency. ‚At these turning points of history,‛
writes Friedrich Nietzsche of the individual and modernity, ‚a magnificent,
diverse, jungle-like growth and upward striving, a kind of tropical tempo in
the competition to grow will appear alongside (and often mixed up and
tangled together with) an immense destruction and self-destruction.‛ The
antagonized, ‚wild egoisms‛ exploit one another ‚for sun and light,‛ no
longer able to ‚derive any limitation, restraint, or refuge from morality as it
has existed so far.‛23 Nietzsche suggests that the slogans of moderation and
mediocrity, ‚Be Like them! Be mediocre!‛ are all that can survive this
ruination of the metropolitan present.24 The modernized occupation of the
Chicagoan literary naturalists, as they saw it, was to contest the submerged
social hypocrisies of American nationhood by rejecting the trappings of
bourgeois realism and its temperate moderation; even if the generic scaffolds
that predominated in representing subjectivity within Enlightenment culture
itself (the Bildungsroman, as exemplar) were left largely intact.
Rolf Meyn suggests that the bourgeois and the proletarian Bildungsroman
both ‚share protagonists who are set apart from their peers by some traits,‛
22 Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, 1905), p. 126.
23 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, eds. Rolf-Peter
Horstmann and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 159.
24 Ibid., p. 160.
36
including sensitivity and intellect, or physical appearance, with a heightened
emphasis on the latter, in relation to the American culture.25 Barbara Foley
identifies the Bildungsroman as the ‚classic form‛ comprising the bourgeois
novel; environment may descriptively factor into the narrative, but it merely
forms the ‚stage‛ upon which heroes display traits of character. 26 The
Chicagoan Bildungsroman locates the transformations of problematic heroism
(Luk{cs’ claim that the ‚hero is picked out of an unlimited number of men‛
and is only placed at the ‚centre of the narrative because his seeking and
finding reveal the world’s totality most clearly‛) 27 by subsuming these
Bildungshelden to representations of fierce, energetic urban environs that
control each individual’s fate, and the structures that try and govern those
urban capitalist regimes.
The difference between the proletarian and the bourgeois Bildungsroman,
then, is that ‚the protagonist’s knowledge (of self) is never an end in itself, but
part of a totalizing ‘truth’ in the form of political values, and ideology or
doctrine; in other words, the proletarian form is far more deeply embedded in
the structure of a roman | thèse or ideological novel.‛28 However, the formal
effects of shifting this classic bourgeois form onto an entirely different class
are manifold; Foley outlines the various formal strategies that proletarian
writers adopt and adapt in this transition, such as paradigmatic plots, mentor
characters, and the narratological schemes that designate what the reader is
told and what they are meant to hear. Yet as Foley concludes, and as the
25 Rolf Meyn, ‘Lewis Jones’s Cwmardy and We Live: Two Welsh Proletarian novels in
Transatlantic Perspective,’ in British Industrial Fictions, eds. H. G. Klaus and S. Knight
(Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 124-136.
26 Foley, Radical Representations, p. 321.
27 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great
Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), p. 134.
28 Meyn, ‘Lewis Jones’s Cwmardy and We Live,’ pp. 124-6.
37
following three sections shall continue to probe, we must not only consider
how the form structurally accommodates the instillation of class-
consciousness in a highly individualistic bourgeois genre; we must consider
the question of whether ‚the new wine of literary proletarianism‛ can even
‚be successfully put into the old bottles of bourgeois convention‛ as a rule.29
If we accept what critics from Derrida to Frow have argued of the affinities of
genre, the ‚proletarian Bildungsroman,‛ even avant la lettre, already
transforms the generic rules. This is why the ideological dissonance in the
very concept of the proletarian Bildungsroman reflects in these novels as
something more akin the subgenre of the Entwicklungsroman. Whilst Moretti
defines this subgenre as the ‚novel of ‘development,’ of the subjective
unfolding of an individuality,‛ 30 I have instead taken some liberties with
Bakhtin’s correlation between the novel of trial and the Entwicklungsroman,31
which I redefine for the purposes of this chapter as novels of limitless growth
in a taxing urban arena. This Chicagoan variant of Entwicklungsroman, I will
argue, forms the common generic affinity between the following three
Bildungsromans I will discuss: Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, James T.
Farrell’s Studs Lonigan Trilogy, and Richard Wright’s Native Son.
The breadth of the attempt to diversify the ‘American’ voice through
Chicagoan Bildungsroman fiction must also form a dominant point of interest
in this chapter; I question the different responses to the epistemological and
material production of space as a generalized ‚‘mental thing’ or ‘mental
29 Foley, Radical Representations, p. 323.
30 Moretti, The Way of the World, p. 17.
31 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 393.
38
place,’‛ as Henri Lefebvre describes it. 32 In terms of the Chicagoan
Bildungsroman, the roman à thèse we associate with the proletarian
Bildungsroman counteracts the alienating effects of the industrialized mode
of production through shocking measures to awaken the text’s class
consciousness. The mental life of Chicago is consistently framed as something
of a charnel house, where the individual enjoyment of social space common in
Enlightenment thought meets its bitter death; for, as Mencken reminds us, all
‚indubitable‛ American writers have tender ‚connection*s+ with the
gargantuan and inordinate abattoir by Lake Michigan.‛33 In this chapter, I
consider this charnel house of the Bildungsroman by including three of the
most prominent authors during the first half of the twentieth century. This
selection occurred not on account of the authors’ paradigmatic fidelity to the
genre, rather for the opposite: the exceptionalism of their contribution to the
Chicagoan Bildungsroman, regarding hostile literary ‘space’ in the terms I
have defined it.
32 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford and
Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), p. 3.
33 Quoted in: Bernard F. Rodgers, Jr., Voices and Visions: Selected Essays (Lanham, New York,
and Oxford: University Press of America, 2001) p. 236.
39
I A Crude Awakening: Experiencing Capital & the Bildungsromance
of Female Labor in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1901)
Capital as Sensuous Form
‚A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing,‛
Marx cautioned his readership, a caveat to approaching the concept of
commodity fetishism. 34 The ‚secret,‛ ‚mystical character‛ of the commodity
stems from its reflection and substitution of the social characteristic of labor as
‚objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves.‛35 Theodore
Dreiser, ‚the American writer whose commodity lust and authorial
investments and attitudinizing are most reminiscent of Balzac,‛ as Fredric
Jameson once postulated,36 was the first author truly to commit American
realism and the Bildungsroman to exposing, characterizing, and dramatizing
the ‚secret‛ processes of commodification. In his attempts to project the
sensorium of the market through his central character Carrie Meeber, of
feeling capital as an outlet of human pleasure plugged into the circuit of
social exchange, Dreiser modified the entire function of the Bildungsheld/e.
For Jameson, Carrie transmits not a strictly novelistic (in its prior sense)
‚point of view‛ but rather a filmic one, instigating the ‚textual institution or
determinant that expresses and reproduces the newly centred subject of the
age of reification.‛37 Consider the gaze of an omniscient narrator, looking over
34 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes
(Middlesex and New York: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 163.
35 Ibid., pp. 164-5.
36 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London and
New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 145.
37 Ibid., p. 146.
40
the shoulder of a protagonist who ‚pauses at each individual bit of finery,‛
wandering aimlessly yet compulsively around Chicago’s The Fair, ‚*noting+
the dainty concoctions of color and lace there displayed‛ before moving
forward, compelled to seek out and ‚*linger+ in the jewelry *sic+ department,‛
to ‚see the earrings, the bracelets, the pins, the chains.‛ 38 To read this
department store scene is to observe the perfidious phenomenon Adorno
describes in the aphorism, ‘Gold Assay’: the individual concentrated into ‚a
mere reflection of property relations.‛ 39 This middle-state of impossible
genuineness, the ‚last bulwark of individualist ethics‛ against industrial mass
production, is at stake in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie; for as with ‚gold,‛ Adorno
forewarns, so to ‚genuineness, abstract as the proportion of fine metal,
becomes a fetish.‛40
It is this sensual play of a modern practice of style, this fool’s gold of
fetishized individualism, that propels Dreiser beyond the ‚Balzacian rhetoric‛
into a textual surface where we begin to both witness and feel the seductive
and vertiginous effects of capitalism upon textual production itself: ‚the
beautiful thing‛ of the utopian drive of the Bildungsroman observing and
adapting its aesthetics to the destructive market forces of mass culture.41 Such
an impulse radiates in Carrie’s emulation of the manners of the world of
leisure and luxury she craves to enter, and eventually does enter through her
theatrical representations, in her quest for relief from her alienated working
middle-class state.
38 Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1959), p. 61.
Subsequent references to page numbers hereafter cited in text for this current section.
39 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott
(London & New York: Verso, 2005), p. 155.
40 Ibid.
41 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 146.
41
This section considers how Dreiser’s Bildungsroman feels the tension in the
roots of its bourgeois fibres working against the machinery of deindividuated
modernity, how the text reforms style even as it recontains essential aspects of
the genre, performing a dialectic between the sensuous and automated
aspects of ‘work.’ The motor of my argument therefore situates Sister Carrie as
an Entwicklungsroman – the narrative of individual growth – in observing
how form works for and against the generic conception of work. If work-as-
being underlines the primary model of becoming (Bildung) in the masculinist
Germanic roots of the Bildungsroman genre, as Moretti argues, this section
considers how Dreiser explores female labor without ‚closing the circle‛ of
productive and non-productive work, or capitalist and noncapitalist
bourgeois reproduction.42 Dreiser’s naturalist canvasing of the new forms of
women’s economic growth through labor and capitalist (re)production, rather
than their moral growth through courtship, offsets critical assumptions about
the mechanized male industry associated with 1890s America and the
Bildungsroman.
For almost one hundred and twenty years, Dreiser’s complex response to the
primary muse of his career – Capital – has remained the object of critical
dispute. Dreiser had ‚one story to tell,‛ Jackson Lears condenses, ‚and he
never tired of telling it‛: a young person from ‚the American hinterland flees
from provincial boredom,‛ seeking ‚a new life in the city.‛43 This is not the
novelist’s entire scope; of the eight novels Dreiser composed, three feature
42 Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London:
Verso, 1987), p. 29.
43 Jackson Lears, ‘Dreiser and the History of American Longing,’ in The Cambridge Companion
to Theodore Dreiser, eds. Leonard Cassuto and Clare Virginia Eby (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 63.
42
American millionaires and/or titanic industrialists as primary characters.44
Granted, Dreiser returns to the Bildungsroman ad nauseum to explicate the
historic coordinates of American macroeconomics through formulaic allegory,
reimagining an expedited process of urbanization as it is sensuously
experienced by young, often unremarkable but highly impressionable
members of the white-collar, middle class workforce: Chicago’s resident
‚clerks and shopgirls.‛45
In the period from 1880 to 1930, the American female labor force ‚grew by 307
percent while the adult female population increased by only 171 percent,‛
and by 1930, ‚one-quarter of all adult women and over half of all the single
adult women worked in the wage labor force.‛ 46 Of this same period, a one
thousand percent increase of female presence in Chicago’s workforce
occurred: from ‚35,600 to 407,600 *<+ three times as great as the rate of
increase of the female labor force for the nation as a whole.‛47 As Joanne J.
Meyerowitz evaluates, literature responded to these changes; and the ‚turn
of the century‛ popular stereotype of the ‚woman adrift,‛ unfettered to any
nuclear family in this climate of industrial overturn, found its ideal mimicry
in the ‚young, single, native born, and white‛ Carrie. The prevalence of this
feminine stereotype ascended despite census data of the 1880s which reveals a
‚strikingly heterogeneous group‛ of racially and religiously diverse women
of various marital statuses (single, separated, divorced, and widowed), and
44 Keith Newlin, A Theodore Dreiser Encyclopaedia (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003), pp.
50-1.
45 Lears, ‘Dreiser and the History of American Longing,’ p. 63.
46 Joanne J. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 5.
47 Ibid.
43
between fourteen to eighty-seven, all of whom were typecast as culturally
‚adrift‛ in The Jungle.48
Framed by this data, we may begin to speculate that Carrie represents a
material mythology of women in the division of labor, a stereotype grounded
in a certain simulation of relations under capitalism (a simulacrum), more
than she simulates any psychic interiority of realist characterization we
associate with the Bildungsroman – a problematic distinction I shall continue
to massage throughout this section.
De-eroticized Bodies and the Erotic Locus of Machinery
Dreiser’s stereotype du jour – the ingénue exposed to the forces of modernity,
impressed and enchanted by the possibilities of the metropolis – always
succumbs to a reversal of fortune; this typically culminates in their revelatory
disillusionment with the excesses of urban society and their dissatisfaction
with the division of labor in the first machine age. This formulaic plot turn
enables the novelist to explore the full socioeconomic dimensions of
modernity at every level of the socioeconomic hierarchy, as well as the human
response system to the mode of production.
For Dreiser, and other Chicago Naturalists such as Stephen Crane and Frank
Norris writing in this peak wave of Spencerian and Darwinian sociology, 49
the natural world and its ‚natural processes were necessary to the proper
48 Meyerowitz, Women Adrift, p. 6.
49 Norris’ The Pit (1903) bears a striking resemblance to the skeleton plot of Sister Carrie,
without the intensity of Dreiser’s commodity lust.
44
functioning of the city.‛ 50 In this field of thought, the further society is
‚removed from the biological rhythms of nature, of the land, the more
grotesque our behaviour becomes,‛ as Lehan describes.51
Carrie’s journey of despiritualization begins with a scene historically invested
in the technologies of expansion and capitalism’s will to power: the railroad.
Modernity’s dynamo presses electrification and infrastructure against the last
natural thresholds of the American frontier in a commonplace ‘establishing
shot’ of a young protagonist, boarding a train. In a camera-sweep movement,
Dreiser’s narrator teases the fantasies of the ‚child,‛ the ‚genius with
imagination,‛ and the ‚wholly untraveled alike‛ at the level of image,
guiding their virginal excitation towards the city’s sensorium of technology
[17]:
Streetcar lines had been extended far out into the open country in
anticipation of rapid growth. The city had laid miles and miles of
streets and sewers, through regions where, perhaps, one solitary
house stood out alone – a pioneer of the populous ways to be. There
were regions open to the sweeping winds and rain, which were yet
lighted throughout the night with long, blinking lines of gaslamps,
fluttering in the wind. Narrow boardwalks extended out, passing here
a house, and there a store, at far intervals, eventually ending on the
open prairie. [17]
As Philip Fisher further argues, this Chicagoan image sequence ‚invents a
feeling of pathos of the future‛ as much as to the ‚nostalgia and regret‛ of the
past; Fisher contends that Dreiser’s Chicago is itself ‚a mediating term‛ that
suggests, uniquely to America, a ‚practice‛ of incomplete, present actions
50 Richard Daniel Lehan, Realism and Naturalism: The Novel in an Age of Transition (University
of Wisconsin Press, 2005), pp. 128-9.
51 Ibid.
45
only existent as ‚the preparation‛ for the unfolding future. 52 The flux of
possibility in experiencing technological innovation and the material mobility
it affords the individual appear initially curative to the constraints of
participating in the urban workforce; these forces being constantly in motion
enables the individual to pause on the threshold of becoming, delaying the
finality of reaching adulthood. This mediated era of the machine defers from
that ‚material sphere of everyday work and activity‛ required to support the
continuation of the consumption cycle now coming into full economic
realization with the twentieth century.53
Upon closer inspection, a hidden account of class struggle and the labor
history of industrial capitalism is sublimated within this web of steel tracks: a
social narrative of blacklisted Chicagoan railroad strikers unable to contest
the increasingly difficult conditions of their ‚*sped+ up and *stretched+-out‛
labor with the invention of ‚doubleheader‛ trains (twice the number of cars;
no extra workers). It encodes fat-pocketed railroad speculators with their
Congress land grants who profited enormously from this transportation
revolution, and the streetcar capitalists who Dreiser would return to in A
Trilogy of Desire. Both sides of this concealed history brought about this
industrial expansion and facilitated the ‚tremendous immigration‛ to
Chicago, the threshold upon which Carrie literally and allegorically stands.54
Thus, in supporting Fisher’s argument that Carrie’s experience magnifies the
city’s inner zeitgeist, as a metonymy and miniaturization of the material
52 Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1986), pp. 129-30.
53 Fisher, Hard Facts, pp. 129-30.
54 Carolyn Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons: An American Revolutionary (Chicago: Haymarket Books,
2012), p. 18.
46
history, I agree only under the provision this is a mechanical simulation of
spirit.
Carrie, as a Bildungshelde, stands ‘above’ this history of the workforce that
supports her journey; her sole interest resides in her own experience of
Chicago, what the city can afford her, and what its history immediately
means to her present condition. She projects no historical awareness, no social
empathy for the suffering of other characters, such as the homeless man
outside the restaurant who Carrie ‚quickly forgot‛ [119]; and particularly for
the latter-day Hurstwood. Her ability to retain memories seems limited; she
forgets her parents at the train station, her sister and brother in law in their
modest apartment, and Drouet and Hurstwood, the instant she leaves them.
Thus she embodies one of the great anxieties of the age of capitalist mass
culture: that nothing in this mode of production, including youth, is made to
last. Everything is replaceable and obsolescent, individuation is impossible,
and Dreiser’s novel seems to look forward in this sense to a postmodernity in
which there is no original referent.
Put another way, via Paul Giles’ more thorough assessment of Dreiser’s locus
of style, the recurring image of the mirror into which Carrie peers suggests a
scopic ‚symbiosis between character and culture.‛55 The mirror reflection that
hosts a collective spirit of self-absorption presents enormous repercussions for
the Bildungsroman genre in form and content. Walter Benjamin describes
such a process, in which the Romantic fascination with the mirror appearance,
the Erscheinung, transfigures the ‚mirror image *Bild]‛ into a filmic device that
‚has become detachable from the person mirror,‛ ‚transported‛ to ‚a site in
55 Paul Giles, ‘Dreiser’s Style,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser, eds. Leonard
Cassuto and Clare Virginia Eby (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
2004), p. 54.
47
front of the masses.‛56 Even prior to her stage career, her transformation into
just such a Bild, Carrie’s pervasive ‚touch of vanity‛ *117+ counteracts the
Bildungsroman’s typical moderate balance between individual desires and
social constraints, if reconciled with Giles’ argument that the prevalent use of
similes throughout the narrative demonstrates the impulsion for all characters
to ‚identify with what they are not,‛ vacating their ‚interiority and
rearticulating them as cogs within the city’s financial machine.‛57
To bind this proposition to the generic root by building upon Marc Redfield’s
etymological analysis of Bildung, Carrie’s mirror allegorically reflects the
‚interplay of representation (Bild) and formation (Bildung)‛ as it internally
‚whispers the profound homology between pedagogy and aesthetics, the
education of a subject and the figuration of the text‛ towards an aesthetic
humanism and the ideological ‚version‛ of the literary absolute in German
Romanticism. 58 Dreiser, not one for subtlety, brings the Bildungsroman’s
subterranean ideology regarding culture and character to the literal surface of
things.
The city’s collective unconsciousness, and Carrie’s individual narrative,
intersect and journey onward in increasingly disparate valences from the
moment she alights the train; for one such as Carrie
56 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second
Version,’ trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its
Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid
Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, et al. (Cambridge, MA and London:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 33.
57 Giles, ‘Dreiser’s Style,’ p. 55.
58 Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 38-9.
48
could have understood the meaning of a little stonecutter’s yard at
Columbia City, carving little pieces of marble for individual use, but
when the yards of some huge stone corporation came into view, filled
with spur tracks and flat cars, transpierced by docks from the river
and traversed overhead by immense trundling cranes of wood and
steel, it lost all significance in her little world. [18]
Naturalist authors, including Dreiser, sought new ways to substantiate the
‚density of urban life and factory work‛ that had shattered the possibility of
fulfilling the bourgeois dreamscape of individual ‘little worlds’ by forcing
‚people into increased contact with one another.‛ 59 Despite the increased
proximity of bodies, the work-life balance of urban life encouraged greater
psychic division between workers, even as it eclipsed the possibility for true
individuation. This paradox of proximity and division comes to the fore in
Dreiser’s theatres of realism, overturning the Enlightenment philosophy that
the socialization of the self was part and parcel of belonging to the bourgeois
collective. Consumption vouchsafes a temporary alleviation of these
increasing anxieties faced by young adults; the commodity grows to define
the individual in this economy, revoking the concept that a profession defines
one’s character and status (as it did in the various Bildung doctrines of the
Enlightenment).
As Siegfried Kracauer would later observe in his survey of the salaried
masses of Dresden, the results of which are comparable in many ways to the
American milieu of Dreiser, educated school-leavers of petit bourgeois origins
were most likely to aspire to commercial employment: to a ‚non-manual job,
preferably in sales, work that’s light and clean,‛ that is, to any role that was
not considered physically demanding or psychically draining, such as factory
59 Redfield, Phantom Formations, pp. 38-9.
49
work.60 In his dissemination of how economic selection informs the evolving
division of labor, Kracauer distinguished that these children had, from birth,
already undergone a bureaucratic interview process; their ‚rosy dreams do
not all come to fruition,‛ for it is ‚not enough to feel the call, you must also be
chosen – chosen by the authorities driving forward the economic process that
drives them‛ in a market of increasing automation and corporate selection.61
‚Jobs are precisely not vocations tailored to so-called personalities, but jobs in
the enterprise, created according to the needs of the production and
distribution process‛; 62 thus, it would take an extraordinary event of
individual exceptionalism to prevail against this current.
I propose that Dreiser dramatizes just such an extraordinary event: observing
the very same sociological dialectic between vocation and social value in a
highly unrealistic way; that is, through the theatres of the realist
Bildungsroman. By doing so, he brings the genre into tension with the
teleological models that analyze how ‚masses‛ of individuals enter the
workforce through networks of race, class, gender, now only in order to
become part of the system rather than to develop their own sense of identity
through vocation. Yet in doing so, it remains unclear to what extent Dreiser
rejects these forces of the capitalist market, or if he actually upholds its
ideologies and values at the level of form; this ambiguity is precisely where
our interest in his generic contribution lies.
Dreiser sublates the anxiety of vocation by dramatizing the fetish nature of
consumerist desire: the eroticization of capital and exchange as a compulsive
feeling, such as Carrie’s orgasmic ‚relief‛ to ‚hold the money in her hand‛
60 Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, trans.
Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1998), p. 33.
61 Ibid.
62 Kracauer, The Salaried Masses, p. 35.
50
[60], coupled with heightened expressions of exotic technological
advancement. This techno-commodity fetishism becomes an increasingly
seductive pressure point of the novel, absorbing Dreiser’s characters and the
reader along with them into the fracturing process of modernization, the
inertia of limitless reproduction moving forward and never arriving at
catharsis. Thus, form and content turn upon one another as the leisurely event
of reading, realism’s delicious familiarities and escapisms, make themselves
known as artificial distractions. Realism, perforce, succumbs to Romance.
As Carrie alights at the train station, the reader must halt in an unresolvable
moment of suspension between discrete binaries or states of being: tradition
and progress, the public and private, between free spirits and automatons;
and in our mutual detachment and disorientation, we observe Carrie clinging
to the city’s smallest material semes as geographical and quasi-spiritual
coordinates: reading and translating the language of commodities. A flâneur
of Fifth Street, her transition from unknowing into knowing (Bildung) begins
in observing people ‚counting money, dressing magnificently, and riding in
carriages‛ with barely the ‚vaguest conception‛ of how industrial capitalism
imbricates the materials, mode of production, market forces, and division of
labor within this city topography. [18] We are likewise forced to seek out and
map the ‘new’ in place of following the manual routines of the realism’s
traditional generic cues and habits.
Dreiser, a sceptical apprentice of Émile Zola’s naturalism,63 substitutes literary
fate for material causality, in which the technological and the architectural
conspire as affective medial ‚forces‛ (Dreiser’s fondest idiom, by Leonard
63 Donald Pizer, ‘Late Nineteenth-Century American Literary Naturalism: A Re-Introduction,’
American Literary Realism vol. 38, no. 3 (Spring, 2006), p. 190.
51
Cassuto and Clare Virginia Eby’s account).64 These forces not only govern the
lives of the principal characters of the Bildungsroman through the economic
unconscious; these fractured subjects all the more embody these forces, in that
Chicago’s exterior material conditions govern their interior lives. Dreiser
‚implicitly recognized the emotional dimension long missing from textbook
accounts of the ‘rise of the city,’‛ proposes Lears;65 although, I stipulate that
this unfettered emotional dimension is not part of some humanization of the
city populace, rather a tendency to bear witness to the affective manipulation
of the masses through image-sequence.
At the level of imagery and language, Dreiser reinstates the lost desire of
‚sensuous pleasure and luxury‛ and an intensity of experience into ‚fleeting
facsimile*s+ of ecstasy‛ that had been cauterized from everyday life in the
modern workforce: the spellbinding rapture of consumption. 66 Yet the
intrusive narrator’s dissatisfaction with both the division of labor and the
urban conditions that uphold the mode of production undercuts the
consumer lust that motorizes the principal character. In this way, Dreiser
produces the first Bildungsroman to remediate the locus of the erotic
anchored in the genre’s philosophical root – the human drive to reproduce –
into an aesthetically sensuousness depiction of capitalism’s reproductive
centre: conspicuous consumption and mass culture. It is in no way incidental
that Dreiser’s protagonist is female – that her course towards Bildung boils
down to this dialectical play between alienated labor and the sensuous
experience of capital as substitutions for the courtship plot. Flouting the
gender distinctions between men’s and women’s Bildungsromans, Dreiser is
64 Leonard Cassuto and Clare Virginia Eby (eds.), ‘Introduction,’ in The Cambridge Companion
to Theodore Dreiser (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004) p. 2.
65 Lears, ‘Dreiser and the History of American Longing,’ p. 63.
66 Ibid.
52
at every corner both resistant to and compliant with the ineffectuality of
realism to express modernity’s Bildung. His use value for the unanchored
female protagonist, her new position in the urban American fabric, neatly
allegorizes the new possibilities for literary representation as a historical
event.
Modernity’s valences, positive and negative, play out in the text’s narrative
force field in a dialectical current, certainly giving credence to Lears’
assessment that Dreiser ‚was never very good at bringing the big picture into
focus.‛67 Sister Carrie analyzes from the last three decades have predominantly
bifurcated between supporting Jameson’s reading of Dreiser as a sceptic of
mass culture,68 or accepting Walter Benn Michaels’ proposal that he was an
inadvertent defender of capitalist economics with an ‚unabashed and
extraordinarily literal acceptance of the economy that produced those
conditions.‛69 In the positive valence, Dreiser’s text makes known that the fin
de siècle American urban public was better connected and less socially divisive
than it had ever been, at least at the level of data; the city was religiously and
racially diversifying (even if these are the least observable transformations in
the text itself to signal the emergence of modernity). Gender roles in the
workforce were less distinct, and a variety of new industries were opening up
previously unheard of employment opportunities; time-zones were
standardized, webs of railroads contracted space whilst the telephone
likewise collapsed communicative distance.
67 Lears, ‘Dreiser and the History of American Longing,’ p. 64.
68 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New
York: Verso, 1991), p. 200.
69 Walter Benn Michaels, ‘Sister Carrie’s Popular Economy,’ Critical Inquiry vol. 7, no. 2
(Winter, 1980), p. 377.
53
This state of collective material fetishism of the new, or commodity
enchantment as a means of connection through social mediation (Carrie and
Drouet the dapper drummer literally meet on a connecting train), disguises
the economic infrastructures that were increasingly governing the way people
lived, worked, and consumed, and were ultimately disconnecting them from
their neighbours: those ‚*n+ationwide corporations and monopolistic trusts‛
that ‚loomed over the economic landscape,‛ as Cassuto and Eby describe.70 In
a peculiar ecology where less privacy paradoxically resulted in greater
disconnection, the corporation could speak directly into the earpiece of the
masses through any number of new media outlets: publishing houses that
were increasing the availability of print, larger newspapers, billboards,
motion pictures. Corporations could show each consumer at all levels of class,
gender, religion, or race a live-reel of the life they ought to want; dazzling
them with shopfront displays and mail-order catalogues; or entice them
inside to test-drive a better lifestyle in the uncanny department stores.71 This
unprecedented, unrestricted medial power transcends the moral spectrum of
the social organism lodged at the Bildungsroman’s philosophical core.
Jameson traces Dreiser as American literature’s first pulse of what Roland
Barthes articulates in Writing Degree Zero as ‚that infinite delicacy of feeling to
the flesh as well as to the soul,‛ in a perplexing fraternization of ‚strange and
alien bodily speech‛ and the ‚linguistic junk of commodified language,‛72
speaking directly to this communications revolution in its own dialect, and
without overt didacticism. Through Carrie’s chiasmic perceptions on
economics and consumer culture, an excess of superficial desire which the
novel goes to great lengths to forgive her on account of her ‘youthfulness,’ the
70 Cassuto and Eby, ‘Introduction,’ p. 3.
71 Ibid.
72 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 147.
54
reader experiences modernity not only as an illuminating historical process.
The reader furthermore witnesses a specific moment in that progression: the
watershed in which American capitalism seriously conflates the accumulation
of capital and its commodities with the fulfilment of individual desire and
happiness, rather than the enjoyment of work (as outlined above in the
Germanic Bildungsroman tradition). America’s love affair with aspirational
individualist capitalism finds itself distilled into the literary romance of a
personalized coming of age, and all the more, in its own language: a Horatio
Algerian wish fulfilment of heightened realism, a vicarious love affair with
accumulating more and more of those ‚soft, green, handsome ten-dollar
bills.‛ *57]
I designate this formal gearshift as Dreiser’s Bildungsromance. This is to
propose, quite problematically, that Dreiser sought to allegorize commodity
fetishism at the expense of developing a coherent realist protagonist, a notion
that requires some canvasing. Stanley Corkin situates Sister Carrie as evidence
that ‚industrialization and urbanization were altering the way in which
individuals worked, lived, and ultimately, the way in which they conceived
of themselves and the world.‛73 Robert Seguin similarly applies the term
‚interpenetration‛ to describe the effect generated by Sister Carrie’s recurring
moments of ‚suspension and transition between work and leisure when the
immediate and lingering memory of work commingles with anticipation of
relaxation, where the purposefulness of the wage earner’s day and the (at
least ideal) purposeless of the time of leisure have not yet been fully
separated.‛74
73 Stanley Corkin, ‘Sister Carrie and Industrial Life: Objects and the New American Self,’
Modern Fiction Studies vol. 33, no. 4 (Winter, 1987), p. 606.
74 Robert Seguin, Around Quitting Time: Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fiction
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 24.
55
American’s agrarianism and agricultural commodities no longer formed the
cradle of the United States’ economy; the rise in manufacturing destabilized
the primacy of the Bildungsroman, which as Moretti postulates, concerns the
philosophical nature of work-fulfilment for the bourgeoisie. Underscoring the
Germanic origins, the Humboldtian understanding of education and work as
Bildung advised that labor, in itself, is a productive and rewarding enterprise
that characterizes the harmonious formulation and socialization of the
individual. Labor forms a will to freedom in a meritocracy, and a process of
limitless growth for the individual to achieve society’s highest ideals. Moretti
analyzes the peculiar economic logic of this socialization in the
Bildungsroman tradition:
The ‘harmony’ that characterizes work in Meister is due to the fact that
work does not follow a strictly economic logic, necessarily indifferent
to the subjective aspirations of the individual worker. Instead of
forcibly sundering an ‘alienated’ objectification and interiority
incapable of being expressed, work in the Bildungsroman creates
continuity between external and internal, between the ‘best and most
intimate’ part of the soul and the ‘public’ aspect of existence.75
Counterpointing the private-public distinction of labor underscoring the
individual’s maturation against the idealist Germanic Bildungsroman
doctrine of Friedrich Schiller, Moretti determines that the harmony of
employment falls into dissonance in a society in which capitalistic work
‚degrades humanity,‛ and the ‚god of profit‛ effectively ‚betrays the very
essence of work, what it is ‘in and for itself.’ Beautiful. Ennobling.‛76 Even as
the bourgeois novel attempts to reinject exceptional individualism, in order to
overcome the increasing objectification of modern workforce, art itself begins
75 Moretti, The Way of the World, p. 30.
76 Ibid., p. 31.
56
to mimic these repetitive, generic processes of mechanized, alienated labor
within popular art and kitsch music, disenchanting the aura of authenticity in
art works and forms. Literature in turn accommodates the cultural
shockwaves of mass migration to the cityscapes, to machine culture, the
reappropriation of gender expectations and the traditional nuclear family
unit, and the new social and labor relations facilitated by these densely
populated industrial zones.
Here, I seek to connect a gendered account of mass culture with the new
female Bildungsroman proposed by Dreiser. ‚In the domain of body culture,‛
writes Kracauer, the quietly changing tastes of mass culture begins its process
with the screening of the Tiller girls: ‚These products of American distraction
factories are no longer individual girls, but indissoluble clusters whose
movements are demonstrations of mathematics.‛77 The Tiller Girls’ ‚plastic
expression of erotic life,‛ which ‚gave rise to them and determined their
traits,‛ exemplifies the ‚locus of the erotic‛78 that criticism has, by and large,
failed to identify in Dreiser. Responding to Jameson’s claim that Carrie’s
mobility as a ‚newly centred subject‛ renders her gender epiphenomenal to
the socioeconomic critique of the novel (her lusts are a guilty side effect of
rampant capitalism, in Jameson’s model), Florence Dore presses the case for a
‚newly centred‛ and ‚newly engendered‛ subject. Dreiser’s female subject
characterizes the new status afforded to women in the urban consumer
economy as an ‚unapologetic sexual woman.‛79
An accord may be struck be struck between these two commentaries through
the mediating movements of the Tiller Girls. I will refer this logic to the three
77 Kracauer, Mass Ornaments, pp. 75-6.
78 Ibid., p. 77.
79 Florence Dore, The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism (Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 22.
57
defining representations of female labor in the novel, all of which complicate
the relevancy of work and individuation within the Bildungsroman
apparatus. Carrie’s three roles are as: a factory girl; the ‚kept woman‛; and in
a final reifying gesture which absorbs all essence into appearance, her work as
the celebrity actress.
I firstly appeal, by way of explanation, to Kracauer’s de-eroticized ‘Girls in
Crisis’ (1931), the second instance in which he compares the all-American
Tiller Girls to cogs in the factory conveyor belt:
Not only were they American products; at the same time they
demonstrated the greatness of American production< When they
formed an undulating snake, they radiantly illustrated the virtues of
the conveyor belt; when they tapped their feet in fast tempo, it
sounded like business, business; when they kicked their legs with
mathematical precision, they joyously affirmed the progress of
rationalization; and when they kept repeating the same movements
without ever interrupting their routine, one envisioned an
uninterrupted chain of autos gliding from the factories into the
world.80
Dreiser preconsciously assigns the female body itself as the locus of the proto-
assembly line and mass reproduction in an image that pre-empts Kracauer’s
feminized automatons of American industry. Kracauer’s mass ornament
designates a fractured ‚female body and its component parts‛ that have been
‚de-eroticized‛ by the rhythms of mass production, Peter Wollen argues. 81
80 Quoted in Patrice Petro, ‘Perceptions of Difference: Woman as Spectator and Spectacle,’ in
Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed. Katharina von Ankum
(Berkley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997), p. 56.
81 Peter Wollen, ‘Cinema/Americanism/the Robot,’ in Modernity and Mass Culture, eds. James
Naremore and Patrick Brantlinger (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1991) p. 59.
58
And as ‚The Tiller girls reduced the erotic to a set of formal operations,‛ the
‚operations and procedure of logic‛ have likewise formalized to the point of
mechanization.82
I refer this de-eroticized operation to Carrie’s employment in the shoe factory
early in the narrative:
The machine girls impressed her less favorably. They seemed satisfied
with their lot and were in a sense ‚common.‛ Carrie had more
imagination than they. She was not used to slang. Her instinct in
matters of dress was naturally better< They were free with the
fellows, young and old, and exchanged banter in rude phrases, which
at first shocked her. [37]
Upon this cultural conveyor belt, the eros of language as a process collapses
under the weight of its heavy desires; Carrie’s ‚innocence of mind‛ buckles
beneath a linguistic (and generic) framework of ‚sexual prohibition,‛ Dore
concedes. 83 However, the more complex inner life vouchsafed by the
Bildungsroman emerges when Carrie distinguishes herself as exceptional,
indeed, as the type of individuated bourgeois Bildungshelde with which our
readerly expectations are trained to align. We are positioned to sympathize
with the protagonist who proactively frees herself from these miserable
collective conditions of labor, an environment without ‚the slightest
provision‛ for the ‚comfort of the employees.‛ *37+ Yet this focalization
reverberates ironically with the reader’s ability to register the panoramic or
peripheral view of the emotional lives of the other alienated workers. The
narrator all the more glosses their hardship with parody; after an hour on the
job, a physically aching Carrie becomes frustrated with how their bodies
82 Wollen, ‘Cinema/Americanism/the Robot,’ p. 59.
83 Dore, The Novel and the Obscene, p. 37.
59
endure mindless labor with such apparent ease and apparently without
question.
Whilst clearly something humorous accentuates her ‘girlish’ incompetency
(like the theatre audience who later find Carrie’s puzzled frown as Laura
charming to the point of fetishized idiosyncrasy: ‚All the gentleman yearned
toward her. She was capital.‛ [370]), the childish satire of Carrie’s mind-
numbing boredom belies the hugely problematic disparity between essence
and appearance of the present conditions of the mode of production. In the
urban machine culture of the late nineteenth century, labor and comfort can
no longer suggest or sustain mutual inclusivity, as they could under
philosophies of the Enlightenment; ‘productivity,’ as a meaningful social
pursuit undertaken by the bourgeois individual, has shifted down the class
spectrum to connotations of corporate ‘productivity,’ in which a company
manipulates its workers and market conditions for commercial gain. The
narrator, in the performance of a peculiar narratological paradox, intrudes
here to equate Carrie’s instinctive dissatisfaction as historically premonitory
to the later efforts of the trade unions, even as she feels contempt for and
alienation from her fellow workers; consider the narrator’s direct sidebar to
the narratee:
but the new socialism which involves pleasant working conditions for
employees had not then taken hold upon manufacturing companies.
[37]
Dreiser both references the decades of labor protests previously outlined
earlier in this chapter, and foreshadows Hurstwood’s scabbing of the
Brooklyn strikes at the end of the novel. These narratorial intrusions form one
of the ways in which the historico-political agendas of the narrator threaten to
eclipse the narrative of the individual; character ‘identification’ struggles
against the narrative voice’s tendency to sociologize. Yet the alienation of the
60
collective workforce suggestively corresponds to their obscurity within the
novel and to the protagonist’s alienation from her peers; such as the case of
Carrie being ‚too timid to think of intruding herself‛ to seek out the company
of the other girls, instead ‚*seeking+ out her machine‛ and eating her lunch
there instead. [37] Her only connection here is with the machine. Our own
sympathies, as readers, follow her lead, guided by the generic forces of realist
solipsism, which entreat us to observe the primacy of the individual over the
collective in a secret act of material fetishization.84
Carrie’s differentiation of her own value in the division of labor is reducible to
her own sense of disembodiment – what Charles Harmon describes as
Carrie’s expansive sense of self which ‚becomes weightless, unballasted,
barely embodied‛ in the escapist experience of window shopping at
Chicago’s ‘The Fair.’85 Like Kracauer’s de-eroticized Tiller Girl assembly line,
Harmon similarly locates the consuming culture’s ambivalent response to
mediations of female bodies and sexuality in that Carrie’s ‚self-involved
beauty‛ rejects the role of the sexual object designed to stimulate the
phallocentric gaze. 86 Despite her ‘living in sin’ by Dreiser’s contemporary
standards for almost the entire novel, she inspires men’s burning desire to in
an erotic and not unrelatedly in a pecuniary sense. All the while, ‚her clothes
84 Put into context, this passage counterpoints the harrowing millinery episode toward the
end of Edith Wharton’s contemporaneous Bildungsroman, The House of Mirth (1905). Where
Carrie’s experience of alienation forms the springboard of her storied career, Lily Bart
experiences alienation only at the bitter end of her own.
85 Charles Harmon, ‘Cuteness and Capitalism in Sister Carrie,’ American Literary Realism vol.
32, no. 2 (Winter, 2000), p. 126.
86 Ibid.
61
go far to fix her identity‛ as abnormally ‚cute‛ or ‚girlish,‛ depriving her of
the appearance of sexual agency as a substitute for Bildung.87
The de-eroticized ‚machine girls‛ become crudely sexuated instruments of
reproduction, who speak in sexually explicit vernacular yet are described in
dehumanized by their mechanical rhythms; their deindividuated,
unexceptional status disturbs Carrie. Consider the violence in the language of
the girl who mindlessly mediates the action of the machine:
‚It isn’t hard to do,‛ *the girl+ said, bending over. ‚You just take this
so, fasten it with this clamp, and start the machine.‛ *34+
The machine itself begins to think and speak its own language:
She suited action to word, fastened the piece of leather, which was
eventually to form the right half of the upper of a man’s shoe, by little
adjustable clamps, and pushed a small steel rod at the side of the
machine. The latter jumped to the task of punching, with sharp,
snapping clicks, cutting circular bits of leather out of the side of the
upper, leaving the holes which were to hold the laces *<+ The pieces
of leather came from the girl at the machine to her right, and were
passed on to the girl on her left. Carrie saw at once that an average
speed was necessary or the work would pile up on her and all those
below would be delayed. She had no time to look about, and bent
anxiously to her task. [35]
The gendered proto-assembly-line of Kracauer’s Tiller Girls takes root in this
description. Action affixes to word, conjoining violent words with little clamps
and rods of steel; the brute force of the machine sublimates into the according
jagged disyllabic verbs: jumping, punching, clicking, cutting, actions
extended beyond the control of human consciousness. At the micro level, we
87 Harmon, ‘Cuteness and Capitalism,’ p. 126.
62
see the violence of the labor protests, of Haymarket, distilled at the level of
routine. Yet Carrie’s fears of failure and even her ‚imaginings‛ succumb to its
repetition, lulled into the ‚humdrum, mechanical movement of the machine.‛
[35] The room darkens. The dank odor of leather thickens. When she makes
the smallest error, the foreman descends upon her with sharp dogmatic
imperatives: ‚Start your machine *<+ start your machine. Don’t keep the line
waiting.‛ *35+ The workers all toil until the point of ‘absolute nausea’ *36+, and
once the bell rings for them to break, only then does ‚the common voice
*sound+ strange‛ against the ‚audible stillness.‛ *37+ To refer this
phenomenon to Luk{cs’ explanation of alienation, the worker loses their
human attributes to the machine, and their labor becomes ‚progressively
broken down into abstract, rational, specialized operations so that the worker
loses contact with the finished product and his work is reduced to the
mechanical repetition of a specialized set of actions.‛88
Dreiser naturalist observations of mass cultural production swiftly return to
the wish-fulfilment and escapism of what I have already signalled as the
Bildungsromance: Carrie miraculously awakens from her state of alienation.
She realizes that she, alone, is exceptional; the narrator’s slippage into free
indirect discourse reveals how only Carrie intuits the social valuations of
commodities; she calculates the economic valuation which ‚*makes+ the
average feminine distinction between clothes, putting worth, goodness, and
distinction in a dress suit, and leaving all the unlovely qualities and those
beneath notice in overalls and jumper.‛ *38+
Yet even when Carrie finds her next remunerated position as the beautiful
accessory to firstly Drouet then Hurstwood (a role both more and less suitable
for the bourgeois female Bildungsroman than the female laborer, as I shall 88 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney
Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1968), p. 88.
63
presently return to), the Bildungsroman increasingly breaks down: the plot
rotating upon the same spot, pending back and forth with its protagonist in
her rocking chair, as if the Bildungsroman itself is unsure how to proceed in
this naturalist environment in which individual personality is eclipsed by the
shadow of machinery and the scale of industry literally ascends beyond her
small human scope.
The phenomenon Carrie experiences, here represented at the level of generic
breakdown, exemplifies the capitalist process that produces the objectification
of labor; or as Lukács illustrates, she bears witness to the estranged,
‚disintegrating effect of commodity exchange,‛ which, ‚directed in upon
itself shows the qualitative change engendered by the dominance of
commodities.‛89 The Bildungsroman as a form chafes against the actuality of
working-class labor; and that chafing in itself precipitates textual irony for
Dreiser, the critic of capitalism. By presenting cooperative labor under the
relations of capital from the vantage point of a prospective Bildungshelde,
Dreiser allows his critique to take root in the frustrations we (and Carrie) feel
from within our generic headspace.
Limitless Reproduction and Empty Wombs: Mythologizing Women’s Work
Using Dreiser’s contemporary, Thorstein Veblen, as a paradigmatic point of
departure, Clare Virginia Eby argues the following of Carrie’s female
Bildungsroman: that in ‚*f+ocusing on Carrie’s recreating herself and
enhancing her personal value by permitting herself to feel ever more elusive
89 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 85.
64
desires,‛ Dreiser creates a ‚Bildungsroman of invidious comparison.‛ 90
Carrie’s transformative process is one of ‚observation, contrast, emulation,
and consecutive change.‛91 Carrie’s growth occurs not in ‚knowledge‛ but in
‚desire.‛ 92 Emulation – rather than envy, as might be inspired by her
companion Drouet’s wandering eye – ensures Carrie’s continual adaptation,
but not necessarily growth or maturation. ‚The Bildungsroman of invidious
comparison cannot end in the transcendent wisdom or stable marriage of its
heroine,‛ Eby concludes; thus Dreiser substitutes ‚the apotheosis of desire‛ in
place of Bildung.93
Eby’s argument suggests that the ‚Bildungsroman of invidious comparison,‛
or what I call Carrie’s Bildungsromance, is most akin to the
Entwicklungsroman. Annis Pratt and Barbara White distinguish the
Entwicklungsroman as the most fitting category for female Bildungsromans:
In the woman’s novel of development *<+, the hero does not choose a
life to one side of society after conscious deliberation on the subject;
rather, she is radically alienated by gender-role norms from the very
outset. Thus, although the authors attempt to accommodate their
hero’s Bildung, or development, to the general pattern of the genre, the
disjunctions that we have noted inevitably make the woman’s
initiation less a self-determined progression towards maturity than a
regression from full participation in adult life. It seems more
appropriate to use the term Entwicklungsroman, the novel of mere
growth, mere physical passage from one age to the other without
90 Clare Virginia Eby, ‘The Psychology of Desire: Veblen’s ‚Pecuniary Emulation‛ and
‚Invidious Comparison‛ in Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy,’ Studies in American Fiction
vol. 21, no. 2 (Autumn, 1993), p. 192.
91 Ibid., p. 193
92 Ibid., p. 194.
93 Ibid., p. 195.
65
psychological development, to describe most of the novels that we
have perused.94
The semantics of the Entwicklungsroman do not necessitate an endpoint to
the moral ‘growth’ of the protagonist, I have previously argued; in this case,
Carrie’s growth is that of material wealth, which provides her monetary
means to constantly adapt her aesthetic to suit the market demands for a
certain commodified version of femininity. The defining constituent of the
Bildungsroman – that the Bildungsheld/e arrived at a summit of maturation
and societal conciliation – is ultimately aborted by the narrator. If the readerly
generic expectation demands that Carrie should grow into a morally sound,
socially harmonious, and happy young adult, then this expectation is
limitlessly deferred, and the purpose of the genre ultimately subverted.
Rather than an educational or moral journey, Carrie’s growth is primarily a
financial one; and it is as much juxtaposed against as it is inadvertently
formed by its development alongside the pauperization of Hurstwood, once a
self-made, now self-unmade man.
Where Bildung should proceed, Dreiser instead allegorizes and dramatizes
the process in which his protagonist literally works her way from the bottom
of the division of labor upwards, and in the process, transforms into an
alienated commodity herself within the text. Carrie’s employment starts on
the factory floor amongst its masses of de-eroticized workers, which stinks
‚of the oil of the machines and the new leather.‛ *37+ However, as Larry W.
Isaac contends, her ‚mobility dreams‛ (and, as I argue, Dreiser’s fantasmatic
indulgence of them) are unsuited to the ‘working-class girl’ narrative
94 Annis Pratt and Barbara White, ‘The Novel of Development,’ in Annis Pratt, Archetypal
Patterns in Women’s Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), p. 36.
66
belonging to what he calls the ‚labor problem subgenre.‛ 95 What is
remarkable is that she ‚ultimately achieves some success‛; but in order for the
novel form to restore its equilibrium, her success comes at the (literal) expense
of Hurstwood, a man who becomes ‚so poor and alienated from Carrie that
he resorts to scabbing in a trolley strike,‛ ‚begging,‛ and ‚suicide in a flop-
house hotel room.‛96
Such ‚spectacular material success was, not surprisingly, highly unusual,‛
Meyerowitz concurs,97 echoing Kracauer’s definitive valuation of the salaried
masses. Despite the factory environment being specifically designed for
working women ‚on the assumption that women lived with kin,‛ as both a
financial and moral expectation and restriction,98 Carrie breaks easily out of
the robotic existence of industrial labor, and straight into her next
‘professional role’ as kept-mistress to the travelling salesman, Charles Drouet,
who literalizes her ‘mobility dreams.’ His benefaction enables her duties as
household consumer to come to the narrative fore as a form of salaried work
that mimics myths of the domestic role of the legitimated housewife. Dreiser
is self-consciously allowing fantasy and Romance to disrupt both the realist
and naturalist norms of the Bildung process.
Thus, Carrie’s economic and erotic will to power of possessing the shoes in
shopwindows brings her into the (presumably) sexual relationship with two
men, for which she is not rebuked, as the ‘working class girl’ narrative
95 Larry W. Isaac, ‘Cultures of Class in the Gilded Age Labor Problem Novel,’ in Class and the
Making of American Literature: Created Unequal, ed. Andrew Lawson (New York: Routledge,
2014), p. 120.
96Ibid.
97 Meyerowitz, Women Adrift, p. 20.
98 Ibid.
67
traditionally necessitated. 99 Indeed, Doubleday, Page, and Company
attempted to break contract with Dreiser in 1900 precisely because the novel
unbalanced the moral expectations of realism:100 Carrie was neither a virtuous
girl rewarded, nor a corrupted innocent who receives her just desserts.101 In
this sense, the text itself became a corrupted commodity in that it did not
conform to market conditions or its assigned use value; yet Dreiser does
promote a certain fixation with the ‚sexual waywardness‛ of an unattached
99 In this trajectory, Dreiser follows the historical narrative of labor strike events that he had
witnessed as a journalist, rather than concede to the literary tradition of American working
girl narratives – such as those of the Gilded Age tradition of Rebecca Harding Davis (Life in
the Iron Mills *1861+, an early ‘naturalist’ novella of great influence to Dreiser) and Elizabeth
Phelps (The Silent Partner *1871+). These narratives focused on ‚how industrial wage labor
deformed the feminine character‛ as a ‚psychic and physical toll on female factory workers.‛
If the working girl remained ‚virtuous‛ in these postbellum storylines, she would prosper in
securing ‚a husband and happiness,‛ and ‚fortune;‛ this came at the expense of the novelist
exploring ‚working solidarity and collective action‛ and therefore lacks and basis for
‚critical, radical social change.‛ However, Stephen Crane’s Defoe-esque modern female
figure for the new American century, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), achieved just that: the
virtuosity plot was incompatible with city life and factory employment for the unwed young
woman, and brought about a moral ‘Fall’ for the Bildungsheldin. See: Larry Isaac, pp. 120-1.
As one of the workers refers to Carrie as ‚Maggie,‛ Dreiser appears to be playfully alluding
to this figure. [SC, 39] Carrie is clearly neither of these archetypes, the redux of her not
‘existing’ within realism’s moral boundaries that she previously internalized to claim
superiority to the factory girls.
100 In the European tradition, the dialectical libidinal impulse of our ‚naïve‛ protagonist
Carrie would situate her somewhere under the long shadows either of the ‘innocent woman,
corrupted’ figure characterised by Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), or the
unrepentant social pariah and whore of Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) typecasts. Of Dreiser’s
more immediate continental contemporaries, Sister Carrie carries with it the aesthetic imprint
of Zola’s Nana (1880) from the Les Rougon-Macquart series.
101 Meyerowitz, Women Adrift, p. 117.
68
working woman in the 1890s.102 As I previously noted, Dreiser distils and
perhaps even defers this erotic impulse into the sensual language consumer
lust, rather than verbally explicit sexual conduct. In light of such a remarkable
break with realist norms, where certain means demand certain expected ends,
I have recast Dreiser’s naturalism and his observation of female labor against
the functional realm of a capitalist Bildungsromance, a term I shall now further
unpack.
Marking Dreiser’s ‚two ‘kept woman’ novels,‛ Sister Carrie and Jennie
Gerhardt (1911), as fulcrums in the transition from ‚Antebellum‛ literature to
the ‚Progressive Era,‛ Laura Hapke frames the sexual division of labor as the
barter of women’s sexual services in exchange for (socio)economic ascension
within the novel, against the historical canvas of the literary representation of
prostitution. 103 Dreiser’s peculiar position in this literary corridor exposes the
explosive fantasization of the cultural myth surrounding ‚self-protective‛
nature of ‚feminine economic activity‛ in the proletariat. 104 Dreiser’s
justification for novel’s escapist sublimation into a Bildungsromance fantasy
is to clarify that these Bildungshelden are not laundresses (perhaps all the
more to alleviate the moral clause of the novel’s publication above); they are
sexually vulnerable to the factory floor harassment faced by a pretty working
girl. The ‚mild light‛ of Carrie’s eyes betrays no ‚calculation of the mistress,‛
in Hurstwood’s estimation; her ‚diffident manner was nothing of the art of
the courtesan.‛ *106+
Her blank surface image of innocence, her simulation of youth and unrealized
Bildung, distinguishes her as a viable commodity in the libidinal economy;
102 Laura Hapke, Labor’s Text: The Worker in American Fiction (New Brunswick and New Jersey:
Rutgers University Press, 2001), p. 142.
103 Ibid., p. 156.
104 Ibid.
69
only if Carrie’s actions are veiled behind the façade that she is not really
exchanging sex for money may she obtain the means to fund her financial and
social promotion in the division of labor via that very means. ‚The prodding
in the ribs by a male co-worker is a ‚rude harbinger of what she can expect if
she remains,‛ Hapke assesses, concluding that Dreiser’s social radicalism is
thus compromised in that he both creates a double standard of sex as labor
power, and worse, that in doing so he ‚decouples women and work.‛105
Building upon Hapke’s notion that Dreiser makes the same claim here as the
‚Shirtwaist strikers‛ – that ‚women are vulnerable under industrial
capitalism, and those without economic independence are in danger of sexual
exploitation‛ – 106 I move to intersect the reading of sex and labor relations as
two sides of the same coin in Dreiser’s appropriated Bildungsideal. Dreiser’s
formal organization of sexualized labor power becomes the motor propelling
Carrie’s Bildung as a will to vocational autonomy (and unravelling it, in the
case of Hurstwood).
The issue of sexual legitimacy and the illegitimacy of women’s work via
Carrie’s second role of ‘employment’ as domestic mistress here requires some
remarks regarding the linguistic overhaul of ‘reproduction’ in relation to the
ideal feminine Bildung, as it plays off a contextual anxiety surrounding
population growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not
long after Sister Carrie’s publication, President Roosevelt would demand of
the American masses that they, ‚Work, fight and breed!‛107 Early in the text,
the intrusive narrator steps in to alert the reader that his narrative
105 Hapke, Labor’s Text, p. 156.
106 Ibid., p. 157.
107 Quoted in James A. Marone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 273.
70
observations are impartial to Carrie’s provocative behaviour for that moment
in realism. Extraneous to the plot, the narrator suddenly declares:
In light of the world’s attitude toward woman and her duties, the
nature of Carrie’s mental state deserves consideration *<+ For all the
liberal analysis of Spencer and our modern naturalistic philosophers,
we have but an infantile perception of morals *<+ Answer, first, why
the heart thrills; explain wherefore some plaintive note goes
wandering about the world, undying; make clear the rose’s subtle
alchemy evolving its ruddy lamp in light and rain. In the essence of
these facts lies the first principles of morals. [101]
There are no traditional domestic scenes in Sister Carrie; Dreiser protests
scenes containing domestic agreement as anything other than a theatrical
farce, which seems to parody the traditional female Bildung narrative. Carrie
plays at being wife – adopting the power of a ‚Mrs.‛ without ceremony or
any legally binding documentation. However, Dreiser contrasts this
‘romantic’ role-play against Mrs Jessica Hurstwood, who shrewdly considers
her legal and economic rights within the institute of marriage. The novel
entertains very little of Carrie’s family life in the small-town Midwest; and
even in her first residence with her sister and brother-in-law, the couple are
childless and void of warm parental mannerisms to nurture. Her female
friends are all fashionably dressed, yet childless and inexplicably barren. The
proletarian women Carrie works with in the shoe factory behave and speak
coarsely of their male counterparts and are non-maternal. With Drouet, Carrie
settles for a cortigiana or ruler’s-mistress role, in which she exchanges pleasure
of some variety to her patriarch sort in return for assets, money, and what
level of independence these may afford her. In this sense, Carrie fashions her
body and aesthetic self into a commodity in order to participate in a
71
glamourized mythology of consumerism rather than as a fertile site of
bourgeois reproduction through marriage.
When the narrator repeatedly emphasizes how ‚empty‛ this type of modern
woman feels, the historical narrative certainly approaches – and quite
problematically so – the central underlying concern of America in those
transformative decades either side of the fin de siècle: the emptiness of the
womb, the deferral of the white sexual female body as a site of national
reproduction. As James Marone astutely notes, the moral panic of ‚fallen
women‛ and the modern ‚battle of brothels,‛ the public fear of venereal
diseases that were conflated with the working classes and particularly African
American communities, ‚roared back into the popular imagination‛ time and
time again in any number of panicked gendered, classist, and racialized
public fantasies: such as the ‚old fear of endangered innocents – this time,
fresh country girls‛; or ‚*f+oreign devils [who] snatched innocent daughters
off the family farm, dragged them to the dangerous city, and chained them in
brothers till they perished.‛108
Even more disturbing, certainly in terms of the double representation of
Bildung, was that despite ‚a lynching holocaust‛ that had seen ‚thousands of
black men *murdered+ for allegedly imagining sex with white women,‛ as
Marone sums, physicians such as L.C. Allen – writing for the American Journal
of Public Health, could declare that young white men were ‚going to sow their
wild oats‛ (evoking Hegel’s terms for the Philistine Bildungsroman trope)109
by exploiting black women, which would in turn threaten the purity of the
‚our innocent *white+ daughters‛ they would eventually marry.110 ‚If Sister
108 Marone, Hellfire Nation, p. 260.
109 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume One, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1988) p. 593.
110 Marone, Hellfire Nation, pp. 259-60.
72
Carrie had been more widely available,‛ Marone claims, ‚Americans could
have read something about the future of their sexual mores.‛111 I alternatively
conclude that in the case of Dreiser, the implausible wish-fulfilment of his
capitalist Bildungsromance itself undercuts the successful realization of a
fully liberated engendered subject.
Allison Pease’s feminist theory of boredom in modernism suggests that male
modernist authors equated female narratives with nihilism to be overcome,
creating narratives of ‚deadness, meaninglessness, blankness, and the
unknown,‛ featuring women who are ‚trapped in meaningless machinery.‛112
These novelists (of which she includes writers such as D. H. Lawrence and H.
G. Wells, to which I add Dreiser) attempt to ‚show how a woman can come to
realize a self‛; yet this selfhood rarely ‚equates with what it means to be an
individual.‛113 These male novelists, whose deeper concern is to symbolically
reject Victorian culture by denying the ‚strictures on female behaviour,‛
substituted the achievement of a true feminist Bildung, which Pease calls the
‚intellectual freedom of development and will,‛ with the realization of the
female self as a sexual being, where only sexual development vouchsafes
authentic ‚psychological relief.‛114
Dreiser certainly appears guilty of joining Lawrence, Forster, and Wells in
their ‚archetype of male wish fulfilment‛ by committing a similar
substitution in Carrie’s development; 115 yet Dreiser sublimates his
protagonist’s realization of sexual autonomy by displacing her erotic impulse
111 Marone, Hellfire Nation, p. 273.
112 Allison Pease, Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012), p. 40.
113 Ibid., p. 45.
114 Ibid.
115 Ibid., p. 55.
73
to consumer lust, thereby doubly deferring her attainment of Bildung. This
charge redoubles if we synthesize Pease’s theory of boredom to Jennifer L.
Fleissner’s terminology of ‚compulsion‛ in the role played by women in the
masculinist tradition of American naturalism. To return to my earlier reading
of Kracauer’s Tiller Girls, the compulsive rhythms of the machine are
sublimated into the image of a ‚rocking chair‛ in which a ‘bored’ Carrie
meditates; the image mutually informs the psychological conditions driving
sexual and economic reproduction under the auspices of mass culture.
Jennifer Fleissner reads the rocking chair as encoded female masturbatory
device, drawing upon the public commentary of influential men of the era,
from Clark University psychologist G. Stanley Hall to then President
Theodore Roosevelt himself, all of whom cast independent women and their
rocking chairs as sublimating their maternal duties with ‚self-gratification.‛116
Both these sites of organic and inorganic female reproduction are ironic in
their production, as Fleissner contends; in their repetitive outputs of energy,
they stagnate individual growth and individuation itself through replication
and duplication.
As escapism in form and content, Carrie continues to grow into something
new in an inconclusive Entwicklungsroman; the alienated worker finally
becomes Carrie the alienated consumer, estranged from the manual labor of
the workforce she refuses to participate in, unable to relate the soreness in her
arms to the beauty of the commodity she fondles or gazes upon in a shop
display. Her commodity lust draws her into a cycle of expenditure only made
viable by a dialectical connection between female labor and female
consumption, which is ultimately directed by fashions of the male gaze.
Sartorial fashion is the most obvious microcosm of the aesthetic life sold to
116 Jennifer L. Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 185.
74
young female consumers by department store advertising. Carrie, an actress
by nature, instinctively reacts to Drouet’s wandering eye of appraisal for the
objective female form with a peculiar need to emulate:
He had just enough of the feminine love of dress to be a good judge –
not of intellect, but of clothes *<+ If that was so fine, she must look at
it more closely. Instinctively, she felt a desire to imitate it. Surely she
could do that too. [112]
Carrie’s instinct to imitate is akin to Dreiser’s naturalist methodology: to
observe and replicate a lens of material or natural reality as an aesthetic
reproduction; it is a desire to labor and earn by reproducing what is and is not
already ‘there.’ As a final promotion on her curriculum vitae, and Dreiser’s
fantastical final thrust into the carcass of teleological realism, Carrie becomes
more than a chorus girl or character theatre actress by trade: but as renowned
actress, a recognizable celebrity brand. Now a more successful type of mass
ornament, whose appearance inspires pecuniary emulation of gender division
through consumption (sextuated clothing), Carrie’s own image now compels
the consumer to mindlessly work in order to afford the ability to dream of
individuation, elevation, exceptionalism through consumption. On the other
hand, the exchange of goods and services for financial gain, without the
property license one legally obtains of another through marriage, actually
indicates Carrie’s desire to earn as much as to spend. I emphasize that in
doing so, Dreiser reinstates the masculine Bildungsideal of work as
meaningful to individuation and their social value and belonging; it seems a
rich coincidence that Carrie finds meaningful employment on the stage, the
exact desideratum of Wilhelm Meister before he enters the Brotherhood. The
circle of labor and reproduction is closed, and yet its implications for
individuation are intensified.
75
This impulse demonstrates a formal lens and lever between realism’s
tendency towards individual exceptionalism, and naturalism’s sweeping
tendency to contain the individual within superstructural forces of the
historico-material environment. Consumption rituals alienate the young
individual, stagnating the ‚congruence of formation and socialization,‛ that
synthesis which Moretti argues is the cornerstone of the classical
Bildungsroman. 117 Thus we arrive at this section’s overarching formal
dilemma: after locating Dreiser’s text in its historical and formal context, how
do we then situate its generic framework as a Bildungsroman against the
narrative’s increasing scepticism not only towards personal ‘growth,’ and
particularly female growth, as something outside of economic valuation?
More alarmingly, how do we resolve the Entwicklungsroman’s now limitless
process of ‘becoming’ against the increasing impossibility of realizing
individuation altogether in mass culture?
The Novel of Individual (Economic) Growth: The Impossibility of
Individuation
In response to Marx’s apodictic outline of commodity fetishism with which I
began this section, Georg Lukács posed the deceptively unassuming question:
‚how far is commodity exchange together with its structural consequences
able to influence the total outer and inner life of society?‛118 What strikes me
as a unique in Dreiser is the penetration of commodity exchange into all levels
of society (as well as the aesthetics that govern the novel form): the
totalization of inner and outer exchange. This synthesis manifests as the
formidable personification of clothes and other ‚universalized‛ commodities
117 Moretti, The Way of the World, p. 30.
118 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 84.
76
within the novel, as well as Carrie’s instinctive eyes for the ways in which the
city ‚evidences‛ its ‚wealth.‛ *32+ Such a slant forms one of the many
implications in the novel that Carrie is not representative of the modern
young women coming-of-age so much as she symptomizes consumer culture
by assuming the form of a peculiar type of commodity: the simulacrum.
Whilst advertising and promotion critically informs meaning in this novel,
free indirect discourse focalized upon Carrie discreetly ‘internalizes’ these
voices, a reification of the ‚500 million dollars‛ increase in advertising outlays
between 1867 and 1900.119 Dreiser speaks to evolving gender roles in the midst
of what Ann Douglas calls the feminization of American culture and the
‚militant crusade for masculinity‛ of the fin de siècle,120 yet in its own ‚junk‛
language, to refer again to Jameson.121 More importantly, advertising within
the novel mediates the heteroglossic ‘voices’ of capitalism which flood the
‚concatenation‛ of modernity – if we recall Hegel’s expression for the
conditions that produce the Bildungsroman. 122 The peculiar narratology
reflected in this passage begins to demonstrate the dialectical voices residing
within the consumer’s internal conscience:
Fine clothes to her were a vast persuasion; they spoke tenderly and
Jesuitically for themselves. When she came within earshot of their
pleading, desire in her bent a willing ear. The voice of the so-called
inanimate! Who shall translate for us the language of the stones? ‚My
dear,‛ said the lace collar she secured from Partridge’s, ‚I fit you so
beautifully; don’t give me up.‛ ‚Ah, such little feet,‛ said the leather
of the soft new shoes; ‚how effectively I cover them.‛ *<] ‚Put on the
119 Cassuto and Eby, ‘Introduction,’ p. 3.
120 Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Avon Books, 1977), p. 397.
121 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 147.
122 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume One, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1988) p. 593.
77
old clothes – that torn pair of shoes,‛ was called to her by her
conscience in vain. She could possibly have conquered the fear of
hunger and gone back; the thought of hard work and a narrow round
of suffering would, under the last pressure of conscience, have
yielded, but spoil her appearance? – be old-clothed and poor
appearing? – never! [111-12]
In an alarmingly recurrent prosopopeia, clothes begin to assume a persuasive
agency separate to the lives of the protagonists, evoking Marx’s own use of
prosopopeia in relation to the speaking commodity: ‚If commodities could
speak, they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not
belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our
value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it. We relate to each other
merely as exchange-values.‛123
In an argument with Hurstwood, Carrie’s heart surrenders not to his
consoling words, but to the voice of something far more disturbing: the
speaking commodity.
In this conversation she heard, instead of his words, the voices of the
things which he represented. How suave was the counsel of his
appearance! How feelingly did his superior state speak for itself! [131]
Carrie’s hearing is finely tuned to the prosopopeia of clothes and
advertisements; these speaking commodities persuade her that investing in
Hurstwood, as a well-dressed and figured commodity, vouchsafes good
returns in the libidinal economy. The narrator sanctions Carrie’s vain
superficiality because ‚*p+eople attach too much importance to words,‛ even
if these words are expelled from the mouths of the commodity. [130] An
ironic tension rises here between the ostensibly societal viewpoint of the
123 Marx, Capital, Volume 1, pp. 176-7.
78
omniscient narrator – again, intruding on the reading process – and the
viewpoint of Dreiser, the novelist, who by trade, places too much importance
of words rather than the systems of language that organize and police them,
such as genre.
Carrie’s perpetual dissatisfaction, her Bildungsromance deferred by the
novel’s limitless Entwicklungsroman trajectory, represents Dreiser’s sceptical
vision of what the human condition and spirit will increasingly succumb to
under the hegemonic forces of American capitalism: one in which maturation
never occurs, because the alienated consumer is constantly being entreated to
become something new, something more than they currently are, through
ritualized consumption. On page 83, the narrator intrudes the narrative,
inserting his own philosophical perspective:
Among the forces which sweep and play throughout the universe,
untutored man is but a wisp in the wind. Our civilization is still in a
middle age, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by
interest; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by
reasons. [83]
This intrusion suggests Dreiser is less interested in his female protagonist as
an ‘emancipated’ woman or even an emancipated individual; he is far more
attentive to how she reflects the despiritualized American zeitgeist of youth
into which she is artistically integrated as lens and lever.
If the forces of mass culture under capitalism have larger authority than social
mores and traditions, individuals will either thrive or perish conditional to
how they adapt themselves to the conditions of the environment and local
market forces. Neither a negative or positive or even deterministic
relationship to the material world, human activity is simply responsive to the
causality of history in which they fit. For an individual novel, Dreiser does
79
not privilege bourgeois individual exceptionalism, its rituals and processes, so
much as he parodies it by making Carrie something altogether more than
exceptional: a celebrity. He sets this distinction against the discourses of
consumerism that target the individual consumer as the centre of their own
world regardless of das Ganze. Dreiser’s role as author is observational: to
reflect conditions as they naturally appear, to wilfully abstain from bias, or
attempts to remedy unfavourable conditions through bourgeois didacticism.
This narrative methodology disputes the teleological development of the
individual in the nineteenth century Goethean prototype, in which the
generic purpose was to create non-extraordinary, ‚full and happy men‛
without any aspirations to reflect ‚universal aims‛ or ‚what may be gained
for the world as a whole.‛124 More than a metaphor for modernity, youth is
the metaphor of the adaptability Dreiser sees as necessary to thrive or survive
in a capitalist society of fluctuant fashions and trends. The fact that youth
cannot last suggests Dreiser’s strong scepticism towards the deindividuating
effects of capitalism.
As an elegy to these misgivings, the narrative remediates into the intonation
of a sad and strange sing-song at the last, the novel’s final tonal gesture of
melancholy and lost innocence in the popular form of mass culture. Observe
the chorus as music heralding the ending of a film, one final cadence of
sensuous expression and commercial form collapsing into one:
In your rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long,
alone. In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such
happiness as you may never feel. [418]
124 Moretti, The Way of the World, p. 31.
80
The rocking back and forth suggests a perpetual middle state, an
impossibility to realize the paradoxical aesthetic finitude beyond ‘becoming,’
for both the individual and for the Bildungsroman genre itself.
II Two Tales of One City: The Valences of Mass Culture in
James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan Trilogy (1932-5)
Positive Mass Culture: Repetition, Populism, and a ‚Bottom-Dog‛
Bildungsroman
One history of James T. Farrell informs us that he wrote and published
prolifically over several decades with general popularity and favorable
commercial reception. 125 His best known works in the literary annals are
undoubtedly his large-scale fictional cycles, including The Studs Lonigan
Trilogy, the O’Neill-O’Flaherty pentalogy, the Bernard Carr Trilogy, and the
nine novels belong to the Universe of Time sequence.126
125 He composed over forty books of fiction, as well as almost ten large works of non-fiction,
on top of an extensive collective of essays and articles covering topics from sociology, politics
and ideology, economics, philosophy, to literary criticism, aesthetics, and cultural critique.
Alan Wald, ‘Inconvenient Truths: The Communist Conundrum in Life and Art,’ American
Literary History vol. 21, no. 2 (Summer, 2009), p. 392.
126 He also experimented with the poetic form, and Charles Fanning estimates Farrell’s short
story and novella output at close to two hundred and fifty titles. Charles Fanning, The Irish
Voice in America: Irish American Fiction from the 1760s to the 1980s (Lexington, Kentucky: The
University of Kentucky Press, 1990), p. 260.
81
Another history proposes that no ‚major American writer has been worse
served by criticism.‛127 Studs has become more or less an historical anecdote
for Farrell’s inclusion within either the histories of the Left, the development
of Chicago naturalism, or in the Irish American tradition. Certainly for the last
fifty years at least, Farrell’s legacy has slipped into a chasm of obscurity
beyond the canon of American letters, outside of a fruitful reinvestment
during the 1980s and ‘90s in investigating his role on the radical left, led by
Alan Wald, Terry Cooney, and Barbara Foley. In this section, I propose that
Farrell’s use of genre, particularly the Bildungsroman, holds the key to the
mystery behind his early success, and his critical neglect of late.
Born the ‚son and grandson of Irish Catholic working-class laborers,‛ 128
Farrell was uprooted from the profound poverty of his birth and brought to
live with his middle-class maternal grandmother, his Aunt Ella and Uncle
Tom Daly at a very early age.129 Despite living only ‚three or four miles‛
away, he was connected to his parents ‚only by sentiment and kinship‛ and
became a ‚child of privilege.‛130 The majority of his fictional oeuvre was set
inside the same ethnically demarcated Irish middle-class blocks of South Side
Chicago from 1900-30, the neighbourhood and time period in which he
himself was raised. Farrell came of age in a period of Chicago’s history in
which the insularity of the Irish Catholic diaspora finally ‚broken‛ free of its
historic ‚pattern of isolation,‛ as the city afforded the new generation a
present filled with possibility afforded by new technologies, media, and
127 Fanning, The Irish Voice in America, p. 260.
128 Ibid, p. 259.
129 Lewis F. Fried, Makers of the City (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), p.
123.
130 Fried describes how Farrell enjoyed the luxuries of ‚steam heat and indoor plumbing,‛
whilst his siblings who had remained behind endured such deep poverty that one brother
died of diphtheria. Fried, Makers of the City, p. 123.
82
economic opportunity.131 As Carla Cappetti demystifies, the South Side that
Farrell reimagines in Studs is not the ‚slum of his biological origin,‛ rather,
the ‚community of Irish American immigrants who had escaped the slum‛ to
form a petit bourgeoisie, only to have their economic security undermined by
the devastation of the Depression.132 Along with newfound freedom came
novel constraints concerning the idea of American ‘nationalism.’
His ‚Irish plebeian origins, his personal struggle against Catholicism, and his
quick rise to fame in the early 1930s as an outstanding exponent of the urban
realist novel‛ made Farrell something of an anomaly to the group of political
intellectuals he became involved with in his early career; particularly, the
Trotskyists during the height of the 1936-8 Moscow Trials.133 At the apex of
his young adulthood, Farrell often staked his political and ideological
attitudes from a radical leftist vantage, although his philosophical outlooks at
times reflected the influenced of Dewey-Mead pragmatism tradition rather
than purist Marxist philosophy. 134 Despite active participation with the
American Communist Party during the publication of Young Lonigan (1932),
Farrell’s novels did not polarize his more moderate reading audience. It is
peculiar, then, to contrast his achievement against his more broadly pro-
Communist writer counterparts, such as Agnes Smedley (Daughter of Earth,
[1929]), Henry Roth (Call It Sleep [1934]), and later Ralph Ellison, whose
politics correlated to a decline in creative output. Wald notes that the above
exemplary trio each wrote one canonical novel during their proximity to the
Left, and subsequently found themselves unable to ‚follow-up‛ their 131 Fried, Makers of the City, p. 123.
132 Carla Cappetti, Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 109.
133 Alan Wald, ‘Farrell and Trotskyism,’ Twentieth Century Literature vol. 22, no. 1 (‘James T.
Farrell Issue’ Feb., 1976), pp. 92-3.
134 Wald, ‘Farrell and Trotskyism,’ p. 102.
83
‚achievement in fiction‛; Farrell proved himself a clear exception to this
rule.135
Dowd, for one, resolves this anomaly by proposing that Farrell’s remarkable
success attests to the lucrative power of a new Irish-American young man
stereotype:
Studs became a symbol for a generation of Irish-American men who
could identify with his ethnic anxieties and cultural confusions, even
if they could not identify with his violent and immoral antics.136
Certainly among New York’s intelligentsia, contrary charges were laid thickly
upon Farrell for this same populist appeal; inter-industry gossip suggested
that all subsequent novels to Young Lonigan (1932) were simply ‚obsessive
reworkings of the same materials, and nowhere near as good.‛ 137 His
commercial success and pop-cultural tour de force, chafing against the risks of
his political and literary polemic, suggests a fertile dialectic in the use value of
the Bildungsroman: a complex connection between changing theories of high
and mass art. Under this lens, the relationship between what people wanted
to read in the new media ecology visibly breaks from the proscriptions the
literary economy and the market forces were making available to them.
Studs engages this transformative and ambivalent triangulation between
politics, culture, and urban consumerism within the mode of literary
production; the very notion of a large-scale trilogy of Bildungsromans
overextends the limits of the novel in content, form, and genre, and clearly
speaks to these changing tides, as did Twain’s Tom Sawyer series half a
135 Wald, ‘Inconvenient Truths,’ p. 392.
136 Christopher Dowd, The Construction of Irish Identity in American Literature (New York and
Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2011), p. 157.
137 Fanning, The Irish Voice in America, p. 261.
84
century earlier. Farrell was certainly in the midst of a Chicago generic
revolution, what we now would call the second peak of the Chicago
Renaissance, 138 and he wrote extensively about it in his non-fiction
publications. In the years of writing The Studs Lonigan Trilogy (1932-5: the
trilogy hereafter referred to as Studs) and immediately thereafter, Farrell’s
ideological allegiances were certainly at their most revolutionary. It is by no
means exaggerated to say that Studs was one of Farrell’s first inter-leftist shots
fired in what Terry Cooney calls his ‚sustained assault on the leading lights of
the New Masses‛ and the pro-Stalinist Communists.139
Finding a voice and a soapbox in his role as theatre critic for William Phillips
and Philip Rahv’s ‚attack on the left‛ in their co-founded Partisan Review,140
an ‚organ‛ of the John Reed Club, a disillusioned Farrell had left the
Communist Party by 1936 and was becoming openly and actively pro-
Trotskyist.141 He ‚launched a polemic‛ against the Second American Writers’
Congress, eventually assisting Dwight Macdonald and variety of intellectuals
in establishing the League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism, an exhumed
version of the Communist-run League of American Writers. 142 This was
despite the obvious risks such radicalism might incur for his publication
opportunities. He advocated Trotsky’s work as ‚more than brilliant,‛ ‚fertile,
suggestive, illuminating,‛ and as Cooney observes, Farrell’s attitude reflects
138 Mary Hricko, Genesis of the Chicago Renaissance: Theodore Dreiser, Langston Hughes, Richard
Wright, and James T. Farrell (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 5-6.
139 Terry A. Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle, 1934-
45 (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), p. 89.
140 Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 86.
141 Wald, ‘Farrell and Trotskyism,’ p. 93.
142 Ibid., p. 94.
85
the emotional depth leftist intellectuals had invested in the liberating
possibilities of cosmopolitan radicalism.143
As evidenced by his oft-cited A Note on Literary Criticism (1936), published just
a year after the completion of Studs, Farrell was concurrently developing a
polemic on American anti-Stalinism as well as the current state of leftism and
proletarian literature in that climate, which illuminates vital aspects of the
trilogy’s generic accomplishment.144 In a later essay entitled ‘Social Themes in
American Realism,’ he marks the 1929 Depression as a thematic watershed in
‚realist American fiction,‛ which prior to that moment, had not ‚centrally
treated‛ voices of the ‚plebeian classes, the lower class, and group sections of
the American population.‛ 145 In his critical writing, he advanced an
alternative term for ‚proletarian fiction‛ which he called ‚bottom-dog
literature,‛ which he developed from Edward Dahlberg’s Bottom Dogs (1929),
the text he argues was the progenitor of youth oriented proletarian
narratives.146 Certainly, Studs fits into his definition of the term: ‚‘bottom-dog’
literature has advantages over ‘proletarian’ literature here,‛ he argues, for
applying ‚‘proletarian’ in the strictly Marxist sense‛ misleading implies that
all these works ‚deal with the proletariat.‛147
Both this essay and his A Note on Literary Criticism echo Trotsky’s earlier
determination that ahistorical terms such as ‚proletarian literature‛ and
143 Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals, p. 182.
144 Foley, Radical Representations, pp. 14; 86.
145 James Farrell, ‘Social Themes in American Realism,’ The English Journal vol. 35, no. 6 (June,
1946), p. 312.
146 Henry Roth, Nelson Algren, the short stories of Erskine Caldwell, Daniel Fuchs, Richard
Wright, and Caroline Slade find their place in his literary history – which he clearly states is
not a ‚literary analysis,‛ or in other words an ‚aesthetic.‛ Farrell, ‘Social Themes,’ p. 312.
147 Farrell, ‘Social Themes,’ pp. 312-13.
86
‚proletarian culture‛ become ‚dangerous‛ at the level of style, as they
‚erroneously compress the culture of the future into the narrow limits of the
present day. They falsify perspectives, they violate proportions, they distort
standards, and they cultivate the arrogance of small circles, which is most
dangerous.‛148 What unites American bottom-dog fiction, and differentiates it
from earlier realist works such as those of Dreiser and David Graham Phillips,
Farrell argues, was that in a post-Depression economy, ‚social snobbery‛
could now be fully ‚revealed as ugly racial prejudice,‛ that outlets of bigotry
and classism emerge differently at different levels of society, always pressing
downward upon the lower classes.149 The dialectic he nurtures here proposes
that literary representations of ‚conditions of dirt, physical misery, and inner
frustration‛ appeal to and engage the plebeian class on a ‚more human level
than has been the case (with perhaps a few exceptions) in the writer of the
past.‛ 150 A semi-autobiographical text such as Wright’s Black Boy is now
‚shown to be equally important in the bottoms layers of American society as
it is in the world of Henry James‛ by humanizing the ‚ugly,‛ violent
underbelly of national life in which ‚one third‛ of the population actually
live, he proposes.151
Perhaps in light of his reluctance to remain within any one school, or his
‚somewhat quirky and individualistic manner‛ of address, as Foley describes
his critical style,152 Farrell’s politics and ideological vision are often cauterized
from formal analyses of his fiction. If William ‘Studs’ Lonigan as a personality
does not quite live up to the revolutionary hype of Farrell’s public persona 148 Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, ed. William Keach, trans. Rose Strunsky (Chicago,
Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2005), p.16.
149 Farrell, ‘Social Themes,’ p. 313.
150 Ibid., p. 314.
151 Ibid.
152 Foley, Radical Representations, p. 16.
87
during the 1930s, this ambivalence overturns by demonstrating how Studs’
role as both an individual character, here to be understood as ‘stereotype’ or
‘product of forces,’ and a ‚social manifestation‛ commonly at home in
naturalism serves the text’s radical enterprises. 153 I tender that Farrell’s
relative exclusion from the American canon of late stems from the tendency of
his mass cultural process to wilfully defy the modernist ideal of an elitist and
autotelic literary agenda.154
Like his contemporaries in American letters – such as Fitzgerald, Faulkner,
and later O’Connor – it may be more productively argued that Farrell
consistently ‘recycled’ the same material from different slants or perspectives
in order to canvas a fuller scope of his region’s social and material history. In
relation to the Bildungsroman, I return to the case against Farrell’s oeuvre as
‚obsessive reworking,‛ by pressing harder upon these repetitions as a notion
of wilful, fructified recycling that breaches the containment of the
individualist Bildungsroman form to criticize a mode of production that has
deindividuated the proletariat. As with Faulkner’s Southern cosmos,
Yoknapatawpha, which emerged currently into America’s literary scene to
Farrell’s Washington Park and South Side, these repetitious tomes feature 153 James T. Farrell, ‘New Introduction to the 1938 Edition,’ Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy Containing
Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, and Judgment Day (New York: The
Modern Library, 1938), p. xi.
154 Often, Farrell is simply disremembered even within the catalogues of broader studies; in
Joe Cleary’s ‘Irish American Modernisms,’ Farrell’s sheer exclusion even as a passing
reference seems an unjust oversight, particularly given how his works substantiate Cleary’s
claims of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Eugene O’Neill second-generational ‚hankering after
something irretrievably lost as the price of entry into American liberal capitalist modernity,‛
or of Flannery O’Connor’s ‚turn*ing+ back to religion to redeem a world shown to be in
desperate need of salvation‛ whilst ‚scarcely capable of even grasping what salvation might
mean.‛ See Joe Cleary (ed.), ‘Irish American Modernism,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Irish
Modernism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014) p. 187.
88
texts that convey the same respective characters, families and events,
reappearing across separate series, often in passing or in minor roles, retelling
the same historical situation from multiple perspectives. Farrell participates in
the same feature of American modernism that Richard C. Moreland suggests
of Faulkner’s ‚compulsive and revisionary repetition,‛ in which the author
repeated ‚certain dominant structures of thought‛ in order firstly to ‚explore,
elaborate, and understand their motivations and consequences, then to
critically revise certain structural contradictions and impasses.‛ 155 The
functions that the materialist model of history and periodization play in the
establishment of modernity’s tectonic shifts in subjectivity, as well as regional
and nationalist identity formation, certainly comes under scrutiny in both
these authors’ serialized works.
Yet to draw an allusion between the craft of a popular urban realist Farrell
with a Southern high modernist like Faulkner appears hasty at first glance;
this gut reaction precisely emphasizes my point, for it begs consideration as to
why two American authors, working within the same period of modernism
and with a remarkably similar modus operandi in this sense, could be
considered so many worlds apart. To acknowledge this discomfit between
high and low cultural production is to arrive upon a hitherto unanswered
consideration of Farrell’s aesthetic politics of form, a question which Wald
hints at in determining Farrell’s now contested legacy, by suggesting that
some of the author’s ‚indeterminate status‛ sublates his fictional production
of ‚‚high‛ and ‚mass‛ culture.‛156
155 Richard C. Moreland, ‘Compulsive and Revisionary Repetition: Faulkner’s ‚Barn Burning‛
and the Craft of Writing Difference,’ in Faulkner and the Craft of Fiction: Faulkner and
Yoknapatawpha, 1987, eds. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson and London: University
of Mississippi Press, 1989), p. 49.
156 Wald, Writing From the Left, p. 40.
89
Farrell therefore presents us with opportunity to fully scope the extent to
which proletarian literature and the urban Bildungsroman by the mid-1930s
were democratically absorbing all local levels of vernacular and indeed
transitioning American ethnicity in this historical ‘moment.’ As a sizeable
trilogy in such a vast volume of literary production as Farrell’s, Studs
therefore already belongs within yet also far exceeds the borders of Foley’s
proletarian generic framework for the novel, particularly where the
Bildungsroman is concerned, in which the ‚many redundancies‛ of these
texts indicates ‚thematic repetition‛:
the protagonist [of the proletarian bildungsroman] is exposed to
multiple instances of exploitation and abuse that reveal to him or her
– or at least to the reader – the devastating physical and psychological
effects of capitalism on the mass of producers.157
Thus on one hand, I situate Studs as both an excessive ‚proletarian
bildungsroman‛ (in Foley’s understanding) or bottom-dog Bildungsroman in
content, in which voluminous repetition parodically mimics the cultural
conveyor belt producing widespread alienation in an age of mass culture.
Farrell therefore demonstrates the text’s commitment to the ‚assimilation of
socialist theory‛ in rejecting out-dated generic classifications, functions, and
(mis)representations of ‘traditional’ class and ethnic structures. 158 On the
other, Farrell’s formal aesthetics of socialist realism and aspects of naturalism
compels the same essential rhythms of Faulkner’s repetitions: enduring
pulses of sameness which exhibit tendencies to ‚describe the essential human
157 Foley, Radical Representations, p. 329.
158 Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the
1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987), p.
83.
90
act, and the essential narrative act, as the compulsion and craft of duplication:
to return to lives already lived, acts already performed, tales already told.‛159
I therefore argue that the recent critical desertion ironically stems from
something else entirely: which is Farrell’s success not in populism but in his
popularism, at a moment in which mass culture came abreast with the
Bildungsroman form now abundant in pulp fiction. To quote a letter from
Fitzgerald to Thomas Boyd regarding Floyd Dell’s recently published
Mooncalf (1920): ‚This writing of a young man’s novel consists chiefly in
dumping all your youthful adventures into the reader’s lap with a profound
air of importance, keeping carefully within the formulas of Wells and James
Joyce. It seems to me that when accomplished by a man without distinction of
style it reaches the depths of banality*.+‛ 160 The trend I observed in the
introduction to this thesis had revolved the high pedigree of bourgeois
Bildungsroman into a commercial outlet for the masses, and in doing so, had
oversaturated the market for emergent and established writers alike.
Where the elitist Fitzgerald recoiled at the thought of ‘cheapening’ his art by
allowing the generic template or fabula to direct a straightforward style of
narrative unfolding or syuzhet (as I shall complicate in Chapter Two), the
socialist Farrell found in popular culture a political avenue to communicate to
and with the masses. As Jameson observed in Dreiser, Farrell likewise absorbs
and recycles the ‚junk‛ urban language, styles, modes, and dialectics too
closely associated with low or mass culture – even if they are adopted as a
critique of classist form, or otherwise, as a parody of the mass production of
159 Donald M. Kartiganer, ‘Faulkner’s Art of Repetition’ in Faulkner and the Craft of Fiction:
Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1987, eds. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson and
London: University of Mississippi Press, 1989), p. 23.
160 Quoted in J. D. Thomas, ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald: James Joyce’s ‚Most Devoted‛ Admirer,’ The
F. Scott Fitzgerald Review vol. 5 (2006), p. 68.
91
culture itself. However, unlike Dreiser’s Carrie (but certainly as was
increasingly the case in Dreiser’s subsequent bloated Trilogy of Desire),
Farrell’s anticipated reading audience was also the self-same class, ethnicity,
gender, and age demographic that formed his material subject.
As Wald elsewhere observes, the ‚torturous debates‛ surrounding Farrell
scholarship since the early 1980s are still the precise conversations in which
Farrell himself vocally participated: firstly, in refusing on Marxist grounds ‚to
reduce the category of aesthetic value to a relativistic functional aspect‛;
secondly, in his ‚adamant rejection of the political coding of literary form‛ at
the ‚heart‛ of the ‚famous‛ Brecht-Lukács dispute. 161 Also writing of
Popularity and Realism in the late 1930s, Bertolt Brecht – reacting against
Lukácsian formalism and realist aesthetics in a series of essays – proposed
that the one and only ‚ally against growing barbarism‛ was ‚the people, who
suffer so greatly for it.‛162 Popular art, as Brecht redefines it, is form made
intelligible to the broad masses, adopting and enriching their forms of
expression / assuming their standpoint, confirming and correcting it /
representing the most progressive section of the people so that it can
assume leadership, and therefore intelligible to other sections of the
people as well / relating to traditions and developing them /
communicating to that portion of the people which strives for
leadership the achievements of the section that at present rules the
nation.163
161 Alan Wald, Writing From the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics (London: Verso,
1994), p. 41.
162 Bertolt Brecht, ‘Popularity and Realism,’ trans. Stuart Hood, in Theodor Adorno et al.,
Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007), p. 80.
163 Ibid., p. 81.
92
Brecht’s catalogue and compartmentalized syntax certainly mirrors his
aggressive politick of the popular as a revolutionary communication device,
which serves as a fitting hermeneutical starting point for determining Farrell’s
use value for popular form, now including the ‘fallen’ pedigree of the
oversaturated Bildungsroman genre, in relation to his seemingly
contradictory ideologies towards mass cultural production.
Yet Farrell’s optative sociopolitical use value for mass culture comes at the
price of overshadowing the text’s deep ideological scepticism of the negative
valences of the culture industry itself; in the second half of this section, I shall
therefore return to this negative valence in order to explicate the cost through
the lens of Adorno and Horkheimer, but also Farrell’s American Trotskyist
comrade and colleague, the critic Dwight Macdonald. The Studs Lonigan
Trilogy therefore presents a paradoxical position within this transitionary
period of American capitalism and its relationship to mass culture and
literary production in the decade preceding this outpouring of scepticism. As
we have observed in early Dreiser, whose method Farrell held in great
esteem, it is possible to trace the essence of the ‘popular’ in both of these
bourgeois and revolutionary definitions outlined by Brecht: the dialectic of
both commercial fiction and socialist visions of mass culture as having
potentially negative and positive valences within Studs, and more so,
depending on whether we are assessing form or content.
To formally evidence this shift, the expressive style of the trilogy has been
discussed through a number of critical slants. Alan Wald calls it ‚a language
experiment, one deeply suffused with a modernist sensibility yet driven by
urban naturalism informed by Marxism.‛ 164 Dennis Flynn, acknowledging
Dostoevsky’s influence upon Farrell’s process, refers to the style of Studs as
164 Wald, ‘The Communist Conundrum,’ p. 392.
93
‚psychological realism‛ in that the writing ‚animates‛ similar qualities of not
only ‚realistic presentation of consciousness but one of the unconscious
depths of human psychology.‛165 Hermeneutical traces of Trotsky’s dialectical
materialism appear at the level of allegory, represented in Studs Lonigan’s
microanalysis of ‚territorial‛ class struggles and the impact of urbanization
upon these social relations between ethnic diasporas and classes: of
marginalized groups turning against each other rather than the oppressive
structures which hold them down in the first place. Wald comes similarly
concludes that whilst Farrell did not intend to write ‚Marxist novels,‛ his
‚Marxist polemic against the political manipulation of literary judgments as
practiced by the Communist Party‛ consistently serve the same ‚theoretical
underpinnings‛ of Literature and Revolution (1923).166
In introducing Literature and Revolution, Trotsky inveighs against the ‚old
literature‛ and ‚culture‛ as ‚expressions of the nobleman and the bureaucrat,
and were based on the peasant,‛ that is, the art of the feuilleton; thus when the
‚Revolution overthrew the bourgeoisie,‛ this ‚decisive fact burst into
literature.‛ 167 Whilst the ‚new orientation‛ of which he speaks primarily
concerns the historical unfolding of Russian literature, spectres of his
argument certainly filter into Farrell’s socialist vision for the role of culture
and literature in America in a time of cultural and social reformation. Trotsky
argues that it is ‚silly, absurd, stupid to the highest degree, to pretend that art
will remain indifferent to the convulsions of our epoch.‛ The ‚profound break
in history, that is, a rearrangement of classes in society, shakes up
165 Dennis Flynn, ‘Farrell and Dostoevsky,’ MELUS vol. 18, no. 1 (Spring, 1993), p.114.
166 Wald, The New York Intellectuals, p. 83.
167 Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, p. 30.
94
individuality, establishes the perception of the fundamental problems of lyric
poetry from a new angle, and so saves art from eternal repetition.‛168
Farrell’s formal paradox proposes that generic mutation – naturalism, as
opposed to realism – absolves the Bildungsroman of a bad infinity of eternal
generic repetition by opening it up its borders to more diverse ethnic and class
voices than can be contained in a singular novel of the individual. As
evidenced in his non-fiction of aesthetics, such as in The League of Frightened
Philistines and Other Papers (1945), Farrell displayed meticulous research and
insight into the formal origins, emergences, and developments of social
realism, the novel, and more particularly, the periodical and international
evolution of the Bildungsroman: from Stendhal and Balzac, to Dostoevsky
and Tolstoy, and finally to the ur-modernist Künstlerroman, A Portrait of the
Artist As a Young Man. Farrell upholds Stephen Dedalus as the champion of a
generation of alienated youths who ‚question*ed+ the whole moral sensibility
of his age,‛ as did Frederic Moreau of A Sentimental Education before him, and
Des Esseintes ‚(in a purely decadent fashion)‛ of Huysmans’s Against the
Grain, and Marius of Pater’s Epicurean, all Bildungshelden who sought
‚freedom in the realm of feeling and culture.‛ 169 Farrell sees this rise in the
importance of interior affect to the functionality of the Bildungsroman as a
result of the evolving conditions of nineteenth century life. Farrell elaborates:
The character of public life changes and decrease the opportunities to
be free. The idea of culture (as the realm of freedom) begins to grow.
Thus, the logic of art for art’s sake. The artist, crushed by the weight of
168 Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, p. 31.
169 James T. Farrell, The League of Frightened Philistines: And Other Papers (New York: The
Vanguard Press, 1945), p. 57.
95
contemporary culture, adopts the attitude that art is its own end,
becomes the rebel artist. *<+170
Farrell stakes an American claim in this tradition, particularly in relation to
his interlocutor Joyce, yet revolutionizes it from within to speak of and for the
current age. 171 Farrell assesses at length the cultural value and political
possibilities of the form; he hypostatizes that the Bildungsroman is evolving
into social realism or naturalism, and Studs displays his developing theories
coming into praxis. Within Studs, the eponymous protagonist experiences a
failure of what Nietzsche calls the self to be ‚overcome‛ in an age of
despiritualization.172 Still, in terms of form, the Bildungsroman remains for
Farrell an ineffective state to be overcome so long as it continues to submit to
bourgeois aesthetics by not reacting against them. Again, in analogous logic
to Adorno and Horkheimer’s observations in Dialectic of Enlightenment,
Farrell’s text suggests that if one is not actively reacting against barbarism,
one is complicit in its totalitarian schematics.
170 Farrell, The League of Frightened Philistines, p. 57.
171 If Studs represents a ‚whimpering echo‛ of the ‘rebellious’ Stephen Dedalus, as Dowd
suggests, he is a deliberately constructed echolalia at that, a subject who has been alienated
from his ethnic roots by cultural displacement and American despiritualization. Dowd notes
that unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was ‚disturb*ed+‛ and ‚concerned‛ to discover a
‚somewhat common‛ Irish identity in Joyce, Farrell fully ‚appreciated‛ the Irishman’s ability
to ‚describe the common, and even the vulgar, aspects of Irish life,‛ and had formed the
Irish-American aesthetics of Studs under the same license. Farrell was ‚not in search of an
extraordinary ethnic identity,‛ Dowd concludes, ‚only a practical one.‛ See: Dowd, The
Construction of Irish Identity, p. 156.
172 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York and London:
Penguin Books Ltd, 1969), p. 41. A Zarathustrian ‚going under‛ is certainly reserved for the
Studs trilogy’s dianoetic side-character, Danny O’Neill, who soon after appears at the helm of
Farrell’s next Danny O’Neill Bildungspentalogy.
96
Negative Dialectics of Mass Culture: Radio, Pool-Halls, Cinemas, Pulpits,
and Lecterns as Medial Conformity
Studs’ character plays upon the notion of what Irish stereotypically appears to
mean in a xenophobic American mainstream culture, by adhering to a very
thin set of behaviours circulating in popular media. Studs knows almost
nothing about Irish history and culture other than what he learns from
movies and popular songs, and is utterly ignorant of Irish-American life
beyond 58th Street; he is ignorant of the literature that supports his own
preconscious ethnic identity, ultimately separating himself from the
successful pedagogical education of Stephen Dedalus, Fitzgerald’s Amory
Blaine, or Farrell’s more related protagonist and literary alterego, Danny
O’Neill, who attends university and works upon improving his mind in order
to escape the constriction of 58th Street.
Studs only knows of populist culture for the masses: on one hand, popular
cultural references to movie stars, baseball players, songs on the wireless; on
the other, the mass culture of religious education, literalized in the ritual of
Mass. He is ignorant of politics, current affairs, and cultural heritage; his ideas
of identity are therefore constructed upon appearances and generalizations.
In the finale of Judgement Day, Studs is ‚not even aware of the May Day
march that passes by while he lies on his deathbed,‛ Foley observes in her
typology of a ‘proletarian bildungsroman’; placing Studs within a schema of
‚novels of nonconversion,‛ Foley demonstrates how the proletarian ‚mentee
is oblivious to the message of a potential mentor‛ figure, the social guidance
commonly associated with the Bildungsroman.173 What is most significant
regarding this particular model of the proletarian Bildungsroman is the
displacement of the protagonist’s enlightenment or self-awareness of the
173 Foley, Radical Representations, p. 335.
97
conditions in which they exist: ‚characters representing the discourse of
radical politics articulate their truths to deaf ears. But the reader hears.‛174
In the section half of this section, I am interested in the media outlets opened
up through the novel’s experimental form, and the transference of meaning
which the reader is able to ‘hear.’ Farrell’s work is negatively insisting that in
this time and place, Irishness was largely defined by racial criteria, and that
this is symptomatic of the American way of being under capitalism more
broadly speaking. By presenting South Side as a microcosm of American
society, Farrell fully scopes the economic conditions of a society suffocating
under its increasing dependency on the superstructures of capitalist
reproduction, and an incompatible Prohibition moral fabric.
Farrell elsewhere proposes that, ‚By and large, the culture of a society cannot
really rise above its origin.‛175 Whether positively or negatively, ‚the culture,
the literature of a society will be an imaginative trial of consciousness of man
in that society. And American literature has been precisely this.‛176 Farrell’s
calls for cultural criticism of the American system to ‚look at the quality of
life, the aims, the wants, the actions, the things men do, and the values they
want to realize among the different social classes that go to compose the
population of these linked States.‛177 In the 1946 essay, ‘American Literature
Marches On,’ he proposes that criticism must observe the ‚Benthamistic
‘paradise’‛ of American economics and American literature’s fascination with
174 Foley, Radical Representations, p. 335.
175 James T. Farrell, ‘American Literature Marches On,’ New International vol. 12, no. 7
(September, 1946), transcribed by Einde O’Callaghan for Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism
Online, retrieved: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/farrell/1946/09/amerlit.htm
(last updated 29 December, 2014), pp. 218-223.
176 Farrell, ‘American Literature Marches On,’ pp. 218-223.
177 Ibid.
98
leisure: in which ‚a commodity is a work of art.‛ The function of American
literature is to observe the ‚American Way of Life,‛ which for Farrell, means:
to explore, to reveal, to criticize, to eulogize, or to state the tragedies
and disappointments of men and women living in the closest
approach to paradise that capitalistic civilization can or will ever
produce on this earth *<+ it is an account, however incomplete, of the
story of how man tries to live in a commodity civilization. *<+ In this
culture, the commodity itself tends to become a value superior to all
other values. Serious American realism is, really, an account of what
happens to men when the commodity is the real summum bonum.178
Studs Lonigan concerns overcoming the self in an age in which individuation
is not only despiritualized but is furthermore becoming increasingly
irrelevant. Writing to John Henle of his outline for Bernard Clare, he proposed
to ‚reduce the ‘sociological’ aspects of the book and try to, deeply, internalize
it. A novel about the soul of a young man, that being a battleground of ideas
and the moral consequences of ideas.‛179 In a second letter to Henle in late
1943, he speaks of probing ‚the moral and intellectual consequences of the
ideas of money, private property, something of the way that capitalism
poisons our lives from cradle to grave,‛ the causal ‚psychological effects of a
whole system based on private profit, private ownership as a means of
production. The idea of property is poured into the depths of our
consciousness from the earliest age. We breathe it as we do air.‛180 As he
writes in his authorial introduction to the Modern Library edition, he likewise
grew to see Studs as an imaginative character as much as a ‚social
manifestation.‛ *xi+
178 Farrell, ‘American Literature Marches On,’ pp. 218-223.
179 Quoted in Flynn, ‘The Tradition of the European Novel,’ p. 119.
180 Flynn, ‘The Tradition of the European Novel,’ p. 119.
99
In the year 1944, just two years after this essay and less than ten after the
publication of Judgment Day, Farrell (A League of Frightened Philistines), Dwight
Macdonald of Politics magazine (‘A Theory of Popular Culture’), and Adorno
and Horkheimer (Dialectic of Enlightenment) all produced work of strikingly
similar content condemning the negative possibilities of mass culture and
even high art over the past decade – a critical association triangulated by
Michael Denning, which I seek to expand upon in specific relation to Studs.181
Macdonald describes the homogenizing effects of this new process in
capitalism and liberal democracy as mass culture:
Mass culture is a dynamic, revolutionary force, breaking down the old
barriers of class, tradition, taste, and dissolving all cultural
distinctions. It mixes and scrambles everything together, producing
what might be called homogenized culture, after another American
achievement, the homogenization process that distributed globules of
cream evenly through the milk instead of allowing them to float
separately on top. It thus destroys all values, since value judgments
imply discriminations. Mass Culture is very, very democratic: it
absolutely refuses to discriminate against, or between, anything or
anybody. All is grist to its mill, and all comes out finely ground
indeed.182
Despite the ‚dynamic, ‚revolutionary‛ capabilities of mass culture, for
Macdonald, high culture and low culture are simply two sides of the same
destructive coin of mass production. In response to kitsch, to protect the
sanctity of high art from the erosion of homogenizing mass culture, high
culture fissures either into ‚academicism‛ – ‚kitsch for the élite‛ – or into the
181 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth
Century (London: Verso, 1996), p. 108.
182 Dwight Macdonald, ‘A Theory of Mass Culture,’ Diogenes vol. 1, no. 3 (Summer, 1953), p.
15.
100
‚Avantgarde,‛ which in refusing to formally compete with mass culture,
retreats into an ‚intellectual rather than a social élite.‛ 183 Building upon
Clement Greenberg’s groundbreaking work, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch‛
(1939), 184 Macdonald proposes that the most alarming impulse of this
tendency is not the denigration of art perse, but the homogenizing effects
upon age lines, in which kitsch ‚blurs‛ the distinction between maturity and
immaturity, resulting in ‚adultized children and infantile adults.‛ 185
Macdonald bemoans how ‚some seventy million people (most of whom must
be adults, there just aren’t that many kids)‛ read the newspaper comic strips a
day, and that children ‚have access to such grown-up media as the movies,
radio, and TV.‛186
Farrell likewise mobilizes the increasingly persuasive sociological theories of
mass culture in which new mass media negatively enters the psyche of
American youth culture; yet his ironic representation of youth suggests how
this might translate into the Bildungsroman apparatus in a way that yields
positive social returns for the masses. Ann Douglas compellingly argues that
Studs ‚has no inner life. His thought patterns could be said to constitute an
external stream-of-consciousness.‛ 187 Studs styles himself as a brand of
American youth. As an example, observe the opening tableaux of Young
Lonigan, in which we are immersed in a material history which problematizes
the social morality of ‘American’ adolescence:
183 Macdonald, ‘A Theory of Mass Culture,’ p. 16.
184 Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch,’ in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1989), pp. 3-21.
185 Ibid., p. 19.
186 Ibid., p. 20.
187 Ann Douglas, ‘Studs Lonigan and the Failure of History in Mass Society: A Study in
Claustrophobia,’ American Quarterly vol. 29, no. 5 (Winter, 1977), p. 494.
101
Studs Lonigan, on the verge of fifteen, and wearing his first suit of
long trousers, stood in the bathroom with a Sweet Caporal pasted in
his mug. His hands were jammed in his trouser pockets, and he
sneered. He puffed, drew the fag out of his mouth, inhaled and said to
himself:
Well, I’m kissin’ the old dump goodbye tonight.188 [3]
We are at once poised on the verge of one transition, and already past
another. The obvious threshold is of a boy, ‚on the verge of fifteen,‛ about to
leave the ‚jailhouse‛ of his Catholic grammar school. [3] The process we are
already past is alienation, and in its fullest extension, deindividuation; we are
not being introduced to Studs so much as a replication of a style of character
fresh off the packaging and advertising billboards for a packet of Sweet
Caporal cigarettes. This establishing shot foreshadows how Farrell will set up
his entire dialectic between the young, still developing subject and his society,
particularly in relation to consumer culture. Here, Farrell presages an entire
thematic gesture of consumption as a liberating defiance against
deindividuation, as much as it is a moment of alienation and addiction to
escapism; this image returns again and again, of Studs lighting up a cigarette,
and retreating into a juvenile role-play of consumption.
In the language of advertising, commodities are marketed to engendered
demographics; tobacco speaks to a certain style of young manhood and
masculinity, or more specifically, a brand of life with a long material history
steeped in questions of morality. As John Burnham indicates, but does not
quite spell out, the Crimean and American Civil Wars had replaced the
engendered binary opposition between cigars (masculine) and cigarettes
188 James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy Containing Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of
Studs Lonigan, and Judgment Day (New York: The Modern Library, 1938), p. 3. Subsequent
references to page numbers hereafter cited in text for this current section.
102
(feminine) with an instantaneous temporal need for a hit of chemical pleasure:
the disposable cigarette could be enjoyed immediately. 189 This surge of
endorphins forms a synecdoche of the psychic pleasures of commodity
fetishism, a powerful product distribution which the medium of advertising
effectively reified in consumerism of the 1920s and 30s. Tobacco, rolled out
into the thin and delicious cigarette, with its seductive, sexualized packaging
(early advertisements featured alluring young women), spoke to the libido of
impressionable young men coming to grips with the crisis of masculinity in
modernity. The perfect commodified packaging is suggestive of ‘instant
Bildung’: that the consumer may become a man in one narcotic hit.
Even beyond the ‘ethical questions’ of the plantations, tobacco became a
definitive coordinate in demonstrating to the collective what type of man, or
indeed boy, the consumer was based on a gradient of Puritanical valuations.
American men of the 1880s had smoked cigars or chewed tobacco, or
otherwise rejected the ‚dirty weed‛ on the basis of asceticism: that it was a
‚habit‛ at the level of both ‚expensive and unhealthy indulgence.‛ 190
Burnham discusses how by the 1880s and ‘90s, the ‚respectable‛ tobacco
trader met an unexpected moral issue surrounding the increased and
democratic availability of low-priced cigarettes: the ‚cigarette-smoking boy,‛
an ‚urban urchin and rowdy.‛ Even if retailers ‚did not consider the juvenile
cigarette customer part of their universe,‛ they ‚reckoned with the lawless
element among the youngsters, who continued to buy and smoke. One
retailer in New York at the end of the 1880s, for example, hung out a glass
189 John C. Burnham, Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual
Misbehaviour, and Swearing in American History (New York: New York University Press, 1993),
p. 89.
190 Burnham, Bad Habits, p. 90.
103
sign, ‘No cigarettes sold to boys,’ and the boys of the area threw rocks at it
and broke it.‛191
However, the tobacco industry soon evolved expressly in order to target
youthful demographics in the new century; if the addictiveness of the
substance, its cheapness in order to open the market to the lower classes were
not enough indication, several brands, including Sweet Caporal, targeted
young male consumers by incorporating collector’s cards (baseball cards, in
particular) in their packaging. Earlier Bildungsromans from Twain’s Huck
Finn to Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick included explicit discussions of this same
generational divide over the ‘chemical commodity’ as a symptom of lost
innocence or corrupted Bildung. Huck, for instance, proposes that tobacco
represents the moral hypocrisy of adult ‘sivilization’: ‚Pretty soon I wanted to
smoke, and asked the widow to let me. But she wouldn’t. She said it was a
mean practice and wasn’t clean, and I must try to not do it any more. That is
just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t
know nothing about it. Here she was a-bothering about Moses, which was no
kin to her, and no use to anybody, being gone, you see, yet finding a power of
fault with me for doing a thing that had some good in it. And she took snuff,
too; of course that was all right, because she done it herself.‛192
The omniscient narrator of Ragged Dick, however, apologizes not only for his
protagonist’s ‘bad boy’ traits, such as swearing and smoking, but all the more
canvases his plight against the social conditions which entrap the
impressionable mind in the addictive escapism of consumption:
Our ragged hero wasn’t a model boy *<+ I am sorry to add that Dick
had formed the habit of smoking *<+ Dick was rather fastidious about
191 Burnham, Bad Habits, p. 91.
192 Twain, Huck Finn, p. 2.
104
his cigars, and wouldn’t smoke the cheapest *<+ Men are frequently
injured by smoking, and boys always. But large numbers of the
newsboys and boot-blacks form the habit. Exposed to the cold and
wet they find that it warms them up, and the self-indulgence grows
upon them. It is not uncommon to see a little boy, too young to be out
of his mother’s sight, smoking with all the apparent satisfaction of a
veteran smoker.193
Where Alger emphasizes Dick’s expensive tastes as indicative of his potential
drive to overcome the symptoms and shortcomings of his proletarian roots,
Farrell indulges in no such romantic reversal for Studs. Farrell’s position
compares to that of Macdonald, who detects the merger of the American child
and the grown-up audience, in which ‚infantile regression of the latter‛
results in adults who ‚escape via kitsch‛ as they become ‚unable to cope with
the strains and complexities of modern life‛; and inversely, in which
‚overstimulation‛ in children means they ‚grow up too fast.‛194 He quotes
Horkheimer’s essay, ‘The End of Reason’:
Development has ceased to exist. The child is grown up as soon
as he can walk, and the grown-up in principle always remains
the same.195
What Horkheimer articulates here very closely approaches what I previously
designated as the twentieth century innovation upon the Entwicklungsroman,
or novel of growth, now floundering without a definable endpoint of
maturation. Consumerism equalizes the distance between young and old by
refusing to discriminate between consumers, therefore levelling all citizens
193 Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick [c.1868], ed. Carl Bode (New York: Penguin, 1985), p. 6.
194 Macdonald, ‘A Theory of Mass Culture,’ p. 20.
195 Max Horkheimer, ‘The End of Reason,’ in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, vol. 9, no.
3 (1941), p. 381.
105
into the role of consumers. For this reason, the individual limitlessly becomes
something new yet always remains the same, never developing into a fully
realized state of individuation, as Horkheimer and Macdonald both argue in
their own methods. Leo Löwenthal’s variation upon colleague Horkheimer’s
proposition of childhood as mimetic reproduction aptly describes Studs’
eclipsed individuality within the ecologies of mass culture:
Childhood appears neither as prehistory and key to the character of
an individual nor as a stage of transition to the growth and formation
of the abundant diversity of an adult. Childhood is nothing but a
midget edition, a predated publication of man’s profession and career
*<+ He was not born the tender and unknown potentiality of human
life, of an intellectual, mental, emotional creativeness, effective for
himself and for society, rather he came into the world and stayed in it,
rubber stamped with and for a certain function. The individual has
become a trademark.196
Studs sees an imaged way of life, a ‚trademarked‛ image of young manhood,
and like Dreiser’s Carrie, emulates the image in order to define himself as an
individual; however, the insularity of his neighbourhood on the cusp of
widespread economic depression leaves him with only a limited range of
possibilities for growth. This rebellious stereotype is only one of many images
and characters he role-plays throughout the novels. However, he does not
seek to stand out and become exceptional through rebellion as much as to
conform and become accepted within the youth culture of his local
community. We see Studs playfully assuming the role of a rebellious
American brand image, revolting against his stationary position within the
parochial petit bourgeoisie:
196 Leo Löwenthal, Literature and Mass Culture: Communication in Society, Vol. 1 (New
Brunswick and London: Transaction Books Inc., 1984), p. 217.
106
He took his last drag at his cigarette, tossed the butt down the toilet,
and let the water run in the sink to wash the ashes down *<+ He
opened the small window, and commenced waving his arms around,
to drive the smoke out. But why in hell shouldn’t they know? What
did his graduating and his long jeans mean, then? He was older now,
and he could do what he wanted. Now he was growing up. He didn’t
have to take orders any more *<+ he was going to tell the old man
that he wasn’t going to high school anymore. *Young Lonigan, 9-10]
Of course, he tells his old man no such thing; most of his fantasies of rebellion
dissipate. His actions both negate and mock his own attempts to style himself
as the image of manly swagger. Yet if Farrell’s vision of an adolescent Irish-
Catholic boy, desperately swatting at the ‚thick smoke‛ to avoid his parents’
discipline comes across as humorous, it strikes me that this tableaux does not
function in the realm of parody so much as the pastiche of several competing
styles and swaggers of young manhood: in which the culture of the market,
according to Jameson, distils into stereotype, absorbed and recycled at the
level of style and form.197 This image sequence suggests a direct correlation
between Studs as an individual personality, and as a symbol of the young
masses’ growing susceptibility to the manipulations of mass culture at the
level of psychic and even chemical addiction, a murky distinction where
adolescents are routinely induced to consume in order to fit in, rather than
stand out.
The ‚social manifestation‛ Studs’ reflects here only prises a gateway to the
darker images of consumption later in the novels; in disdain for outdated,
outlandish representations of Irishness, Farrell bleakly plays upon negative
stereotypes of the Irishman. Studs later plays the young drunkard thug or
hooligan, shifting the rhetoric of self-knowledge from knowing himself as
197 Jameson, Postmodernism, pp. 16-17.
107
‚The Great Studs Lonigan‛ to the alienated ‚Lonewolf Lonigan,‛ ‚Pig
Lonigan,‛ a drunk and failure at sexual selection. [YL, 57] Dowd reads these
names as Studs’ ‚illusion‛ of knowing himself, ‚to borrow identities,‛
negative as they may be, ‚from popular culture.‛198
Studs’ eventual death results from his alcoholism; his inability to make
something of himself outside of the negative stereotypes he is familiar with
seems painfully ironic and fatalistic, a direct inversion of the wish-fulfilment
of pulp Bildungsromans, such as Alger’s Ragged Dick. Studs’ failures are what
Horkheimer above described as the result of mimetic repetitions of his
(hypocritical) upbringing: in particular, the failed pedagogy of his father. In
Young Lonigan, his father, attempting to guide his son, gives the following
awkward, broken speech:
‚Bill, you’re gettin’ older now, an< well *<+ it’s a father’s duty to
instruct the son, and you see now if you get a little itch< well you
don’t want to start< rubbin’ yourself< *<+ because such things are
against nature, and they make a person weak and his mind weak and
are liable to even make him crazy, and they are a sin against God; and
*<+ I wish you’d sort of wait a little while before you started in
smoking’<‛
The father’s speech is met with ‚Silence.‛ The ‚lazy day‛ is ‚suddenly robbed
of sunlight by a float of clouds,‛ the pathetic fallacy of Studs’ ‚self-
conscious*ness+‛ and affective ‚shame.‛ His stricken bodily response disputes
the monetary motive which coaxes Studs to concede to his father’s
disapproval: ‚Studs promised not to smoke. Why the hell not? The old man
would maybe give him a little extra spending money.‛ [YL 163]
198 Dowd, The Construction of Irish Identity, p. 163.
108
Studs escapes into the clean air, ‚*feeling+ the seventy-five cents in his jeans,‛
and after a ‚short debate with his conscience‛ he ‚*lights+ a fag‛ and lets ‚it
hang from the corner of his mouth‛ as a small defiant act of individuation.
[YL, 163] This small, ritualistic transaction forms a type of individuation in
defying the hypocritical moral asceticism of his class, religion, and cultural
heritage in an age in which subjective development and individuation are
both increasingly impossible. The cold, hard cash in Studs’ pocket enables
him to evade the sanctimony and piety of the older generation through an act
of ritual and addictive, amoral consumption. However, the mirror as a
metaphor and Studs’ reflecting upon his own image – forming different
expressions to reflect a sense of psychic identity and individuation through
the visual – further indicates an aesthetic nervousness of social insecurity,
outsideness, and alienation that cannot be absolved in this transaction made
under the summum bonum of capital and its extreme privilege of the
‘authentically’ American male.
The commercial interests invested in the audio-visual media of modernity,
certainly from Farrell’s era onwards, also expressly pursued the youth
demographic, exposing them to and ensnaring them in the dream-worlds of
capitalism. In the forthcoming Richard Wright section, I shall further examine
the positive and negative interfaces and exploitation of mediated mass
culture; for now, I advance that cinema and the still-photograph harness an
oracular power that distorts the manner in which these young responders
view the world, in its dual sense. ‚In the hands of the ruling society,‛ as
Siegfried Kracauer wrote of capitalist modernity’s mass ornaments, ‚the
invention of illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful means of
organizing a strike against understanding.‛ Collective and individual
109
consciousness succumbs to ‚the flood of photos‛ that ‚sweeps away the dams
of memory‛; ‚Never before has a period known so little about itself.‛199
Kracauer’s paradox here suggests that a culture that spectacularizes social
information correlates to an effect of oversaturation that erases individuation,
promoting widespread ignorance and alienation. Media outlets serve the dual
function of circulating commodity fetishism, encouraging consumption as a
chemical addiction to short-lived pleasure, whilst increasingly becoming the
source of fetishism itself; literature, the Bildungsroman, and Studs, feed upon
this fetishistic system. The two devices of information transference most
frequently downloaded into Studs’ consciousness – film and radio – attest to
the increasing presence and influence of mediation in the formation of
identity. Narrated as montage sequences in real-time, entire episodes occur in
which the narrator leans back and observes with great detail as Studs listens
to the radio, observes a poster or ad, or watches an entire movie.
For instance, in Judgment Day, the third act of the trilogy, Studs attends a film
called ‚Doomed Victory‛ (in the novel, an actual movie poster is included, as
part of Farrell’s mediated style), a movie about a hardboiled Irish gangster.
Ann Douglas proposes that Farrell draws upon archetypal gangster films of
the era: Mervyn LeRoys’s Little Caesar (1930), Howard Hawks’ Scarface (1932),
and William Wellman’s Public Enemy (1931) featuring the ‚immigrant-
gunboy‛ Tommy Powers on whom the hero ‚seems modelled.‛ 200 Studs,
yawning, ‚slump*s+ into his seat ready to let the picture afford him an
interesting good time‛; [61] the reader is positioned as a fly on the wall,
observing the event over his shoulder. Studs idolizes the character of Joey
Gallagher, a handsome, confidant young man who gives ‚cold lead as his 199 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 58.
200 Douglas, ‘Studs Lonigan and the Failure of History,’ p. 496.
110
answer to every rat who gets in his way,‛ *64+ has sex with stunning blondes,
yet abuses them and treats them cruelly. Cinema functions as a screen and
soundscape for multileveled advertisement – particularly of a certain type of
‘aspirational’ manhood. We witness Studs, as a cinematic viewer, being
conditioned by the first person solipsism of the film narrative to adulate this
sort of glamorized version of Chicago’s criminal underbelly:
Getting near the finish, and Jesus, he wanted Joey to come through it.
Joey, unsuspecting, pointing to the advertising sign<
THE WORLD IS YOURS
Joey Gallagher again fading, in the mind of Studs Lonigan, into Studs
Lonigan. Studs Lonigan, the world is yours. Take it. Oh, Christ, why
hadn’t he had an exciting life like Joey Gallagher? It happened to
some people. Look at Al Capone. [Judgment Day, 69]
When the feature’s anti-hero dies in a blaze of glory, Studs feels like ‚a part of
himself *was+ dying.‛ *JD, 70] When he meditates on why the movie couldn’t
‚have ended differently,‛ he effectively questions the escapist function of
cinema: for ordinary individuals like Studs Lonigan to culturally invest in the
individual exceptionalism they cannot achieve themselves in the real mode of
production. [70] The ‚WORLD‛ might be ‚YOURS‛ for the blockbuster hero,
but for Studs Lonigan it is close to ‚THE END‛ of the line. [70]
As a theoretical comparison, we may press upon the sensible relationship
between art and advertisement as Walter Benjamin fuses them in the
aphorism, ‘This Space for Rent’:
Today the most real, the mercantile gaze into the heart of things is the
advertisement. It abolishes the space where contemplation moved and
all but hits us between the eyes with things as a car, growing in
gigantic proportions, careens at us out of a film screen. And just as the
film does not present furniture and facades in completed forms for
111
critical inspection, their insistent, jerky nearness alone being
sensational, the genuine advertisement hurtles thing at us with the
tempo of a good film< For the man in the street, however, it is money
that affects him in this way, bring him into perceived contact with
things.201
The medial expressions of capitalism and the market imbricate within the
trilogy as they do in the outside world for the ‚man on the street‛: novel
becomes film, becomes advertisement, becomes pop song, becomes lecture or
sermon. As Ann Douglas proposes, Studs’ does not act out his Joey
Gallagher-inspired brutal fantasies of male-female powerplay, in which the
male inevitably imposes force upon the female who cannot defend herself
even at the level of language. In his imagination, his streams of consciousness,
he is a remorseless but powerful villain; in his actual relations to women, his
impotence results from his lack of agency in reality. As a result, he becomes
the kind of man he thinks of as weak: a despondent disavowal of the
Bildungsroman’s generic impulse to aspire to a certain class of manhood.202
One of Studs’ many foil characters, Weary, does enact his brutal fantasies in
sexually assaulting a young woman; he also beats Studs, his arch-street
opponent, after which Weary is arrested. [Young Manhood, 409-11] The novel
subsidizes some of the displaced guilt of repressed and overexposed sexuality
by erasing Studs’ sexual and physical competitor. As Douglas interprets,
‚Studs, as a participant in and victim of mass culture, inevitably sees the
world in terms not of institutions or even people, but of audiences.‛203 He is
201 Walter Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street,’ trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Volume 1:
1913-1926, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 476.
202 Ann Douglas, ‘Studs Lonigan and the Failure of History,’ p. 500.
203 Ibid., pp. 502-3.
112
without a ‚coherent objective or subjective life,‛ which he sublimates by
becoming an increasing ‚creature of moods.‛ Moods are ‚defined here as the
process by which anxiety does the work that ought to be carried out by a
more elaborate range of feelings,‛ all of which are based upon Studs’ feelings
of ‚competitiveness.‛ 204 ‚He incessantly imagines what others are thinking of
him: are they admiring, preferably envying him – or scorning him? The
principle of comparison is the closest approach he has to an idea.‛205
What forms the bulk of his imagination is the ‚dramatization‛ of what Fried
describes as ‚Randolph Bourne’s litany of the deindividualizing agents of an
unreflective culture in his study published in 1915, the year before Studs
Lonigan begins.‛ 206 As if recoiling from the necessity to freely think and
communicate the interiority of an individual who has no originality, the
narrative often retreats into the second primary mass-media device of the age:
the radio. Consider the domestic episode in which Studs, at home with his
family, ‚*sinks+ into a rocking chair opposite the radio‛:
[H]is father, toying with the dials, produced grating static. The parlor
suddenly filled with howling jazz, and Lonigan again tinkered with
the dials, decreasing the ear-splitting volume. Out of the swift tempo
the notes of a saxophone came like a clear stream of fluid that seemed
to flow into Studs, shivering up his spine, spilling through his nerves,
and pouring poignancy into every corner of his bran. He leaned back,
a brooding expression settling on his face, and again the saxophone
was lost in a rising cacophony that crashed into a wild conclusion.
Lonigan looked at his bulky gold watch, its ornamented case flashing
back a ray of electric light that had hit it. [JD, 79]
204 Ann Douglas, ‘Studs Lonigan and the Failure of History,’ pp. 502-3.
205 Ibid.
206 Lewis F. Fried, Makers of the City (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), p.
136.
113
The rocking chair, once again, sublimates the underlying state of social and
economic alienation. Tuning out from the white-noise of music, anxiety
regarding progress and aging consumes Studs’ thought processes – thoughts
about his family and friends eventually all dying, about his own mortality –
until he lets the ‚cloying-voiced radio crooner‛ lull him back into a trance of
mediated suspension. That that the music playing is the African American
‚howling jazz‛ is not coincidental, for it embarrassingly reminds Studs’ and
the Lonigans of their disgust for racial ‘mixing’ and perceived cultural
displacement in the wider neighbourhood. The prose narration of Studs’
feelings of displacement and alienation now distil into radiowaves,
remediating into popular song lyrics:
Youth will pass away,
Then what will they say about me?
When the end comes, I know they’ll say,
‚Just a gigolo,‛
And life goes on without me. [Judgment Day, 80]
The song fragments into leitmotifs, lines of lyrics which are parcelled and
dispersed throughout the narrative (on pages 243-4, the line that disturbs
Studs so much upon its first hearing – ‚Just a gigolo<‛ – replays again, and
again over the page). Radio, cinema, and literature are all effectively
displacing each other in the mass cultural experience. The technodeterminism
Farrell channels here is correlative to the same cultural retrograde that
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer depict in Dialectic of Enlightenment: the
domestic and social spaces opened up by the wireless are invaded by the
peripheral voices of capital, tuning in and out of the conversation like white
noise. What is peculiar about this parlor scene is the frequency in which
advertisements interrupt and disrupt the social interface of the ‚radioland‛
programme:
114
‚And friends of Radioland, the Peoples Stores, situated all over the
city for the housewives’ convenience, will be gratified, and amply
repaid if you have enjoyed this concert which they have sponsored.‛
[JD, 81]
If Studs’ father Lonigan and Martin are, in their alienation, still able to
complain about and mock these advertisements lest they succumb to
boredom, his mother reasserts the capitalist ethic that ‚they have to have
money for the radio, don’t they, and I think you should appreciate what you
get for nothing and not be making such mean remarks.‛ *JD, 81] In a more
finessed response to the phenomenon of the regression of listening and the
fetish character of music, Adorno presents the comparable anecdote of ‚an
American specialist in radio advertising, who indeed prefers to make use of
the music medium, has expressed scepticism as to the value of this
advertising, because people have learned to deny their attention to what they
are hearing even while listening to it. His observation is questionable with
respect to the advertising value of music. But it tends to be right in terms of
the reception of the music itself.‛207
The effect of the music in this domestic context, like the intrusion of
advertising, leaves the Lonigans entirely open to subliminal interference; thus
the listener is susceptible and uncritical of music’s ideological undercurrents.
The mother’s words generate the same response as Adorno’s answer to the
riddle of ‚whom music for entertainment still entertains‛ upon such a stage:
the ‚reduction of people‛ to unresponsive ‚silence.‛208 Studs, his father, and
Martin are muted by the mother’s obedient logic to the propaganda machine
of capital, what Adorno elsewhere calls the ‚Radio Generation‛: a ‚type of
207 Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein
(London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp.30-1.
208 Adorno, The Culture Industry, p. 30.
115
person whose being lies in the fact that he no longer experience anything
himself, but rather lets the all-powerful, opaque social apparatus dictate
experiences to him, which is precisely what prevents the formation of an ego,
even of a ‘person’ at all.‛209 Studs is a text that knows on every level that it is
the alienated product.
This binary between interfaces of tradition and progress, on a larger scale,
signifies Farrell’s modus operandi for the Bildungsroman. Studs’ narratology
gives vocal outlets to a far broader collective consciousness than that of the
individualist Bildungsroman. The intermedial stylistic intrusions include:
posters [JD, 60]; pop song lyrics; traditional Irish ballads, such as ‘My Irish
Molly,’ and ‘Little Annie Rooney’ [YL, 15]; newspaper headlines [JD, 197];
hymns in Latin [YM, 189]; and even scrubbed-out handwriting. [YL, 4] Farrell,
likely drawing upon the influence of John Dos Passos, narrates the experience
of song, cinema, and print as sensory events of interface between human
experience and the inhuman machine.
Yet between episodes in Studs’ life, the reader also becomes privy to
pervasive and typically two-page long streams of consciousness that interrupt
or distract the flow of narrative. These intrusive episodes are italicized to
distinguish their voices from Studs’ at the level of style (a similar effect to
Faulkner’s chronotopic modulations in The Sound and the Fury). These
interludes include montages of strangers and acquaintances to Studs. We
observe a character called Mr. Le Gare’s tears as he is laid off for protesting
wages, replaced by ‚Yellow Scabs!‛, whilst his son Andy, whose brain is ‚not
very good,‛ offers to seek out find employment to help the household’s
finances [Young Manhood, 104-5+; or Mrs Sheehan’s ‚premonition‛ of her son,
209 Theodor Adorno, Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor
(Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008), p. 465
116
the football star, lying dead at her feet‛ *YM, 114-5]; or the tragic tableaux of
Davy Cohen, ‚an unhappy man – a poor sick Jew‛ residing on the streets of
Manhattan, stealing a book from the local library, coughing up blood. [YM,
150-1] The focalized uniformity of the bourgeois consciousness of the
traditional Bildungsroman, which is distilled into the values and actions of
the individual coming terms to their place within the division of labor, now
gives way in Farrell to a collective consciousness of the masses, the
proletariat, the marginalized, and the disenfranchised petit bourgeoisie
experiencing the effects of the Depression.
The most remarkable instances of these ‘distractions’ occur in the final two
chapters of Young Manhood, in which the narrative’s polyphonic slippages
take a stronghold of the plot and effectively displace Studs as the leading
character of his own chronicle. Studs is approaching his mid to late twenties
by this point but has not yet reached manhood, in the generic sense; his
courtship quest fails in that his ‚true love‛ Lucy Scanlon marries another; his
job prospects are meagre.
He still resides with his chauvinistic parents, who intend to vacate the
neighbourhood to escape the influx of African Americans. Studs’ mother
becomes ‚more religious every day [<] filing the house with holy pictures and holy
water,‛ and tries to get the three ‘men’ of the house to join Father Shannon’s
mission, believing Studs is ‚a good boy, with no harm in him‛ save for his ‚bad
companions.‛ [YM, 342] Whilst his father, increasingly disconnected from
reality, looks upon his son Bill (Studs) ‚with a father’s love and pride,‛ and
‚hell, they weren’t sinners, and did all their duties to God and the Church.‛ [YM,
342] Studs is already in physical and psychic decline exacerbated by his
increasing ethnic agitation, which we observe in his interaction with the
Greek intellectual figure, Christy, at the local pool-hall. Christy gives the
following speech to the young men:
117
‚Yes, what do they know? Silly boys. They have no education. *<+
Fear! Crazy! What can they teach boys? To become sanctimonious
hypocrites too. Silly boys, they grow up, their fathers want to make
money, their mothers are silly women and pray like the
sanctimonious sisters, hypocrites. The boys run the streets, and grow
up in pool-rooms, drink and become hooligans. They don’t know any
better. Silly boys, and they kill themselves with diseases from whores
and this gin they drink *<+ Or else they are sent to the capitalist war
and they get killed, for what? Like the last war, they get killed to
make more money for Morgan and the bankers.‛ *YM, 336]
It takes an outsider to see how the insularity of the neighbourhood leaves its
youth to fester in ignorance and addiction to the rituals of escapist
consumption, rather than to experience the world outside of Chicago’s
diasporas. Studs, who enters halfway through the monologue, is perplexed by
Christy’s disillusionment in the American Way of Life – by the proposition
that life was better under Wilson, ‚the greatest American we ever had‛ in
Christy’ esteem, yet who in their suburban collective consciousness was now
only remembered as a ‚socialist‛ who was ‚against religion and the home‛ to
Davey and Studs. [YM, 337+ Davey forgives Christy: ‚hell, Christy was a
Greek. He didn’t get the idea about America right‛ *336+, but he fears Studs’
guttural response. Watching Christy translate Whitman into Greek, an act of
exporting ideational American individualism and culture, a persuasive
‚mood,‛ in Douglas’ understanding of the term, takes over Studs in the form
of a jingle:
A song of several years back jingled in Studs’ mind, Don’t Bite the
Hand That’s Feeding You< The first like kept returning to him: If you
don’t like your Uncle Sammy< The song hit the nail square. Studs had
an image of Uncle Sammy in his brain, tall, thin, angular, kindly, a
trifle bucolic, but with powerful Abe Lincoln or Slug Mason mitts. He
118
had a picture of him steady in his mind, this thin, tall, kindly, bearded
man in red, white and blue clothes, his eyes sad with sorrow caused
by the ingratitude of all the foreigners who had come over here and
been ungrateful to him. [337-8]
As a tissue of inputs and outputs, songs, radio, and jingles sink into the
register below consciousness; the jingle infects Studs’ memory, overwhelming
him with the discomfiting prospect of disappointing his childhood ‘idol’
Uncle Sam. Studs longs to tell that ‚lousy Greek sonofabitch, get the hell out
of a white man’s country‛; instead, he asks the most damning charge one can
level against a man’s identity: ‚Say, is that Greek an American citizen?‛ *338+
The mythologized patriotism symbolized by the Uncle Sam figure overrides
his affective response system, making him recall with powerful nostalgia how
‚as a kid, he had used to see cartoons with Uncle Sam in them in the
newspapers, and he used to wish that Uncle Sam was a real man, the same to
American as God was to the world. It made him wish that again, and wishing
that, he was wishing he was a kid again. He had heartburn. He felt his
stomach. Getting more and more of an alderman. He felt rotten. He wasn’t
sleeping so well, and some days, he got all pooped out at three or four
o’clock.‛ *338+ Christy’s attack strikes not only at Studs’ sense of national
security, but all the more, his last relics of his ‘childhood’; Christy’s otherness
forces Studs to confront the reality of Bildung, an adult world of
responsibility and demands.
Studs’ cultural failure to integrate, rather than assimilate, manifests as an
increasing physical sickness from which he never recovers. Dislocated from
the young man’s patriotism that would have seen him fight overseas, he
mollifies himself by reminiscing about that one glorious day when he ‚licked
Weary Reilly.‛ Davey indulges him: ‚That was a battle.‛ *338+ This ‚sickness‛
caused by inaction appears contagious amongst their crowd. Friends like
119
Hink are beginning to look ‚crazy,‛ ‚queer,‛ and are increasingly acting ‚far
away.‛ *339+ The temporality of the novel lurches forward in years at a time,
Studs’ youth slipping away in vertiginous motions.
A tide of atavistic anti-intellectualism descends upon the neighbourhood in
this time of ethnic creolization and economic depression; in this period of
destabilization of the collective and the notion of self, a radical shoring-up of
the parochial Irish Catholic traditions becomes increasingly persuasive to
disillusioned youth such as Studs. Against Christy’s radical vision, the
community church leader, Father Shannon, preaches at the pulpit that ‚I
know what it means to be young. I know that Satan rides about through the
night, like a witch in the Sleepy Hollow, planning traps and temptations with
which to beset the young.‛ He personalizes his address to mollify the desires
of young men seeking out freedom: ‚I know that you want good times. I
believe, uncategorically that you should have good times.‛ *349+ ‚Today,
there are afoot movements started by vicious men and women who philander
with the souls of youth in order that they will receive their paltry profit, and
their cheap, ephemeral notoriety. I refer to such movements as jazz, atheism,
free-love, companionate marriage, birth control. These, and similarly
miscalled tendencies, are murdering the soul of youth,‛ Father Shannon
passionately orates.
His speech divides youth into two categories: those who submit to God and
attend Mass and listen to the sermons; or those who fill ‚those seats of the
godless – the universities – those iniquitous incubators of vice, cheapness, and
trash – the movies (he sneered) those imitation Anti-Christs, modern authors
whose books perfume the vilest of sin.‛ *351+ He declares that if he could, he
would shout to these authors how they are ‚worse than dogs! You are the
vilest of the vile, the most vicious of the vicious, lower than snakes, you rats
who write books to rob youth of its shining silvered innocence!‛ *351+
120
No ‚fear of naming names and titles,‛ Shannon specifically (and ironically)
charges all competitors of mass cultural production: the works of H.G. Wells
and the novel Elmer Gantry, Sinclair Lewis’ 1927 satire of the fundamentalist
evangelical hypocrisy of 1920s religious activity, the boozing, skirt-chasing
Reverend Elmer Gantry; the Judge Ben Lindsay, famed as the ‚father‛ of the
juvenile court system but also the ‚companionate marriage‛ which allowed
for young couples to live together as ‘trial marriage’ which caused much
disturbance in the Catholic clergy for its implications that marriage was about
anything other than procreation. He lastly contrasts the work of conservative
thinkers such as G. K. Chesterton to H. L. Mencken – that ‚noisy, vociferous,
and half-baked little man‛ who keeps telling people to ‚Read Nietzsche!‛
Reading Nietzsche, in his opinion, unequivocally leads to violent uprising, for
the criminals Leopold and Loeb – students of the University of Chicago who
invaded the public psyche by kidnapping and murdering a wealthy fourteen
year old boy, Robert Franks in order to become self-proclaimed ‚supermen,‛
a ‘psychological’ motive which became a source of media fixation –210 ‚read
*Nietzsche+ in this city, almost in this neighbourhood.‛ *352-3] America is
‚being ruined‛ and ‚contaminated‛ by all who are not young and Catholic
devout. [355]
Through the mouthpiece of irony, Farrell puts forward the notion that
mediated mass culture itself cannot be held responsible for ruining the minds
of young men and women, despite its negative, manipulative capabilities; it is
a lack of thinking, all the ideological platforms of mass culture, including
outlets, soapboxes and pulpits of religion and politics, which do not allow
individuals to think for themselves due to a saturation of competing ideas.
210 For a more thorough account of the cultural impact of this case, see Paula S. Fass, ‘Making
and Remaking an Event: The Leopold and Loeb Case in American Culture,’ The Journal of
American History vol. 80, no. 3 (Dec., 1993).
121
These forces drive American youth to live desperately from one thrill to the
next, to fear anybody who is not like them, and deprives them of the psychic
and philosophical tools necessary to question the deindividuating system in
which they live. Studs’ generation are all caught in the ideological crossfire
between an ‘adult’ political system which advocates parochial asceticism and
an economy which demands immoderate consumption. The fractured
method of Farrell’s polyphonic narration, his breaching of the
Bildungsroman’s individualist, insular scope and perspective, enables the
reader to intuit this dialectic in the interstices between the competing
propagandist voices which promote these forces.
The novel allows for one slim outlet of hope against this one-way street of
despair, and it is important that it is not achieved via the Bildungsheld Studs:
rather, in the small episode focalized upon his foil character, Danny O’Neill,
who would become the protagonist of Farrell’s next eponymous Bildung-
pentalogy. Danny attends university, where he feels a keen sense of
despiritualization; yet when he attempts to speak to Father Shannon and seek
his advice, he is told that the Father is ‚too busy.‛ It ‚crystallizes‛ his opinion
that the Father speaks not out of ‚ignorance and superstition‛ but rather a
‚downright hatred of truth and beauty.‛ [369] This realization releases him from
his heavy burden of spiritual guilt, and he is able to experience the ‚exultant
feeling of freedom‛ in declaring to himself that ‚God was a lie. God was dead.
God was a mouldering corpse within his mind.‛ *369+ Replacing God with
Nietszchean nihilism, Danny can ‚[envision] a better world, a cleaner world, a
world of ideals such as that the Russians were attempting to achieve,‛ but he knows
he must ‚study to prepare himself to create that world.‛ *370+ He is presently ‚a
disillusioned young man‛ surrounded by ‚the guys‛ like Studs Lonigan and
Red Kelly and Barney Keefe whom he ‚hated,‛ who pass him by on the other
side of the street and call him a ‚goof‛ for his book-learning. Yet he intuits that
122
by educating himself, he will be able to ‚drive this neighbourhood and all his
memories of it out of his consciousness with a book,‛ thus he ‚swerve[s] again from
disillusionment to elation.‛ [372]
Danny, not Studs, achieves that ‚dangerous‛ moment of Bildung that Father
Shannon so fearfully preaches against: Nietzsche’s overcoming of the self.
Farrell here sardonically cleanses the medial hysteria that supports Shannon’s
fear-mongering sermon through affirmation. Danny’s transformative ‚going
under‛ is in contradistinction to the trilogy’s protagonist, who – as
Horkheimer hypostasizes – ‚remains the same,‛ paralyzed by indecision,
ambivalence, and fear. The protagonist succumbs to spiritual despair and
socioeconomic alienation, journeys onward only to meet his own inevitable,
tragic ‚Judgment Day.‛ There is, therefore, an unexpected affirmation
underlying Farrell’s concept of mass culture and the new role of the
Bildungsroman: populist art that appeals to the reader’s imagination,
requiring them to think and reason, rather than to escape into the
expectations of genre.
123
III Shock Values: Self-Construction and Self-Deconstruction,
or Mediation, Murder, and Mass Culture in Richard Wright’s
Native Son (1940)
Shock City
When friend and fellow writer Margaret Walker questioned the saleability of
Native Son’s (1940) melodramatic chase scene along Chicago’s Indiana Avenue
rooftops, she recalls Richard Wright grinning at her as he replied, ‚I think it
will shock people *<+ and I love to shock people.‛211 A Mississippi-born black
boy from sharecropper roots, Wright escaped the South to come of age in
Chicago, a city of resistance and shock. ‚The deepest problems of modern
life,‛ as Georg Simmel argued of the fin de siècle condition, ‚derive from the
claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his
existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of
external culture, and of the technique of life.‛ 212 Such antagonism forms the
modern conflict between the ‚social-technological mechanism‛ and the
individual threatened to be ‚levelled down and worn out‛ inside the ‚super-
individual contents of life.‛ 213 Wright echoes Simmel’s sentiment in his
Chicago-School inflected 1941 folk history, 12 Million Black Voices: ‚There are
so many people. For the first time in our lives, we feel human bodies,
strangers whose lives and thoughts are unknown to us, pressing always close
211 Quoted in Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 160.
212 Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life,’ in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans.
Kurt H. Wolff (New York: The Free Press, 1950) p. 409.
213 Ibid.
124
about us< It seems as though we are now living inside of a machine.‛214
Living ‚by the grace of jobs and the brutal logic of jobs,‛ mankind inhabits ‚a
world of things,‛ utterly alienated from a natural dependency upon ‚the soil,
the sun, the rain, or the wind.‛215
Wright presented Chicago as the ‚city to which Negroes were fleeing to by
the thousands,‛216 an exodus from the hypocrisies of the South, trying to find
autonomy and acceptance in the ‚dream-maker‛ city.217 The young Richard of
Black Boy (1945) first realizes this when he discovers he has been selling
newspapers that ‚*preach+ the Ku Klux Klan doctrines‛: that ‚racial
propaganda‛ could be and was indeed ‚published in Chicago,‛ including
articles that advocated lynching ‚as a solution for the problem of the
Negro.‛218 It was a city built and visualized by media promoting a false sense
of universal economic prosperity and national community, all the
propaganda of newspapers, film shorts, magazines, jingles, and pamphlets. It
was also a city built upon a media and communication system that
understood the selling power of shock value, exemplified by the ‘detective
story’ and crime exposé that reveal pseudo-psychoanalytical and statistical
clues so that the public could make sense out of the senselessness through
safely generic patterns and sequences. The ambivalent power of media
circulation, of a saturated image culture and its evolving technologies for
envisioning the self, is a complex dialectic that Wright understood in relation
to both literature and the civil rights movement.
214 Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices [c. 1941] (New York: Basic Books, 2008) p. 100.
215 Wright, 12 Million, p. 100.
216 Richard Wright, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (New York: Harper and Brother
Publishers, 1945), p. 115.
217 Mary Hricko, Genesis of the Chicago Renaissance: Theodore Dreiser, Langston Hughes, Richard
Wright, and James T. Farrell (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 99.
218 Wright, Black Boy, p. 115.
125
The stamp of sameness is pressed onto every urban surface, in order to
detract attention from the totalizing reality, as Adorno and Horkheimer
describe of ‚city housing projects designed to perpetuate the individual as a
supposedly independent unit in a small hygienic dwelling,‛ rendering the
individual ‚all the more subservient to his adversary – the absolute power of
capitalism.‛ 219 The simonized, claustrophobic labyrinth of Adorno and
Horkheimer’s image of the proletariat tenement counterpoints the unsanitary
maze of urban ghettos that spatialize race in Wright’s Chicago. Consider
Native Son’s first searing sound-image of a young black man awakening to the
sound of alarm: the palpitating ‚Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng!‛ of an alarm clock.220
The protagonist opens his eyes and the novel to a dingy, one bedroom
apartment beside his sibling, his mother, and a ‚huge black rat.‛ *9+
Light flooded the room and revealed a black boy standing in a narrow
space between two iron beds < [7]
We are already beyond the Bildungsroman’s comforting realism, cornered
into the cramped territory of allegoric rats and symbolic iron posts belonging
to shocking melodrama. Violence and destitution are naturalized by the
division of labor, both in local material reality and at the level of a class
allegory. The dichotomy between propaganda-fed dreams of accruing wealth
through hard work – the nihilistic will to power of capitalism – and the harsh
reality of city life for its proletariat, a workforce fuelled by ethnic labor power,
generate a situation where the marginalized seek retribution not only for the
ignominious and brutal injustices they have incurred. Moreover, they seek
compensation for the fiscal opportunities promised to them through media
219 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming
(London: Verso, 2010), p. 120.
220 Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper and Row Publishers Inc., 1966), p. 7.
Subsequent references to page numbers hereafter cited in text for this current section.
126
which never actualized. Aimé J. Ellis, in her analysis of downtown black male
politics in Native Son, outlines how,
*<+ life in the North for poor southern blacks during the 1920s and
1930s was a hard one and, tragically, the hope of racial justice in
Chicago and other northern cities during the years of black migration
was undercut by the reality of overcrowded and dilapidated housing,
joblessness, and race riots.221
The nature of the burgeoning city – particularly one so highly industrialized
and dependent on cheap, dispensable labor, yet with high rates of
unemployment by 1940 – further ghettoized the black and ethnic underclass.
Bigger’s consociates repeatedly remind him of his ‚luck‛ to have found work;
he cannot understand why he is fortunate to have to work. For Karl Precoda,
these preconditions translate within the text in the tragedy tradition,
articulated as a rhetorical Oedipal ‘blindness’ conflated with Bigger’s
increasing inability to ‘read’ (interpret, accept, adapt to) societal cues. This
metaphor signifies the wider American political and societal ‚blindness,‛ a
society that has indoctrinated its children for generations to accept
segregation, double standards, and hypocrisy, particularly as regards the
division of labor by, as Kracauer argues, saturating the market with images
and fragments that do not supply the full societal picture. 222 Boris Max’s
defence speech consolidates the metaphor – as the peculiar and astonishing
221 Aimé J Ellis, ‘‚Boys in the Hood:‛ Black Male Community in Richard Wright’s Native Son,’
Callaloo vol. 29, no. 1 (Winter, 2006), p. 182.
222 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 58.
127
Marxist cadenza of the novel – with recurring imagery of ‚blindness‛ and
‚sleepwalking‛ permeating his rhetoric, as Paul N. Siegel traces.223
Yet Max’s orotundity figures the modern workforce as either somnambulists,
too lost in the dreamscape of consumption to question the division of labor, or
‚mechanical men‛ at the bidding of their masters and market forces. Both
these images harbour national spectres of the original American mode of
production: plantation slavery. In tracing the origins of the American zombie
figure in literature via Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Sascha Morrell articulates
how ‚Mechanical men and the living dead had long been working together in
U.S. literature of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to embody the
dehumanizing effects of racial oppression and (relatedly) labor
exploitation.‛224 The soulless body, the sleepwalker, affixed itself to African-
American literature and cinema in a way that ‚emblemized how slavery and
wage-labor relations reduced persons to things.‛225
The sonoric imagery of the alarm clock in this opening passage therefore
disturbs and upholds the pendulous ‚subordination of the man to the
machine.‛ 226 ‚Time is everything, man is nothing,‛ Marx contends. ‚Quantity
alone decides everything.‛ 227 Or as Luk{cs interprets, time ‚sheds its
qualitative, variable, flowing nature‛ in the reification of the ‚mechanically
objectified ‘performance’ of the worker, wholly separated from his total
223 Paul N. Siegel, ‘The Conclusion of Richard Wright’s Native Son,’ PMLA vol. 89, no.3 (May,
1974), p. 519.
224 Sascha Morrell, ‘Zombies, Robots, Race, and Modern Labour,’ Affirmations of the Modern
vol. 2, no. 2 (Autumn, 2015), p. 101.
225 Ibid.
226 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy [c. 1847] (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing
House, n.d.), p. 59.
227 Ibid.
128
human personality: in short, [time] becomes space.‛ 228 The collapsing of time
and space into a reified mechanical chronotope (such as the working day
initiated by an alarm clock) suggests the fragmentation and specialization of
the subjects and objects of labor as Lukács designates.229 In this inorganic
industrial ‚environment where time is transformed into an abstract,‛ as
Lukács contends – or as I advance of the Chicago case, the division of space is
designed in order to transform time into an oppressive abstraction,
particularly for youths now entering the workforce – ‚*<+ the personality can
do no more than look on helplessly while its own existence is reduced to an
isolated particle and fed into an alien system.‛ 230 Significantly for the
Bildungsroman genre, capital does not distinguish between man and the
young man who has not yet achieved maturation in this structure; all bodies
of labor are homogenous in this durée.
However, if capital does not discriminate between man and child as workers,
the division of labor under American capitalism certainly enforces its own
logic of racial segregation in the mental life of the isolated worker. Bigger’s
alienation aligns his sense of self with white superiority, an alienation from all
people of his own racial background, and from people of his own age who are
conditioned into the role of ‘sleepwalking’ zombies who work in order to
consume, never questioning, never rebelling. However, in advance of what
Ellison fully realizes at the level of style in Invisible Man, Wright constructs
this economic and social alienation as a figure of racialized ectoplasm, a
spectral marionette being manipulated by the white man for the amusement
of an audience. Consider his job interview with Mr Dalton:
228 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 90.
229 Ibid.
230 Ibid.
129
He felt naked, transparent; he felt that this white man, having helped
to put him down, having helped to deform him, held him up now to
look at him and be amused. [68]
The scale of the imagery is alarming; Bigger’s cultural training transfigures
him into a small child or, more specifically, a Sambo doll in the presence of
the white man. He is not an equal in class or race, but rather, the literal
product of racist objectification (an image Ellison later reinstitutes in Invisible
Man) that seeks to keep him in permanent emasculation for fear that he will
inevitably become the hyper-libidinal monster circulated in racist mythology.
His sensations of shame and rage attest to an internalization or reification of
Bigger’s racial alienation. We know this for certain because later, Bigger
reflects upon those
rare moments when a feeling and longing for solidarity with other
black people would take hold of him. He would dream of making a
stand against that white force, but that dream would fade when he
looked at the other black people near him *<+ he hated them and
wanted to wave his hand and blot them out. [109]
The mechanical disintegration – sublimated in Bigger’s work as a chauffeur,
for instance – ‚destroys those bonds‛ that had bound individuals to a
community in the days when production was still ‘organic.’‛231 Dehumanized,
all social bonds broken, Bigger’s position is later counterpointed in Boris
Max’s declaration that white culture wants to conveniently ‚Stamp out this
ghost!‛ for the young man’s symbolic and generic affront against all
‘whiteness.’ [360]
At the level of imagery, Max and the narrator alike ironically align Bigger to
the ‚spectre of Communism‛ that ‚is haunting Europe,‛ as Marx and Engels
231 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 90.
130
the opening metaphor of the Communist Manifesto.232 The stamped out ‚ghost‛
also intriguingly animates the Southern locution of ‘haint,’ not only in terms
of the postslavery haunting that follows the African American north to the
urban metropolises, but furthermore the supernatural costumes of the white
robed Ku Klux Klan terrorists who ‘tricked’ superstitious slaves into thinking
they were human haints in an elaborate masquerade of psychological
manipulation to control the unauthorized movement of black Southerners;233
prior to abolition, planters used stage props (rattling tin cans), headless
disguises, and a sinister ‚chase‛ scene to deter slaves from assembling after
dark.234 According to testimonies from black Southerners, the technique of
exploiting the supernatural made palpable the ‚telling [of] the story itself‛:
narrative as a circulated rumour controlling the plantation slaves.235
Bigger’s ghostly characterization recalls one folk tale collected by the Federal
Writers Project, where the interviewee recalls firsthand how the lynched black
man would return to haint the living:
‚Was not long after dat fore de spooks was gwine round ebber whar.
When you would go out atter dark, somethin’ would start to a
haintin’ yet. You would git so scairt dat you would might ni run every
time you went out atter dark; even iffin you didn’t see nothin’ *<+
when a man gits killed befo he is done what de good Lawd intended
*<+ he comes back here and tries to find who done him wrong. I
mean, he don’ come hisself, but de spirit, it is what comes and
232 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin Books, 2004),
p. 2.
233 Gladys-Marie Fry, Night Riders in Black Folk History (Chapel Hill and London: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1975), p. 45.
234 Ibid., p. 71.
235 Ibid., p. 63.
131
wanders around. Course, it can’t do nothin,’ so it jus scares folks and
haints dem.‛236
Bigger’s growing sense of alienation from his own ‚blackness‛ escalates with
his increased presence amongst Anglo individuals, as he works amongst
them in the gentrified heart of the South Side, Kenwood and Hyde Park,
observing their heightened position in Chicago’s food-chain with resentment.
The alarm clock later transfigures into the image of a gold wristwatch he feels
necessary to purchase in his role as the Dalton’s chauffer. [60] When Dalton
confirms Bigger’s wage – a meagre twenty dollars per week specifically for
his family, with five dollars for himself – subtle, seductive delusions of
grandeur creep into his consciousness, aligning him once more to the
commodified machines of his labor: the watch, and the car. [48-9] Firstly,
He looked at his dollar watch; it was seven. In a little while he would
go down and examine the car. And he would buy himself another
watch, too. A dollar watch was not good enough for a job like this; he
would buy a gold one. [60]
Then shortly after,
He was a little disappointed that the car was not so expensive as he
had hoped, but what it lacked in price was more than made up for in
color and style. [63]
The seductive prospect of increasing one’s cultural value through materialism
and consumption – a crossover with Carrie, the latter-day Hurstwood, and
even Studs – provokes Bigger to limitlessly desire, to limitlessly consume in
such a way as can only breed further disappointment and anomie when these
236 The Federal Writers Project, South Carolina Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the
United States from Interviews with Former South Carolina Slaves (Reprinted by Native American
Book Publishers, 1938), p. 47.
132
unfettered desires are inevitably unsatisfied by wage labor. Consumption
therefore mutates into its most destructive connotation as a frenzied Bigger
observes Mary Dalton’s corpse disintegrate into a white ash, utterly
consumed by flames. Like Carrie playing at being rich, Bigger further plays at
being rich and white in thinking of ‚color and style,‛ which for a time,
distracts him from the need to play tough, as Aimé Ellis discusses.237 This
particular instance of role play runs parallel to the violent articulation of
Emile Durkheim’s hypothesis of alienation:
Unlimited desires are insatiable by definition and insatiability is
rightly considered a sign of morbidity. Being unlimited, they
constantly and infinitely surpass the means at their command; they
cannot be quenched. Inextinguishable thirst is constantly renewed
torture.238
Durkheim’s imagery of torture and famine resonate with the violence of
Bigger’s desires to ‚blot out‛ life and to inflict his internal pains onto the
external world. In terms of the aforementioned rhetoric of blindness that
recurs throughout Native Son, Durkheim argues that the first consequence of
indulging consumerist behaviours is ‚blindness to its uselessness.‛ 239 The
second consequence is ‚for this pleasure to be felt and to temper and half veil
the accompanying painful unrest, such unending motion must at least always
be easy and unhampered. If it is interfered with only restlessness is left, with
the lack of ease which it, itself, entails.‛240 Bigger violently fluctuates between
this consumerist anomie and a state of ennui, ‚thin‛ conditions which render
237 Ellis, ‘‚Boys in the Hood,’‛ pp. 188-9.
238 Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology [c.1897], eds. and trans. John A. Spaulding
and George Simpson (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 208.
239 Durkheim, Suicide, p. 209.
240 Ibid.
133
him ‚breakable at any instant,‛ in the words of Durkheim, in an unending
cycle of affective expenditure. When exterior forces – the law, both
constitutional and social or moral – cannot limit and recontain his hunger for
more, his conscience cannot re-establish the ‚state of equilibrium of the
animal’s dormant existence.‛ 241 His ‚awake*ned+‛ heart ‚cannot be touched
by physiochemical forces,‛ by physical restraint, such as imprisonment, or by
total self-destruction. 242
Bigger’s guilt functions on two generic planes. The obvious moral and legal
senses play out in the detective thriller/courtroom drama; however, as we
already know in advance what the outcome of the trial will be, this drama
concedes to the negative Bildungsroman, in which the individual unbecomes
by submitting to the economic and sociopolitical superstructures beyond his
conception. Bigger’s hyperawareness of the racialized authority which holds
power of agency over him emphasizes the fatal double standard: he is a
Negro; therefore he must already be a murderer. What begins as a
noncommittal reasoning of his actions in Bigger’s mind,
Though he had killed by accident, not once did he feel the need to tell
himself that it had been an accident. He was black and he had been
alone in a room where a white girl had been killed; therefore he had
killed her. [101]
overturns through forceful introspection of his meaningless position within
the collective:
The hidden meaning of his life – a meaning which others did not see
and which he had always tried to hide – had spilled out. No; it was no
accident, and he would never say that it was. There was in him a kind
241 Durkheim, Suicide, p. 209.
242 Ibid.
134
of terrified pride in feeling and thinking that some day he would be
able to say publicly that he had done it. [101]
Bigger’s calls his own agency over this crime into question by envisioning
how he might repurpose the murder as the action of a public figure
(Bildungshelden, by definition, must prove themselves exceptional): a
spokesperson politicizing his actions outside of morally accountability.
Whether his actions are socially controlled or individually premeditated,
Bigger fatalistically enacts the white superstitions of black monstrosity, for
there is no other path against the tidal power of white authority, even as his
questions his own will to power. As with Farrell, we must factor in the
deliberate allusion to the influential medial circulation of Loeb and Leopold
reading Zarathustra; it was certainly one case upon which Wright styled the
courtroom proceedings.243
For Simmel, the psychological foundation underlying metropolitan
individuality is the ‚intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the
swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli.‛244 Exposed to a
‚rapid crowding of changing images‛ with ‚each crossing of the street, with
the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life,‛ the
sensory foundation of metropolitan life is one of constant adaptation to shock
guided by monetary exchange.245 For this reason, Mark Seltzer determines
243 Sara D. Schotland, ‘Breaking Out of the Rooster Coop: Violent Crime in Aravind Adiga’s
White Tiger and Richard Wright’s Native Son,’ Comparative Literature Studies vol. 48, no.1
(2011), pp. 14-15.
244 Simmel, ‘The Metropolis,’ p. 410.
245 Ibid.
135
that Chicago was the ‚‘shock city’ of the turn of the century‛ in a uniquely
violent sense.246 He stakes the following claim:
The bourgeoning commodity distribution centre and relay point
between the industrial East and the agricultural West, the city was
dominated and defined by its stockyards and slaughterhouses. (In
1839, 3,000 head of cattle were butchered in Chicago; in 1871, 700,000;
eventually, one of the great packing plants had a daily quota of 60,000
head.) The apparatuses of mass slaughter and mechanized organic
disassembly lines constitute what Siegfried Giedion describes as the
development of an elaborate ‚murder machinery‛ and the
‚mechanization of death.‛247
‚It was uncanny to watch them,‛ Sinclair’s narrator of The Jungle remarks,
‚press on to their fate, all unsuspicious – a very river of death. Our friends
were not poetical, and the sight suggested to them no metaphors of human
destiny; they thought only of the wonderful efficiency of it all.‛248 Murder
industrializes in such a way that transcends into a kitsch tour of Chicago’s
psychic spatiality and art; ‚what surfaces here,‛ in Seltzer’s opinion, ‚is an
irreducibly traumatic component in the project of self-making or self-
construction.‛ 249 Citing a media culture that imagined and imaged H. H.
Holmes’s Chicagoan ‚murder factory‛ at the time as the quintessential
illustration of the end of the century, Seltzer frames the question: ‚what
exactly does it mean to understand persons as illustrations of conditions,
melting persons into place?‛250 To sublate Simmel’s ‚metropolis and mental
246 Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York and
London: Routledge, 1998), p. 203.
247 Seltzer, Serial Killers, pp. 203-4.
248 Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, 1905), p. 38.
249 Seltzer, Serial Killers, p. 205.
250 Ibid., p. 204.
136
life‛ into the more radical assumption of the ‚metropolis as mental life‛
means the subject becomes ‚utterly assimilated to his milieu‛ and ‚created by
his conditions that, in circular fashion, he illustrates‛; by doing so, Seltzer
inevitably frame the new historicist subject as ‚the subject in a state of
shock.‛251
Shock in this context posits ‚the permeability of the subject to his
surroundings‛ in a way that gravitates towards and ‚seems inseparable from
the violent and erotically charged uncertainties of agency and motivation that
everywhere surface in the representation of the new historicist subject.‛ The
‚subject’s own logic‛ generalizes space ‚at the expense of the individual‛ and
may therefore ‚assume a traumatic form: a psychotic, or paranoid, defense
against the subject’s intimation that his own interior is not merely targeted
from but formed from without.‛ 252 Wright’s application of shock value
compares to the radical constructionist logic that Seltzer calls upon here to
explain the material self-invention of the serial killer, the ‚internally divided
logic of self-construction‛ as it becomes ‚indissociable from the double-logic
of prosthesis‛ – that is, the ‚vexed intimacy with technology that defines the
subject of machine culture.‛253
To extend Seltzer’s logic, the media appropriates these sites of horror and
trauma, filled with the folklore of hainting, into kitsch: the commodity
belonging to a genre of ‘mass’ or ‘low’ art. However, as Native Son makes
apparent, the ‚mere physical aspect of our civilization‛ is not experienced
equally by the native sons and daughters of Chicago. As Boris Max declares
in defence of Bigger,
251 Seltzer, Serial Killers, p. 204.
252 Ibid., pp. 204-5.
253 Ibid., p. 205.
137
‚How alluring, how dazzling it is! How it excites the senses! How it
seems to dangle within easy reach of everyone the fulfillment [sic] of
happiness! How constantly and overwhelmingly the advertisement,
radios, newspapers, and movies play upon us! But in thinking of them
remember that to many they are tokens of mockery *<+ Imagine a
man walking amid such a scene, a part of it, and yet knowing that it is
not for him!‛ *421-2]
Whilst Max first appears to be Wright’s ideological mouthpiece in the text,
Wright’s methodology caters to a far more explicit need to demonstrate the
individual human response; Wright achieves this humanization,
paradoxically, through emphasizing the protagonist’s literal dehumanization.
What Seltzer calls the ‚cultural technologies of the self‛ are assembled by
Bigger and by the print media in the same shocking way that the Bigger
dissembles Mary’s body, a metonymy of the way that black body is
disassembled in the lynching act. This logic assists the preconscious
methodology by which Bigger deconstructs Mary’s corpse, and by doing so,
self-constructs a type of persona after the fact in a disturbing will to
individuation: ‚what I killed for, I am.‛ *391-2] Stephen Prothero, drawing
upon Philippe Ariès’ Western Attitudes Towards Death (1974), speaks to the
aesthetics of cremation as the ‚most radical‛ means of denying death in the
modern West. For Prothero, cremation is actually ‚unfriendly to denial,‛ for
in a burial, the ‚body remained intact,‛ preserving at least momentarily the
‚illusion of life.‛ 254 Cremation instead insists upon ‚the real,‛ in that the body
is ‚quickly reduced to ashes‛ and its cindery remains delivered to the family
members to render ‚denial close to impossible.‛255
254 Stephen Prothero, Purified By Fire: A History of Cremation in America (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2011), p. 207.
255 Ibid.
138
That cremation is ‚unfriendly to denial,‛ leaving behind traces of Bigger’s
crime, transforms his criminality into an inevitable, inescapably political
action. What is of most interest here is the notion of the cremationist as an
industrial capitalist, who devises and develops technologies to reform and
remediate the body into an extremely personalized commodity: the relics of
death reified as the ashes and the urn. In an infallible economy of grief, the
cremationist profits upon marketing the inert product to the consumer, who
may have even purchased their own funeral plan themselves in advance of
their own death, and therefore could only experience the moment of
transaction and not the physical possession of the commodity.
Throughout the long history of American capitalism, death itself had become
a kitsch industry with its own rituals of consumption driven by various stages
and moods of public morality, and that the ‘consumers’ decision to cremate or
bury their dead was ‚largely driven by style.‛256 At a 1943 convention of the
Cremation Association of America, one member said he took ‚colored‛
cremations after hours, but would not allow an urn holding African-
American ashes to be place in his Jim Crow columbarium. The CAA President
Currie himself declared that his crematory ‚rules *<+ allowed only Caucasian
cremations; he did not take African Americans.‛ Only twelve members
admitted to cremating ‚colored people.‛ If the Black church dissuaded its
parish from the disposal method of creation, ‚the insistence of many
crematory operators on cremating only white – and the insistence of a few
that cremation was an ‘Aryan’ activity – also kept African-American
cremation rates down.‛ Where style gives way to logic, cremation effectively
256 Prothero, Purified By Fire, p. 209.
139
‚aligned Blacks with dirt, the body, and superstition, *which+ did little to win
African Americans to the cause.‛257
I seek to refocus the economic concept of self-deconstruction, in this very real
sense of Bigger appropriating the death rites that under capitalist enterprise
formed yet another means of discriminating between black and white bodies,
to the impossibility of achieving the Bildungsideal of self-construction under
urbanized Jim Crow. Cremation rituals belonged to white society in two
obvious and totalitarian senses. Firstly, the industry of death, which was
subject to the same consumer manipulations as any other industry, to
socioeconomic trends and availability, and that moreover discriminated
between generic bodies even in the columbarium in such a way that flouted
the homogenizing logic of the indiscriminating commodity. Secondly, the
lynching tradition in which cremation served as the climax of both ritualistic
killing and blood-sport, a ceremony for the white culture which had been
contaminated by contact with blackness to shore up its borders. The more
shocking the event, the more socially affirming the entertainment proved for
the violent enactors, who never saw litigious punishment for the crime.
When Bigger incinerates Mary’s already deceased body, he does not intuit the
faintest traces of evidence which residually haunt every site of trauma; these
traces are both physical and metaphysical, in the history of lynching. I refer
this dissociative image of Bigger fragmenting Mary’s corpse into a mere pile
of ash and a tell-tale jawbone to Wright’s earlier 1935 anti-lynching poem,
‘Between the World and Me.’ The second stanza exemplifies this comparison:
There was a design of white bones slumbering forgottenly
upon a cushion of ashes.
There was a charred stump of sapling pointing a blunt finger
257 Prothero, Purified By Fire, p. 136.
140
accusingly at the sky.
There were torn tree limbs, tiny veins of burnt leaves, and
a scorched coil of greasy hemp;
A vacant shoe, an empty tie, a ripped shirt, a lonely hat,
and a pair of trousers stiff with black blood.
And upon the trampled grass were buttons, dead matches,
butt-ends of cigars and cigarettes, peanut shells, a
drained gin-flask, and a whore’s lipstick;
Scattered traces of tar, restless arrays of feathers, and the
lingering smell of gasoline.
And through the morning air the sun poured yellow
surprise into the eye socket of a stony skull . . . .258
The poetic persona has ‚stumbled‛ upon a lynching site ‚one morning while
in the woods.‛259 Wright, as poet, seeks to close the false sense of chronotopic
distance between the early postbellum South and the urban North and
Midwest in the machine age. The race of the persona is withheld; thus, when
he feels the ‚ground grip his feet‛ and a ‚thousand faces *swirl+ around me,‛
he becomes the victim of the eternal historical present that implicates all
Americans regardless of ancestry in a shared bond of inerasable collective
trauma. Unlike the 1930s cremationist, who generically discriminates between
bodies and customers as a rule of visual gradient, the fire itself democratizes
the remnants of the body into a pile of ash, its own unique shade of black and
white.260
258 Richard Wright, ‘Between the World and Me,’ in Richard Wright Reader, eds. Ellen Wright
and Michel Fabre (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1978), p. 246.
259 Ibid.
260 What requires emphasis in reference to the aesthetics of Native Son are the last two lines of
this stanza: the illuminate ‚surprise‛ that pours into the persona’s sunlit eye sockets to
witness this evacuated scene of decay. The arrangement of this image stresses the evocation
141
The blind, helpless subject of shock mirrors Wright’s Bildungsheld, Bigger
Thomas. In both this poem, and in Native Son, Wright problematizes both
theatres of cruelty and theatres of entertainment within the culture industry
by conflating them. Wright implicates two forms of barbarism: overt physical
violence, and the more subtle systemic violence. The novelization of ‚shock‛
is the method not only by which Wright contains the ‚subject in a state of
shock‛ in the ‚conditions‛ of his milieu; shock all the more serves as the
device through which Wright constructs his testament to the traumatic ‚lives
of the masses‛ that had become the flotsam and jetsam of party politics. If
mainstream journalists of the period were judicious and discriminating in
their reporting of lynching events, both Wright’s fiction and his work for the
Federal Writers’ Project reports the injustice against black lives with shocking
attention to detail.
Reversing the young black man’s role in the lynching act still customary in
Wright’s 1920-30s South, Bigger decapitates Mary’s body, and reforms her
material being into white bone and ash. When he recalls the fingerprint
of a sudden visual awareness, of the process and production of horror directly funnelled into
the optic nerves as an electric shock. By fragmenting the material scene, selecting palimpsestic
imagery in small snippets, slices, and residues of the traumatic event, Wright constructs a
vacuous theatre of cruelty rather than a preserved reproduction of depersonalized historical
fact. The lynching event sublimates into the waste products of its aftermath as surplus
commodities of the spectacle: peanut shells, cigar butts, loose buttons, the sexually charged
‚whore’s lipstick,‛ tar, feathers, wafts of gasoline. The persona’s sensory powerlessness
precedes Benjamin’s contemporaneous description of Paul Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus,’ the angel
of history connecting the ‚chain of events‛ ‚which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage‛;
unable to stay and ‚awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed,‛ the angel is
propelled blindly into the future and the ‚storm‛ of ‚progress.‛ See Walter Benjamin, ‘On the
Concept of History,’ trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940, eds. Howard
Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2003), p. 392.
142
evidence about which he has read ‚in magazines,‛ (‘magazine’ suggests
fictional crime thrillers, rather than the more ‘authoritative’ news source of
print journalism), he then thinks to blame it on Jan, having likewise deduced
from his mediated education that ‚Reds’d do anything. Didn’t the papers say
so?‛ *87, repeated on 88+ Yet what we witness is not a black boy, seeking
vengeance for his people against all white people – but the total alienation of
the subject grasping for any concrete course of action when he cannot come to
terms with the divisive conditions of the contemporary collective and
sourcing answers instead from the culture industry. His instinctual reaction is
that individuation for the marginalized can only be achieved through violent
radicalization.
Bigger is propelled into the ultimate aborted Entwicklungsroman, a
collapsing of the playfulness of experiential becoming, and the sadistic
violence saturated with political unconsciousness and a desperate will to
power. His fear of incarceration gives way to his desires to be noticed, to gain
infamy and notoriety through the terrorism of owning his violent acts; he
seeks to propel his aggrandized self-image of testeronic power into cultural
circulation as a simulacrum. His morality warps until there is only ‚one angle
that bothered him; he should have gotten more money out of it; he should
have planned it.‛ *123+ In devising the ransom note, he mimics and inverts the
psychological control methods of the early Ku Klux Klan ‘spectres,’ by
attempting to write himself into the historical consciousness after the fact and
in the only way he knows how: by framing the words of a fictional villain
typecast familiarized to him in the movie theatre such as ‘the Red,’ the rude,
stereotypical ‚spectre haunting Europe‛ figure of Marx and Engels.261 The
note therefore contains a political assault of form upon the bourgeoisie who
hate Reds, whom Bigger and Jack determine are the ‚baddie‛ scapegoats of
261 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 2.
143
the American culture, whilst simultaneously revenging the two communists
objectify him on account of his color (as he understands it). [70]
The political unconscious of the text surfaces at the level of form. Authors
such as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown turned their
political activities towards literary production in order to draw the attention
of the liberal middle classes to the ‚prevailing dangers to black life,‛ such as
lynching and other systemized forms of brutality. 262 At the beginning of
Wright’s professional life, in the year 1930, twenty-one black persons were
lynched in the United States according to a graphic study made by sociologist
Arthur F. Raper, a ground-breaking document which spares the reader no
detail in his gruesome autopsy of these barbaric events. 263 Trudier Harris
describes this process as one where black individuals were ‚accused of
crimes, pursued, captured and either summarily executed by hanging,
burning, or shooting, or executed after they were given a mock trial, or taken
from jails and summarily executed in a similar manner,‛ a course which
shaped the aesthetics of Wright, Hughes, Brown, and others.264
Whilst twenty-one might not compare to the average of two hundred black
individuals murdered per year by whites in the 1890s, the statistics
themselves showed an alarming revival in the ritual killing of black lives in
the 1930s. 1930 represented ‚an increase of almost two hundred percent over
the number of black lynch victims for 1929, fifty percent over 1928, and
twenty over 1927.‛ 265 Fluctuating cotton prices and economic disasters
262 Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 95.
263 Arthur F. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications Inc.,
1933), p. 3.
264 Harris, Exorcising Blackness, p. 95.
265 Ibid., pp. 95-6.
144
‚concomitant to the Depression‛ had obvious effects upon this spike due to
‚increased idleness and irritability,‛ as Harris speculates. 266 Yet the most
disturbing aspect of this increase was the ‚brutality with which lives were
taken.‛267 Harris quotes one of the more distressing accounts included in
Raper’s The Tragedy of Lynching report, in which a young black man named
James Irwin from Ocilla, Georgia, was viciously executed on February 1, 1930,
a case with which Wright was familiar:
[The victim] was jabbed in his mouth with a sharp pole. His toes were
cut off joint by joint. His fingers were similarly removed, and his teeth
extracted with wire pliers. After further unmentionable mutilations,
the Negro’s still living body was saturated with gasoline and a lighted
match was applied. As the flames leaped up, hundreds of shots were
fired into the dying victim. During the day, thousands of people from
miles around rode out to see the sight. Not till nightfall did the
officers remove the body and bury it.268
‚*S+ouvenirs were gathered from the lynched and burned bodies,‛ Harris
elaborates. The issue of journalistic language here, Harris notes, is the
redaction of details for the sake of ‚delicacy‛; incensed by this ‘polite’
discourse, Wright intends to ‚record the killing and the over-kill, as well as
the ceremonial aspects of both,‛ she notes.269 Wright’s shocking dramatization
of brutality against black youth itself forms a linguistic relic of these events.
Within Native Son, this historico-cultural anxiety translates into the young
individual’s consistent struggle against the co-optation of his story by
collective forces, black or white. Unlikely to become a heroic Bildungsroman
266 Ibid., p. 96.
267 Ibid.
268 Quoted in Harris, Exorcising Blackness, p. 96.
269 Ibid.
145
protagonist, Bigger Thomas becomes an exceptional one in the most negative
sense: an increasingly radicalized, desperate young man. Ira Wells notes how
Wright couples the emotive traditions of the Romantics with new concepts of
political expression in order to ironize the ineffective representation of
African American experience. She argues that Wright stylizes Bigger as an
‘apprentice’ of passion rather than of language. Calling upon the early
twentieth century rhetoric of the League of Nations that she believes
influenced Wright, Wells argues that in Native Son,
*<+ terror emerges not as a radical gesture performed by a
profoundly alienated self – the Romantic notion of terror as the
passionate expression of disaffected individuality – but as a political
effect, where ‚terror‛ is the result of ingrained patterns of structural
violence in a system in which the perpetrators are often least
‚themselves‛ in their moments of terror.270
As a means of reasserting personal autonomy by differentiating himself from
these ‚ingrained patterns of structural violence‛ (rather than society dictating
the linguistic terms and expressions of différance), Bigger’s instinct is likewise
violent: to thwart and crush semiotic cues he either cannot understand or
otherwise reconcile to his desires. Certainly, as philosopher Harry Slochower
first contended, echoed more recently by Jay Garcia, Native Son plots
coordinates to the American origins of fascism, as Wright makes clear in
‘How Bigger Was Born’: American fascism constitutes the regime of
‚lynching, segregation, and long-standing forms of exclusion‛ still in living
memory within the present urban setting.271 The novel is furthermore alert to
270 Ira Wells, ‘What I Kill For, I Am: Domestic Terror in Richard Wright’s America,’ American
Quarterly vol. 62, no. 4 (December, 2010), p. 875.
271 Jay Garcia, Psychology Comes to Harlem: Rethinking the Race Question in Twentieth-Century
America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), p. 31.
146
the technological mechanics of indoctrination and propaganda peculiar to the
divisions of labor under liberal democracy.
Bigger internalizes elements of all of these collective impulses, paradoxically
sutured into the cellular social seme of an ‘individual’; this fractural
characterization asserts a generic resistance to the extant Bildungsroman
form. For whilst the conflict between individual desires and social constraints
is typical of Moretti’s Bildungsroman formula, it is most ‚*u+nlike the hero of
the traditional bildungsroman,‛ Humann concludes, that ‚Bigger’s lack of
individuality is in itself one of his defining features.‛272 Beyond Wells’ logic, I
locate the distillation of the collective political unconscious into the individual
himself, and that this unconscious affect becomes the central crisis of both
Bigger’s Bildung and the genre: how can the Bildungsroman scaffold cope
with and contain the ideological consequences of a terroristic Bildungsheld?
Genre as Medial Distraction
Native Son interbreeds other genres, modes, and media with the proletarian
Bildungsroman form, including the naturalist city novel, the detective plot,
crime thriller, tragedy, the adventure plot, courtroom drama, and film noir.
All the while, Wright scrutinizes propaganda of the American 1930s:
newspapers, magazines, film, newsreels, radiowaves, advertisements,
speeches, legal documents, even legislation fall under Wright’s authorial
gamut; all part and parcel of what Horkheimer and Adorno delineate as the
culture industry, armoured with weapons of ‚mass deception.‛273
272 Heather Duerre Humann, ‘Genre in/and Wright’s Native Son,’ in Richard Wright’s Native
Son, ed. Ana Fraile (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), p. 152.
273 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 120-166.
147
The generic pattern of formal violations, contradictions, and liminality
between textual producer, readerly receptor, and environment that I have
argued throughout this chapter now fully emerges in the Chicago literary
ecology. As Martin Japtok emphasizes of the ‚ethnic Bildungsroman,‛ the
form’s ‚focus on the self‛ forcefully imposes the ‚subjective element into the
genre of realism,‛ ensuring that the a priori experience of the reading act is
one inflected by seeing society and its apparatuses ‚through the eyes of the
protagonist,‛ ‚as the protagonist experiences it.‛ 274 Japtok contends that
whilst the ‚form is individualist in nature,‛ thus conforming to a ‚European
world view that is foundational to modern capitalism,‛ simultaneous
constrictions and flexibilities ensue for the author who chooses to write about
ethnicity or the proletariat within a subjective genre in order to describe an
individual’s ‚experience in the world.‛275 Japtok’s understanding of the inner
workings of form interrogates the ‚*deceptive+ subjective intentionality,‛ for
as much as it ‚invites views‛ of the state of things from ‚any angle,‛ creating
a paradox in that it must in many ways conform to that individualist
capitalist world view that so ‚often arises on the backs of ethnic groups and
colonized people.‛276
Barbara Foley’s suggested resolution for this paradox therefore paints the
naturalistic works of Dreiser, Farrell, Wright and others with the wider
brushstroke of ‚proletarian bildungsroman.‛277 She later problematized this
accepted oxymoron in a comparative reading of Dreiser (An American Tragedy,
in this case) and Wright, determining that ‚the criteria of a bildungsroman‛
274 Martin Japtok, Growing Up Ethnic: Nationalism and the Bildungsroman in African-American
and Jewish American Fiction (Iowa City: The University of Iowa Press, 2005), p. 148.
275 Japtok, Growing Up Ethnic, p. 148.
276 Ibid.
277 Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 321-361.
148
stresses a ‚typicality and narrative transparency‛ aesthetically ‚unsuited to
the proletarian novel‛ that ‚eschews the normative political premises upon
which such criteria are based.‛278 In regards to Native Son, this logic can be
tessellated with Bakhtin’s reading of Dostoevsky’s generic appropriation of
the combination adventure plot, which placed ‚a person in extraordinary
positions that expose and provoke him‛ to serve the ‚unusual‛ and
‚unexpected‛ in an endgame that ‚test[s] the idea and the man of the idea,
that is, for testing the ‘man in man.’‛279
Building upon this critical foundation that foregrounds Wright in the
quagmire of the ethnic and proletarian Bildungsroman traditions,280 I specify
that Wright’s polyphonic approach to genre directs itself to earlier discursive
conversations, particularly W. E. B. Du Bois’ Talented Tenth. In the
concluding article of The New Negro, Du Bois announced that the ‚attitude of
the white laborer toward colored folk is largely a matter of long continued
propaganda and gossip.‛ 281 The New Negro subject could read and write yet
278 Barbara Foley, ‘The Politics of Poetics: Ideology and Narrative Form in An American
Tragedy and Native Son,’ in Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, eds. Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993), p. 197.
279 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Problem of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 105.
280 It is uncontroversial to acknowledge Wright’s well-recited formal allegiance to the Russian
great; Michael F. Lynch gives an informative account of the triangulated political and
aesthetic exchange of Dostoevsky, Wright, and Ellison. See Michael F. Lynch, Creative Revolt:
A Study of Wright, Ellison, and Dostoevsky (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 1990).
Dennis Flynn has produced a smaller-scale yet likewise pressing account of Dostoevsky’s
influence upon Farrell, and in turn, Wright during their Chicago correspondences. See Dennis
Flynn, ‘The Tradition of the European Novel: Richard Wright and Fyodor Dostoevsky,’ The
European Legacy: Towards New Paradigms vol. 1, no. 4 (1996), pp. 1439-44.
281 W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘The Negro Mind Reaches Out,’ in Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and
the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 89.
149
remained confined to dwell within a ‚world of color prejudice,‛ a ‚childish
propaganda‛ factory spewing the same age-old diatribe that white culture
‚possessed‛ ‚civilization‛ which they protect through divinely sanctioned
‚cheating, stealing, lying, and murder.‛282 American society was underlined
by the bad infinity of dishonest (at best) white education that he believed
could only be inverted with positivist propaganda of black experience as a
form of re-education, a reinstating of the particular that had been lost in the
universal.283 Yet many prominent African American intellectuals and artists
felt the collectivist party politics of Communism, particularly those derived
from white and black petit bourgeois origins, failed to appreciate the
multiplicities and complexities of history, race, and class. As explained by
Wright in his essay, ‘I Tried to Be a Communist,’ the effort to ‚recruit masses‛
came at the expense of not appreciating ‚the lives of the masses.‛284
282 Ibid.
283 Du Bois’ logic interplays with that of a young Karl Marx in Theses on Feuerbach, in which he
stated: ‚The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and
that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing,
forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that it is essential to educate the
educator himself.‛ See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, Second
Edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1978), p. 144.
Education through revolutionary practice was the conditional formula through which the
division of ruled and rulers could be overcome, for Marx, in the self-emancipation of the
working class. Yet, ‘emancipation’ provokes dual overtones in regards to civil rights politics
and cultural production, redoubling its significant relationship to the Bildungsroman as a
signifier of the individual and collective ‘coming into manhood.’ Both Du Bois and Marx
uphold the bourgeois solipsism of elevating individualist exceptionalism in this logic that
Wright found usable, at least at certain points in his career, but which left an overall
unsavoury essentialist aftertaste in praxis.
284 Quoted in Keneth Kinnamon, The Emergence of Richard Wright (Urbana: University of
Chicago Press, 1972), p. 53.
150
Wright, as evidenced as much by Native Son as by Black Boy/American Hunger,
was himself complicit with this anxiety of form – particularly as the word
propaganda developed overtones of systemic mediated manipulation.
Houston Baker, Jr. contends that African American modernist ‚anxiety‛
stemmed firstly from ‚the black spokesperson’s necessary task of employing
audible extant forms in way that move clearly up, masterfully and re-
soundingly away from slavery,‛ more so than the ‚fear of replication
outmoded forms or of giving way to bourgeois formalism‛; 285 Wright belongs
to a problematic group of outliers whose works at times contradict this
anxiety of influence. ‘Authentic portrayals’ and the mediation of ‘real
experience’ more often fell under the commercial authority of white novelistic
conventions, ideological frames, generic lineages, historical consciousnesses,
and social discourses that were themselves guided by material demands and
public expectations.
I have now risked tendering that Native Son is not so much a generic
Bildungsroman as we have previously defined it, as it is a vortex of racial
polemics and political tracts platforming on the irreconcilable discursive
aesthetics of youth-oriented individualist fiction. That it is all the more an
ambiguous political tract has, quite problematically, altered what Wright
himself called the ‚perspective‛ or angle of approach time and time again
within the history of the novel’s critical reception and between different
theoretical schools.286 The naturalistic objectivity of the narration, as well as
285 Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 101.
286 Wright defined ‘perspective’ as ‚that part of a poem, novel, or play which a writer never
puts directly upon paper‛ in ‘Blueprint For Negro Writing,’ composed for the inaugural issue
of New Challenge (1937). Reprinted in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, eds.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co.,
1997), p. 1385.
151
Wright’s controversial preface after the fact, ‘How ‚Bigger‛ Was Born,’ has
stimulated much of this hermeneutical obscurity. Yet, the perspective of this
text may be retuned by reinserting Wright into a regional development of the
Bildungsroman. For, if Sister Carrie and Studs have ultimately attested the
hypothesis that the Chicagoan Bildungsroman upholds the subgeneric
orthodoxies of the Entwicklungsroman – that novel of growth or development,
yet devoid of the genre’s harmonious phenomenology and tailored to
attenuate the expectations of the ‘liberal’ reader – then Native Son both
resolves and sublates this formal and generic legacy.
Native Son is the most extreme variation within this thesis’ generic limits,
indeed, due to the fact that Wright wrote this novel exactly to test the
particular readership to which his work directs itself. Donald B. Gibson
argues that Wright’s contribution to African American literature as a career of
‚defiance‛ and ‚refusal to give the reading public what it had hitherto
demanded of the African American writer‛ through an ‚insistence‛ on a
unique landscape of language and culture belonging to African Americans.287
Cedric Robinson more convincingly demonstrates the case that Wright’s
audience was precisely those members of the Communist party who had no
familiarity with the ‘common man’ they championed (even more so the black
proletarian) on the one hand, and an ethnic ‘community’ who had no concept
of the sympathies this movement held for their plight; Native Son was
Wright’s attempt to convey a ‚more authentic, more historical, more precise
image of the proletariat to which the party had committed itself.‛288
287 Donald B. Gibson, ‘Richard Wright,’ in The Oxford Companion to African American Literature,
eds. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, & Trudier Harris (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 793.
288 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill and
London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983), p. 296.
152
In order for shock to efficiently support this endgame, Wright instils an
atmosphere of hypersexuality and ultraviolence beneath the generic
camouflage of the traditionally harmonious Bildungsroman form. ‚The
advertisement of the subtitle,‛ Baker writes of Wright’s autobiography,
originally entitled Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1946), ‚provides
a wonderfully innocent camouflage for a work that *<+ employs
carnivalesque discourse and zero-degree writing to present a blues world
and to sound, in the process, an insurgently blue note of marronage.‛289 We
may exfoliate the likewise deceptive camouflages of Wright’s generic
exploitation of the Bildungsroman, its own variation on the ‘record of youth.’
Heather Duerre Humann scopes the formal complexity of Wright’s novel, by
determining that the way criticism has responded to the generic workings of
Native Son itself reflects how the novel formally ‚resists any easy generic
classification.‛290 Organized resistance or marronage from within is perhaps
the most visibly appropriate classification of Wright’s generic labors in
protest fiction.
In responsive terminology to my previous usage of Derrida’s concept of
generic invagination,291 Humann tenders the term ‘violation’ to describe how
the three paramount genres within Native Son respond to their traditional
literary categorization: the Bildungsroman, the social protest novel, and the
crime novel/courtroom drama.292 Generic invagination or violation occurs on
multiple levels between readership, text, and author, and it may therefore be
argued that this unexpected and indeed shocking use of genre is the primary
289 Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago & London:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 100.
290 Humann, ‘Genre in/and Wright’s Native Son,’ pp. 143-4.
291 Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre,’ p. 59.
292 Humann, ‘Genre in/and Wright’s Native Son,‘ p. 134.
153
mechanism by which Wright problematizes white bourgeois images of
individualization.
Bigger ‚hungers‛ for the modern spatiality of male dreamscape through the
cinematic – and gratifies his libidinal devotion to the escapist cultural
industry, in this sense. Like Joyce’s Ulysses, the superfluous channels of
manhood in the narrative of becoming peaked during the 1920s and 30s. Yet
widespread white modernist conceptions and aesthetics of ‘genius,’ what
Julian Murphet profiles in relation to Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis’ will
to division as the ‚superfluity of spermatozoic pressure‛ upshot to the
brain, 293 are absolutely consistent, conflated even, within the mediated
masculinities of Harlem Renaissance authors and poets. Masculinity, black
and white, was certainly in crisis; and the novel of emancipation, the coming-
of-age, playfully turns this anxiety upon itself in the case of black male
literature. Murphet’s figuration of the relation of ‚the work of genius to the
literal phallic processes of erection and insemination,‛ 294 correspondingly
inseminates the equally hardened and effeminate aesthetics of Wright, Jean
Toomer, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman et al, and later Ralph Ellison
and James Baldwin (I will take up the implications of this gendered double
standard in the Zora Neale Hurston section of Chapter Three).
This crisis of masculinity chafes against a reality in which black Americans
were lynched, even physically castrated, for the mere rumour of sexual
‘misconduct.’ Take, for instance, the leftist groups Wright was involved with
which worked to, in Leigh Anne Duck’s words, garner ‚extensive public
attention to problems of both mob and ‘legal’ lynching,‛ in particular, the case
of the eight African American young men from Scottsboro, Alabama, who
293 Julian Murphet, ‘Towards a Gendered Media Ecology,’ in Modernism and Masculinity, eds.
Natalya Lusty and Julian Murphet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 57.
294 Murphet, ‘Towards a Gendered Media Ecology,’ p. 57.
154
were condemned to death by an all-white jury for allegedly sexually
assaulting two white women.295
The character of Bigger exemplifies the most extreme valences of this
superfluity of reactionary gendered pressure spilling into the Bildungsroman
genre, a genre which trended from what Hegel defined as the ‚Philistine‛
trope of the young man who wins over his lover by the end of the novel, to
narratives of increasingly explicit sexual initiation by the avant-garde of
modernist experimentation with the form. Here, generic pressure overshoots
into reactionary sadism, of course: firstly in Bigger’s recoil from the
overbearing mother figure; in his use of sexualized violence against firstly
Gus as an assertion of gang alpha-manhood;296 the spermatozoic resistance or
perhaps capitulation to Hollywood’s semiotic authority when Bigger and Jack
masturbate in the theatre; Bigger’s terror towards Mary Dalton’s lust for him,
which he suppresses to the death; and later, sadism in its fullest extent
committed against Bessie Mears. Rather than biological reproduction, the
performance of male sexuality becomes just another mode of production: a
cultural construct. Here, Wright undoubtedly polemicizes the transposition of
Southern racism and ideology in literature where the sexualized black man is
considered a deviant, where ‚a black man’s sexual relationship with a white
woman perverts the meta-plantation’s power structures because it
symbolically puts him in a position of power over the white woman and
undermines the authority of the white man – a power shift white men have
historically resisted through terror, violence, and lynching.‛ 297 Bigger’s
295 Leigh Anne Duck, The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S.
Nationalism (Athens and London: the University of Georgia Press, 2006), p. 78.
296 Ellis, ‘‚Boys in the Hood,‛’ p. 191.
297 Michael P. Bibler, Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the
Southern Plantation, 1936-1968 (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press,
2009), p. 9.
155
increasing excitement and terror reifies the caricature of the primitively carnal
black brute and sexual offender; the same thought-process featured in
Toomer’s earlier avant-garde protest novel, Cane, in which a young man
likewise slips into a somnambulist ‘trance’ in order to absolve the guilt of
sexual violence committed against his girlfriend in a canefield.298
Whilst many feminist issues are at stake here in regards to masculinity and
sexual violence within the novel, which have received reasonable attention in
Wright scholarship since the seventies,299 the primary risk in terms of genre is
a male protagonist whose development forks between two stereotypes of
blackness, as they are circulated in all facets of the American cultural
industry. The centre of this paradox is that neither one of these two
stereotypes is fit for the protagonist of a Bildungsroman. Thus like a spectre,
Bigger exists within the genre only in the terra nullius of this condemning
cultural interstice.
Bigger’s fluctuating resistances and submissions to each of the following
roles, therefore, requires consideration. Firstly, his evocation of the
mechanical automaton or zombie, outlined above by Morrell: the slave body
as the soulless machine of industrial labor, devoid of libidinal charge or any
sort of desire beyond capitalist production.300 Secondly, his portrayal of the
black ‘bogeyman’ figure of racist Southern mythology, a sexual predator
unable to restrain his infernal lust for white flesh (racial sublimation which
would inform the postmodernism Hollywood trope of the ravenous
298 The specific ‘chapter’ or section I refer to is entitled ‘Fern’; however, the theme of sexual
violence in particularly in relation to race and masculinity recurs throughout the entire work.
See: Jean Toomer, Cane (New York: The Modern Library, 1994), p. 25.
299 Sandra Guttman, ‘What Bigger Killed For: Rereading Violence Against Women in Native
Son,’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language vol. 43, no. 2 (Summer, 2001), p. 169.
300 Morrell, ‘Zombies, Robots, Race, and Modern Labour,’ p. 101.
156
zombie).301 Rather than wedge his protagonist between youth and manhood,
as we have observed in other Bildungsromans, Wright traps Bigger between
these two types of living deadness: automaton and monster. The intensity of
the aforementioned chase scene wilts after Bigger’s arrest; the white authority
recontains the threat of the black sexualized body, the fullest extent of force
brought down to suppress any remaining outpouring of deviancy. Like a cast-
iron pan thudding down upon the cornered black rat, flattening him out, the
overarching authority of genre duly deflates and castrates Bigger’s ‚tall
black‛ manhood. This firewall of mediation cannot be penetrated or
overwritten by machismo shock tactics:
Back of the newsboy was a stack of papers piled high upon a
newsstand. He wanted to see the tall black headline, but the driving
snow would not let him. The papers ought to be full of him now. It
did not seem strange that they should be, for all his life he had felt
that things had been happening to him that should have gone into
them. But only after he had acted upon feelings which he had had for
years would the papers carry the story, his story. He felt that they had
not wanted to print it as long as it had remained buried and burning
in his own heart. But now that he had thrown it out, thrown it at those
who made him live as they wanted, the papers were printing it. [208]
Bigger cannot inseminate the culture with any emotive ‚his story,‛ for all the
culture momentarily fixates upon the events committed by his bodily action:
his violence and sexual deviancy. All libidinal, testeronic energy saps from
the narrative as the media overwrites his motives, dehumanizing him
through the abstraction and objectification of reprinting. The narrator does
not commit to Bigger’s beliefs, retaining the objective naturalism that
characteristically holds its principal characters at arm’s length. In terms of the
301 Morrell, ‘Zombies, Robots, Race, and Modern Labour,’ p. 128.
157
‚tall black headline,‛ so large in the micro of his ‘native habitat’ in the ghetto,
subtends to the oppressive forces of capitalism, metaphorized as a white force
of nature: the ‚driving snow.‛ In Bigger’s limp acceptance of his ‚Fate‛ in the
aptly named concluding third of the book, double entendre is incurred as his
worldview is painted only by the extremes of the grey-scale:
The snow had stopped falling and the city, white, still, was a vast
stretch of roof-tops and sky. He had been thinking about it for hours
here in the dark and now there it was, all white, still. [226]
The purified image of a whitewashed city concretizes into a still photograph
of inescapable oppression; no throbbing life, no resistance pulsates here.
Between the newspaper articles and Bigger’s visual contemplations, Wright
problematizes the limited functionality of written language, of crude cultural
semiotics (the ‘reading’ of people as black, white, red, male, female), of
history itself (or his story, as the narrator implies).
The unspeakable, the unnamed, the unrepresentable – all the inefficiencies of
language as narrative, redoubled in the case of racial marginalization – carries
us into the core of the Bildungsroman’s primary function: to artificially
represent the (social) development of an individual into full adult
‘consciousness.’ The only way the marginalized protagonist may differentiate
himself from this homogenous structure is a violent, abject assault upon its
borders, a sensational spectacle of militant depravity; but individualism even
then cannot suffice, and the Bildungsroman cannot fulfil its generic objectives.
Karl Precoda explains how Bigger’s ‚failure,‛ and by extension his self-
deconstruction of manhood, stems from his linguistic inexperience:
[A]nywhere beyond Black Belt Chicago, and especially at the point of
impact of white man’s law, the gavel crashing down upon the bench
of judgment, Bigger is helpless, prisoner of a deterministic fate that is
158
grounded and plotted by his inability to read, to interpret, in the
novel’s terms, to see.302
Bigger’s inevitable fate realizes not merely on account of his Oedipal
blindness, but furthermore, that he is both impotent and illiterate, the
antithesis character to the self-emancipated Richard of Black Boy, whose
education indeed echoes Frederick Bailey’s in Douglass’ Narrative. Bigger
inherently characterizes ‘failed’ pedagogical education from the outset,
undermining the possibility for Bildung, castrating the concept of manhood.
His blindness to his position within the division of labor is a linguistic
handicap, reminiscent of Herman Melville’s stuttering tragic hero of ‘Billy
Budd, Sailor,’ who when cornered, cannot ‚Speak!‛ to ‚defend *himself+‛ and
therefore sublimates words with murderous blows. 303 Bigger, like Billy, does
not possess the effective philosophico-linguistic tools to communicate his
marginalization. Bigger’s blindness is his inability to see a way out other than
by force, through violence or crime, in other words only to capitulate to a
different stereotype sufficiently recognizable to the white standards of
cultural production. As Precoda discusses, Bigger is ‚forced to confront not
only the texts that surround him‛ such as the tricky armchair and confusing
modern painting in Dalton’s office, ‚but his own textuality as a Black
Other.‛304
Bigger seeks out other means of asserting his appearance of ‘manhood’ –
rather than the self-cultivation of Bildung – outside of book learning or even
experiential growth as white rhetoric establishes it. Even the core concept of
302 Karl Precoda, ‘In the Vortex of Modernity: Writing Blackness, Blindness and Insight,’
Journal Modern Literature vol. 34, no. 3 (Spring, 2011), p. 31.
303 Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Stories (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd.,
1998), p. 273.
304 Precoda. ‘In the Vortex,’ p. 35.
159
Bildung as the establishment of ‘manhood’ becomes a confused expression of
différance in terms of the novel’s linguistic motifs by its continual conflation
with phallic dominance and aggression. Naturalism mediates this
discrepancy, the unexpected shock value of its dark gaze modulating and
eventually corroding the ‚typicality‛ and ‚narrative transparency‛ of the
bourgeois Bildungsroman, as outlined above by Foley.305
305 Barbara Foley, ‘The Politics of Poetics,’ p. 197.
160
Chapter Two: The New York Künstlerroman
Introduction: The Jazz Age
Différance in the Self-Conscious Semblances of Fitzgerald
& Fitzgerald
In The Writing of Fiction (1925), Edith Wharton reflected upon what she saw as
the most ‚unsettling element‛ of modern art: ‚that common symptom of
immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.‛ If ‚the *instinct+
of youth is imitation,‛ she concludes, ‚another equally imperious, is that of
fiercely guarding against it.‛ 1 This chapter commences with a marriage
between the debut Bildungsromans of two of America’s most memorable
literary figures: Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz (1932) and F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920). Perhaps more fittingly than any two
comparative texts in American letters, to marry these texts perforce certifies
Wharton’s dreadful dialectic between imitation and innovation, as this
introduction shall canvas.
The two segments to follow in this chapter, regarding J. D. Salinger’s Catcher
in the Rye (1951) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), will then examine
the ways in which these subsequent generations of authors affirm the regional
dominance of the New York Künstlerroman of disillusionment. The
conclusions of the Fitzgeralds’ Bildungsromans both rest on the existential
precipice of the artist’s failure to fulfil their artistic potential; the next
generation of Künstlerromans, written in the early 1950s, concern artists
1 Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction [c.1925] (New York: Touchstone, 1997), p. 17.
161
whose artworks are created within these confined urban spaces of alienation
and asylum: underground caverns, sanatoriums. Questions of plagiarism,
authenticity, disillusionment, and artistic degradation form the imperatives
driving the Bildungsroman studies within this framework, reacting to an
increasingly homogenized America in the age of technological reproduction.
These factors all contribute to an infinitely pervious boundary between
author, genre, place, and text.
At the vantage of 1920, New York stood poised to become the financial capital
of the world, after the fiscal and infrastructural devastation of World War I
upon London’s reserves and cityscape.2 The agglomerate five boroughs of
New York accommodated in excess of seven million citizens by 1930,
eclipsing Chicago, the birthplace of the steel frame and the term ‘skyscraper,’
and her 3.4 million citizens.3 ‚Whatever a man like Hurstwood could be in
Chicago,‛ the narrator of Sister Carrie informs us, ‚it is very evident that he
would be but an inconspicuous drop in an ocean like New York.‛ *Sister
Carrie, 245] The architectonic and social growth of New York during the
Fitzgeralds’ epoch onwards were on a scale that America, and indeed the
entire world, had never seen; even the ‚six- to eight-fold increases‛ of
Manchester, London, and Paris between 1801-1901, writes Kenneth Frampton,
appear ‚modest compared with New York’s growth over the same period.‛4
2 Nestor Rodriguez and Joe R. Feagin, ‘Urban Specialization in the World System: an
Investigation of Historical Cases,’ in The Global Cities Reader, eds. Neil Brenner and Roger Keil
(London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 39.
3 Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space,
1840-1930 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 21.
4 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London: Thames and Hudson,
1980), p. 21.
162
Even beyond the question of infrastructure, the linguistic boundaries of the
metropolis necessitated redesign in order to accommodate the amassment
that was New York, and in particular, the skyward ascending Manhattan.5 It
was a city of exceptionalism, in all the discourses. From as early as 1848, the
program of Manhattan was that of a ‚theatre of progress,‛ as Rem Koolhaas
describes it: ‚its protagonists are the ‘exterminating principles which, with
constantly augmenting force, would never cease to act.’ Its plot is: barbarism
giving way to refinement *<+ the performance can never end or even
progress in the conventional sense of dramatic plotting; it can only be the
cyclic restatement of a single theme: creation and destruction irrevocably
interlocked, endlessly re-enacted. The only suspense in the spectacle comes
from the constantly escalating intensity of the performance.‛6
Not a ‚theatre‛ for Marshall Berman so much as a ‚production, a multimedia
presentation whose audience is the whole world,‛ the New York of the
Fitzgeralds exemplifies the motif of Berman’s study: that ‚the fate of ‘all that
is solid’ in modern life‛ inevitably ‚melt[s] into air,‛ as Marx had envisioned.7
New York affixed to literature as modernity’s city, with its soaring high-rises
lengthened into even more altitudinous skyscrapers, an amaurotic vastness
for each single ego to fully comprehend; New York was a city where every
individual is replaceable alongside millions upon millions of other bodies in a
‚Baudelairean forest of symbols.‛8 How does one grow to define one’s self in
such a claustrophobic latitude, under the weight of the city’s many
5 Lisa Krissoff Boehm and Steven Hunt Corey, America’s Urban History (New York: Routledge,
2014), pp.197-8.
6 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: The
Monacelli Press Inc., 1994), pp. 13-15.
7 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York:
Penguin Books, 1988), p. 288.
8 Berman, All That Is Solid, p. 289.
163
‚impressive structures‛ that were ‚planned specifically as symbolic
expressions of modernity‛: that is, a world of ‚symbols and symbolisms *<+
endlessly fighting each other for sun and slight, working to kill each other off,
melting each other along with themselves into air?‛9
The pressing inquiry for literature concerns finding a space for the individual
and in particular the artist to emerge in such uncontainable, relentless
multiplicity. New York City was called upon by the moderns ‚to allegorize
the sheer novelty of the modern‛ as a vertical ‚pathos of distance,‛ as Jean-
Michel Rabaté determines, citing the American critic John Huneker’s
following homage to the city in 1888-9:
‚New York is not beautiful in the old order of aesthetics. Its beauty
often savours of the monstrous, for the scale is epical *<+ But what a
picture of titanic energy, of cyclopean ambition, there it is if you look
over Manhattan from Washington Heights *<+ when the chambers of
the West are filled by the tremulous opal of a dying day, or a lyric
moonrise paves a path of silver across the hospitable sea we call our
harbour.‛10
In every sense, New York was described as modernity’s city: a wealthy,
restless, dynamic city, neither young nor old, inflaming the modernist
imagination; and certainly a city with which the Fitzgeralds perforce held a
troubled relationship. After Sayre fell pregnant in 1921, the couple left for
Fitzgerald’s birthplace, St. Paul, Minnesota, deciding that it was
‚inappropriate‛ to raise a child ‚into all that glamour and loneliness,‛ into a
9 Ibid.
10 Quoted in Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Pathos of Distance: Affects of the Moderns (New York and
London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 21.
164
city that ‚resembled a ‘Bible Illustration.’‛11 The metropolis of New York –
what the pair observed as the ‚port to America, port to the world,‛ Ann
Douglas writes – embodies the theatrical nature of their lives and works, with
its many entrances and exits:12
they found *<+ an industrial order of sorts so established in its
slipshod exploitativeness as to offer the reassuring authenticity of
permanently assembled history usable by art, and still in that process
of quick formation which is modern art’s parallel and incentive. A
museum and a factory, New York in the 1910s and 1920s was a
modern scene in action crying for comment, tantalizingly ready to
express and be expressed. It was a photo shoot inviting models and
masqueraders, a play in the vast business of being cast, a movie set
calling those ready, like Fitzgerald, to live inside their ‚own movie of
New York.‛13
Observing New York as a ‚museum and a factory‛ or a movie set that
exploited art and history critically demonstrates how the New York
Bildungsroman became a genre so fixated with outwardly expressions, with
the difficulties in negotiating differentiation and semblance; and why this in
turn brought about the local proliferation of the self–reflexive Künstlerroman
subgenre. The genre breaks with the nineteenth century tradition with clear
concern towards the growing claustrophobia of multiplicity upon not only
individual subjectivity but art production itself.
In one of the most memorable works of modernist American poetry, Sacred
Emily (1913), the law of identity comes under Gertrude Stein’s consideration
11 Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: The Noonday
Press, 1996), pp. 58-9.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., p. 59.
165
with the now inestimably reproduced adage: a ‚Rose is a rose is a rose is a
rose.‛ 14 I begin this chapter with a related metrical reckoning of the
predicament of differentiation and signification. As the title of this opening to
the chapter suggests, a semiotic discomfit at the level of signification embeds
itself in discussion of the two Fitzgeralds’ works. Jacques Derrida’s interplay
of the homonymic ‚deffére‛ – in the French, meaning both to defer and to
differ – shall structure my method for discussions of Fitzgerald and
Fitzgerald. The empirical challenge in comparatively analyzing the works of
these two authors is to somehow isolate each of them for the sake of
cognominal clarity; this difficulty in itself signifies the bipartite obstruction of
différance in Fitzgeraldian scholarship. It presents firstly an unshakeable
difficulty in extracting the author from the semblance of their authorial brand
name – the endurance of the famous signifier, ‘Fitzgerald,’ which ironically
continues to proliferate and immortalize their celebrity at the expense of
serious examinations of their work; it also posits an ontological frustration in
approaching works that manifest vexed relations to that very same cultural
entity: fame.
Unpacking différance exposes a second greater difficulty in extracting the two
authors from each other; we must morally elect how to differentiate two
artists whose lives and works have been welded together in high resolution
by cultural history in such an uncomfortable symbiosis, sine qua non. This
discomfit largely results in a critical binary which has privileged the
masculine for the longest time, and stigmatized the feminine – particularly in
relation to psychological conditions of the authors. For the sake of clarity,
when uncoupling the two works at hand, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald shall be
referred to by her maiden name, a polemic denotation serving the nominal
14 Gertrude Stein, ‘Sacred Emily,’ in Geography and Plays (Madison, Wisconsin: The University
of Wisconsin Press, 1993), p. 187.
166
function of momentarily divorcing her output from the artistic influence of
her husband.15
In terms of relating the second meaning of deffére – to defer – This Side of
Paradise and Save Me the Waltz have been selected for their exemplary
reflections of two contradictory moments in the creative lives of the
Fitzgeralds and their peers: the ‘limitless’ consumption and moral naïveté of
the 1920s, and the hangover of disillusionment in the bankrupted 1930s. As
the case studies of Chapter One sustained, the limitless deferral of maturity
through excessive consumption functions as the escapism from adult realities
in the urban Bildungsroman, a diversion from comprehending and accepting
that there is no conceptual difference between a rose and a rose and a rose
(and indeed, whether the rose – the original referent – can exist in the
mechanical age of reproduction). For the Künstlerroman, the boundaries
between artist and art become increasingly porous, a shuttling back and forth
between text and life; genre therefore infects the life of the artist, and feeds
upon the infection, in this period and place.
The Fitzgeralds were champions and disciples of what John Attridge
describes as the ‚intrinsically hybrid, traditionally disreputable‛ roman à clef
aesthetic.16 ‚From the French for ‘novel with a key,’‛ the roman à clef came to
salience as the ‚bad conscience‛ of the novel, as Sean Latham argues; it was
15 In do so, I have expanded Željka Švrljuga’s rightful critique of Fitzgeraldian scholarship,
drawing attention to the fact that even highly acclaimed Fitzgerald biographers and scholars,
such as Matthew J. Bruccoli, Elisabeth Hardwick, Ann Douglas, and Nancy Milford, and
countless other critics still refer to ‚Zelda‛ in their discussions. See: Željka Švrljuga, Hysteria
and Melancholy as Literary Style in the Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Zelda
Fitzgerald, and Djuna Barnes (Lewiston and Queenston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2011), p. 125.
16 John Attridge, ‘Introduction,’ in Incredible Modernism: Literature, Trust and Deception, eds.
John Attridge and Rod Rosenquist (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 14.
167
‚a reviled and disruptive literary form, thriving as it does on duplicity and an
appetite for scandal,‛ encoded with ‚salacious gossip about a particular
clique or coterie.‛17 For the modernists, from Oscar Wilde to Jean Rhys, the
repurposed roman à clef had ‚brought fiction’s embarrassing kinship‛ with
genres such as ‚memoirs, and worse, gossip‛ into plain sight, and thereby
‚opening another front in modernism’s war with the conventions of the
realist novel,‛ Attridge argues.18 Of this transaction between artist and art in
this period, Aaron Jaffe traces the ‚substitution of modernist discourse for
modernist authors,‛ in which texts habitually stand in for bodies:
When Wyndham Lewis, for example, calls his memoirs an
autobiography of a career, the phrase lets him hybridize a body of
texts and a text of bodies while eschewing both biographical self-
fashioning and bibliographical text-fashioning.19
Following Jaffe’s logic, I propose that removing the void between text-
fashioning and self-fashioning occupies the Fitzgeraldian Bildungsroman,
where the commerciality of the roman à clef and the Künstlerroman subgenre
form a lucrative alliance for the career-minded author. The Fitzgeralds
inherently demand that their readers not only spectate, but in doing so,
furthermore participate in the same exchange of symbolic capital that
saturates their novels. The Fitzgeraldian reader, like the artists, is inveigled to
the lore of celebrity, and to the logic of the self-fashioned mythologization of
the author who performs both the source and producer of meaning.
17 Sean Latham, The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel, and the Roman à Clef (Oxford Scholarship
Online, 2009), p. 7.
18 Attridge, ‘Introduction,’ p. 14.
19 Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), p. 19.
168
Jaffe describes this logic of authorial intrusion in modernism as that of the
imprimatur, which he defines via Jameson’s dialectics as the ‚stylistic stamp of
its producer prominently,‛ the authorial insignia that marks the modernist
literary object. By Jaffes’s own account, ‚no better text‛ exhibits the modernist
preoccupation with celebrity than Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist; the corollary
being that the Künstlerroman itself must then be the genre that best
exemplifies this watershed in American literature in which the imprimatur
itself elevates the value of ‚exemplary artistic consciousness.‛20 Jaffe argues
that the imprimatur ‚sanction*s+ elite, high cultural consumption in times
when economies of mass cultural value predominate.‛21 The natural modus
operandi of the imprimatur supports the axiom that ‚movement from
immaturity to maturity rewritten in aesthetic registers is the major thematic
axis of the novel‛; and yet as Jaffe argues, criticism itself has determined
whether these Stephen Dedalus prototypes are to be read as artists, matured,
or whether they ‚prove themselves pretenders to the vocation.‛22
The enquiries of Latham and Jaffe compellingly account for the formal
development of the roman à clef in which the Fitzgeralds clearly participate;
however, the ubiquitous interest in ‚High Modernism,‛ to which the
Fitzgeralds could only be considered peripheral, given their tendency
towards commercial, mainstreamed self-promotion – leads to the Fitzgeralds’
omission. I seek to capitalize upon this interstice. The project of my argument
puts into proportion the Fitzgeralds’ valuable commitment to the American
Künstlerroman, but also their conscious exploitation of their own authorial
celebrity, and the way this dialectic feeds into their development of the
20 Jaffe, Modernism, p. 33
21 Ibid., p. 20
22 Ibid., p. 34.
169
Bildungsroman as a generic supplement now precariously wedged between
commercial and autotelic art.
Like Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound, the Fitzgeralds
were both seriously committed to and invested in the economization of a
modernist market in America, utilizing New York’s globalization as a cultural
communication route to Europe. Sayre committed spousal support to this
cultural economy, but was ultimately excluded from it as an occupational
writer; we might therefore configure this exclusion through Jaffe’s gendered
consideration of literary firmament and modernist labor:
Modernists and their allies, working to create and expand a market
for elite literary works, transformed the textual signature itself into a
means of promotion. Imprimatur fashioning informs the ad hoc
infrastructure of modernist production from its elite durable goods to
its sanctioned, masculinist frameworks of reviewing, introducing,
editing, and anthologizing to its kind of devalued, feminized
collaborative work apocryphally documented in modernist memoirs.23
The Fitzgeralds stood out from their peers in that the majority of their
professional networking also became competitive acts of aesthetic self-
promotion, eroding the lines between the public and private roles of the artist.
Their characters, with their vertiginous semblances of the authors, were
naturally tarred with the same sceptical brush as early criticism that had
painted Stephen Dedalus as a ‚posturing esthete‛;24 yet the Fitzgeralds’ public
personas, cast in the same image, were subject to similar scrutiny in their
early careers. The consuming public wanted to read these authorial legends
into their narratives; and the Fitzgeralds seemed keen to oblige, so long as
23 Jaffe, Modernism, p. 3.
24 Ibid., p. 34
170
they were on the payroll. The turbulent processes of the Fitzgeralds’ conjoint
artistic development become the subject of their novels, short stories, and
articles (some collaborative); notwithstanding, their relationship to the
concept of the imprimatur sublates as we remind ourselves that of the five
complete novels composed between them, there is no one work which does
not reflect the unshakeable presence – whether thematic or aesthetic – of the
other. Whilst all genres perform the effect of the palimpsest to a certain
degree, setting out ‚new information on the basis of old information‛ as John
Frow argues,25 the Fitzgeralds’ mutual works call and respond to one another
on a much more immediate and literal basis.
Questions of plagiarism and authentic authorship inevitably arise in this
impossible differentiation of semblance; this frustration filters into their
Künstlerromans. In Fitzgerald’s years, Sayre was accused of pirating her
husband’s ideas; Fitzgerald furiously declared to Sayre’s physician, Dr.
Squires, that of the fifty thousand words he had written towards Tender is the
Night, ‚literally one whole section of her novel is an imitation of it.‛26 In the
early years of their celebrity, Sayre was amused to see her diary entries enter
the pages of The Beautiful and Damned [1922], delivering the famous quip that
‚plagiarism begins at home.‛ 27 Recent revisionist scholarship has determined
25 Frow, Genre, p. 7.
26 Quoted in Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald
(London: Cardinal, 1991), p. 380.
27 Consider Sayre’s sharp-witted April 2, 1922 New York Tribune review of her husband’s
second novel, ‘Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald Reviews The Beautiful and Damned, Friend Husband’s
Latest’: ‚It seems to me that on one page *of The Beautiful and Damned] I recognized a portion
of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also
scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr.
Fitzgerald – I believe that is how he spells his name – seems to believe that plagiarism begins
171
that Sayre’s novel was not only more injuriously plagiarized, but also fiercely
edited by her husband; accordingly, Željka Švrljuga substantiates that if ‚an
influence out-of-text‛ makes itself known in the discourse surrounding
Sayre’s work, ‚it is with reference to Scott’s editing hand.‛28
Two authors unashamedly conducting their aesthetic lives and art almost
exclusively under public scrutiny – the remarkable spectacle of their artistic
development and relationship – has both compelled and muddled historical
and literary scholarship since they entered the New York literary arena.
Rather than reducing their works to a soap-opera compendium of ‘he-said,
she-said,’ the formal effects of their co-development deserve serious
examination within Bildungsroman studies. By choosing two works of
analogous generic makeup constructed more than a decade apart, this thesis
resists reading this commercialized schema of converting the literary into
capital as a stabilized exchange, particularly when it comes to revisionary
readings of Sayre. For as the Fitzgeralds’ outlooks on individuation and
society evolve with time, their motivation for engaging with the imprimatur
aesthetic, and indeed even the roman à clef as form, dramatically fluctuates. By
the point of The Great Gatsby (1925), Fitzgerald’s stylistic roman à clef of This
Side of Paradise succumbs to the presentation of a far more nuanced
imprimatur; at the same time, Fitzgerald returns to the development novel as
art for art’s sake, his mission to forge the sort of portable aesthetic milieu or
at home.‛ See: Zelda Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings, ed. Matthew J.
Bruccoli (New York: Macmillan, 1991), p. 388.
28 Željka Švrljuga, Hysteria and Melancholy as Literary Style in the Works of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, Kate Chopin, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Djuna Barnes (Lewiston and Queenston: The Edwin
Mellen Press, 2011), p. 125.
172
‚culture‛ a young Henry James had once declared lacking in Americans, the
disturbing ‚vulgar[ity+‛ thrown into sharp relief against a European setting.29
The Fitzgeralds’ conjoint awareness of the function of the Bildungsroman
evolves yet again by the point of Sayre’s Save Me the Waltz – controversially
co-edited by Fitzgerald – in which the Künstlerroman, where it connects to
the biography of the author, compels the text to be read as an object of sheer
narrative therapy. 30 Sayre adopts the development of the artist plot to
effectively reject the couple’s commercialized celebrity as a bygone phase of
moral enslavement, in which she’d so ‚hoped to be paid for [her] soul.‛31 Yet
the imprimatur embedded in Save Me the Waltz reflects a matured desire to
revise that early period of objectification and commodification. The roman à
clef, lodged at the core of the Künstlerroman, proposes an alternative reality,
more than a thinly veiled autobiography for Sayre, who fantasizes an
independent female subjectivity and artistry in which her own persona is
foregrounded as the protagonist, the Bildungshelde, the great artiste: what
Sayre calls ‚the story of myself versus myself.‛32
By chronologically mapping a co-reading of these two texts, this thesis
evaluates the Fitzgerald’s fictional and living narratives within the immense
socioeconomic shift in New York cultural production, and the American
Bildungsroman by extension, over these two sequential decades. The
causation of this evolving mentality displayed in the late works of the
Fitzgeralds stems from the the socioeconomic culture of New York (as a
microcosm of America) itself. I refer to the vicissitudes in values which
29 Quoted in Harold T. McCarthy, The Expatriate Perspective: Americans Novelists and the Ideas of
America (Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974), p. 102.
30 Švrljuga, Hysteria and Melancholy, p. 125.
31 Douglas, Terrible Honesty, p. 471.
32 Quoted in Švrljuga, Hysteria and Melancholy, p. 125.
173
upheld the society of New York’s many artists-in-residence during the 1920s
and 30s. In these ‚boom times,‛ these children of Victorian mothers
experienced a renaissance of American concern with morality – which Karen
Sternheimer correlates to a restricting of the social structure, particularly the
inclusion and newfound mobility of women within the hegemon. Sternheimer
remarks the phenomenon of increased female mobility during this period was
afforded by the circulation of the social mythologies of Hollywood and
tabloid – the popularity of ‚celebrity tales.‛33 The middle-class stronghold of
values resulting in Prohibition caused tens of thousands of Americans and
vast sums of New Yorkers to decamp to Europe; the irony, as Linda Wagner-
Martin puts it, was that the American government ‚assumed legislating
morals was one of its right,‛ yet ‚people had fought for their freedoms, losing
lives and health in World War I, only to be censured for one of the behaviors
that going to war had led them to develop – drinking.‛34
There was an overwhelming presence of native New Yorkers on the
programme, from Eugene O’Neill to George and Ira Gershwin – the majority
of ‚artistes and performers‛ who embodied what Fitzgerald coined as ‚the
metropolitan spirit‛ were migrants to the city, ‚arrivistes filled with
excitement and eager to escape their hometowns.‛35 Equally as critical to the
33 Karen Sternheimer, Celebrity Culture and the American Dream: Stardom and Social Mobility, II
(New York and London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 55-7.
34 Linda Wagner-Martin, The Routledge Introduction to Modernism (London and New York:
Routledge, 2016), p. 85.
35 Douglas notes that among these new residents, a miscellany of notable figures included:
‚Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Elinor Wylie, Hart Crane, Sara Teasdale,
Katherine Ann Porter, Thomas Wolfe, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Louise
Bogan, Edmund Wilson, Robert E. Sherwood, Edna Ferber, John Dos Passos, George S.
Kaufman, Ludwig Lewisohn, Gilbert Seldes, Van Wyck Brooks, Katharine Cornell, Laurette
Taylor, Charles Gilpin, Paul Robeson, Zora Neale Hurston, Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake,
174
concerns of popular morality driving artists out of America was the changing
social fabric within the great cities of the nation, particularly the fluctuation of
artists moving in and out of New York. The Great Migration and increased
immigration from Europe had resulted in growing ethnic diversity in art; in
particular, what we now call the height of the Harlem Renaissance in the
1920s transpired within this influx of population, resulting in a remarkable
array of new approaches to the representation of American literary voice. The
sheer numbers in which these public artistic figures arrived in New York had
never seen parallel outside of the great cities of Europe.
Sayre’s novel in particular directly speaks to the early democratic influx of
creative performers and artists from a variety of cultural, socioeconomic, and
ideological backgrounds, each coming to New York for the mobility afforded
by the network of celebrity built into the social infrastructure.
Contemporaneous celebrity artists find and invent their way into Sayre’s
novel, from Paul Whiteman playing the popular tune ‚Two Little Girls in
Blue‛ on the violin in the background, to Broadway and film stars such as
Lillian Lorraine, Marilyn Miller, Gloria Swanson, and Charlie Chaplin passing
through their social circle. Fitzgerald’s debut novel alternatively claims
familiarity with the works of influential artists, intellectuals, and culturists
that Amory Blaine encounters in his education. The couple’s incessant
cultural referencing, persistent at both ends of their career, serves as more
that a catalogue of celebrity high jinks; it services a uniquely American
aesthetic that exceeds the early celebrity dystopia of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie.
Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Rudolph Fisher, Claude McKay, Duke Ellington, Ethel
Water, Bix Beiderbecke, Cole Porter, Arna Bontemps, Jean Toomer, Wallace Thurman,
Damon Runyon, Gene Fowler, Robert Ripley, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, E. B. White,
Al Jolson, Babe Ruth, Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, Harry Houdini, and architect Raymond
Hood.‛ Douglas, Terrible Honesty, p. 16.
175
Sayre’s heroine, Alabama Begg-Knight’s New York, like that of the author
who documents every cultural element of their surroundings in enraptured
detail, forms a vertiginous spectacle ‚more full of reflection than of itself – the
only concrete things in town were the abstractions.‛36 [65] Abstraction – role-
playing others, role-playing the self, in life, in fiction – is vitally important to
understanding the emergence of the modern American Künstlerroman, and
where the Fitzgerald’s fit into this evolutionary generic process.
New York facilitated a potent triangulation of what Karen Sternheimer
accounts for as celebrity culture, consumption, and social mobility. 37
Notwithstanding, the definition of celebrity cannot be reserved for people
with ‚measurable talent or skill‛; rather, people who are ‚watched, noticed,
and known by a critical mass of strangers.‛38 Whilst the ‚teen years of the
twentieth century held the promise of a life beyond industrial labor,‛
Sternheimer writes, ‚the twenties seem[ed] to deliver on the promise. And
celebrity culture shifted along with the era’s economic growth.‛39 Tabloid
journalism, newspapers, magazines, and particularly Hollywood, were
rapidly forcing the evolution of the American writer, as much as they were
rapidly progressing household life and what entertained the masses. The
commercialization of the novel, particularly the Bildungsroman, had resulted
in popular fiction receiving an enormous mark-up in fiscal viability over
literary ventures. In part, this resulted in many writers – Fitzgerald included –
increasingly participating in ‘cheapened’ celluloid forms of the art to fund
their great novel projects, such as screenwriting out in Hollywood; Murphet
36 Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz (London: The Grey Walls Press, 1953), p. 65.
Subsequent references to page numbers hereafter cited in text for this current chapter.
37 Sternheimer, Celebrity Culture, p. xiv.
38 Ibid., p. 2
39 Ibid., p. 55
176
and Rainford go so far as to label Fitzgerald a ‚wage-slave‛ to the cinema.40
Fitzgerald also prolifically produced short stories and articles for the press, of
varying finesse, as did Sayre.
In turn, the Fitzgeralds created novelized worlds not comprised of people, but
of commodities, governed by capital, liberalism, and the ‘free’ market. People
grew, but only in wealth; they did not mature. Without the courtesy of a
caveat emptor, deferred maturation and financial capriciousness therefore
accrued with literal interest, bankrupting both the city and its residents. The
‚Jazz Age‛ or Roaring Twenties were depicted in Fitzgerald’s own American
literary history as a temporal economy, in which the emergent young adults
of one decade live in the excess of immaturity to the detriment of the next. In
the fiction of the Fitzgeralds, the young American generation emerging out of
the Great War enjoyed decadent lifestyles on the tab of their adult selves – in
Fitzgerald’s words, blindly investing themselves in a state of ‚borrowed
time,‛ to be repaid in the disillusionment of the 1930s.41 Comparable to this
discourse of ‘borrowed time’ is Moretti surmisal that the early Bildungsroman
encapsulated youth as the quintessence of modernity: ‚the sign of a world
that seeks its meaning in the future rather than in the past,‛ where modernity
succumbs to the ‚simple and philistine notion that youth ‘does not last
forever.’‛42
The Fitzgeralds’ novels galvanized the authors’ legend by chronicling this age
in which maturation was limitlessly deferred, using variations of the
Bildungsroman form and the roman à clef as their vehicle. As Malcolm Cowley
40 Julian Murphet and Lydia Rainford (eds.), ‘Introduction,’ in Literature and Visual
Technologies: Writing After Cinema (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 4.
41 Douglas, Terrible Honesty, p. 471.
42 Moretti, The Way of the World, pp. 5-6.
177
wrote of the New York of the 1930s, the new decade engulfed this Lost
Generation in ‚a new mood of doubt and even defeat,‛ and people were
forced to consider ‚whether it wasn’t possible that not only their ideas but
their whole lives had been set in the wrong direction.‛43 As the twentieth
century entered the 1930s, and the young artists entered the thirties of their
own lives, payment was to be exacted for what Fitzgerald christened the
‚gaudiest spree in history,‛ this ‚borrowed time.‛ 44 Youth was found to be an
impermanent state, and its deferral came with moral and fiscal consequences,
as well as categorical ones; for, as Robert Martin Adams has described of
modernism, ‚*of+ all the empty and meaningless categories, hardly any is
inherently as empty and meaningless as ‘the modern.’ Like ‘youth,’ it is a self-
destroying concept; unlike ‘youth,’ it has a million and one potential
meanings.‛45 The obsolesce conjoining the destructive character of youth to
the modern is likewise poignantly realized in the melancholic late
Bildungsromans of the Fitzgeralds, and forms a remarkable counterpoint to
the existential despair in This Side of Paradise.
Yet, in seriously accepting Fitzgerald’s temporal metaphor, ‚*t+he paradox
must be sharpened,‛ as in Derrida’s Specters of Marx.46 Derrida’s theory of
revolutionary consciousness applies to the cultural and economic resurgence
of the so-called Jazz Age, an era preciously built upon generic and language
systems borrowed over from the past, and investment in the cultural assets to
be repaid in the future. Derrida reminds us that with Marx,
43 Quoted in Kendall Taylor, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald: Sometimes Madness is Wisdom: A
Marriage (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003), p. 248.
44 Douglas, Terrible Honesty, p. 471.
45 Robert Martin Adams, ‘What Was Modernism?’ Hudson Review vol. 31 (Spring, 1978), pp.
31-2.
46 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), p. 136.
178
[t]he more the new erupts into the revolutionary crisis, the more the
period is in crisis, the more it is ‚out of joint,‛ then the more one has
to convoke the old, ‚borrow‛ from it. Inheritance from the ‚spirits of
the past‛ consists, as always, in borrowing. Figures of borrowing,
borrowed figures, figurality as the figure of borrowing. And the
borrowing speaks: borrowed language, borrowed names, says Marx. A
question of credit, then, or of faith.47
Exhumation of the past, a parody of faithfulness and atavism to the passé
cultural ancestor, forms the borrowed object of study for Fitzgerald’s
Bildungsroman during this transitionary period of economic and cultural
revolution. In an increasingly financialized economy in which the accrual of
wealth urges the endless pursuit of growth – as in the case of Jay Gatsby of
Fitzgerald’s third novel – consumption, or for Derrida, acquisition of ‚the
new,‛ does indeed loom over the lifestyle of the individual, for mechanical
reproduction means the end of individuality and the original referent itself.
For Derrida, an ‚unstable and barely visible dividing line crosses through this
law of fiduciary,‛ passing ‚between a parody and a truth, but one truth as
incarnation or living repetition of the other, a regenerating reviviscence of the
past, of the spirit, of the spirit of the past from which one inherits.‛ 48 This
division ‚passes between a mechanical reproduction of the spectre and an
appropriation that is so alive, so interiorizing, so assimilating of the
inheritance and of the ‘spirits of the past’ that it is none other than the life of
forgetting itself. And the forgetting of the maternal in order to make the spirit
live in oneself.‛49
47 Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 136.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
179
This spectre returns to the Fitzgeralds by the point of 1932, with Sayre looking
back upon the ‚wastefulness‛ of the Jazz Age with a revised conception of
‚borrowed time,‛ transitioning from the ‚financial to the Faustian‛; Douglas
describes how:
Zelda, writing in 1932 about what now seemed the wastefulness and
over-extended risk taking of the decade, remarked, ‚I so wanted to be
paid for my soul.‛ With her characteristic half-crazed superlucidity,
she raised the stakes and shifted the meaning of ‚borrowed time‛
decisively from the financial to the Faustian. As ‚borrowed time,‛ as
prodigious achievement and reckless loss, the 1920s were somehow
comparable to the decade of creativity and omnipotence for which
Faust had pledged his soul to the devil.50
Whether a moral or financial price is tributed to their art, the Fitzgeralds’
fixation with the tension between popular commercialized fiction (progress)
and the elite culture of high art (atavism) rests on the assumption that the
high pedigree of the Bildungsroman must perforce evolve into some
cheapened abstraction of its form to remain abreast with lucrative
autobiographical literature and the market for the roman à clef. This tension
results in the increase of the cultural and market value of the Bildungsroman
genre within American audiences, with whom the mêlée of the young
individual caught between the tidal patterns of the past and modernity
appears to deeply resonate. The Bildungsroman text itself was no longer just
the personified commodity; the author had, in Marx’s terms, undergone a
transition of reification [Versachlichung] in which the novelist’s own celebrity
vouchsafes the novel’s market value in the production of literature.51 The
50 Douglas, Terrible Honesty, p. 471.
51 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Middlesex
and New York: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 209.
180
commodification of the artist in turn produces texts which make visible the
alienated labor of artistry itself, in order to reconstitute the monetary value of
cultural production, i.e.: by writing novels which prioritized the value of the
labor and talent of the literary author who struggles for sacrifices pecuniary
prosperity for his art, the cultural value of texts and authors themselves
increases.
The Fitzgeralds’ capitalization upon the ‚stylistic stamp‛ of producer/author
implies a specific ideology about the production, institutionalization, and
commercialization of creative industry; this means we must read their
Künstlerromans in a non-traditional way, problematizing the concept of art
and specifically literature production itself in regards to the New York
tradition. Where Chicago Bildungsromans thrived on naturalism and
narratives of the chaos of downbeat, industrial echelons, the Fitzgeralds
proposed that the people of New York ‚were tired of the proletariat,‛ in the
words of the omniscient narrator in Save Me the Waltz. [64] Their vision of
American maturation exposed the volatility between the bourgeois and the
‚aristocracy‛ – between new money, and old money, and the reinforcement
of individuation where capitalism was increasingly rendering these class
divisions indistinct.52 In the New York of Mr and Mrs Scott Fitzgerald and
their literary likenesses, ‚everybody was famous. All the other people who
weren’t well known had been killed in the war; there wasn’t much interest in
private lives.‛ *64+ The financialized and Faustian stage of Jazz Age New
52 It wasn’t really until the publication of The Great Gatsby that Fitzgerald’s representation of
the relationship between the echelons of American capitalism could be feasibly read as a
violent apparition of class warfare. For instance, class dispute that is metaphorized in the
lethal and underhand finale between the aristocratic Tom Buchanan, the nouveau-riche
capitalist Jay Gatsby, and the small business owner and service provider George Wilson; all
narrated, of course, by the reticent bourgeois artiste, Nick Carraway, who watches over it all.
181
York sets our generic backdrop, a stage that both venerates the image of the
artist whilst constricting them to the fiscal bonds of mass culture.
I The Künstler’s Theatrical Imagination in F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920)
In March 1920, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, published This Side of
Paradise, the debut novel of an untested Princeton drop out, belonging to the
‚history of a young man‛ genre.53 By February of 1921, the Bildungsroman
had evolved into the most ‚overworked art-form at present in America,‛ by
the author F. Scott Fitzgerald’s free admission. 54 The fabula of This Side of
Paradise first appears as the quintessence of the customary Bildungsroman: a
genteel young man from the Midwest, Amory Blaine, pursues pedagogical
Ivy League edification, romances beautiful Southern debutantes, and affirms
his appropriate social institutionalization through courtship and upwardly
mobile socialization; he even serves his nation during the war as a dutiful
citizen. He reads the classics; he is versed in the Catholic scripture; he can
quote great philosophers. However, in his moment of contemplation of the
future – the defining moment that should arouse the artist’s maturation –
Amory Blaine’s vision of what is to come succumbs to sexual impotence,
despiritualization, economic alienation, blind disillusionment in the literary
tradition, and relentless existential crisis.
53 J. D. Thomas, ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald: James Joyce’s ‚Most Devoted‛ Admirer,’ The F. Scott
Fitzgerald Review vol. 5 (2006), p. 68.
54 Ibid.
182
Of course, the highly fragmented, deteriorating syuzhet that stylizes the
narrative has already indicated to the reader long before this point that the
novel has no intention of obeying the Bildungsroman’s traditional laws of
genre. Having already canvased the contextual momentum behind this
thematic crisis of subjectivity, I will now demonstrate the formal ways in
which Fitzgerald, at the bright beginning of his career, responds to and
experiments with the crisis of form that had, in his mind, rendered the
Bildungsroman useless as it stood in 1919 New York and beyond. The
preoccupation of this present section concerns Fitzgerald’s hybridization of
multiple formal and generic registers as the map to a nascent media ecology
within This Side of Paradise; of particular regard are his development of the
theatrical imagination and his importation of the dramatic form, which
Fitzgerald applied in order to distinguish his novel in what he saw as an
overcrowded, oversaturated genre.
Matthew Bruccoli describes the ‚loose form‛ of This Side of Paradise as the
product of a green author’s ‚inexperience with structuring a novel,‛ drawing
upon the New Republic review which smartly retitled the work: ‚the collected
works of F. Scott Fitzgerald.‛ 55 James West echoes Bruccoli’s argument,
referring to Paradise as ‚an inspired cut-and-paste job, a merging of bits and
pieces of a failed novel (called ‘The Romantic Egotist’) with some short
stories, a handful of poems, and a one-act play.‛ 56 These evaluations
presuppose that Fitzgerald’s rushed manuscript process merely displays a
‚desperate attempt to prove himself as an author and a prospective husband
55 Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (London:
Cardinal, 1991) p .139.
56 James L. W. West III, ‘The Question of Vocation in This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and
Damned,’ in The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Ruth Prigozy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 48.
183
for Zelda Sayre,‛ that ‚whatever appears to be bold in This Side of Paradise –
its mixture of genres and styles – is not really as daring as one might think.‛57
To argue that the Bildungsroman unravels under its ‚cut-and-paste‛
construction overlooks how this collage itself fashions a novel that
modernizes form from within. In incorporating a miscellany of artistic
customs as a competitive economy of form, Fitzgerald’s Bildungs-montage
anticipates and symptomizes what would become a significant modernist
gesture of mimetic representation and decentred subjectivity.
Whilst many modernists were influenced by the theatre, drama itself quickly
took up residence inside the novel form, reshaping the expressive dynamics
of the Bildungsroman in turn. Dramaturgy would appear in Joyce’s Ulysses
(1922), Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), Woolf’s final novel Between the Acts (1941),
and Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (1951); it was also littered throughout the
oeuvre of Flann O’Brien. Put into this perspective, given Fitzgerald’s
exhausted sense of the ‚banality‛ of the Bildungsroman genre in America,58
and his dramatic innovation of form at the beginning of his creative timeline,
Fitzgerald’s ‚cut-and-paste job‛ evidences more than the development of a
singular artist. Even beyond the novel’s inclusion of a one-act play,
Fitzgerald’s wider use of the theatrical imagination in particular, indicative of
reluctance with regard to realist novelization, therefore deserves a complex
response in light of what was to come both before and after Paradise’s
57 West, ‘The Question of Vocation,’ pp. 48-9.
58 Consider the vitriol letter that Fitzgerald wrote to Thomas Boyd, literary editor of St. Paul
Daily News, in early 1921 regarding the recent publication of Floyd Dell’s Mooncalf (1920):
‚This writing of a young man’s novel consists chiefly in dumping all your youthful
adventures into the reader’s lap with a profound air of importance, keeping carefully within
the formulas of Wells and James Joyce. It seems to me that when accomplished by a man
without distinction of style it reaches the depths of banality[.+‛ Quoted in Thomas, ‘F. Scott
Fitzgerald: James Joyce’s ‚Most Devoted‛ Admirer,’ p. 68.
184
publication. The unruly shape that Fitzgerald’s novel takes places his
achievement squarely within the James-Wells controversy over the function
of art and the novel as mediations of modernity, the apex of which was their
1915 correspondences.59 Boiled down to its essentials, the debate concerned
Wells on the one hand, who was ‚delighted‛ in his findings of the ‚loosely-
constructed‛ novel of the age; James, however, was ‚disturbed.‛60 Fitzgerald,
I argue, was both delighted and disturbed by what he had produced, and the
movement that produced it.
This Side of Paradise speaks directly to the modernist reconsideration of
literary form; in particular the poetics of subjectivity as a search for the ‘new,’
only to find – as Adorno surmises – that the rise of high capitalism from the
nineteenth century onwards meant that art must remain equally concerned
with the evermore disturbing question of ‚whether anything new had ever
existed.‛61 In entitling the opening section ‘The Romantic Egoist,’ Fitzgerald
positions himself beside Ezra Pound’s new direction for the The Egoist literary
periodical. The year before This Side of Paradise was published, T. S. Eliot
published the landmark essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in The
Egoist (1919). Paradise both internalizes similar concerns to Eliot’s position as a
critic and poet, and also directly references the literary institution’s suspicion
towards the ‘newness’ of Pound’s poetics in the 1915 volume Cathay (on page
142, Amory writes an unorthodox ode to these misgivings). Rather that focus
on the history of the young man narrative, Fitzgerald renders it increasingly
irrelevant to Amory’s artistic development as symbolized through the
experimental style of the prose. In this sense, he responds to the technical
59 James E. Miller Jr., The Fictional Technique of Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Springer, 2013) p. 2.
60 Ibid.
61 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert
Hullot-Kentor (London and New York: Continuum, 1997), p. 19.
185
invention of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man published late 1916,
which had also been serialized in The Egoist. Joyce’s fragmented form,
featuring an extended stream of consciousness technique, allowed the author
to deftly probe the limits of what Jed Esty calls an ‚antidevelopment novel‛:
where Stephen ‚cycles through traumatic exchanges that echo each other
backward and forward‛; Stephen’s antidevelopment is ‚gilded with
narcissistic fantasy and supported by self-conscious refusal of forced identity,
that cyclical, or epicyclical, movement marks Stephen’s adolescence as more
or less permanent.‛ 62 Like Esty argues of Joyce, Fitzgerald’s protagonist
remains ‚a swooning, listless, and passive spectator who queers even
heterosexual desire and whose libidinal plots, all ‘elfin preludes,’ seem to
suspend the double master plot of an individual and national emergence,‛63
as I shall demonstrate in this section. Therefore, in his aesthetic kinship to the
program of Joyce, Fitzgerald’s individual artist of antidevelopment represents
not a whole generation, but a very selective one which wilfully and
problematically resists its ‘American’ cultural heritage: a ‚talented‛ or
‚smart‛ elite who were responding to the development of form as ‚art and
not a pastime,‛ to quote Pound’s distinction.64
Like Eliot, Joyce, and Stein, Fitzgerald was influenced by the philosophical
output of Henri Bergson, William James, and Arthur Schopenhauer, which he
was reading during 1917 as This Side of Paradise came to shape; at the same
time, he was viewing the epic films of D. W. Griffith and the comic films of
Charlie Chaplin, attending the music-hall varietals of Marie Lloyd, and
62 Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (Oxford
Scholarship Online, 2011), p. 142.
63 Ibid.
64 Ezra Pound, ‘A Retrospect,’ in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New
Directions, 1954), p. 10.
186
listening to the songs of Irving Berlin. 65 Avenues of American popular
entertainment were at a ‚fertile crossroads‛ by the turn of the 1920s. 66
Vaudeville, an older form of entertainment, and musical comedy
‚reinvigorated by a new talented generation of composers, lyricists, and
performers‛ reached their commercial apex ‚before imploding by the end of
the decade,‛ negotiating themselves in the public imagination against a newer
cinematic industry that was undergoing its ‚first decade of creative and
commercial maturity.‛67 At the beginning of his career, Fitzgerald’s style and
subject matter was clearly influenced by the motley ‚new popular arts,‛
however much his appreciation of the ‚dynamic entertainment‛ offset his
ironic perception that these forms held ‚limited‛ potential as genuine
artforms, as Walter Raubicheck and Steven Goldleaf contend.68
If, as David Seed supposes, Fitzgerald truly was ‚the supreme novelist of
style‛ on account of his ‚particular attention‛ to visualizing how his
characters construct social personae and project self-images,69 the question of
style itself requires elaboration. Writing on the problem of style, Georg
Simmel not long before argued that the powerful force driving ‚modern man
so strongly to style is the unburdening and concealment of the personal,
which is the essence of style. Subjectivism and individuality have intensified
to the breaking-point, and in the stylized designs, from those of behaviour to
those of home furnishing there is a mitigation and a toning down of this acute
65 Walter Raubicheck and Steven Goldleaf, ‘Stage and Screen Entertainment,’ in F. Scott
Fitzgerald in Context, ed. Bryant Magnum (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2013), p. 3.
66 Raubicheck and Goldleaf, ‘Stage and Screen Entertainment,’ p. 303.
67 Ibid.
68 Raubicheck and Goldleaf, ‘Stage and Screen Entertainment,’ p. 303.
69 David Seed, Cinematic Fictions: The Impact of Cinema on the American Novel up to World War II.
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), p. 86.
187
personality to a generality and its law.‛ 70 The ego could no longer ‚carry
itself, or at least no longer wished to show itself and thus put on a more
general, a more typical, in short a stylized costume.‛71 Fitzgerald’s novel both
internalizes and scrutinizes the ways and means of art production within this
modernist conversation of style, critiquing the response to and effects of art as
a formal performance of the ideas it conveys within a Künstlerroman
scaffolding. Fitzgerald’s ‚loosely-constructed‛ novel therefore pre-empts the
generic hybrid that Virginia Woolf would prophesize in her 1929 essay, ‘The
Narrow Bridge of Art’:
That cannibal, the novel, which has devoured so many forms of art
*<+ We shall be forced to invent new names for different books which
masquerade under this one heading *<+ It will be written in prose,
but in prose which has many of the characteristics of poetry. It will
have something of the exaltation of poetry, but much of the
ordinariness of prose. It will be dramatic, and yet not a play. It will be
read, not acted.72
Consider, as one instance of this formal cannibalization and estrangement, the
unassuming, single page episodic chapter entitled ‘Amory Reads a Poem.’73
The episode describes how Amory attends a ‚stock-company revival‛ theatre
production in New York, and writes a poem on his programme, which the
70 Georg Simmel, ‘The Problem of Style,’ trans. Mark Ritter, Theory, Culture & Society vol. 8
(1991), p. 69.
71 Ibid.
72 Raubicheck and Goldleaf, ‘Stage and Screen Entertainment,’ pp. 302-3.
73 F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), pp. 127-8. Subsequent references to page numbers hereafter cited in text for this
current section.
188
narrator includes in full. 74 In other instances, the novel narrativizes the
creative process in which the protagonist composes and ‚scribble*s+‛ such
poems, including his frustrations – ‚Why could he never get more than a
couplet at a time?‛ *142+; here, Fitzgerald transcribes Amory’s revisions line
by line. [142-3] These petite but recurrent writing sprees become the narrative
event of entire episodic chapters; moreover, they contribute to the novel’s
prevailing mood of creative discontent, without adding value to a generic
plotline.
Beyond the significant influence of drama and poetry as formal investments,
Fitzgerald’s intermediality goes significantly further to subsume the
importance of Bildung as narrative to that of Bildung as style. The novel
comprises two ‚books,‛ with a brief ‚interlude‛ between them, when Amory
heads to Europe to serve his country during World War I. This six page
interlude comprises the following: firstly, a letter from Amory’s mentor,
Monsignor Darcy; an elegiac poem written by Amory about embarking, ‚We
leave tonight‛; and finished with a coded letter from Amory to Tom
D’Invilliers, discussing their plans for after the war.75 [149-54] I shall briefly
itemize the standout formal techniques within the two adjacent book sections:
popular songs (i.e.: Chopsticks and ‘Babes in the Woods’ on pages 70-1) and
school hymnals and anthems [46]; a Wellsian short story idea (by which I
mean, one mood prevailing over a short, standalone episode); interlocutions
between characters, included in full; cinematic inspired techniques of
perspective, as well as other visual imagery inspired by portraits and
74 Joyce would soon after craft a similar situation in Ulysses, when Stephen composes a poem
on the bottom of the letter given to him by Deasey, and tears it off; its contents are not
revealed to the reader until much later in the novel.
75 There are early resonances here of Virginia Woolf’s war interlude in To the Lighthouse
(1929), in the middle section entitled: ‘Time Passes.’
189
photographic ‘snapshots,’ and vignettes which read as tableaux; increasing
use of the free indirect discourse and even a one-page stream of consciousness
experiment, narratological gestures that are particularly evident when Amory
sinks into despair towards the end of the novel (to give the semblance of an
‘unmediated’ consciousness); catalogues and lists. *25; 40+ An even more
remarkable innovation of free indirect discourse takes the form of an internal
dialogical interview:
Somewhere in his mind a conversation began, rather, resumed its
place in his attention. It was composed not of two voices, but of one,
which acted alike as questioner and answerer:
Question. – Well, what’s the situation?
Answer. – That I have about twenty-four dollars to my name.
Q. – You have the Lake Geneva estate.
A. – But I intend to keep it.
Q. – Can you live?
A. – I can’t imagine not being able to. People make money in books
and I’ve found that I can always do the things people do in books.
Really they are the only things I can do.
Q. – Be definite. [237-8]
The most remarkable aspect of Fitzgerald’s ad hoc construction of the novel
concerns the formal contradictions to hand in the above internal interview. If
Amory is disturbed by the thought of ‘prostituting’ his artistic potential to
commercial demand (the outcome of which is signified in the late event of the
novel in which he and his friend Alec are caught soliciting an actual sex-
worker [227-9+), Fitzgerald sublates Amory’s chronic ambivalence by refusing
to separate popular culture and high art as discrete entities. Fitzgerald is
unwilling to draw lines between genres despite the persistent (if episodic)
framing of a Bildungsroman-Künstlerroman plot. If his authorial vision
means to reflect the splintering of modern subjectivity, such an achievement
190
is surely reflected in the young protagonist who wrestles with all these
competing forces of mediation in a post-World War I capitalist economy,
resulting in a fragmentation and proliferation of forms and styles.
The concern to create art in a contradictory cultural market, in this sense,
forces Amory’s characteristic ambivalence: his inability to decide which path
into adulthood and the workforce he will take, what political and ideological
beliefs he will commit to, or even his métier. The overarching effect
determines the novel’s aesthetic ambivalence, in which the plot seems unsure
of where it will head next and in what form the narrative shall move forward:
whether drama, poetry, epistolary fiction, romantic or realist prose. The
novel’s internal and external stylistic scaffolding therefore allegorizes the
position of American literature as a transforming mode of production in both
the ideas it exposes, and at the level of formal presentation. It diminishes the
potency and will of the subject in relation to the larger and anonymous
institutional powers of mediation and dissemination.
These internal modes rub against the formal constraints of the
Bildungsroman; the erratic style shapes, diverts, and interrupts how the
narrator conveys the plot of Amory’s romantic development, moral
edification, and pedagogical education as defines the ‚history of a young
man‛ genre. This Side of Paradise therefore displays a novelistic tendency in
which the disjointed and pastiche narrative, its lack of fidelity to the
traditional constraints of the novel form, itself reflects the development of the
literary artist through this self-same experimentation process. The gesture of
this fluid intermediality is twofold: firstly, it demonstrates both Amory and
Fitzgerald’s rejection of literary ancestors, a disavowing of the generic
inheritance left by the Victorians in particular, and their strict regulation of
generic enterprises. Secondly, it challenges the Bildungsroman genre in
particular, the fatigued and oversaturated ‚history of a young man‛ novel, by
191
showing that masculinity after World War I is a compromised and sickly
affair. Fitzgerald realizes style as ‚an aesthetic attempt to solve the great
problem of life‛ as it is defined by Simmel: ‚an individual work or behaviour,
which is closed, a whole, can simultaneously belong to something higher, a
unifying encompassing context.‛ 76 Only in this case, it is not through a
singular attitude, but by way of a provisional collage of various partial masks
plucked from different media, that style is paraded as a ‚unifying‛ force.
Amory’s cinematic imagination is evidenced in one intoxicated episode
entitled ‘Experiments in Convalescence’: ‚His head was whirring and picture
after picture was forming and blurring and melting before his eyes *<+ as the
new alcohol tumbled into his stomach and warmed him, the isolated pictures
began slowly to form a cinema reel of the day before.‛ *187-8] Few critics have
granted serious consideration to the implications of Fitzgerald’s formal
fidelity to theatre and the dramatic arts, all the more evident in his early
novels; criticism therefore overlooks how Fitzgerald’s style positions his first
novel within the nascent conversation between theatrical and cinematic arts,
as an experiment with technologies that could fill the interstices of
subjectivity that the realist novel, the Bildungsroman in particular, simply
could not account for in its limited perspective.
The relationship between celluloid art and literary narratives cuts both ways
for Fitzgerald; if Hollywood’s incompetence required ‚‘younger good writers’
to improve the quality of their films,‛ as Fitzgerald saw it – with Chaplin and
Griffith as exceptions to this rule77 – Fitzgerald’s cinematic imagination also
suggests a recalibration of the Bildungsroman as a genre in need of
‘experiments in convalescence’ (as another chapter title suggests), to expand
76 Simmel, ‘The Problem of Style,’ p. 70.
77 Seed, Cinematic Fictions, p. 87.
192
its horizons through other technologies of mediation. In a remarkable reading
of Paradise through the lens of musical theatre, T. Austin Graham considers
Fitzgerald’s transpositions of the ‚dynamism‛ he ‚associated with the stage‛
into a new medium: with its ‚inflated dialogue,‛ ‚emotional extremity,‛ the
‚literal use of dramatic stage and presentation,‛ the ‚abrupt *cutting+ between
scenes,‛ a ‚relative disregard for the unities of time and place,‛ and above
and beyond all this, ‚its overarching variety-hall aesthetic.‛78
Rather than focus on Amory’s psychological maturation, Fitzgerald
dramatizes an objective shift between media: using dramaturgy to transition
into the cinematic as an artistic development, an internal Künstlerroman of
form. As the apex moment of Fitzgerald’s ‚variety-hall‛ aesthetic, the plot
abandons its novelistic narrative by entering the dramatized form: a one-act
play entitled The Debutante in which the narrator (or at this point, the stage
director) introduces Rosalind Connage. Within the fictional roman à clef, Sayre
is lucidly represented as Amory’s second love interest, the yellow-haired,
nineteen-year-old New York debutante, Rosalind. The narrator foregrounds
her artistic talents as an ‚exceptional‛ dancer, and a ‚clever‛ artist, rather
than her mere objective beauty; these background character descriptions are
written as stage directions. The narrator suggests her most formidable ability
is as a wordsmith, describing that she ‚had a startling facility with words,
which she used only in love letters.‛ *160+ Rosalind is ‚by no means a model
character,‛ *160+ a play on words that dually suggests she is neither a ‘stock
character’ stereotype nor a morally upright person. Her demeanour is
‚theatrical‛ and her conversation ‚musical.‛ *161+ Fitzgerald therefore
constructs Rosalind as a paradoxical aesthetic: at once the epitome of lawless
feminine creativity and possibility; and on the other hand, a commercial
78 T. Austin Graham, ‘Fitzgerald’s ‚Riotous Mystery:‛ This Side of Paradise as Musical Theatre,’
The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review vol. 6 (2007-8), p 22.
193
aesthetic subject to the rational, predetermined scripts of patriarchal
convention. She is presented as an actress, a performer, reading lines from a
script or screenplay rather than a true wordsmith of romance.
The narrator describes her ‚glorious yellow hair,‛ as the very shade ‚the
desire to imitate which supports the dye industry‛ *161+, an image that
startlingly recalls the vicious yellow imagery permeating Robert Browning’s
dramatic monologue, ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ (1836). In this allusion, Amory
exposes how his Princeton lectures have unconsciously infiltrated the level of
style, despite his inattention *142+; whilst his English professor ‚drones‛
information regarding the dramatic monologues of R. Browning, Swinburne,
and Tennyson, Amory ‚scribble*s+‛ couplets and rhymes into a notebook to
form a contemptuous ‚poem to the Victorians‛ *142+ – a poem which is
included in its entirety within the novel [143] – whom he blames for the onset
of the world war and his generation’s disillusionment in the wake of this
international mass trauma. *142+ Amory Blaine ‘knows’ the Victorians’
methods to be fool’s gold; this allusion therefore signals that the dramatic
scene will not fulfil its generic intention.
The scene’s unique contribution as a ‚one-act play‛ signifies how the
courtship plot that underpins the early Bildungsroman is a theatrical farce.
Rosalind first entertains Amory alone, having never met him before, in the
generically inappropriate setting of her boudoir – which Rosalind ironically
entitles ‚No Man’s Land.‛ *163+ Gender is the object here: the script refers to
them only as HE and SHE during this intercourse. Their initial flirtations are
conducted within the discourse of an economic farce, in which Rosalind
forwardly likens her magnetism to a business pursuit:
HE: I thought you’d be sort of – sort of – sexless, you know, swim
and play golf.
194
SHE: Oh I do – but not in business hours.
HE: Business?
SHE: Six to two – strictly.
HE: I’d like to have some stock in the corporation.
SHE: Oh it’s not a corporation – it’s just ‚Rosalind, Unlimited.‛
Fifty-one shares, name, good will and everything goes at $25,000 a
year.
HE: (Disapprovingly) Sort of a chilly proposition.
SHE: Well, Amory, you don’t mind – do you? When I meet a man
that doesn’t bore me to death after two weeks, perhaps it’ll be
different.
HE: Odd, you have the same point of view on men that I have on
women.
SHE: I’m not really feminine, you know – in my mind. [163]
The use of the dramatic form therefore serves multiple functions, the first of
which revaluates the most quotidian theme of Bildungsroman literature – the
courtship plot – laboring underneath the new regime of finance capital of the
Roaring Twenties, and the economic boom of finance, insurance, stocks, and
bonds. Firstly, the form ironizes the young hero’s ‚Philistine‛ romance plot,
to apply Hegel’s sardonic assessment, the first of a series of trials on his
regular path into adulthood, a destiny of what Hegel calls ‚domestic affliction
*<+ the headaches of the rest of married folk.‛ 79 The second effect
decentralizes the protagonist from his own narrative. The dramatic form
emphasizes the increasing spectacle of private affairs in the theatre of early
twentieth century America; scripting the narrative creates characters who are
transfigured into puppets, automatons of some predesigned screenplay. The
form here emphasizes the importance of people as surfaces on which
79 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume One, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1988) p. 593.
195
narratives unfold, demonstrating that one can never be sure of the interiority
beneath the costumes, masks, and sets. For this to occur within a novel
emphasizes the shortfalls of realism, and the Bildungsroman genre by
extension: the inability for literature to encapsulate the vicissitudes of modern
subjectivity (and indeed, gender or sexuality).
Fitzgerald falls for what Adorno once called the ‚fraud‛ of the ‚feminine‛ as
a supplement for ‚mass culture‛ hook, line, and sinker. 80 Shakespearian
dynamics echo through the androgynous dramatization of Amory and
Rosalind’s transitory love affair, in which men and women may be costumed
as such, but the scripts they read do not reflect traditional gender assignment.
Fitzgerald selects the heroine’s name in allusion to As You Like It, the redux of
the liberated intersex of Rosalind/Ganymede, a woman masquerading as a
man pretending to be a woman. As Pearl James recognizes, Fitzgerald
problematically characterizes Amory with ‚feminine nervousness,‛ which he
must overcome in order to ‚know *him+self‛:
Fitzgerald’s novel betrays a suspicion that character, in the sense that
it held for nineteenth-century writers, no longer seems tenable.
Instead, identity is performed and relatively unstable. In the novel’s
80 Julian Murphet’s gendered account of the media ecology of the modern period reveals how
the misogynistic gesture of Nietzsche, which Adorno describes as falling for the ‚fraud‛ of
saying ‚‘feminine’ when talking of women,‛ became ‚symptomatic of an ‘embattled’
minority (artists) at the very time that ‘the feminine’ was perceived, under the auspices of
‘mass culture’ and in its various media, to have assumed an insuperable hegemony in the
capitalist world. These men fell for the fraud of saying ‘the feminine’ when talking of culture.
The result, in nuce, was modernism.‛ Julian Murphet, ‘Towards a Gendered Media Ecology,’
in Modernism and Masculinity, eds. Natalya Lusty and Julian Murphet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 53.
196
lexicon, this shift appears as a move from ‚character‛ to
‚personality.‛81
The exclusive use of the drama form for this section enables Fitzgerald to
abstain from villainizing Rosalind as a woman, whilst the relative antagonist
is played a far more intangible and threatening agent to the history of the
young man genre and to the concept of masculinity it has always vouchsafed:
the threat of feminization as mass culture. More than a character or antagonist
to a courtship plot, Rosalind’s rejection symptomizes the wider American
condition at the fin de siècle, where Fitzgerald has ‚turn*ed+ to history as a
partial attempt as masculine recuperation *< adumbrating+ a larger
American coming-of-age story scripted in the context of World War I.‛82
When Rosalind breaks off their engagement in exeunt after only a dozen or so
pages, the novel foregoes the narrative drama form, returning to its episodic
structure. However, Amory has proven himself inadequate as both a man,
socially, and as protagonist, generically. His education has been a lesson in
disillusionment and emasculation in the theoretical antithesis of a
Bildungsroman: the unbecoming of a man. Castrated by capitalist
apparatuses beyond his control, Amory cannot qualify as a coherent hero,
character, personality, protagonist, or personage (despite trying on each of
these categories for style, throughout the novel).
A disqualified Amory descends into self-pitying, suicidal alcoholism, the tone
and structure of the narrative mimetically evolve with him; experimental
style aggregates in step with Amory’s increase of existential dislocation, with
increasing use of the free verse form. As Ronald Berman argues, Fitzgerald
81 Pearl James, ‘History and Masculinity in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise,’ Modern
Fiction Studies vol. 51, no. 1 (2005), p. 3.
82 Ibid., p. 4.
197
problematizes the chronological nature of representing the subject, in which
the protagonist seeks to assert order in a disordered environment by
‚classify*ing+ things that resist measure,‛ such as capital and time:
A great change in thinking about the self within time had come about
early in Fitzgerald’s life. One began by accepting ‚the uninterrupted
forward movement of clocks, the procession of days, seasons, and
years‛ as a way of thinking about historical time and also as a way of
thinking about values. Starting something chronologically explains it.
It also translates it: ‚forward movement‛ became a metaphor of
intellectual and even of moral advancement. That is one reason why
the ‚future‛ is so important to American midcult thinking – it can so
easily be confused with progress.83
Fitzgerald, in could be surmised, positions his protagonist now in cinematic
time where the Bildungsheld’s future succumbs to entropy, in his failing
attempts to manipulate the relativism between the past and present through
numeric sequentiality and causality, beating against the current of a world of
increasing chaos and antiheroism.
The critical formal question of Fitzgerald’s expropriation of the
Bildungsroman culminates in the novel’s dramatic conclusion. Having failed
every traditional endpoint of the Bildungsroman’s generic goals, unable to
synthesise the romantic, pedagogical, or professional fulfilment of young
manhood, Amory’s narrative concludes in striking estrangement by reverting
at the last to dramaturgy. In an extraordinary final impulse of generic
disunity, the narrative concludes in a tragic speech act, an exeunt reached this
time without the clear mediation of stage directions:
83 Ronald Berman, Modernity and Progress: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Orwell (Tuscaloosa,
Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 2005), pp. 39-40.
198
He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. ‚I know
myself,‛ he cried, ‚but that is all –‛ *260+
After Amory’s disengagement with Rosalind and the dissolution of the
‚philistine‛ courtship plot, the fiery tête-à-têtes between Tom and Amory
reveal the novel’s importance to the evolution of the Bildungsroman genre,
particularly in terms of its relation to the ideological practices of literature.
Perhaps the most critical speech in the novel emerges from these discussions –
and in this case, it is indeed given in the format of a monologized speech act
rather than a dialogue:
‚*<+ Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try
to believe in their congressmen, countries try to believe in their
statesmen, but they can’t. Too many voices, too much scattered,
illogical, ill-considered criticism *<+ [a] financial genius can own a
paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired,
hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to
swallow anything but predigested food *<+ more confusion, more
contradiction, a sudden inrush of new ideas, their tempering, their
distillation, the reaction against them –‛
He paused only to catch his breath.
‚And that is why I have sworn not to put pen to paper until my ideas
either clarify or depart entirely; I have quite enough sins on my soul
without putting dangerous, shallow epigrams into people’s heads; I
might cause a poor, inoffensive capitalist to have a vulgar liaison with
a bomb, or get some innocent little Bolshevik tangled up with a
machine-gun bullet – ‛ *200+
Undercurrents of ideological ambivalence in the face of the dehumanized
political and capitalist machineries governing the lives of the individual –
particularly the unanchored bourgeois individual – saturate Amory’s
199
elongated syntax and lengthy speech act. Amory presents socialism as a
premature answer to the American capitalist malaise and his discontent; but
unlike Princeton comrade Burn Holiday, an outspoken comrade, Amory
realizes his nebulous concept of socialism seems too juvenile to disseminate
through literature, and cannot form the basis of his writing. The politicization
of identity and the ideological weaponization of words form clear
problematics within this speech; literature is clearly the domain of ideology
and politics, about both of which Amory feels ambivalent due to his relative
ignorance on the matters. The vulgar liaison of the ‚poor, inoffensive
capitalist‛ preconsciously anticipates the Wall Street Bombing of September
16, 1920 – an eerie coincidence, as the novel was published in late March. Yet
the uncomfortable closeness of the real and the fictional here marks how
closely Amory’s speech lies to the violently malcontent generational mood of
Fitzgerald’s East Coast contemporaneity.
Amory’s expensive, bourgeois pedagogical education has again failed him,
this time, in not having thoroughly equipped him with the means to do
anything about his discontent, or to become any sort of socio-political
frontrunner. He is the quintessence of the mugwump, wracked with chronic
ambivalence and neutrality. Despite his almost sardonically self-aware
announcement that his ideas are underdeveloped, Amory details to Tom the
insufferable dilemma of his position of authors without the financial means to
write in the current market:
‚How’ll I fit in?‛ he demanded. ‚What am I for? To propagate the
race? According to the American novels we are led to believe that the
‘healthy American boy’ from nineteen to twenty-five is an entirely
sexless animal *<+ Well, the war is over; I believe too much in the
responsibilities of authorship to write just now; and business, well,
business speaks for itself. It has no connection with anything in the
200
world that I’ve ever been interested in, except a slim, utilitarian
connection with economics.‛ *200+
In this moment of meta-reflection upon the Bildungsroman, Fitzgerald and
Amory alike have taken the stance of what Clement Greenberg calls the
‚cynical artist‛: who ‚rejects his own judgment-decisions and choose
deliberately those that he anticipates will be accepted by a kind of taste that
he himself regards as inferior to his own.‛84 Cynical art, Greenberg foresees, is
‚usually frightened art.‛ The cynical artist, likewise ‚frightened,‛ ‚un-
esthetically, un-intuitively‛ breaks with the precedents he is conversant with,
Greenberg suggests; nervousness perforce attaches itself to all sophisticated
art. 85 Whether or not Greenberg’s proposition is correct, Fitzgerald’s
ambivalent position purposefully mirrors that fearful perception of cynical
artistry, as does his literary equivalent. Amory fears a future in which his
youth, talent, and potential are spent ‚lost in a clerkship, for the next and best
ten years of my life,‛ equating this traditional sense of Bildung to ‚the
intellectual content of an industrial movie.‛ *201+
In the metaphor of the ‚industrial movie,‛ Amory disengages himself from
any ties to both the masses and to the popular culture, of which Hollywood is
emblematic. Tom suggests the panacea of ‚fiction,‛ to which Amory replies:
‚Trouble is I get distracted when I start to write stories – get afraid I’m
doing it instead of living – get thinking maybe life is waiting for me in
the Japanese gardens at the Ritz or at Atlantic City or on the lower
East Side *<+ I haven’t the vital urge.‛ *201+
84 Clement Greenberg, ‘Judgment and the Esthetic Object,’ in Homemade Aesthetics:
Observations on Art and Taste (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 44.
85 Ibid., p. 45.
201
Distracted by New York and by extension modernity’s many trappings that
discourage him from fulfilling his artistic potential, the Künstler therefore
exiles himself rather than indulge in what he calls ‚the slaughter of American
literature.‛*201+
Through This Side of Paradise, however, Fitzgerald the author opens friendly
fire upon America’s most outdated literary tradition of the novel in the new
mode of production of the machine age, tearing asunder the novel’s apex
individualist form: the Bildungsroman. To counteract ‚the slaughter of
American literature‛ and the deindividuation of the young American male
brought about by increasing commodification and mass reproduction,
Fitzgerald was certain of what his protagonist could not yet articulate: that
literature could only retaliate through a precarious manoeuvre of self-defence
and generic self-destruction, or to return to Woolf’s term, cannibalization.
Ironically, in hindsight, both Fitzgerald and Sayre would return again and
again to the Bildungsroman formula and to the coming of age trope, to the
point where it becomes unclear to what extent he both overvalued and
preserved the form he had here, at the first, so boldly attempted to reignite.
202
II Balletic Bildung: the Dialectical Dance of Zelda Sayre
Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz (1932)
Twelve years of ‚borrowed time‛ occurred between the publication of
Fitzgerald and Sayre’s respective debuts. It was more than a decade of
turbulent marriage and laissez-faire parenthood; of cheaply retailing micro-
narratives of their private lives, and sprinted short stories beneath their
potential, to magazines and newspapers. A decade of decadent European
lifestyles beyond their means, of waltzing between endless drunken soirees
decorated with the most highly regarded cultural figures of the international
stage. There was also the commercial failure of The Beautiful and Damned, then
redeemed by the success of The Great Gatsby (though in their lives, this would
only ever amount to Fitzgerald’s second most commercially acclaimed
novel).86 A dozen years succumbing to nervous breakdown, schizophrenia,
institutionalization, and destructive alcoholism: this is the biographical
narrative that tethers This Side of Paradise to Sayre’s standalone novel – what
could be measured its alternative sequel from Rosalind’s perspective. To
corroborate such hypotheticals, the leading male character of Save Me the
Waltz, the artist David Knight, was also called Amory Blaine in the original
drafts; Fitzgerald himself exasperatedly pointed this out to Sayre’s doctor, in
an attempt to dissuade her from publishing: ‚Using the name of a character I
invented to put intimate facts in the hands of the friends and enemies we
have accumulated en route – My God, my books made her a legend and her
single intention in this somewhat thin portrait is to make me a non-entity.‛87
86 Philip McGowan, ‘Popular Literary Tastes,’ in F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context, ed. Bryant
Mangum (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 273.
87 Quoted in Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald
(London: Cardinal, 1991), p. 380.
203
In reading these two texts together, a fierce rivalry over the authenticity of
experience arises, reminiscent of Hélène Cixous’ vision of the ‚display of
forces on both sides that the struggle has for centuries been immobilized in
the trembling equilibrium of a deadlock.‛88 This second half of this section
concerning the Fitzgeralds therefore considers the other side of the ‚trembling
equilibrium‛ between Save Me the Waltz and This Side of Paradise, in order to
demonstrate a more full-bodied portrait of the state of New York
Bildungsroman literature and its cultural context in the 1920s. This ‘gender
trouble’ will be reconnoitred in order to illustrate the revisionist elements of
the feminist Künstlerroman that qualify Sayre’s novel as an invaluable
autonomous contribution to the evolution of the American Bildungsroman,
and as a text that mutually enriches our understanding of the New York
Künstlerroman.
In this section, I deviate from the tradition of biographical scholarship that
reads Save Me the Waltz as a roman à clef in its most salacious sense. For several
reasons, the urge to read Save Me the Waltz as some sort of continuation of
Fitzgerald’s existing roman à clef is too parochial a claim to sustain at length;
the technological equipment of Sayre’s style of fabula is entirely separate from
that of Fitzgerald’s. As much as This Side of Paradise evaluates eroding
masculinity, Save Me the Waltz is equally concerned with the ways in which
the new century has both empowered women, and the ways in which the
experience of womanhood continues to be sidelined – particularly in the
emergent cultural spheres of American culture. Both Sayre and her alias are
constricted by preconceived notions of what they are permitted to develop
into as American female artists.
88 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs vol.
1, no. 4 (Summer, 1976), p. 877.
204
Rather than mirror the theatrical meta-novelization of Paradise, with its
critique of the social scripts of subjectivity, Sayre steers the style of the
modernist Künstlerroman towards dance, and the choreographed expression
and bodily semiotics of gendered identity formation. Gender performance is
once again symbolized through the playful production of art; however, the
social fabric of the bourgeoisie is not represented as a theatre of actors, as in
This Side of Paradise, but a coordinated ballroom. Subjectivity is still staged
and performed, but it is choreographed under longstanding traditions of
movement as language.
The modernist fascination with the dancing body came to the theoretical fore
in America in the years 1872 and 1893 respectively. The first instance was the
influential publication of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy in the Spirit
of Music, and his excavation of the Dionysian and Apollonian forces, the ideas
of which ‚penetrated developments in dance in almost every field of
choreographic innovation,‛ as Susan Jones argues.89 The second ripple may be
condensed to the influence of French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé,
whose ideas are exemplified in his prose-sketch review of a solo performance
given at the Folies Bergère in Paris by renowned American ballerina, Loïe
Fuller. 90 Fuller’s ‚musical embodiment, entwined in swirling materials
shimmering in the play of light‛ elevated her to the level of a mystical
‚enchanteresse‛ in the imagination of Mallarmé.91 The ‚un écriture corporelle‛
of the dancer provided an elegant model for Mallarmé’s symbolist poetics,
where, like poetry, the body could be choreographed to harness its ‚gestural
potential‛ as an alternative to written communication.92
89 Susan Jones, Literature, Modernism, and Dance (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2013), pp. 44-5.
90 Ibid., p. 13.
91 Ibid.
92 Ibid., p. 14.
205
Sayre’s Künstlerroman shuffles between these two imported styles of
modernist dance theory in response to modernity’s reinvigorated liaison
between the moving body and language. Firstly, Sayre draws upon the
elegant gestural potential of Mallarmé’s Dionysian dancing bodies, the
expressive and enchanting female figure that danced its way into the imagery
of the French Impressionists, to English-language writers such as Oscar
Wilde, W. B. Yeats, and T. S. Eliot, whose works in turn inspired the Ballet
Russes.93 On the one hand, writers such as Eliot were mutually speculating
that the ‚future for drama and particularly for poetic drama, will it not be in
the direction indicated by ballet?‛94 In reading Stein’s modernist ekphrasis,
Olga Taxidou determines that rhythm can render language into a dance
within the reading act; she quotes Stein’s ‘Orta or One Dancing, ’ an homage
to Isadora Duncan:
This one is the one being dancing. This one is one thinking in
believing in dancing having meaning. This one is one believing in
thinking. This one is one thinking in dancing having meaning. This
one is believing in dancing having meaning. This one is one believing
in dancing having meaning. This one is one dancing. This one in one
being that one. This one is one being one being dancing. This one is
one being in being one who is dancing. This one is one being on. This
one is one being in being one.95
Where Stein, Yeats, or Eliot imported dance into poetry, the performance
manifestos of dancers such as Isadora Duncan’s 1915 The Dance of the Future,
highly influenced by Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, emphasized, staged and 93 Ibid.
94 Quoted in ibid, p. 110.
95 Olga Taxidou, ‘‚Do Not Call Me a Dancer‛ (Isadora Duncan, 1929): Dance and Modernist
Experimentation,’ in Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity, eds. David
Bradshaw, Laura Marcus and Rebecca Roach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 110.
206
enacted the formal and thematic declaration of the body as a medium ‚just as
a writer uses his words.‛ 96 Sayre keeps this modernist dialectic of dance in
motion, counteracting the aesthetic enchantment with the dancing body by
revealing an increasingly progressive feminist representation of the female
dancer, chapter by chapter. Her ballerina protagonist, Alabama Begg-Knight,
increasingly displays the anarchic ‚alienation and isolation of the artist from
the larger society‛ that pioneer dancers such as Duncan, or indeed Martha
Graham’s 1929 performance entitled Heretic, ‚proudly exposed.‛97
Modernism’s impact upon dance performance converged action and
individualism in such a way that ‚celebrated and explored definitions of
womanhood,‛ as in Doris Humphrey’s famed performance of The Life of the
Bee. 98 Humphrey’s statement that dance embodies ‚the arc between two
deaths‛ supplements Julia Foulkes’ proposition that the ‚transience of one
moment of dance speaks to the fragility of the artform as a whole‛ and the
‚lack of permanence of the artworks‛ so difficult to preserve, reproduce,
record.99 Graham, alternatively, inverted this ‚emphasis on individualism‛ in
her performance of Heretic, which choreographed the psychoanalytical
experience of female interiority and expressiveness. Heretic ‚dramatized the
stoic individual fighting the confining masses,‛ and in doing so, transformed
the nineteenth century ‚idea of the individual as rational public citizen‛ and a
denizen of the democratic political system.100 The body of Graham’s model is
a diurnal accumulation of ‚social tensions, triumphs, and woes,‛ leading
Foulkes to conclude that dance therefore symbolizes ‚a fluid act of revelation 96 Quoted in ibid., pp. 110-11.
97 Julia L. Foulkes, Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin
Ailey (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), p. 34.
98 Ibid., p. 6.
99 Ibid.
100 Foulkes, Modern Bodies, pp. 33-4.
207
whereby newspaper headlines move and get rearranged‛ in a centred,
passionate ‚quest for understanding.‛101
Sayre’s novel does not start in this radical mood; it starts in a traditional
Bildungsroman form, and steadily develops into the artistic manifesto of its
Künstlerroman. Like This Side of Paradise, Sayre employs an omniscient third
person roman à clef, here to narrate the young adulthood of a headstrong
Southern debutante, Alabama. The tension between fame and art pour l’art
once again becomes a central concern within the Künstlerroman form in both
plot and style. Ostensible similarities in characterization resonate between
Dreiser’s Carrie and Alabama that seem worth consideration – even if, to
Sayre, Dreiser’s women were merely a lesson in how not to characterize
female melancholia.102 The product of Sayre’s feminist treatment of fame and
artistic celebrity and the rejection of the domestic courtship plot is realized
quite differently to Carrie’s own profound moment of New York
disillusionment. In the 1923 galley proofs with pencilled corrections held in
the Fitzgerald Collection at Princeton’s Firestone Library, Sayre’s revisions to
the original draft of Chapter One effectively sideline a young Alabama Begg’s
naïve and superficial desires for fame. These corrections demonstrate that the
Bildungshelde’s quest is far more concretely concerned with achieving
personal autonomy outside of patriarchal convention, and that Sayre wanted
to make this abundantly clear in her semantics:
101 Foulkes, Modern Bodies, p. 7.
102 In Sayre’s published review of The Beautiful and Damned, she sets her ironic dislike of
Gloria (her own roman | clef likeness) on par with her intense dislike of Dreiser’s later
eponymous Bildungshelden of Jennie Gerhardt (1911): ‚I have an intense distaste for the
melancholy aroused in the masculine mind by such characters as Jenny [sic] Gerhardt, [Willa
Cather’s+ Antonia and Tess *of the D’Urbervilles+. Their tragedies, redolent of the soil, leave
me unmoved.‛ Quoted in Clare Virginia Eby, Dreiser and Veblen, Saboteurs of the Status Quo
(University of Missouri Press, 1999), p. 184.
208
‚I want to go to New York, Mama,‛ said Alabama.
‚What on earth for?‛
‚To be famous.‛ *my own boss+
Millie laughed. ‚Well, never mind,‛ she said. ‚Being famous *boss+ isn’t a
question of places. Why can’t you be famous *bossie+ at home?‛103
Sayre’s revision displays uncertainty towards giving her protagonist the
rather grubby motive of fame-seeking, leaning instead towards the nobler
quest for autonomy and power in a vocation. Sayre works through the
problematic nexus between famousness and being ‚boss‛ (the masculine) in
the mind of the young girl; much of this problem resides in the debutante
remaining in the domestic nest. Linda Wagner’s determination of Save Me the
Waltz as Bildungsroman concludes that Alabama is ‚pigeon-holed from the
beginning of her life into the proper female roles: good girls don’t cry, tease,
whine. They do, however, defer to fathers, marry for money, and keep the
family name respected.‛104 David appears far more valuable to Alabama’s
goals than the immediate wealth of her other potential suitors; for he belongs
to what Legleitner refers to as the ‚cult of artistry,‛ the gatekeeper to a world
of fashionable society, celebrity, and most importantly, high culture.105
David is both famous and the boss of their marriage, the two things she most
desired to absorb from New York City for herself as a young girl. New York,
103 Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, ‘Save Me the Waltz Galley proof with author's corrections; dates not
examined,’ Zelda Fitzgerald Papers Box 1, Folder 8-10 (Manuscripts Division: Department of
Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library), pp. 19-23. I have indicated
where Sayre used pencil to cross out certain words and inserted replacements in the
marginalia; these replacements appear in the published edition.
104 Linda Martin-Wagner, ‘Save Me the Waltz: An Assessment in Craft,’ The Journal of Narrative
Technique vol. 12, no. 3 (Fall, 1982), p. 201.
105 Rickie-Ann Legleitner, ‘The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz,’ The F.
Scott Fitzgerald Review vol. 12, no. 1 (2014), p. 125.
209
and not her experience of matrimony or motherhood, facilitates the initiation
Alabama seeks to enter into her specific understanding of authentic
womanhood. This early galley proof also demonstrates that her mother holds
fast to her traditional Kentucky values, emblematic of a cultural atavism for
Old America, in which a woman’s life goals are to find domestic bliss and
find somewhere to ‚finish the story of her life‛ – a line pencilled into the
proof as a correction.106
Alabama even by name signifies the quintessence of the Southern belle
stereotype; she represents the displacement of gendered, deeply entrenched
white Southern values coming into contestation with more liberal
cosmopolitan precepts of the North. Like Dreiser, Sayre evokes the
Bildungsroman trope of the young ingénue escaping dull, agrarian life by
venturing to the enlivening streets of the grand metropolises;
notwithstanding, unlike other Bildungsroman that follow this pattern,
including Sister Carrie, Alabama is already married. For this reason, the city of
New York only foreshadows the musical and cultural education that prepares
Alabama for her artistic development as a dancer; the couple are married in
the frenetic soundscape of the Jazz Age, conducting the gender roles of their
marriage under archaic edicts of Victorian America – emblemized by the
metaphor of the popularized dancehall waltz.107
106 Sayre Fitzgerald, ‘Save Me the Waltz Galley Proofs,’ pp. 23-6.
107 The early chapters of Save Me the Waltz are colored with references to New Amsterdam
music which ‚pumped in their eardrums and unwieldy quickened rhythms invited them to
be Negroes and saxophone players, to come back to Maryland and Louisiana, and addressed
them as mammies and millionaires.‛ *63-4] Where this whitewashed text could be said to host
a (naïve) racial unconsciousness, it sees the African American performer as the embodiment
of human strength beyond gender: ‚By springtime, she was gladly, savagely proud of the
strength of her Negroid hips, convex as boats in a wood carving. The complete control of her
body freed her from all fetid consciousness of it.‛ *174+
210
The unconventional marital understanding between Alabama and David
undermines the generic function of the sentimental courtship plot. Sayre does
not design her heroine for a harmonious domestic situation; Alabama, who
was born into an affluent Southern family of good society, possesses limited
domestic skills and a low tolerance for household labor. The couple quarrel
over her inability to palate household tasks; Alabama resents not being able to
afford things due to David’s struggling artistry – an intertextual fulfilment of
the heated marital disturbance prophesized by Rosalind in This Side of
Paradise. In a seemingly passing argument, David declares Alabama that has
‚become nothing but an aesthetic theory – a chemistry formula for the
decorative,‛ *66+ as they discuss financial difficulty and only having two
dollars to cross New York City to call upon Alabama’s family. Alabama
naively assures him, ‚Daddy’ll have some money.‛ *66+ Rampant materiality
governs the daily activities of bourgeois white men and women in the New
York lifestyle. Despite their dwindling money supply, they simply cannot do
without their Japanese butler, Tanka, because when they tried to do without
him, ‚Alabama cut her hand on a can of baked beans and David sprained his
painting wrist on the lawn mower.‛ *68+
The narrator focalizes events through Alabama’s consciousness as she adapts
to adulthood, marriage, and modernity as a financial awakening, resulting in
a hyperawareness of material concerns, such as personal finances, and
possessions such as clothes:
Alabama didn’t know how to go about asking the Judge to pay the
taxi – she hadn’t been absolutely sure of how to go about anything
since her marriage had precluded the Judge’s resented direction. She
didn’t know what to say when girls postured in front of David hoping
to have him sketch them on his shirt front, or what to do when David
211
raved and ranted and swore that it ruined his talent to have his
buttons torn off in the laundry. [67]
The novel sustains a similar thematic premise to that of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie;
currency, and not romance, is what sustains desire, and her relationship with
a man is not enough to give her existence meaning when the chores and
responsibilities of adult life sour the beauty of young romance. 108
To waylay these early domestic disturbances, Alabama and David abandon
New York City, absconding from their domestic duties to live in a permanent
holiday situation on the French Riviera, escaping the residuals of Prohibition,
and later, the devastating socioeconomic effects of the 1929 Wall Street Crash.
There, David’s celebrity mortgages a decadent lifestyle filled with high
society and entertainment, to hire help to raise their child, Bonnie, and
maintain their household without Alabama being required to control the
domestic sphere. From this point, the courtship plot becomes increasingly
null and void; the marital plot reads as a nefarious ‚waltz‛ between the ‚Mr.
and Mrs. David Knights‛ as they adapt to modernity in both New York and
abroad. When the passers-by declare it such a ‚nice‛ thing to see the couple
108 It seems unlikely that Sayre had not read Sister Carrie, given the strong impression
Dreiser’s writing made upon Fitzgerald, and the latter’s guidance in her reading. Horst H.
Kruse notes that Dreiser and Fitzgerald’s close associate Mencken were in Fitzgerald’s words,
‚the greatest men living in the country today.‛ By other accounts, Fitzgerald was specifically
moved by Dreiser’s powerful characterization of the declining capitalist Hurstwood, which
he called ‚almost the first piece of American realism,‛ the influence of which can be
unmistakeably recognised in Fitzgerald’s Anthony Patch of The Beautiful and Damned. Later,
he would measure against Hurstwood the strength of his antagonist, Tom Buchanan of the
Great Gatsby, telling his editor Perkins in 1924 that he considered them to be two of the three
‚best characters in American fiction in the last twenty years.‛ Quoted in Horst H. Kruse, F.
Scott Fitzgerald at Work: The Making of The Great Gatsby (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University
of Alabama Press, 2014) p. 96.
212
dance together in a room with Chaplin and Paul Whiteman, the couple
quarrel over treading on each other’s toes, to which David decides, ‚I never
could waltz anyway.‛ *64+ The uncoordinated, claustrophobic embrace of the
dance forms the thematic gesture of the intimate courtship plot unravelling:
‚There were a hundred thousand things to be blue about exposed in all the
choruses,‛ says the narrator. *64+ If the waltz symbolizes marriage in the
novel’s terms, then the autonomous self-development of the protagonist
hereafter signifies a separate discipline of classical dance: ballet.
As Susan Manning outlines, the conceptual study of the female dancer is a
field entrenched in feminist gaze theory, which originated in theatre and film
studies; forms of modern dance have evolved over the course of the twentieth
century to respond these gender concerns, subverting patriarchal concepts of
gaze, spectatorship, and the role of the dancer as artist.109 Like theatre, dance
is an artform in which the bodies on stage respond directly to an authorial
script invisible to the audience; classical ballet leaves little room for deviation
from this script. The visual expressions of the choreography may be unique to
each performance, but the dancer is limited to the role of the interpreter.
Unlike the novelist or visual artist, the performer is constrained by
ephemerality, in which each artwork only lasts for the duration of a
performance. Selecting ballet as the foundational metaphor around which her
Bildungsroman is constructed therefore speaks to Sayre’s existential views of
the scripted role of the artist in modernity particularly in relation to the
generic expression of gendered subjectivity and female development. The
traditional courtship plot of the nineteenth century female Bildungsroman as
a form of ‘growing down’ significantly overlaps with the choreography of the
109 Susan Manning, ‘The Female Dancer and the Male Gaze: Feminist Critiques of Early
Modern Dance,’ in Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, ed. Jane C. Desmond
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 153.
213
female dance soloist. ‚Over and over again,‛ writes Sally Banes, ‚women
characters on the dance stage are enmeshed in what I call ‘the marriage plot,’
in both ballet and modern dance.‛110 The forerunners of modern dance at the
fin de siècle, such as Isadora Duncan, emerged ‚choreographically as sexual
revolutionaries,‛ Banes observes, ‚for by dancing solos without male
partners, they categorically rejected the marriage plot entirely in their dances
– even if, like Isadora Duncan,‛ or indeed like Alabama Knight, ‚they
celebrated maternity.‛111
The next generation of dancers in ballet and modern dance alike, such as
Martha Graham, returned to the marriage plot in a ‚troubled‛ fashion.112 Yet
across the board, Banes notes how unlike the favoured theme of the
‚conspicuous framing of the moment of marital choice‛ noticeable in the Jane
Austen lineage of female Bildungsromans, ‚domesticity in general‛ is
remarkably absent from the canon of Western dance. 113 ‚The medium of
dance – lively young bodies, with a preponderance of female bodies, in
motion – itself militates against depicting sedentary states (like domesticity)
and leans instead towards issues of sexuality and the social governance of
mating through the marriage institution,‛ she insists; the marriage institution
within dance, due to the largely aristocratic and bourgeois setting of the
concert venues, color the value-systems behind these expressions towards
sexuality, race, and class, even if at times these values are contested.114 For
instance, the ‚coming-of-age‛ of the eponymous heroine of Sleeping Beauty is
choreographed for the stage by Marius Petipa as an ‚enforced passivity‛ for the 110 Sally Banes, Dancing Women: Females Bodies on Stage (London and New York: Routledge,
1998), p. 5.
111 Ibid., p. 6.
112 Ibid., pp. 6-7.
113 Ibid.
114 Banes, Dancing Women, pp. 6-7.
214
1890 performance at the Maryinsky Theatre, St Petersburg; the prince’s ‚gaze,
his kiss, brings her to life.‛115 We might contrast this against a standard 1895
choreography of Prince Siegfried of Swan Lake, who ‚comes of age‛ and ‚goes
hunting.‛116 Observing the history of the development of dance, it becomes
clear how Sayre’s novel connects two responsive traditions in text-fashioning
– the female Bildungsroman and genres of dance – via the Künstlerroman
apparatus.
Classical ballet is also a particularly strict expression of art, a form that Sayre
consciously contrasts against the experimental culture of modernist New
York and Europe. A heightened voyeurism shapes the performance of the
female ballerina: their physique is expected to respond to the demands of the
(patriarchal) audience, both in terms of movements but also in terms of their
physical structure, a distinction Sayre’s novel clearly attends to in its stages
prior to Alabama’s formal training. However, unlike the hypothetical actress,
the ballerina’s thin and muscular body is an outward expression of grace and
beauty, but the narrator makes clear that the gaze is not aroused with the sort
of overt primal sexuality associated with the more rounded stereotype of the
childbearing figure – the Hollywood siren embodied within the novel by
Gabrielle Gibbs, the famous American movie actress with whom David has a
very public and unapologetic affair. [236]
Like Fitzgerald, Sayre’s novel harbours deep suspicions regarding the cultural
revolution of the film industry, and its effects upon the role of the literary and
performance artist. Quoting the exclamation of Agnes de Mille, Banes notes
that dance is ‚written on the air‛; Western dance is without a standard
notation system, and recording technologies such as film and later videotape 115 Marianne Goldberg, ‘Homogenized Ballerinas,’ in Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies
of Dance, ed. Jane C. Desmond (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 305-6.
116 Ibid., p. 306.
215
‚rarely capture the whole of a dance.‛117 The implication is that authenticity
proves ‚difficult, if not impossible, to verify in dance history,‛ 118 a claim
which in itself responds to claims of authenticity in the novel, or the
‘sincerity’ of the roman à clef. Many male modernists, Fitzgerald included, had
already responded to the role film and screenplays were having upon the
modern novelist, forcing the novel to take new directions in the mechanical
age of reproduction.119 Sayre, alternatively, sees film and the popularization of
celluloid performance as a direct assassin of the performing arts, a forced
diminuendo of outdated concert artforms, such as classical dance, a mortal
wound from which the form will never be able to recover.
Her text already anticipates this morgue. In a symbolic incidence within the
novel, Madame tells the girls that they will have to vacate their ballet studio,
for ‚*t+hey are making a moving-picture studio of my place here.‛ *193+
Alabama searches ‚behind the dismantled segments of the mirror for lost
pirouettes, for the ends of a thousand arabesques. There was nothing but
thick dust, and the traces of hairpins rusted to the wall where the huge frame
had hung.‛ [193] Whilst the ballet studio only relocates to a different address,
the event signifies Sayre’s misgivings for the decline of classical dance in
modern Americanized popular culture, and what this decline might signify
for possibilities for female artists to review the gendered relationship of
subjects and objects in different media. When it comes time for her family to
return to America, David offers to find Alabama some way to dance the ballet
in America, but the narrator informs us that whilst it was ‚nice of David,‛
Alabama ‚knew she’d never dance in America.‛ [210] In an idiosyncratic
stylistic tendency towards pathetic fallacy, Sayre sets the halcyon backdrop of
117 Banes, Dancing Women, p. 8.
118 Ibid.
119 Murphet and Rainford, ‘Introduction,’ Literature and Visual Technologies, p. 4.
216
Alabama’s career as an ‚intermittent sun‛ which ‚disappeared from the
skylight over her last lesson‛ with Madame. *210+
Alabama risks her marriage and motherhood to continue her career by
refusing to follow David to Switzerland after his affair with the screen actress
Gabrielle Gibbs, pursuing a role as a prima ballerina in Naples. Before they
adjourn to Europe, the Knights agree that it is acceptable to flirt or ‚make
eyes‛ with members of the opposite sex, an accord they come to only after
David’s own admission of infidelity as some sort of an emotional tax write-off
or necessary educational development for his art. Alabama does not question
the ethics of this behaviour, and does not act upset at this incident. However,
jealousy inevitably disintegrates the foundations of their relationship when
such extraneous flirtations eventuate on Alabama’s part – such as the
unrestrained passion she demonstrates for the French pilot, Jacques.
Following his own double standard, David as patriarch becomes violently
upset by his wife’s affair; he eventually retaliates through an unapologetic
dalliance with the ‚most beautiful‛ bodied screen actress, Gabrielle Gibbs.
[140] Wagner reads the event’s effect upon Alabama as crucial to her artistic
development:
That he plans an affair because, in his words, ‚my work’s getting
stale. I need new emotional stimulus,‛ makes Alabama doubly
furious. She not only loses her husband; she is reminded again that
her life is of little worth compared to that of the artist, that she has
nothing of importance to do or to think about.120
In such a reading, ballet represents more than the cathartic release of art; it is
Alabama’s chosen vehicle of retaliation, and more importantly, reformation at
the level of genre. She wills herself into the role of artist: ‚I am going to be as
120 Wagner, ‘An Assessment in Craft,’ p. 204.
217
famous a dancer as there are blue veins over the white marble of Miss Gibbs.‛
[154]
If Paris is the epicentre of modernity, with ‚tumultuous friends drowning the
Chopin in modern jazz and vintage wine,‛ [221] Naples draws the
Künstlerhelde into a primitive symbolic space of theatrical creativity behind
the curtains of the bourgeois lifestyle of her youth and her decadent life as the
wife of a celebrity artist. It is only in Naples, a cheaper city than anywhere
they have previously travelled, where Alabama is able to become a fully
autonomous participant in the division of labor; she earns a scholarship wage
enough to keep her own living expenses without withdrawing any allowance
from her husband’s earnings. She foregoes the decadent dreams of upward
class mobilization that the pair had in their young marriage, symbolized by
her refusing to travel any higher than second-class on the train. [211] Like
Dreiser, Sayre romanticizes the female notion of labor by conflating it with
performative artistry.
Despite having expressed her distaste for the ‘ugliness’ of naturalism in her
early letters to Fitzgerald,121 Sayre retreats from this position by the point of
writing Save Me the Waltz. Her stylistic commitment to a naturalistic insight
into the lives and training of the ballerinas in Naples evidences this reversal.
Alabama’s eyes ‚throb‛ with every ‚beat of her pulse,‛ her hair clings ‚like
121 Research into the correspondences of Sayre suggests her strained relationship towards
‚ugly‛ realism or naturalism. Upon reading Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899) at the behest of
her then suitor, Scott, she was repulsed by the ‚ugly‛ realism of it – that strain which we call
naturalism. She wrote to Fitzgerald: ‚It certainly makes a miserable start< All authors who
want to make things true to life make them smell bad – Like McTeague’s room – and that’s my
most sensitive sense. I do hope you’ll never be a realist – one of those kind that thinks being
ugly is being forceful.‛ Quoted in Nancy Milford, Zelda: A Biography (New York: Harper &
Row Publishers, 1970), p. 60.
218
plasticine about her head‛ as the beautiful music trills through her ears like
‚persistent gnats‛ after endless rehearsals. [220] Her upper lip feels ‚cold and
peppery with drying sweat‛; she retires to bed at night with bloody feet. [208]
She fears to look at the other dancers in the change rooms because lest she
witness ‚sagging breasts like dried August gourds, and wound themselves on
the pneumatic buttocks like lurid fruits in the pictures of Georgia O’Keefe,‛
the dreaded external effects of overexercise upon the female form. [220] The
ballerinas in the stage wings are not beautiful; they are ‚mostly ugly, and
some of them were old,‛ according to the narrator. [221] ‚Their necks were
pinched and twisted like dirty knots of mending thread when they were thin,
and when they were fat the flesh hung over their bones like bulging pastry
over the sides of paper containers. Their hair was black with no nuances to
please the tired senses.‛ *221+
Sayre’s partiality for celebrity references returns in the allusion between the
dancer’s fleshiness and Georgia O’Keefe’s velveteen brush strokes of flower
petals and the flesh of fruit. Sayre gestures towards artists whose expressions
subvert conceptions of femininity and the female body in a set of ‚startling
similes about art and the body.‛122 Alabama’s feminist imagination of the
changing relationship between subject and object is awakened by Georgia
O’Keefe’s abstractions of the shapes and lines of ‚lurid fruits‛; and by Van
Gogh’s ‚brilliant‛ and ‚carnivorous‛ flowers, his ‚venomous and vindictive
blossoms‛ with the power to ‚sting and strangle *<+ submarine flora,‛ a
‚pathological category‛ of art which she likens to the ‚savage and oblivious‛
Jeanne d’Arc.123 Alabama’s moment of awakening, therefore, is likewise in
122 Kathryn Lee Seidel, Alexis Wang, and Alvin Y. Wang, ‘Performing Art: Zelda Fitzgerald’s
Art and the Role of the Artist,’ The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review vol. 5 (2006), p. 145.
123 Quoted in Ibid.
219
realizing that in authentic art, the dialectic never stands still between beauty
and suffering.
When David telegraphs ‚a basket of Calla-lilies,‛ the Neapolitan florist
misspells the card, which reads: from your two ‚sweat-hearts‛ *220-1], the
narrator emphasizes that Alabama ‚didn’t laugh‛ at the sentiment. She seems
disturbed by her child Bonnie’s enclosed portrait of Alabama as ‚a clumsy
militant figure with mops of yellow hair,‛ underscored by the legend: ‚My
Mother is the most beautiful lady in the world.‛ *221+ What reads as the
protagonist’s distaste for the all-too fleshy, sweaty, sagging, abject women
hidden in the stage wings of the ballet production complicates what the
author herself seems to suggest: which is that the gestural power of the
artwork, whether painting, literature, or dance, may overturn patriarchal
objectification of the decorative female form. If nothing remains ‚to please the
tired senses‛ of the bourgeois gaze *221+, Alabama intuits a subjectivity that
disregards these standards as exemplified in ballet, where the performance
hides the ugly realness of labor that went into the production. The process of
creating the script, the gruelling rehearsal of the choreography of the dance
itself, therefore powerfully undermines the romanticized generic pattern of
female courtship plot as it is performed.
Sayre does not resolve this dialectic; for, like a typically exceptional
Bildungshelde, Alabama distinguishes herself amongst this chorus of women
because of her youth and beauty. Alabama finds the praise and recognition
she once sought out as confirmation of her exceptional subjectivity in this
Neapolitan opera company, for the others all seem to be ‚waiting for
something to happen.‛ *221+ Madame Sirgeva, her tutor at Naples, tells her
that she must have ‚the stellar rôle,‛ for the other girls are too ugly to lead the
troupe. Alabama’s siren beauty is said to bring men to ‚the shadows of the
220
Opera door‛ *221+ – again, imagery highly reminiscent of the male suitors
lining up to see Carrie in Dreiser’s novel.
Unlike Carrie, Alabama’s ‚Faustian‛ debt to the cult of artistry is inevitably
recalled.124 Foreshadowing the decline of Alabama’s career is the event that
eventually amounts to the height of that same career: the opera company
gives three performances of Faust in her last season as a star ballerina. [223]
When her young daughter Bonnie visits her during rehearsals, Alabama’s
family and career are once again risked by the threat of film. Alabama is once
more reminded of the celluloid threat embodied by the actress Gabrielle
Gibbs. Consider Alabama’s exchange with her child:
‚Oh, *I shall have+ no husbands. They shall, perhaps, be away at the
time,‛ said Bonnie vaguely. ‚I have seen them so in the movies.‛
‚What was that remarkable film?‛
‚It was about dancing, so Daddy took me. There was a lady in the
Russian Ballet. She had no children but a man and they both cried a
lot.‛
‚It must have been interesting.‛
‚Yes. It was Gabrielle Gibbs. Do you like her, Mummy?‛
‚I’ve never seen her except in life, so I couldn’t say.‛
‚She is my favourite actress. She is a very pretty lady.‛ *227-8]
Gabrielle Gibbs preconsciously mirrors Greta Garbo’s performance as
Grusinskaya, the tragic Russian prima ballerina figure in Grand Hotel [1932],
whose career and mental health are both in severe decline, and who delivers
the immortal lines: ‚I want to be alone *<+ I just want to be alone.‛ Gabrielle,
as Greta Garbo avant la lettre in Grand Hotel, mediates the tragic stereotype
that increasingly characterizes the alienated Alabama. Standing in the ballet
studio, the narrator observes how, ‚Alabama stood alone with her body in
124 Douglas, Terrible Honesty, p. 471.
221
impersonal regions, alone with herself and her tangible thoughts, like a
widow surrounded by many objects belonging to the past.‛ *194+
Changes occur to her over-exercised figure, driving her mind to a state of
obsessive compulsion; however, her exercise literally builds her body into an
autonomous subject in her own right, outside of the legal and social
patriarchy of marriage confined to the courtship plot and domesticity.
Wagner argues that since Alabama replaced her maiden name with that of
Mrs. David Knight, she feels progressively embittered, like the sideshow to
his ego, the ‚princess in the tower‛ locked away forever.125 Rather than learn a
lesson in objective fame – the kind that is represented in Gabrielle Gibbs –the
character of Madame Lubov Egorova serves as ‚one of the best portrayals in
American literature of the older woman who is dedicated to, and
impassioned by, her work,‛ in Wagner’s perception. 126 Alabama learns an
imperative lesson in female empowerment, in review of the former
Darwinian belief that women need always compete in the arena of sexual
selection.
This Bildungsroman therefore responds not only to psychological
development of the young female protagonist moving through stages of
subjective différance, but furthermore, the way in which the female body is
called upon to differentiate itself against the carnal gazes of male voyeurs and
female sexual competitors. The female artist all the more responds to the
intermedial competitiveness of the female form in the new media ecology. In
terms of the Künstlerroman, this novel also further outlines the physical
production of the artist’s body itself into a reified installation artwork; it
brings an entirely unique perspective to the subgenre, elevating the aesthetic
125 Wagner, ‘An Assessment in Craft,’ p. 204.
126 Ibid., p. 204.
222
of the female body as something more meaningful and beyond the mere sub-
existence as a duplicable, interchangeable commodity within the patriarchy.
Appealing to the aesthetics of avant-garde dance, Sayre’s violent account of
the process to develop the ‚tidiness‛ of the dancer’s body deconstructs the
eroticization of the early modern female dancer. Mary Douglas’ vital reading
of the oppositional social divisions of gender recital suggests how ideas
regarding ‚separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions
have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy
experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and
without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a
semblance of order is created.‛127
Alabama’s obsessive compulsivity towards the ballet serves as a rite of
passage, where physical penance converts into an act of purification. Alabama
manipulates her body into these unnatural positions; she coils her tongue
around the foreign languages that support the linguistic structure of the ballet
tradition; her movements, her speech, connect the literary to the dancing
body. Her goal of excellence cannot be accomplished until she has conquered
her audience by demanding their admiration and bodily empathy of her
counterbalancing elegant movement with extreme effort. In what could
almost be considered as a strange parody of Fitzgerald’s short story, The
Curious Case of Benjamin Button (1922), Alabama’s development is juxtaposed
against the contours of her body regressing back into a pre-maternal,
prepubescent figure.
In extending Mary Douglas’ proposition of inner and outer spatial
distinctions in the symbolic order of sexuality, Judith Butler highlights the
precise function that gender performs in the Fitzgeraldian Bildungsroman. In
127 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 1969), p. 4.
223
her thesis of performative gender and its inscription upon the body, Butler
applies the Foucauldian theory of bodily inscription, arguing that:
Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative
in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to
express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporal
signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is
performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the
various acts which constitute its reality.128
Butler ties the concept of gender performativity into Fredric Jameson’s
understanding of pastiche: that ‚parody by itself is not subversive, and there
must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions
effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become
domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony.‛ 129
Observed within Butler’s sense of gender performance as a ‚stylized repetition
of acts‛ under the duress of late capitalist logic, 130 Alabama performs the
‚disruptive, truly troubling‛ womanhood that destabilizes the sedimentation
of gender norms masculine and feminine. Her achievement ironically
juxtaposes and subtends to the recirculated sexualized (and commodified)
‚perfect‛ figure of Gabrielle Gibbs, the instrumental female figure of
patriarchal cultural hegemony.
Discord occurs, then, between the development of the waltz and the ballet as
bodily tropes within the novel – particularly where they come into contact
with the repetition of mass cultural logic. The use of the dance metaphor
thrived in the nineteenth century women’s Bildungsroman, where it signified
128 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and
London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 138-9.
129 Ibid.
130 Ibid., p. 140.
224
the exacting rituals of courtship. It recalls the importance of social dance in
the oeuvre of Austin and the English novel tradition, where every touch, look,
and movement is a heightened experience of courtship in an otherwise
sexually segregated society. Or in a vastly different context of the French
tradition, the trope recalls the early waltzes of Emma Bovary at the chateau La
Vaubyessard, in which the tragic protagonist craves to emulate the woman
who holds the attention of the ballroom because she ‚knew how to waltz.‛131
In terms of the New York tradition of Bildungsromanes, one recalls the
evolving trope of dance in the imagination of Wharton’s Lily Bart of The
House of Mirth, who firstly likens the emotional sensation of ‚youthful
romance‛ with the ‚whirl of a waltz‛: ‚that lightness, that glow of
freedom.‛ 132 Lily’s dance metaphor later develops to reflect the double
standard of gender roles in courtship: ‚‘All Jack has to do to get everything he
wants is to keep quiet and let that girl marry him; whereas, I have to calculate
and contrive, and retreat and advance, as if I were going through an intricate
dance, where one misstep would throw me hopelessly out of time.’‛133 Lily
inevitably does misstep, leading to the novel’s tragic realization of the
‚central truth of existence‛ signified through the apt simile of dance as cosmic
choreography, in which all men and women are ‚like atoms whirling away
from each other in some wild centrifugal dance.‛134 Sayre remains within this
tragic Bildungsromane tradition of dance metaphor, whilst revising the older,
now clichéd social metaphors belonging to the female development novel in
the 1920s mode of production. By doing so, Sayre choreographs the failure of
131 Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary: A Study of Provincial Life, ed. and trans. Dora Knowlton
Ranous (New York: Bretano’s Publishers, 1919), p. 52.
132 Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, ed. Martha Banta (Oxford and New York, Oxford
University Press, 1994), p. 65
133 Wharton, House of Mirth, p. 48.
134 Ibid., p. 311.
225
genre to the personal experience of failure as a professional dancer and artiste
beyond the courtship plot in a likewise wild, centrifugal movement.
The lessons learnt in the ‚waltz‛ of Alabama’s marriage and motherhood are
auxiliary memories to the infinitely more meaningful aesthetic configurations
of the ballet; the waltz is a more relaxed discipline of dance in one sense, but
ballroom dancing is also a tradition which reinforces binarized gender in
which the masculine is primordially privileged in the role of leading the
feminine. By choosing the title as an allusion to ballroom dancing, Sayre
comments on a relationship between the protagonists that upholds strict and
conspicuous semblances of social order. Alabama’s realizes there is no longer
any value in attaching herself to the glory of her husband’s name and artistic
reputation. True immortalization lies in making a name for herself on the
stage. Her fashionably feminized body rewrites itself into the kind of leanly
muscled, long limbs that can only materialize with extreme discipline and
dedication to the craft. Yet her movements must deceive the audience, belying
the exertion involved in creating the movement, projecting only an effortless
design of beauty. Unlike Amory Blaine, Alabama’s professional quest is not to
novelize one’s life, but to inscribe her own history upon the body, a narrative
sculpted through personal expressions of the choreographed movements of
the ballet. However, this voice is muted in the devastating personal injury
Alabama incurs through overexercise.
The temporality of the plot development moves forward in arrhythmic
temporal lurches; Alabama grows up, marries, and moves to New York City
within the first chapter. Again, temporal coherency is foregone in favour of
what could be described as painting a portrait of her young life, capturing its
essence rather than relying upon the strictures of realism. The novel becomes
increasingly structured as an expressive narrative, focusing on ‚emotionally
226
crucial happenings.‛ 135 For Wagner, ‚Events do not follow events in an
expected order; scenes juxtapose with other scenes, and Fitzgerald uses very
little formal transition,‛ which leads her to conclude that the narrative reflects
the chaos of Sayre’s own mind, and the autobiographical protagonist drawing
closer in age to becoming the destined middle-aged author living ‚in one
mental institution after another.‛136 However, to reach this conclusion is to
minimize Sayre’s autonomous strengths as a pragmatic female public figure,
social critic, and innovative novelist in her own right.
As Rickie-Ann Legleitner notes, Save Me the Waltz employs elements of the
traditional nineteenth century American sentimental women’s novel, whilst at
the same time, expresses profound dissatisfaction with the traditional
courtship plot of the female Bildungsroman, with Sayre’s aesthetic intention
to be read as accomplishing something more profoundly ‘literary.’ 137
Alabama’s quest for development embodies the ‚cynical edge‛ of women’s
domestic narratives, an increasingly apparent element in American fin de siècle
fiction.138 Alabama resolves to fashion her own artistic legacy, an aspiration
demanding numerous personal sacrifices in order to pursue with serious
intent. In a painful twist, Alabama’s transcendence into the artiste is aborted
by a devastating physical injury from which she is never to recover. Whilst
her life is spared from the blood poisoning that threatened to kill her, news is
given that her father is taken from her, passing away from old age in reduced
circumstances. Unlike This Side of Paradise (but also Portrait of the Artist), the
elliptical structure of Alabama’s narrative – in which Alabama returns to her
135 Wagner, ‘An Assessment in Craft,’ p. 204.
136 Ibid.
137 Rickie-Ann Legleitner, ‘The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz,’ The F.
Scott Fitzgerald Review vol. 12 (2014), p. 126.
138 Ibid.
227
hometown Montgomery a failed artiste, once more to play the role of the kept
housewife – implies that all creative potential has been spent, and the
development of the artist plot has ultimately miscarried. Sayre’s contribution
to the genre is darkly unique in that the denouement of the novel
uncharacteristically exposes the destruction of the artist’s career, as much as it
speaks to the artist’s perception of the pressures of performance art in the age
of technological mediation.
Save Me the Waltz therefore reads as an ambitious, subversive Bildungsroman,
which fiercely appropriates and discards the pre-existing bibliography of the
female development novel. Very much in line with the traditional female
Bildungsroman, this novel ends with a connubial conclusion. Yet Alabama’s
elliptical return to her life as a wife and mother is melancholic at the level of
style; the vibrancy of the novel’s recurrent imagery of flowers fades into the
ashen imagery of an overfilled ash-tray: ‚It’s very expressive of myself. I just
lump everything in a great heap which I have labelled ‘the past,’ and, having
thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to
continue.‛ *272+ Unlike the modernist Künstler prototype, Joyce’s Stephen
Dedalus, and indeed, the disillusioned but unvanquished Amory Blaine,
Alabama’s fate is decidedly bleak. The final realization of the Künstlerroman
is that her youth and artistic potential has disintegrated into ash, a thing of
‘the past;’ that her future is but a mere state of continuation – a growing
down, a return to genre. If the roman à clef, the elliptical ‘turning of the key,’
opens the music box and allows the ballerina to briefly dance her mechanical
pirouette, Sayre’s decisive final gesture as author of the Bildungsroman is to
snap the lid shut.
228
III Atomic, Anomic Narration: the Arrested Development of
the Artist in Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Screenwriting a Broken Bildungsheld: the Künstler at the Movies
In the surreal finale of a fantastical short story entitled ‘The Diamond as Big
as the Ritz,’ written by Fitzgerald for the June 1922 issue of The Smart Set
periodical, the disillusioned protagonist, John Unger, declares to his beautiful,
diamonded companion that ‚Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of
chemical madness.‛ 139 The now orphaned, shellshocked heiress, Kismine
Washington – whose father’s illicit wealth has quite literally come crashing
down upon them with the full weight of an atomic bomb – peculiarly
exclaims, ‚How pleasant then to be insane!‛
Striding beyond the Jazz Age, past the interposition of the Depression and
World War II into an age lived under the mushroom cloud of atomic warfare,
we return to New York as the shellshocked site of a disgruntled heir of the
Fitzgeraldian Bildungsroman: Holden Caulfield of J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in
the Rye (1951). Like This Side of Paradise, Catcher is said to encapsulate and
reflect the values of the young generation of its era, yet retains universal
Bildungsroman qualities that have directly contributed to its ‚sustained
readership‛ to this day.140 Where the Fitzgeralds capitalized upon their own
imprimatur through the roman à clef, Salinger’s increasing distaste for public
life, and his decision to quit publishing after producing just four books,
139 F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,’ in ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ and
Other Stories (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1998), p. 35.
140 Stephen J. Whitfield, ‘Cherished and Cursed: Toward a Social History of The Catcher in the
Rye,’ The New England Quarterly vol. 70, no. 4 (December, 1997), pp. 567-8.
229
paradoxically amplified the commerciality and popularity of his works.141 The
novel signals an aesthetic retreat from the tendency toward roman à clef fiction
as the scaffolding for the white male Künstlerroman. Despite this ideological
difference between the self-promoting artist of the Roaring Twenties and the
reclusive artist at the onset of the McCarthyist Cold War years, Salinger once
again proposes a dislocated role for the American artist in self-imposed exile.
This novel continues the Fitzgeralds’ pattern of the ‚chemical madness‛ of
youth as a shattering, fragmented process of disillusionment in the bourgeois
rites of passage into adulthood. Observed within Michel Foucault’s theory of
discipline, Holden Caulfield, the Bildungsheld under consideration, indicates
tendencies of a ‚madman,‛ a ‚patient,‛ and a ‚schoolboy.‛142 As Stephen
Whitfield calculates, Holden uses ‚crazy,‛ ‚mad,‛ ‚madman,‛ and ‚insane‛
more than ‚fifty times,‛ far exceeding the idiomatic use of ‚phony‛ for which
the text is best remembered.143 Whether or not Holden is also a ‚condemned‛
young man, Foucault’s final signifier of the disciplined subject, remains to be
seen, a question I shall attend to in the second half of this section.
The alienation experienced by the anomic protagonist allegorically manifests
in the style and structure of Holden’s narration; the first half of this section
shall attend to alienation as a style of ‘screenwriting,’ the second half, to
structure. To construct the anomic narrator, Catcher features the succinct,
epistolary confessional of a young male patient ‚taking it easy‛ at some
undisclosed institution in the Mid-West. Holden speaks from a position more
proximate to California than the New York setting of his picaresque
141 David Shields and Shane Salerno (eds.), Salinger (New York and London: Simon and
Schuster, 2013), pp. xiii-viv.
142 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 200.
143Whitfield, ‘Cherished and Cursed,’ p. 570.
230
misadventures, and this relocation greatly important to the style of narration,
as I shall argue. The first person narration, featuring present and past tense,
adds a confessional element to the Bildungsroman scaffold, as suggested by
the implication of a narratee, a second agent to whom Holden directly
addresses his thoughts as ‚you.‛ An unclear motive drives his testimony;
however, logic implies that catharsis motorizes Holden’s all-too casual
chronicle.
Catcher’s relationship to the genre and to the wider novel form is highly
elasticized – adopting those generic liberties of Fitzgerald’s novels and setting
them to hyperdrive – absorbing and embodying many of the vernaculars and
rhetoric of popular youth culture. The novel begins as an unrepentant
testimonial, narrated in the present but set mainly in the past, colored by
vagueness and apathy. That famous opening line reads,
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want
to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like,
and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and
all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into
it, if you want to know the truth.144 [1]
This long opening sentence is rich in compounds and run-ons, yet it forms an
immobile, empty surface of encoded words. Holden’s narrative intention,
conscious or not, resists explanation through exposition; rather, the
protagonist demonstrates his character through his recollection of
unremarkable events. Holden’s refusal to plainly expose events of interest, or
provide useful information as to his character, sets the tone for a highly
144 J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1994), p. 1.
Subsequent references to page numbers hereafter cited in text for this current section.
231
rebellious narrative and an agonizing reading act that inflicts and performs
the self-same confusion and mistrust that characterize Holden.
‚To whom is Holden speaking?‛ 145 Perhaps the most obvious question
relating to Catcher remains the most unresolvable. Fred Marcus’ review in
1963 determined that the monologue addresses a reluctant reader, whose
walls Holden ‚needs to knock down‛ to escape his isolation through
communication. 146 More recently, and more compellingly, Pamela Hunt
Steinle suggests that Holden’s ambiguous address mocks the ‚ideal reader‛
of twentieth-century realism, undermining their training to assume details
will be given about family and position.147 Such assumptions are a lost cause,
she adds; this subversion of the traditional reading event symbolizes how
realist representations of the nuclear family and class structures were rapidly
dissolving, and more importantly, secularizing within popular and literary
culture.
Referencing Lewis’ seminal 1955 treaty for a ‚native American mythology‛ of
youth culture, The American Adam, Steinle reads Holden’s ‚statement of
introduction‛ as positioning himself ‚as a solitary individual in the Adamic
tradition’ in ‘contrast to the English literary tradition.‛ 148 Unlike Saul Bellow’s
Chicago Bildungsroman-picaresque The Adventures of Augie March, published
within a year of Catcher, we observe no equivalent declarations here that the
protagonist is ‚an American, [New York] born,‛ despite the obvious ‚free-
style‛ in which the protagonist determines to ‚make the record in my own
145 Fred H. Marcus, ‘The Catcher in the Rye: A Live Circuit,’ The English Journal vol. 52, no. 1
(Jan. 1963), p. 3.
146 Ibid.
147 Pamela Hunt Steinle, ‘The Catcher in the Rye as Postwar American Fable,’ in J. D. Salinger:
New Edition, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2008), p. 135.
148 Steinle, ‘Postwar American Fable,’ p. 135.
232
way.‛149 Yet the American brand of realism makes itself known at the level of
style, that is, in what I call Holden’s Hollywood-cinematic imagination.
Both Marcus’ and Steinle’s lines of criticism assume, perhaps incorrectly, that
Holden directly addresses a ‘literary’ readership. This assumption itself is
worth complicating at length. The novel’s intriguing opening immediately
designates a mood of suspicion, particularly regarding the novel’s apex event:
the impersonalized ‚it‛ that Holden believes the reader wishes to ‚hear‛
about; the reader can only assume that it must regard a nervous breakdown.
The narrator implies the narratee has already been informed of the main
event by some undisclosed source, but desires to hear it in Holden’s own
‘authentic’ words; this places the reader – who cannot possibly know what
the narratee has already heard – in a strange position of suspense.
By using the word ‚hear‛ rather than ‘read,’ the narration itself appeals to an
oral tradition, and a historical moment where regressive ‚traditional yarn-
spinning‛ meets the cinematic paradigm as opposed to a literary one, as
Jameson describes of the rise of pulp fiction and noir cinema. 150 Holden’s oral
gesture forms the first implication that this text determines to obey the edicts
of the spoken word and story-telling traditions, and not the realist written
tradition. Where I previously noted how Farrell’s protagonist, Studs Lonigan,
emulates the hard-boiled antiheroes of detective pulp and early noir as
149 The Adventures of Augie March begins: ‚I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that
somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in
my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so
innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way
to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.‛
Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March [c. 1953] (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 1.
150 Fredric Jameson, ‘The Synoptic Chandler,’ in Shades of Noir, ed. Joan Copjec (London:
Verso, 1993), pp. 35-6.
233
characterization, Salinger’s use of first person directly mimics this generic
récit at the level of style. Here, Jameson’s examination of the ‚voice-over‛ in
pulp and noir may assist in exposing how Salinger signals the omnipresence
of radio culture ‚as it resonates out into other genres and media‛ and
‚virtually disappear*s+.‛151 The value of traditional récit is itself undermined;
Holden pejoratively juxtaposes his narratorial faculties against the testimonial
plot of the Dickensian Bildungsroman, warning the reader that he is going to
be a ‘lousy’ Bildungsheld or protagonist if they approach his narrative with
such great expectations; he implies that this narrative event will not be
another ‚lousy‛ Bildungsroman, which ironically, it actually is.
Salinger’s recalcitrant use of youthful vernacular, combined with Holden’s
anti-generic declarations effectively, shatters the aura associated with the
Bildungsroman genre and literary tradition. At the same time, both Holden
and Salinger comment in unison on the possibility for personal authenticity in
the age of limitless reproducibility. This auretic worldview can be
summarized in Walter Benjamin’s concept of the aura in art in the machine
age:
[W]hat withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the
work of art is the latter’s aura. The process is symptomatic; its
significance extends far beyond the realm of art. It might be stated as a
general formula that the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced
object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating the work many times over,
it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence. And in permitting the
reproduction to reach the recipient in his or her own situation, it actualizes
that which is reproduced. These two processes lead to a massive
upheaval in the domain of objects handed down from the past – a
151 Jameson, ‘The Synoptic Chandler,’ pp. 35-6.
234
shattering of traditional which is the reverse side of the present crisis
and renewal of humanity.152
Benjamin goes on to argue that film is the most ‚powerful agent‛ of these two
processes of mass movement. Film as a medium may project positive
contributions to culture whilst retaining its ‚destructive, cathartic side.‛153
The very first page demonstrates Holden’s ‚shattering‛ position on this
‚powerful agent‛ that serves mass existence at the expense of the auretic
artwork:
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to
me. [1]
Holden certainly intuits the destructive facets of the ‚powerful agents‛ of
media, and makes this position crystalline. Holden metaphorizes his older
brother’s career as a Hollywood screenwriter as prostitution *1+; not like
prostitution, screenwriting is prostitution in Holden’s mind, a facilitator of
capitalist generic reproduction eroding the unreproducible aura of art.
Holden critiques a culture in which sexuality and creativity alike are not
intimate expressions of identity, but rather, crude commercial exchanges.
Hollywood leaches the authenticity of D.B.’s talent and art – the talent for
short stories that ‚killed‛ Holden when he was a ‚regular writer.‛ *1+ D.B. has
‚sold out.‛ [1]
No slim coincidence, here, that the career of Holden’s big brother D.B.
resembles that of Fitzgerald. For Salinger, the movies symbolize the arrival of
152 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Third
Version),’ in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W.
Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University
Press, 2003) p. 254.
153 Ibid.
235
late capitalism in America and disenchantment with realist and modernist
traditions of subjectivity – his ‚lousy‛ inheritance as the artist. ‚Prostitution‛
signifies Holden’s juvenile rationalization of capitalist mechanisms that
reduce great artists into ‚phonies.‛ The significance of this crystallizes in the
later New York chapter, when a naïve Holden inadvertently engages the
services of a prostitute, an accident that recalls the sexual impotence of
Amory Blaine’s own accidental excursion with a prostitute at the end of This
Side of Paradise. Holden proposes that lousy Dickensian literature doesn’t
‘work’ anymore after the irresistible contamination of the literary corpus by
the cinematic virus; ironically, he only proposes this through the ‘tough guy
language of the pulps and films of the 1940.
Like Ellison’s Invisible Man would depict only a year later, evoking an eerie
vision of racist ‚Hollywood ectoplasms‛ in the first sentence of his
narrative, 154 Holden’s disgust for the cinematic culture he unconsciously
mimics also serves as the very first personal detail he reveals about himself;
his tirade against the phoniness of culture parodies itself by the fact that his
speech act is inflected by the ‘voiceover’ effect. His belief in the virtue of
authenticity, his assault on realism as well as on cinematic mimesis, serves the
greater importance in this narrative than what his ‚lousy childhood was like,
and how my parents were occupied and all‛ *1+; Salinger positions this
upfront. Holden begins within the Erziehungsroman limits, explaining in a
similar fashion that he wishes to begin his narrative at school – in this case,
Pencey Prep.
You’ve probably seen the ads, anyway. They advertise in about a
thousand magazines, always showing some hot-shot guy on a horse
jumping over a fence. Like as if all you ever did at Pencey was play
154 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 7.
236
polo all the time. I never even once saw a horse anywhere near the
place. [1-2]
‚*G+uy,‛ ‚like as if‛, ‚about a thousand‛: Holden’s vernacular performs
language as it has been reshaped by mass communication and copy, implicit
in the style of prose as well as the content. Pencey Prep appears synonymic to
the St. Regis Prep school Amory Blaine attended in This Side of Paradise. At
this point, the mechanisms of capitalism encroach upon the realms of
education; in this case, the manipulations of advertising inescapably infiltrate
every level of American life. Interesting, the advertisement itself participates
in its own mutation of the Bildungsroman mechanisms: Holden condemns
how it feeds upon the viewers’ blind faith that expensive, private education
from an institution with a nineteenth century history of affirming pedagogical
traditions will somehow ‚mold boys into splendid, clear-thinking young
men‛ and successfully initiate them into adult society. ‚And I didn’t know
anybody there that was splendid and clear-thinking and all,‛ Holden narrates
in broken sentences. ‚Maybe two guys. If that many. And they probably came
to Pencey that way.‛ *2+
This situates Holden in the anti-pedagogical, vernacular-dependent tradition
of picaresque that originates with Twain. It also signifies that the text is aware
of its own nature as a generically cannibalistic text – understanding generic
cannibalism as Fredric Jameson defines it through the rhetoric of the a well-
edited pastiche: a conglomerate of recycled cultural influences, or ‚heaps of
fragments.‛155 Holden as a character already performs and accrues elements
of earlier Bildungsromans, at home and abroad.156 In terms of the elements of
155 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New
York: Verso, 1991), p. 25.
156 In addition to the ‚lousy‛ Dickens, Holden – a self-confessed ‚illiterate‛ who ‚read*s+ a
lot‛ *15+ – has read Out of Africa twice *16+, and claims to wants to ‚call up‛ Isak Dinesen on
237
generic pastiche at work, the novel interplays with a long history of American
Bildungsroman; but the blank historicism of the text itself sets Catcher apart
from its own historical moment. The text conceals any obvious outside to the
actions and mind of the protagonist, revealing few events of narrative
relevance beyond the immediate action – as one might expect of an action
sequence in a film. Indeed, what we learn of Holden’s own history, we learn
through his perspectives framed as ‘flashback’ sequences.
Holden’s infamous, seemingly idiosyncratic vernacular merely punctuates the
text’s cannibalistic absorption of the many phrases of cultural production, a
papier-mâché of different signs. His recycled vocabulary derives from all
forms of modern multimedia: fiction and nonfiction books, Broadway theatre,
film, advertisements, popular songs and radio plays; and also American
national cultural belief systems and mythologies – particularly, the evocation
of capitalist mythologies such as ‘the American Dream,’ and the typical rites
of passage for affluent white adolescents in the era of consumption and
suburbia.
Firstly, we recognize this in Holden’s peculiar echolalia of words such as
ostracism, a concept fresh out of a SAT history textbook and foreign to his
vernacular. His idiosyncratic vernacular otherwise mimics pop-cultural
phrases not of his invention, such as ‚phony,‛ ‚it kills me,‛ ‚like hell,‛ or
even calling people ‚Old Phoebe‛ or ‚Old Maurice‛; without self-reflection,
he admits at another point that the ‚Old Sport‛ motif from Gatsby ‚killed
[him].‛ *127] Moreover, Holden’s language adapts its dialogue to his different
audiences: whether adult, young male, or young female, or child, and their
the telephone to discuss it; on the other hand, he says he certainly does not want to call up W.
Somerset Maugham to discuss Of Human Bondage, despite his admiration; in another remark,
he declares that he wants to get close to Thomas Hardy’s Eustacia Vye of The Return of the
Native. [16]
238
occupation within the division of labor. He speaks an evolved, but
‘unsivilized’ language, to paraphrase Huck Finn. Huck’s language reflected
the vernacular of an undereducated working class second generation Irish
boy with a sharp wit; whereas, the ‘unsivilized’ phonology of Holden’s
monologic narration grates against the expected elocution of a well-educated,
affluent sixteen year old boy with an aptitude for English literature and
creative writing. Holden’s address, however, upholds the verbal play we
might expect from a character whose linguistic identity shapes itself around
the unconscious absorption of the rhetoric of Hollywood youth culture and an
administered society.
Holden’s entire narration, therefore, is proof of what he claims to despise:
phonyism, the inauthentic, the superficial, the unreal. For all his juvenilia,
Holden’s sentiment echoes that of Adorno and Horkheimer, for whom the
‚real life‛ in the postwar was ‚becoming indistinguishable from the movies.
The sound film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for
imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to
respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail
without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to
equate it directly with reality.‛157
Writing Behind the Screen: Salinger’s Künstlerroman as Prison
(Screen)Writing
157 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming
(London: Verso, 2010), p. 126.
239
From what sociopolitical ‚reality‛ did the flickers misdirect the young
audience’s attention? What pure wish-fulfilment of individual rebellion did
the movies of the 1940s and 50s provide for their viewers?
One answer arises from the playful riff when Holden declares his admiration
for ‚Old Gatsby,‛ at which point the young narrator digresses with sudden
wild provocation: ‚Anyway, I’m sort of glad they’ve got the atomic bomb
invented. If there’s ever another war, I’m going to sit the hell on top of it. I’ll
volunteer for it, I swear to God I will.‛ *127+ Replanting this admission into a
broader conversation with Holden’s patterns of interjections, the narrator’s
sudden ultraviolent and at times suicidal overreactions, Gerald Vizenor traces
a ‚shocking message‛ in the ‚terroristic mentality‛ of Holden’s sporadic
outbursts; Salinger’s dangerous vision remediates in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove
(1964), in which Major King Kong leaving behind the pages of Playboy ‚to
arming the bombs to the orgasmic launch and ride on one bomb to the
death.‛158 Alan Nadel likewise argues that Holden falls victim to the logic of
his own ‚political unconscious‛: he ‚*dons+ his red hunting hat‛ and
‚attempts to become the good Red-hunter, ferreting out the phonies and
subversives, but in so doing he emulates the bad Red-hunters, those who
have corrupted the conditions of utterance such that speech itself is corrupt.
Speech, like veracity, like the Soviets, like atomic power, has a dual nature,
one that implicates the speaker equally with the spoken, allowing only a
religious resolution to the closeted life of containment and the web of
contradictions that makes it impossible to keep the narrative straight.‛159
158 Takayuki Tasumi, ‘Total Apocalypse, Total Survivance: Nuclear Literature and/or Literary
Nucleus – Melville, Salinger, Vizenor,’ in Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, ed. Gerald
Vizenor (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), p. 191.
159 Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995) p. 71.
240
These readings speak to the bipolarity that characterized the American
climate after the exit from the World War, the conditions under which the
novel was written. Jonah Raskin describes how the feeling of ‚euphoria and
liberation among writers and intellectuals as well as in the population as a
whole‛ soon gave way to dark disillusionment. If the atomic end of the war
had brought home the troops (including Sergeant Salinger), reunited families,
and lifted overt U.S. government censorship, this utopian ‚promise of peace
and prosperity‛ succumbed to grim realization: ‚that the bombs dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only had ended the war but also had ushered in
a new and frightening era. The horrors of the German concentration camps
were revealed. The Iron Curtain descended on Europe and the Cold War
began.‛ More ‚aware of the dark side of the postwar era and the dark side of
humanity,‛ artists found transformative means to reflect this darkened mood.
The Cold War ‚was the era of the noir novel and film noir. Behind the calm
exterior, the house beautiful and the happy family, there was anxiety,
paranoia, restlessness.‛160 The cultural community of Salinger’s New York
was characterized by (not unfounded) paranoia regarding censorship: the
‚U.S. government‛ from ‚State Department to Congress‛ considered ‚writers
as dangerous‛; ‚Hollywood directors and screenwriters were jailed‛; artists
of all disciplines were investigated, detained, even imprisoned by the FBI.161
Salinger reflects this dangerous political mood in an allegorical, and I argue,
deliberately discreet way. Holden’s rebellion is symptomatic of a ‚fifties‛
culture that collapses ‚genuine rebellion, with genuine violence and genuine
consequences‛ upon ‚the romantic representations of such a rebellion,‛ as
160 Jonah Raskin, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation
(Berkeley, L.A., and London: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 3-4.
161 Raskin, American Scream, p. 5.
241
Jameson describes it, typified in the films of Marlon Brando or James Dean.162
Holden’s atypical reactions to events, given his current institutionalization,
appear symptomatic of his depression and ‚craziness,‛ in his own words; yet
they signify a symptomatic aesthetic where reality and unreality are called
into question, and where ‘truth’ is always encoded and must be sought out
and observed under a spyglass. In an overall character analysis, seemingly
throwaway admissions such as, ‚Almost every time somebody gives me a
present, it ends up making me sad,‛ [46] demonstrate a functional
disconnection in Holden’s adolescent chemical makeup, but also the makeup
of the novel form and Salinger’s society, a culture spellbound with
‚mesmerized fascination in lavish images of specific generational pasts‛ at
large, to apply Jameson’s illustration.163
Holden’s displays of contrarian dissent have largely contributed to the
novel’s enduring popularity in youth culture. However, for one unalienable
reason, Holden’s position separates him from that of the typically atypical
teenager: he is detained at some sort of medical facility during an era that
marked the high-water point of the institutionalization and medicalization of
difference and dissent. In this respect, Holden’s rebellious style and attitude
of narration echoes against the literary climate of more overtly radical texts,
such as Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1955). As the novel progresses, scores of
pessimistic generalizations saturate the narrative to bursting point: from
‚People never notice anything,‛ [8] ‚People always clap for the wrong
things,‛ [77] ‚People are always ruining things for you,‛ [79] ‚Goddamn
money. It always ends up making you feel blue as hell,‛ *102+ progressing to
more clearly paranoid observations, such as ‚when you're not looking,
somebody'll sneak up and write ‘Fuck you’ right under your nose.‛ [183]
162 Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 291.
163 Ibid., p. 296.
242
Holden’s plenary displays of disillusionment, agitation, and ultimate
rebellion against the closing-in of a dually ‚phony‛ and violent adult surface
culture have culminated in an implied nervous breakdown; or if we indulge
Tasumi’s argument, perhaps a radical, or ‚terroristic‛ outburst.164 Différance
once again becomes the object of our analysis in a very immediate way;
martyring himself through self-destruction, Holden attempts to separate and
differentiate himself from the hordes of other teenager peers following the
quotidian path to maturity: SAT graduation, college, career, marriage, and
parenthood. These are the rites of passage Sally Hayes substantiates as the
bare minimum necessary in order to accrue enough wealth to ‚survive‛
urban life. [118-9] Holden regrets asking Sally to run away with him to an
obscure life somewhere on the fringes of society, ‚somewhere with a brook
and all,‛ tantamount to Huck Finn’s adventure down the Mississippi. He
can’t understand Sally’s strong unwillingness to reject city life; the
disconnection between them forms a technological disconnection, comparable
to Holden’s many abortive payphone conversations, in which Sally telling
him to ‚stop screaming at me,‛ which Holden tells the narratee ‚was crap,
because I wasn’t even screaming at her.‛ [119] The reader wonders: was
Holden screaming then, just not at her? Perhaps howling against the
bureaucratization of American life, like Ginsberg and the Beat writers?
Moments later, his screams juxtapose against whispers; Sally says, ‚I can’t
hear you. One minute you scream at me, the next you –‚ He then recalls his
following interjection:
‚I said no, there wouldn’t be marvellous places to go after I went to
college and all. Open your ears. It’d be entirely different. We’d have to
go downstairs in elevators with suitcases and stuff. We’d have to
164 Tasumi, ‘Total Apocalypse,’ p. 191.
243
phone up everybody and tell ‘em good-by and send ‘em postcards
from hotels and all.‛ [119]
Despite what he sees as his reasonable request, Sally’s continuing disapproval
of his celluloid dream of exile and rebellion leads him swear at her, ‚You give
me a royal pain in the ass, if you want to know the truth.‛ Apparently, Sally
does not want to hear the truth, as Holden describes how she ‚hit the ceiling‛
until he apologized enough times that he actually began to ‚feel sort of sorry I
said it.‛ The narrator reflects upon his past self, laughing uncontrollably at
her with a ‚loud, stupid laugh,‛ which if he ‚ever sat behind myself in a
movie or something, I’d probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up.‛
*120+ ‚What a goddamn fool I was,‛ he sadly tells the narratee. [119]
From the outset, Holden announces that his narrative pertains to his secret
mental breakdown that ‚everybody‛ already seems to know about except the
reader, and the subsequent deferral of his maturation course. The entire novel
is structured as a deferral from actualizing the breakdown itself as the novel’s
climax; however, his flashbacks that return to these smaller outbursts create
small pockets of emotional intensity as outlets of his undisclosed breakdown.
As impotent and ambiguous as its sexually abstruse protagonist, the novel
contains no climax; the narrative structure performs the very definition of
ambivalence. The disjointed but vaguely cyclical structure produces an
affective discord between the tone of the present tense narrator and the
emotional volatility of his past tense self. No subjective contiguity exists
between these two selves; the emotional chasm between the narrator and his
past self widens as the novel progresses, detailing the course of the two days
the narrator wishes to reflect upon in his confessional.
Holden’s frame narrative therefore indicates his nature as an enframed
protagonist, a picaro of ennui, of stasis. Unlike the Twainean picaresque
244
tradition, Holden can’t escape down the river: he has been confined within a
strictly regulated institution, from where he narrates at either end of the
novel. The narrator tells the narratee through implication that he is currently
recovering from tuberculosis, implying that his ‚sickness‛ and quarantine is
medical. However, he undermines this implication in his continual
demonstration and even assertion of unreliability; the third chapter begins
with the confession (or perhaps decoy) that he is ‚the most terrific liar you
ever saw in your life.‛ *14]
Countless readers perforce have recognized that Holden Caulfield is an
unreliable narrator. A far smaller assembly of scholars have antithetically
read Holden’s private narration as an intimation between the narrator and the
narratee, or what Michael Cowen designates as the ideal ‚nominal audience‛:
the ‚you‛ that is ‚inscribed by Holden himself.‛ 165 Reading Holden’s
proclivity for creative fabrication as belonging to ‚the narrative past‛ no
longer relevant to the altered narrator, Cowan argues that ‚we need not
assume that, as a confused adolescent, he has the intelligence, insight, or
wisdom to tell his ideal audience everything it (or the reader) might want to
know about him and his experiences.‛ 166 Such an argument productively
rejects narrative stasis, in characterizing Holden through the segmentation of
the past and present; the past tense serves a ‚museum‛ function in its
relationship to the narratee, where events are encapsulated and memorialized
to be drawn upon by later audiences.
However, Cowan’s argument oversimplifies and underestimates Holden’s
faculties as narrator; firstly, by watering down his unreliability as the logic of
165 Michael Cowan, ‘Holden’s Museum Pieces: Narrator and Nominal Audience in The Catcher
in the Rye,’ in New Essays on The Catcher in the Rye, ed. Jack Salzman (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), p. 40.
166 Cowan, ‘Holden’s Museum Pieces,’ p. 43.
245
a ‘mere adolescent’; and secondly, by assuming that some sort of mutual trust
implicitly exists between narrator and narratee. Holden may be unaware of
the generic specificities of the Bildungsroman in which he performs the
central role, which would account for his inability to live up to generic
expectations; but he consistently demonstrates his lucid awareness of exactly
what his ideal audience wants to know about him, and in various ways,
refuses to gratify them. The details of his family history, including the death
of his brother, and the events of his own breakdown – the narrator
intentionally diverts, avoids, and rejects the narratee’s desires, and the entire
exposition of the narrative enmeshes seemingly random and irrelevant
anecdotes about society and the popular culture. Rather than reduce Holden’s
pastiche to an unfocused storyteller who doesn’t know how to narrate, I
suggest that the narrator reveals a different motive at several moments: the
fear of exposure so wholly at odds with the Bildungsroman tradition as the
individual’s testimonial ‘record of youth,’ or ‘history of the young man.’
Despite his ineloquence, this may not be Holden’s first ‘version’ of events, but
rather, an edited version that carefully redacts any admissions that may be
considered more incriminating than what surfaces on the page.
This novel clearly demonstrates a case in which the narratee and the reader
are not one in the same. With a narratee kept deliberately in the dark by its
narrator, and a highly reticent authorial position leaving no clues as to his
intention, the reader is forced into a detective role associated with the reading
of pulp fiction or crime noir film, in which they must actively fill in the blanks
in order to find meaning in the events. The reader cannot believe one way or
another whether what Holden narrates the ‘truthful’ version of events, as he
is a self-confessed pathological liar uncomfortably situated in a culture in
which the ‘authentic’ self is no longer relevant. Holden’s unreliability
problematizes concepts of authenticity in both realist literature, popular
246
culture, and in post-war life. The closer we read into this notion, the further
the verisimilitude of the novel form unravels.
Any justification for misleading or lying to the narratee remains unclear. The
wider structure of the narrative points to its elliptical habits of avoidance. In a
lucid but guarded epilogue (the half-page Chapter 26, a meagre twenty-four
lines in length), the narrator warns the narratee:
That’s all I’m going to tell about. I could probably tell you what I did
after I went home, and how I got sick and all, and what school I’m
supposed to go to next fall, after I get out of here, but I don’t feel like
it. I really don’t. That stuff doesn’t interest me too much right now.
[192]
Despite implying that he’s under observation for tuberculosis at the very
beginning of the novel, [4] Holden now – at the very end – lets slip that he is
under psychiatric evaluation by a team of psychoanalysts, who have
determined that he will be return to school next September. [192] That Holden
is ‚sorry I told so many people about it‛ [192] implies a mutiny amongst his
confidantes leading to his institutionalization, which would reasonably
account for his mistrust and an avoidance of going into details about the
redacted event. It becomes obvious from this miniature chapter that Holden
erects a fearful barrier between the narrator and the reader; that he has said
‚too‛ much implies he has already been punished by some structural force for
an earlier version of events, meaning that the version the reader has received
may not be the authentic account. Yes, as Cowley suggests, Holden is clearly
more candid in the admissions he makes to the narratee than say he would
make to Ackley, or Stradlater; however, his vagueness demonstrates
problematic ambivalence of meaning in the conclusion of the novel which
must be considered.
247
Holden’s institutionalization may also be read as remedial to the ‘condition’
of Holden’s private sexuality, for instance, or as Duane Edwards suggests,
‚latent homosexuality,‛ which was certainly one of the major causes of
institutionalization and ‘treatment’ in that era, and which implies that all the
passages in which Holden sexualizes the female body reveal themselves must
be deliberately misdirected or encoded. 167 Either way, Holden serves his
sentence in the most extreme social extrication all for allowing people into his
version of his personal breakdown: he has been forced into psychiatric care,
institutionalized, stigmatized, alienated for revealing too much of his
‘Bildungsroman,’ in other words.
This alienation crystallizes when Holden’s Hollywood writer ‘big-shot’
brother, D.B., brings an ‚English babe‛ actress along to visit at the hospital. It
is a seemingly passing incident; no significant reading of it stands out in all
the litany of Salingerian scholarship. However, within these three lines, one
faint but most vital clue exposes how this institution of rest must be read as a
social quarantine rather than some sort of homeopathic asylum:
She was pretty affected, but very good-looking. Anyway, one time
when she went to the ladies’ room way the hell down in the other
wing, D.B. asked me what I thought about all this stuff I just finished
telling you about. [192]
‚Affected‛ strikes me as a peculiar word choice, markedly pathological
against the thirty-three of the more childlike option of ‚phony‛ in the 191
pages leading up to this conclusion. In this, the only use of the word in the
entire novel, ‚affected‛ may mean ‘elevated’ or ‘pretentious,’ possibly even as
‘artificial’ or ‘inauthentic’ upon its first reading; yet, given its peculiar
167 Duane Edwards, ‘Holden Caulfield: ‚Don’t Ever Tell Anybody Anything,’ ELH vol. 44, no.
3 (Autumn, 1997), p. 559.
248
supplementation of Holden’s catchphrase ‘phony,’ it may also be more
significantly read as ‘disturbed.’
The objective of Holden’s narration until this point has been to ‘perform’
language in order to survive or ‚stay alive‛: such as the statement, ‚I am
always saying ‘Glad to've met you’ to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If
you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.‛ [79] This could be
a casual if hyperbolic expression of what it means to stay socially viable in
consumer driven culture; but upon second reading, an existential dilemma
emerges in which social mores – the cornerstones of ‘civilized’ society – and
mortality somehow become mutually equated in Holden’s logic. Yet again, a
seemingly passing admission reveals it deeply suspicious underbelly, and this
ambivalence of meaning speaks of a trend in which Holden’s seemingly
conversational and frank admissions, hyperboles, and generalizations, are
saturated with paranoid morbidity in their undertones.
The asylum as a positive site of healing transfigures into a purgatory
establishment of homogenization and social acclimatization in which people
say the ‘right’ things in order to ‚stay alive.‛ The disaffected, noncommittal
tone of his narration reflects that his period of ‚taking it easy‛ is a veritable
imprisonment, a punishment for his state of mental disease (in one sense, or
the other); his ambivalent tone is therefore something of a weapon of self-
defence against the incrimination caused by admitting to anything. By the
end of the novel, Holden resumes a passive position within the theatre of a
deceptive role-play – the kind of two-dimensional Hollywood act he despises
– of acting ‘normal’ so he can ‚get out of here‛ on schedule. To some extent,
this normalcy internalizes; his admission that ‚I don’t know what the hell to
say. If you want to know the truth, I don’t know what I think about it‛
suggests that his instincts for morality and reality are now both skewed past
the point where he can commit to any black-and-white sense of right or
249
wrong, true or false, real or unreal. If this is the final artistic statement of his
Künstlerroman, Holden’s inability to ‚say‛ anything and finish his narrative
also signifies the Bildungsroman’s inefficiency at conveying truth or meaning
in the wake of postmodernity.
The famous, melancholic last two lines affirm his enforced alienation: ‚Don’t
ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.‛ *192+
The underlying double meaning here becomes muddled by the ambiguous
tone of narration, which could be read as the normal bleakly humorous
bemoaning characteristic of the adolescent Holden; or it could be a very lucid,
earnest caveat to keep oneself guarded, and one’s authentic narrative private,
in a conspicuous public age in which differentiation, individualism, and most
importantly dissent from the normative meet a policy of zero tolerance. In his
utter alienation from the ‘normal’ world, Holden admits that he has started
‚missing everybody,‛ even people he spent a large majority of the novel
saying he despised or disliked. This isolated last chapter, saturated with
loneliness, falls chronologically out of place, replacing what we generically
expect should have been either initiation into society or the mental
breakdown itself.
Regardless of whether or not Holden lies or misleads the reader regarding the
majority narrative events, hidden beneath a ‘mask’ of mass-cultural
adolescence – and whether or not he lies to either the narratee, to himself, or
indeed, to protect the narrative from some omnipotent or authoritative
external monitor – the seed of mistrust already infects our ability to read his
narrative as congruous, transfiguring the ideological intentions lodged at the
Bildungsroman’s generic core. By achieving this unusual paranoia in the
relationship between protagonist and reader, Holden’s unreliability teases the
reader in a specific way: to generate mistrust, suspicion, confusion, paranoia,
differentiating the text from its bourgeois form, which should be harmonious
250
in its resolution, predictable, plot-driven, and generically formulaic in
content. With a generically lawless, unreliable narrator, the reading act itself
becomes politically complicit with the paranoia of identity surrounding the
atomic threat, and the subsequent McCarthyist communist witch-hunts.
Salinger’s picaresque of Cold War New York converts into a McCarthyian
Panopticon, in the Foucauldian sense:
All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and
to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a
worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe
from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small
captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many
cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly
individualized and constantly visible.168
Holden speaks to a narratee placed as the ‚supervisor‛ in the central tower of
the narration, overseeing this madman-patient-schoolboy. Holden’s anomic
narration functions as a self-internalized panopticism in which narratorial
admissions must not be taken at face value. In his preamble to the theory of
the Panopticon, Foucault discusses the theory of power mechanisms in times
of plague:
This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the
individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest
movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which
an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in
which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous
hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located,
examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the
168 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 200.
251
dead – all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary
mechanism.169
Foucault’s model captures the symbolic system that upholds Catcher in form
and content. The anomic narration of this Künstlerroman proves unreliable
because it is a ‚supervised‛ written recording to be examined by disciplinary
mechanisms, in which ‚all events are recorded.‛ However, this process is not
necessarily a harmonious recording. The true meaning of the narrator’s
experience and the text itself lies beneath this monitored surface – lies to be
read here in both senses of the word. Holden’s episodic, fragmented style of
narration, which jumps back and forth between the past and present tense,
threading together seemingly random memories, attests to his method of
aversion. The reader must rely upon their own interpretations to make sense
and meaning of the events and commentary placed before them.
Thus, Holden’s unreliability as a Bildungsheld serves as commentary on the
limitations of realism, problematizing the traditional hierarchy in the
relationship between narrator, author, and reader. For the Bildungsroman,
maturation itself is held in a state of suspension. Holden remains defiantly
ambiguous to the last, and whether the completion of the narrative signifies
an act of great courage or one of great fear for the young Künstler, he refuses
to discuss what would be of greatest interest to the reader in the traditional
reading act: the revelation of causation, some sort of pseudo-psychoanalysis
or pathologization of the protagonist. The traditional, safe narrative structures
break down, leaving the reader with an institutionalized, disaffected
protagonist who, in his own words, does not ‚know what the hell to say‛ or
‚know what I think about it‛; who, in true defeatist McCarthyian paranoia, is
‚sorry I told so many people about it.‛ Throughout the narrative, Holden
169 Foucault, Discipline, p. 197.
252
gives account after account of whatever trivial memories, opinions, or
whatever improvisational anecdotes come to his mind; yet he remains unable
to articulate the larger difficulties of adulthood to the last. The narrative itself,
the Bildungsroman, performs a ‘cathartic’ end, in one cruel sense of the word:
the act of narration becomes a closed asylum in and of itself; meaning in art is
confined and closed-off. The ‚effect of backlighting‛ behind Salinger’s
solipsistic Bildungsheld may appear captivating, notwithstanding, it is only
one of ‚so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone,
perfectly individualized and constantly visible.‛170
IV A Broken Record of Youth: High Fidelity, the Fate Motif,
and the Stylistic Education of the Late Harlem Musician in
Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)
Harlem Is Nowhere: The Bildung Tradition as a Dystopian Blueprint
One of Ralph Ellison’s great critical influences, Kenneth Burke, was perhaps
the first to situate Invisible Man (1952) as an ‚epoch-making‛ Bildungsroman
in the tradition of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister prototype, conducting a
comparative plot analysis in one letter to the author.171 Ellison’s masterwork,
broadly speaking, certainly concerns a young man’s pedagogical education in
170 Foucault, Discipline, p. 200.
171 Kenneth Burke, ‘Ralph Ellison’s Trueblooded Bildungsroman,’ in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible
Man: A Casebook, ed. John F. Callahan (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2004),
pp. 65-79.
253
a Booker T. Washington South (Erziehungsroman); and his sociopolitical
growth as both a factory worker and as a political agitator for a thinly veiled
version of the Communist Party, the Brotherhood, in Harlem
(Entwicklungsroman).
However, Fate each time intervenes in the pathways that a Bildungsroman
plot must follow: efficacious education, professional development, and the
eventual coalesce between the individual and the social demands expected of
them, symbolized by marriage as the reproductive institution of bourgeois
society. Instead, Invisible Man is expelled from college for inadvertently
exposing to the white patron, Mr Norton, the dark underbelly of the Booker
T. Washington system: Jim Trueblood’s vernacularized tale of how he raped
his daughter. In Harlem, Invisible Man’s letters of recommendation from Dr
Bledsoe, who expelled him on account of ‘radical tendencies,’ are found to
contain disparaging slander. Invisible Man’s employment in a paint factory
renowned for its idiomatic shade of Optic White, white potently offset by
globule of black paint, is cut short when he is attacked by the foreman, who
suspects Invisible Man he is either a ‘scab’ or a union spy. Invisible Man is
hospitalized, where a simulated lobotomy is performed upon him. He
fortuitously joins a political party called the Brotherhood (equivalent to the
social chapter into which Wilhelm Meister is folded). After a long series of
obstacles, chase scenes, internal party conflicts, and even sexual
misadventures that ‚seem to conspire to ‘Keep This Nigger-Boy Running,‛ 172
Invisible Man’s time within the Brotherhood ends with him fleeing from a
full-scale race riot in Harlem.
172 Daryl Cumber Dance, Long Gone: The Mecklenburg Six and the Theme of Escape in Black
Folklore (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1987), p. 4.
254
In nuce: the motif of Fate repeatedly rises up to displace the Bildungsroman’s
ideological function to unify the subject and his society. Ellison builds upon a
long running bassline of exclusion for black male writers on the run from the
laws of genre: Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, William Wells Brown,
James Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver and countless figures of black folklore
engage with this ‚dilemma of the man on the run.‛173 Yet to inspect Ellison’s
use of style, the great overlooked gesture and motif of the narrative is the
stabilization of the Bildungsroman through Invisible Man’s true artistic
development not only as a storyteller, but furthermore as critic of music,
culture, and society.
In Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man, a utopian fantasy
connects the dialectic of Bildung in a harmonious interplay of self and society:
‚Though need may drive Man into society, and Reason implant social
principles in him, Beauty alone can confer on him a social character. Taste
alone brings harmony into society, because it establishes harmony in the
individual.‛174 Ellison looks back to the self-determination we might find in
Wilhelm Meister, certainly as a means of reimagining the classical
Bildungsroman’s utopian desire.
Yet what Ellison finds, in translating this aspiration to the mid-twentieth
century American scene, is that this genre still disavows the young black
man’s participation at every level, and therefore requires radical attunement.
If Schiller’s attempts to advent a ‚social society‛ requires the ‚spontaneous‛
dialectic of ‚beauty,‛ ‚play,‛ and ‚art‛ against the ‚great, alienated social
mechanisms,‛ Moretti extrapolates that in order ‚to bring harmony ‘to the
individual and to society,’‛ aesthetic education follows a more ‚indirect,‛
173 Ibid.
174 Moretti, The Way of the World, p. 32.
255
‚elusive,‛ indeed, ‚non-confrontational‛ strategy by creating a ‚new realm of
existence in which those abstract and deforming forces penetrate less
violently, and can be reconstituted in syntony with the individual aspiration
toward harmony.‛175 Critiquing Schiller’s doctrine of aesthetic self-cultivation,
Moretti fashions the following caveat: that whenever one deals with the
question of utopias, one must always consider ‚where exactly is the realm of
aesthetic harmony to be located? Furthermore, which aspects of modern life
has it effectively involved and organized?‛176
Prior to publishing Invisible Man, Ellison had already answered the question
posed here by Moretti, as it relates to the American milieu; his solution was
certainly not elusive or non-confrontational: ‘Harlem Is Nowhere,’ suggests
the paradoxical title of an Ellison essay, dated 1948. 177 He channels the
predicament of Gertrude Stein, who upon recalling her childhood home in
Oakland, California, uncovers that the address ‚that is like an identity a thing
that is so much a thing that it could not ever be any other thing‛ is no longer
‚there‛ except in an eroding memory.178 ‚To live in Harlem,‛ Ellison declares,
‚is to dwell in the very bowels of the city; it is to pass a labyrinthine existence
among streets that explode monotonously skyward with spires and crosses of
churches and clutter under foot with garbage and decay.‛179 The essay evinces
what Barbara Foley demonstrates as Ellison’s increasing attempt to distance
himself from the radical left of his professional youth, by claiming artistic
fidelity to the aesthetic formalism he would be remembered for in Invisible
175 Ibid.
176 Ibid.
177 Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), p. 294.
178 Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1993), p. 73.
179 Ibid., p. 295.
256
Man.180 Harlem, now past the creative height of its Renaissance epoch in the
1920s and 30s that had fashioned time and place into the cultural utopia of
black creativity, ‚is a ruin‛ both spatially and conceptually for the Janus-faced
Ellison by 1948. 181 Invisible Man is the product of this ‘nowhere,’ where
Harlem stands as only the ‚scene and symbol‛ of the African American’s
psychic and physical ‚perpetual alienation in the land of his birth.‛182
What does it mean to come of age, then, to develop as an artist, in cultural
dystopia? If there is ‚nowhere‛ and ‚no one‛ there, how does the
Bildungsroman, or art more generally, come into being; how does it survive
the decentralization of the subject? What meaning can be produced within the
vicinity in which ‚the major energy of the imagination goes not into creating
works of art, but to overcome the frustrations of social discrimination?‛183
The style of Invisible Man serves as the blueprint for answering Ellison’s
question, even if the irresolvable plot of its Bildungsroman only serves to
180 Since Ellison’s death in 1994, Barbara Foley has made the most extensive attempt to
historicize and complicate Ellison’s political reversal by 1952 by ‚demonstrating that Ellison’s
masterwork emerged only after a protracted, and torturous, wrestling down of his former
political radicalism.‛ *Foley, Wrestling, p. 3+ Investigating his ‚vast archive‛ of published and
unpublished manuscripts, she ‚reads forward‛ to Invisible Man via his early writings,
particularly his three dozen pieces of journalistic and critical work for the Federal Writers
Project, New Masses, and Negro Quarterly prior to 1946, as well as the extensive drafts and
revisions of Invisible Man itself which demonstrate how the author and publishers expunged
much of his radical leftist ideology. This give a very different account of the author’s
ideologically pressurized development and the ‘final’ product that is Invisible Man than
Ellison himself presented during the nation’s anticommunist political atmosphere and
literary market forces of Cold War America. Barbara Foley, Wrestling with the Left: The Making
of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 69-70.
181 Ellison, Shadow and Act, p. 295.
182 Ellison, Shadow and Act, p. 296.
183 Ibid., p. 297.
257
inflame it. As discussed in Chapter One, Richard Wright’s solution to the
exclusion of black representation was to blaze an avenue of protest under the
‘shocking’ auspices of naturalism, shifting the Bildungsroman’s inherent
bourgeois ideology onto the class of the proletariat as a political and aesthetic
tour de force. As Jed Esty evaluates, the chronotope of ‚national Bildung‛
waned towards the end of the Victorian era, dividing the ideological and
formal operations of the Bildungsroman between either: ‚*n+aturalist fate,‛
the ‚grim solution to the narrative problem‛; or ‚the modernist figure of
unseasonable youth,‛ a figure that vouchsafes the ‚secular historicism at the
core of the modern novel yet unsettles the protocols of a genre that can no
longer restrict the story of progress to the symbolic confines of the nation-
state.‛184
Invisible Man, Ellison’s only published novel during his lifetime, stands
between these two categorical valences of the Bildungsroman; however,
Ellison engages the aesthetic dilemma of black representation within the
symbolic nation-state of America by shifting the Bildungsroman’s emphasis
on the self-evident visuality of selfhood to the more ambiguous sounds of
individuality. If only the white male could uphold the role of heroic
protagonist, an exclusion leading to the ‚grim solution‛ of naturalism for
writers such as Wright, conjoining modernism’s ‚unseasonable figure of
youth‛ and the musical subject served as another viable possibility for artists
such as Ellison to reconfigure this American double standard of
representation.
What I will presently establish as Ellison’s musical stylistic ‘solution’ to the
systemic problem of the novel (in particular, the Bildungsroman) was not a
184 Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (Oxford
Scholarship Online, 2011), p. 26.
258
simple disavowal of naturalism and the overtly partisan protest novel; rather,
it was his attempt to improve or improvise upon the manner in which the
protest novel subordinated the individual to the political, as he saw it. As
Paul Allen Anderson compellingly argues, Ellison, drawing upon his
education as a classically trained musician, listened to musicians such as
Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker and observed not celebrities appeasing
the consumer demands of white capitalism, but cultural leaders who
possessed a powerful and direct earpiece to all Americans through the
technologies of new media.185 Certainly, as Armstrong appears in Invisible
Man, these musical artists might not perceive themselves as invisible political
agents; what the narrator emphasizes in the prologue is the susceptibility of
the individual listener to fetishistic practices of what Theodor Adorno calls
‚regressive listening.‛186 The reader, the listener, must be retrained to hear the
political and historical unconsciousness of their music; and the author must
learn to harness the democratic power made available through new media.
The racial segregation of classical, jazz, and ‘popular’ music meant that even
such freedom as a ‘new’ musical subject could allow still had its limitations
and generic expectations; this point is made most obvious when a mystified
Invisible Man arrives in Harlem only to be told by a white peer, fittingly
named Emerson, that ‚*w+ith us it’s still Jim and Huck Finn. A number of my
friends are jazz musicians and I’ve been around. I know the conditions under
which you live.‛ 187 *154+ Ellison’s first person sounding-board therefore
complicates the Bildungsroman’s generic inefficiencies by drawing all its 185 Paul Allen Anderson, ‘Ellison’s Music Lesson,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison,
ed. Ross Posnock (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 82-3.
186 Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein
(London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 46.
187 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 154.
Subsequent references to page numbers hereafter cited in text for this current section.
259
meaning into this systemic social failure: how can a young black man perform
the role of Huck, and not the infantilized Jim, or worse, the Bigger Thomas
‚spook‛ and ‚Hollywood ectoplasm‛ that he has always been cast to play,
when his existence is still overshadowed by the spectres of slavery? How can
a Bildungsheld move past the predetermined ‘fate’ of race in recording the
history of the young man?
Like Catcher in the Rye, Invisible Man begins and ends with ‚the end‛ in medias
res, an unresolvable cadence; the reader, trained in generic cues, knows in
advance where the plot must head in a Bildungsroman, and Invisible Man
parodies this expectation by cutting straight to the chase: ‚Here, at least, I
could try to think things out in peace, or, if not in peace, in quiet *<+ The end
was in the beginning.‛ *460+ This novel is an elliptical record of youth,
Invisible Man here implies. Any variation cannot be spontaneous or original,
exposing the Bildungsroman’s inherent farce of individual self-determination,
and its concept of maturation as linear and finite. At the same time, as Buelle
notes, Invisible Man has positioned himself as Huck Finn, an intimate, first
person record of youth which ends in the beginning: ‚I been there before.‛188
These mid-century New York Künstlerromans therefore demonstrate the
American tendency towards what Franco Moretti describes as increasing
generic approximation,189 particularly as regards the development of the artist
novel, only insofar as they inevitably return to the wellspring of the genre’s
American origins. However, I resituate Ellison’s achievement as sublated
generic ‘improvisation,’ where he plays on the dual literary and musical
association of free expression; parodic improvisation, for Ellison, incurs both
freedom and constriction, the expression of individual creativity which 188 Lawrence Buell, The Dream of the Great American Novel (Cambridge, MA and London: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 189.
189 Moretti, The Way of the World, p. 15.
260
affirms life through its paradoxically harmonious and dissonant relationship
to collective traditions of form. Bildung is formed through a cultural call-and-
response, in which the ‚jazzman‛ must ‚learn the best of the past, and add it
to his personal vision,‛ in a world of ‚group improvisation,‛ where the
‚delicate balance struck between strong individual personality and the group
during those early jam sessions‛ became a ‚marvel of social organization.‛190
The record, therefore, forms the thematic trope and technical device through
which Ellison encourages us to read this novel as a Künstlerroman. The
illuminated ‚bowels‛ of New York City, the escapist underground stage
between white Manhattan and Harlem that has been lit with ‚exactly 1,369
lights‛ leached from the monopoly of white capitalism, Monopolated Light &
Power, forms a spatial and temporal suspension. [10] This performance space
is where Invisible Man and Ellison both ruminate on what has brought about
this catastrophe of inertia in the development of an inclusionary ‘American
voice,’ and how progress can be made through art that breaks with
exclusionary traditions by ‘tinkering’ with their engineering. This should not
be read as Ellison’s pacifistic protest; whilst Ellison agrees with Irving Howe’s
determination that ‚protest is an element of all art,‛ protest does not
necessitate that a work must overtly ‚*speak+ for a political or social
program‛ so much as appear within the novel as ‚a technical assault against the
styles which have gone before.‛191 The purpose of art, certainly in Ellison’s
‘blueprint,’ must bring those voices on the ‚lower *frequencies+‛ *469+ to the
surface in a dialectical struggle, a ‚technical‛ assault of style.
190 Ellison, Shadow and Act, p. 189
191 Ibid., p. 137.
261
In pursuing a musical line of inquiry, criticism has tended to fixate on
Ellison’s jazz writing and his own lyrical ‚blues‛ style;192 yet to focus on this
generically specific musicality alone gainsays both Ellison’s sincere, even
notorious conviction in the ‚confounding reality‛ of ‚*d+iversity within
unity‛ that underscores his textual intention,193 as well as sidelines his more
subversive, contradictory allegiance to a negative dialectic of cultural and
musical reproduction at the height of the first machine age approaching
digital conversion. Ellison himself infamously encouraged criticism to
observe his lineage to ‚ancestors‛ such as Hemingway, Twain, or Eliot in
order to ‚distance‛ himself from ‚relatives‛ such as Wright that would
demographically brand him as a ‚Negro writer.‛ 194 However, to emplot
Ellison’s novel within and outside ancestry of Western musical history
beyond Harlem proper productively reveals his relationship to a variety of
competitive Western musical influences, none the least the Künstlerroman.
The closer one looks into these competing musical attractions within the text,
192 Some notable works that specifically investigate Ellison’s blues aesthetic include: Raymond
M. Olderman, ‘Ralph Ellison’s Blues and Invisible Man,’ Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary
Literature vol. 7, no. 2 (Summer, 1966); Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American
Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984);
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the ‚Racial‛ Self (New York &
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). More recently, see: Gregory Rutledge, ‘The
‚Wonder‛ Behind the Great-Race-Blue(s) Debate: Wright’s Eco-Criticism, Ellison’s Blues, and
the Dust Bowl,’ ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews vol. 24, no. 4
(2011); Shadi Neimneh, ‘Genre, Blues, and (Mis)Education in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,’
Cross-Cultural Communication vol. 8, no. 2 (2012).
193 Charles Banner-Haley, ‘Ralph Ellison and the Invisibility of the Black Intellectual:
Historical Reflections on Invisible Man,’ in Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political
Companion to Invisible Man, Lucas E. Morel ed. (Lexington: The University of Kentucky,
2006), p. 162
194 Barbara Foley, Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2010), p. 69.
262
the less subsidiary and unconnected they seem. For Ellison, as has been the
case for Joyce’s Portrait, narrative is therefore not the best way to approach
this text as a successful Bildungsroman; but a true development may be
traced stylistically.
I shall excavate the various ways in which Ellison, rather than resolve this
double standard, buries the individual underground into a dialectical, chaotic
‚late style‛ of Harlem Künstlerroman: a noisy triangulation that parodies the
structures of literary, musical, and racial genre that comprise American
culture, and capitalizes upon their powerful universal capabilities to speak to
the masses. My argument considers the formal, imaginative play of
intermedial signification exemplified in the following musical and literary
tropes of coming of age: where Ellison connects social responsibility to high
fidelity, the blues to blueprints (generic manifestos), records of youth to
recording devices, and the Bildungsroman’s concept of fate to Beethoven’s
‘Fate Motif.’
The Blues of Blueprints: The Broken Record of Bildung
If the universal subject has been decentred by the machine age, the record
itself harnesses a power for recording and transmitting a history of the
minority figure beyond the inefficiencies of individualist genres such as the
Bildungsroman; yet it is a power balanced between positive and negative
valences held in dialectical tension. ‚What does it mean when a listener
knows a symphony only with the specific characteristics of the ‘radio
voice’?‛195 Adorno probes; or rephrased in the context of Ellison’s work, how
does technology transform the possibility to create and mediate a record of
195 Adorno, ‘The Curve of the Needle,’ in Essays on Music, p. 273.
263
individual experience under capitalism? For on the other hand, despite its
democratic distribution of sound, the gramophone forms a fetish apparatus of
repressive listening for Adorno, for in its ‚brassiness, they initially projected
the mechanical being of the machines onto the surface.‛196
We observe Adorno and Ellison alike at their most internally and mutually
conflicted as music critics and as aficionados of sound production. Both are
ambivalent regarding the possibilities of musical subjectivity and
phenomenology in an age of recorded subjectivity mediated by vernacular,
here, to be read within Houston Baker, Jr.’s dual definition of vernacular as a
‘native’ feature of a country or nation, but otherwise defined as a slave born
upon ‚his master’s estate.‛197 Baker proposes that when the protagonist hears
‚recorded blues (one designed for commercial duplication and sale),‛ Ellison
‚speaks to the historical and literary historical possibilities of the single,
imagistic figure, or trope.‛ 198 The economic action of purchasing a blues
record made available by its mass marketability signifies a complex historical
position, one shaped by ‚a modern, technological era of multinational
corporations, mass markets, and advertised commodities.‛199 For this reason,
Baker argues that Ellison’s ‚blues of historical renewal‛ – the black ‚already-
said‛ of youth – implicates itself in the ‚scarcity and brutalization of an
economics of slavery‛ at the level of form.200
196 Ibid.
197 Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, p. xii.
198 Baker, Jr., Blues, pp. 62-3.
199 Ibid. Baker furthermore conjoins this notion to the folkloric design of Zora Neale Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God, a text I shall return to at length in Chapter Three.
200 Ibid.
264
In Invisible Man, Ellison attempts to ‘regroup’ (umgruppieren) 201 music’s
segregated racial ancestries within the allegory of the Künstlerroman to
illuminate the true meaning of their social relation; he attempts to counteract
the erosion brought about by a paradoxically homogenized market of
auditory oversaturation and overexposure, outlined above by Baker, held in
tension against a social fabric of racial segregation and exclusion. Ellison
moves his protagonist from the corrupt sounds of the romanticized Booker T.
Washington South, that either wants to ‚keep that nigger boy running,‛ *32+
or to advise the integrationists against radical insurgency and to ‚go slow,‛ a
problematic strategy Faulkner soon after encapsulated in his 1956 interview
for Reporter. 202 Lawrence Buell, thinking beyond Bourke’s comparative
analysis of Wilhelm Meister and Invisible Man as a ‚negative Bildungsroman,‛
connects Wilhelm’s ‚fascinated-embarrassed susceptibility to puppetry,
theatre and off wandering‛ to Ellison’s motif of the ‚Run, Nigger Run‛ folk
rhyme; the cathartic intention of the rhyme’s circulation was for the slave to
conflate laughter towards the absurdity of his helplessness and dread
towards the plantation patrollers. 203 The novel’s ‘fascinated-embarrassed’
resonance of Faulkner’s threadbare determination that integrationist
Southerners ‚must learn to deserve equality so that we can hold and keep it
after we get it. We must learn the responsibility, the responsibility of
201 I refer this term to the philosophical process of phenomena interpretation, where Adorno
sought out new construction processes ‚’to regroup’ (umgruppieren) the elements‛ in ‚a
continuously renewed attempt to picture the essence of society.‛ See Susan Buck-Morss, The
Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute
(New York: The Free Press, 1977), p. 96.
202 Quoted in Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 308.
203 Buell, The Dream of the Great American Novel, p. 190.
265
equality,‛204 preconsciously emanates in the improvised ‚social< equality‛
slippage Invisible Man stutters in his speech given to the racist black patrons
of the gentleman’s club *30+. It echoes again in the militant cautions of both
Invisible Man’s grandfather *17+ and Bledsoe *124+; and later through Brothers
Brockway, Wrestum, and Jack. Within the syuzhet of Invisible Man, Ellison
directly conflates such contradictory political positions and ‘responsibilities,’
totally incompatible with the urgent reality of black discrimination, as an
elasticated trope of duration and musical tempo (the directive controlling the
speed of motion in which a passage should be played). He pits the ideological
inefficiencies of the adagio ‚go slow‛ approach against the sinister and urgent
allegro of the ‚Run, Nigger Run‛ folksong as incompatible temporal
economies at the level of form.
Ellison keeps this negative dialectic in motion by literally ‘expelling’ his
protagonist from the Southern soundscape, and from the generic expectation
that education can lead to Bildung in the violently segregated pedagogy. This
is just one of Ellison’s multiple occasions of allegorical wordplay, or
‚Signifyin’‛ in Gates’ definition of both the rhetorical and folkloric venture in
signification: a ‚hall of mirrors‛ of doubled and redoubled meaning in the
allocation of signs and sound-images. 205 Ellison replants his protagonist
within the chaotic, industrious noises of the North: a musical cacophony of
competing manifestos, slogans and blueprints, folksongs, blues and bebop. In
one sense, the act of allegorical historicization, a cultural ‘origins story’ of the
Great Migration masquerading as the novel of the individual, preserves the
idea of a developing system of musical subjectivity and cultural identity as an
individual recording in a moment of increasing technological and industrial
204 Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History, p. 308.
205 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 44-45.
266
reproduction of sound. This serves Ellison’s vision of a Harlem ‚late style‛;
like Adorno’s identity theory of the late-style Beethoven, Invisible Man brings
together a narrative not in harmony but as ‚a dissociative force‛ to tear apart
‚for better or worse what has gone before,‛ that is, formal and generic
tradition that has resulted in Harlem as dystopia. Where Beethoven’s late
works ‚fall silent‛ in order to turn modernity’s ‚hollowness inwards,‛ Ellison
turns his subterranean subject invisible. As Adorno concludes to serve his
own purposes: ‚In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.‛ 206
Catastrophe may be the only state from which progress is made possible for
the young American subject.
In a novel that begins and ends with an alienated protagonist buried beneath
the metropolis and its cacophony of reproduced sounds, the generic question
reforms: what does it sound like to come of age in a profit-driven media
ecology guided by traditions of segregation and an industrial model of
musical reproduction? As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. proposes, when Ellison
creates a nameless, shapeless protagonist of invisibility, one who is defined by
what he is visibly not – not the black figure that haunts white culture, a
primitive ‚spook‛ tormenting Poe, nor a horrific ‚Hollywood ectoplasm‛ *1+
– he eliminates the anxiety of exposure of the minority figure by presenting a
‚faceless‛ character ‚who exists for us as a voice alone.‛207 Ellison therefore
posits a negative dialectic that strikes at the philosophical core of naively
universalist Bildungsroman genre that is itself founded upon the acoustic
trope of an individual coming to ‘harmonious’ union with the collective.
206 Theodor Adorno, ‘Late Style in Beethoven,’ in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppart, trans.
Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley, L.A., and London: University of California Press, 2002), p. 567.
207 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the ‚Racial‛ Self (New York &
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 170.
267
In Ellison’s construction of a musical style of Künstlerroman, the baseline
influence of music as a cultural and political force transcends the
individualistic nature of the first person Bildungsroman structure; for, as
Robert O’Meally observes, jazz generally cannot be defined as ‚an art of
unaccompanied solo making.‛208 The idiom of jazz is ‚collaborative music,‛ in
which ‚one hears the instruments and the singers in conversation.‛ 209 A
highly interiorized, individualistic narrative told in the first person, yet
without a visible narrator, unravels the inherent idealism of a form which
disavows the illusion of appearance as evidence of identity. The protagonist
who ‘is not there’ exists only as one interpretive characteristic: sound.
The repertoire of sound-images and musical tropes featured throughout
Invisible Man perform complex expressions of subjectivity, particularly in
representing the development of what Esty above called the ‚unseasonable‛
artist figure at the helm of the Künstlerroman subgenre. In this case, Invisible
Man is an audiophile who has learned that sounds are themselves political
actions and economic choices. If ‚black music, by definition,‛ due to the very
nature of music according to Gates, avoided the ‚schism between form and
content‛ as it reacted to a culture that had set black experience as a by-
product of the ‘American’ experience, he advises that ‚*b+lack music, alone of
all the black arts, has developed free of the imperative, the compulsion, to
make an explicit political statement.‛ 210 When Louis Armstrong modestly
croons a deceptively simplistic call and response melody against the
wavering vibrato of a muted trumpet in Fats Waller’s blues-jazz standard,
208 Robert. G. O’Meally, ‘Jazz,’ in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, eds.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y McKay (New York & London: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1997), p. 56.
209 Ibid.
210 Gates, Jr. Figures in Black, p. 31.
268
‘What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue’ (1929), he distils all political emphasis
into an individual, interiorized experience of alienation and historical
victimization without any ostensible political platform other than for his
plight to be heard and noticed. Yet beneath the melody, the timbre of the
repurposed battlefield instrument motorizes the musical gesture of art that
transcends violent catastrophe: ‚Louis bends that military instrument into a
beam of lyrical sound.‛ *11+
This logistical slippage between the militarized instrument and a physical
response of the ‚shock-troops‛ and ‚inarticulate following‛ of jazz music
would become one of Adorno’s defining assaults against the jazz identity,
certainly in comparing the American cultural industry to the expropriated
swing jazz in Germany: ‚While the leaders in European dictatorships of both
shades raged against the decadence of jazz, the youth of other countries has
long since allowed itself to be electrified, as with marches, by the syncopated
dance-steps, with bands which by no accident stem from military music.‛211
Yet, here, Ellison seems to hear a strategic power worth harnessing in the
repurposed battlefield instrument. Invisible Man’s reference to Thomas
Edison and his invention of the phonograph machine indicates how Ellison
wants his reader to apply his ‚new analytical way‛ method of listening to
music to reading his ‘new sound’ of novel. The phonograph itself was
invented in 1877 by Edison; needless to say, by Ellison’s era, it had well and
truly been replaced by more sophisticated high fidelity systems, but let us
sharpen the historical significance of this allusion. As Jason Camlot argues,
Edison’s 1878 and 1888 predicative essays, ‘The Phonograph and its Future’
and ‘The Perfected Phonograph’ demonstrate the extent to which Edison
211 Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1997), p. 128.
269
envisioned how his technology would generate a mediated practice of
reading and decipherment; he quotes Edison’s first essay: ‚The advantages of
[talking] books over those printed are too readily seen to need mention. Such
books would be listened to where now none are read. They would preserve
more than the mental emanations of the brain of the author; and, as a bequest
to future generations, they would be unequaled *sic+.‛ 212 Camlot situates
Edison amidst the Victorian fantasy to conjure an ultimately ‚immediate,‛
‚intimate‛ communication event between author and reader.213
Others had invented and developed new sounding devices during Edison’s
epoch. However, Edison’s was the first ‚talking machine‛ to record sounds
and reproduce them. The Victor Talking Machine Company, who ran a more
successful marketing and business model by numbers, far outsold Edison’s
talking machines largely by contracting celebrity artists to its label; Edison
refused, for the following reason: ‚We care nothing for the reputation of the
artists singers or instrumentalists< All that we desire is that the voice shall be
as perfect as possible.‛214 Invisible Man positions him alongside the father of
high fidelity as a visionary of human communication [10], and by extension,
to an intimate economy of sound production and Edison’s mediated fantasy
of the ‚talking book‛ that transcends the limitations of realism – such as the
ideologically exclusionary Bildungsroman. This trope literalizes Gates’ second
definition of Signifyin(g) concerning ‚speakerly,‛ double-voiced texts that
‚talk to other texts,‛ which Zora Neale Hurston and later Ishmael Reed
called the trope of the ‚Talking Book‛; this narrative strategy, with roots
212 Jason Camlot, ‘Early Talking Books: Spoken Recordings and Recitation Anthologies, 1880-
1920,’ Book History vol. 6 (2003), p. 148.
213 Ibid.
214 Leonard DeGraaf, ‘Confronting the Mass Market: Thomas Edison and the Entertainment
Phonograph,’ Business and Economic History vol. 24, no. 1 (Fall, 1995), p. 93.
270
tracing back to the earliest slave narratives, concerns itself with the
representation of the speaking black voice in writing.215
At the same time, the pervasive use of trumpets, horns, and trombones
throughout the gamut of the novel and Ellison’s essays at large indicates the
extent to which Ellison wants the reader to infer an image of Edison’s older
style of the machine and its brass instrument. Like the trumpet, the brass horn
of the phonograph emits the sound of the recording, and ‚bends‛ the
‚military instrument‛ in new ways through the recording device as its
instrument emits the sound of the human voice. Invisible Man, indeed, makes
clear in the prologue that one phonograph, the resounding of one horn, is not
enough to create a record of ‘American’ subjectivity; he wants five
phonographs, all playing in unison, a militia of collective sound in the plural.
Ellison, likewise, wants the reader to listen attentively not only to the ‘music’
of his prose and how it mediates meaning; he all the more requires us to
observe how the technology itself, and the market driving its development,
frames a productive, dialectical battle royal of sound within the novel form.
Ellison’s prologue trains us to analyze the sound of subjectivity, and the
intimate political message it conveys, outside of capitalism’s ‘regressive
listening’ practices.
Blues/Blueprints
Called upon to perform and compete in a battle royal of noise for counterfeit
coins, the individual artist must strategize an individual course of ‚action‛ to
find their place in the coenobitic fold. [7] Here, the battle royal episode, where
Invisible Man and a group of young black peers are coerced into a
215 Gates, The Signifying Monkey, p. xxv.
271
performance scrummage to amuse the white patrons at a Southern
gentleman’s club, mirrors the sonoric confusion of the adolescent Ralph in
‘Living With Music,’ who tries to drown out the Germanic arias of his
upstairs neighbor with his records of Armstrong or Bessie Smith to remind
the soprano ‚of the earth out of which we came.‛216 It is in this ambivalent
mood, both at the beginning and end of Invisible Man’s cyclical frame
narrative, in which we find an alienated musician hibernating, ruminating on
the state of music, politics, race, technology, and culture, waiting for his
epiphanic moment in which their connection illuminates: ‚At first I was
afraid; this familiar music had demanded action, the kind of which I was
incapable, and yet had I lingered there beneath the surface [in his trance] I
might have attempted to act. Nevertheless, I know now that few really listen
to the music.‛ *15+ When he finds it, he will ‘come of age’ and rise back to the
surface of the city with a plan of attack on how to produce his record of his
own history, in its dual sense.
Intoxicated under the ‚spell of the reefer,‛ retreating into the subconscious
recesses of the mind, Invisible Man discovers ‚a new analytical way of
listening to music‛ akin to the ‚profane illumination‛ of revolutionary
consciousness Walter Benjamin dialectically connected between hashish and
Surrealism. 217 Invisible Man’s ‚profane illumination,‛ in Benjamin’s sense,
allows the ‚unheard sounds‛ to ‚*come+ through‛:‚each melodic line existed
of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece, and waited patiently
for the other voices to speak.‛ *11+ Hearing sounds as deconstructed time and
216 Ellison, Shadow and Act, p. 196.
217 Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,’ trans.
Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings: Volume 2, Part 1, 1927-193, eds. Marcus Bullock,
Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA and
London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 215-16.
272
space – like how Benjamin connects the ‚technology body and image space‛
that ‚interpenetrate‛ ‚all revolutionary tension‛ – 218 allows the reader to
access a fluid type of novelized subjectivity, poised in a suspended state of
‘becoming,’ even as Invisible Man is compelled ‚to put invisibility down in
black and white *<+ an urge to make music of invisibility.‛ *15+
Due to the predatory economic nature of American capitalism, all the more so
after the Great Depression and World War II, the culture industry presses the
‚stamp‛ of sameness upon its listeners, in which ‘individuals’ must be
categorized into neat consumer demographics so they may be plugged into
the product. 219 For this reason, fifteen years prior to the publication of
Ellison’s declaration that ‘Harlem is Nowhere,’ Theodor Adorno put forward
the polemic that jazz music, distorted and dislocated from its ‚Negro‛ (here
he means New Orleans) origins, had performed a last undignified cadence in
Weimer Germany.220 The exact time of death was in October 1933, when the
Nazis banned radio broadcasts of ‚Negerjazz‛;221 however, his central thesis
or ‚idea‛222 of the study proposes that jazz mortified during its assimilation
into the markets of mass culture. If for Ellison, there ‘is no Harlem’ left in the
218 Benjamin, ‘Surrealism,’ p. 217.
219 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 120.
220 Theodor Adorno, ‘Farewell to Jazz,’ in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppart, trans. Susan
H. Gillespie (Berkeley, L.A., and London: University of California Press, 2002), p. 496.
221 Richard Leppart (ed.), ‘Commentary: Music and Mass Culture,’ in Theodor Adorno, Essays
on Music, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley, L.A., and London: University of California
Press, 2002), p. 359.
222 My local understanding of the Adornian ‚idea‛ is here indebted to Susan Buck-Morss’
assessment that Adorno’s 1930s essays, including the essay cited above, ‚*articulate+ an ‘idea’
in Benjamin’s sense of constructing a specific, concrete constellation out of the elements of the
phenomenon *<+ in order that the sociohistorical reality which constitutes truth becomes
physically visible within it.‛ Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W.
Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 1977), p. 96.
273
creative wake of the Harlem Renaissance, which had been unable to fulfil its
objective goal of equality, and for Adorno there ‘is no jazz’ after the Third
Reich, what is at stake for black subjectivity to lose jazz, to lose its cultural
centre and idiom at such a moment in both literature and social organization?
This dual dilemma of decaying cultural authenticity and art responds to a
politically saturated place, community, and soundscape.
The ‚flourishing interest‛ in African American folklore in the Jazz Age and
Harlem Renaissance 1920s and 30s through the arts, as Peter Conn describes
it, produced an ‚energetic effort both to reclaim and re-define the shared
black past of stories and songs,‛ whilst responding to the acute economic
difficulties of the Depression upon Harlem’s residents that perpetuated their
historical-present as a state of ‘blues.’223 Listening to the harrowing blues of a
vocalist such as Bessie Smith or Ma Rainey,224 Gates’ statement rings true in
regards to the liberating connection between music and individual voices as a
valve that releases subjectivity in isolated, invisible soundwaves distributed
to the masses. 225 Yet the musical Künstler, as the central character of a
narrative, was still a relatively new fixture of the novel form in the 1950s. In
American literature, with its particularly shallow musical history before the
twentieth century emergence of jazz, it was a concept therefore entirely
weighted by and predicated upon the emergence of the ‘jazz’ subject as
223 Peter Conn, The American 1930s: A Literary History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), p. 185.
224 According to Arnold Rampersad’s biography of Ellison, a young Ralph Ellison had met
both of these blues greats through his musical patron, Zelia N. Page, a music teacher at the
Douglass School in Oklahoma and co-owner of The Aldridge theatre. Arnold Rampersad,
Ralph Ellison (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), p. 26.
225 Gates, Jr. Figures in Black, p. 31.
274
protagonist.226 Paul McCann attributes this sudden interest in the lucrative
‚vocabulary of jazz‛ to the ‚eccentric voice‛ of Louis Armstrong, exemplified
in his 1936 biography, with its comprehensive glossary of common jazz
phrases.227 McCann claims that literature’s responsive appeal to mimic this
‚authenticity,‛ in a peculiar reversal of the phonographic mimetic process,
results from the view of jazz as an extension of a Folk Process that is under
siege by a profit-driven communication system.‛228 This estimation certainly
rings true for the sceptical Ellison.
In their perfect ambivalence towards cultural industry, Ellison and Adorno
are in an unlikely accord here, even if the latter’s writings on jazz led various
intellectuals to accuse him of ethnocentrism,229 especially German jazz critic
Joachim Ernst Berendt. 230 Berendt’s dogged defence of jazz as serious art
demonstrated through musicological exposition seems, at first glance, more
responsive to Ellison’s jazz and music writings.231 Yet Adorno’s radio essays
226 Stories such as Henry Steig’s ‚The Swing Business‛ (1935) and Julian Street’s ‚The Jazz
Baby‛ (1936), as well as Dorothy Baker’s jazz-Künstlerroman Young Man With a Horn (1938),
exemplify this transitory era that depicted ‚the conflict between the individual artist and the
marketplace as instrumental to the process of great jazz production.‛ See Paul McCann, Race,
Music, and National Identity: Images of Jazz in American Fiction, 1920-1960 (Madison and
Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), p. 76.
227 Ibid.
228 Ibid.
229 Quoted in Andrew Wright Hurley, The Return of Jazz: Joachim-Ernst Berendt and West
German Cultural Change (New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011), p. 40.
230 Hurley notes that in 1953, Berendt ‚implied that Adorno’s analysis was racist, in that it
imposed the sadomasochistic trait on the already discriminated-against African American,
and he disputed any link between jazz and totalitarianism by pointing out that jazz fans had
been hounded both by the Nazis and by Eastern European regimes.‛ Ibid., p. 39.
231 Certainly, as is the case when Berendt appeals to Nietzsche’s juxtaposition of the rational
apollonian artwork and the Dionysian emotional art of music, to demonstrate how jazz
275
in particular, especially where he brings children into focus as the most
‚powerful rhetorical example of innocence betrayed,‛ may prove more
instrumental in articulating a sociological framework for the stylistic analysis
of Ellison’s Künstlerroman, staking the impracticality of the ‘innocent’
Bildungsroman genre in a commerce of art that is reduced to entertainment
and amusement ‚as a dehumanization of the subject,‛ as Richard Leppart
describes it.232 The same dilemma faces Ellison’s culturally displaced Künstler,
the quintessence of American innocence betrayed, in Invisible Man. The novel
narrativizes the ‚surrealistic‛ resultant ‚clash of cultural factors‛ inherited by
the Harlem individual, whose ancestors ‚possessed no written literature‛
through which to ‚examine their lives,‛ these American grandchildren now
forced to self-examine ‚through the eyes of Freud and Marx, Kierkegaard and
Kafka, Malraux and Sartre.‛233
The protagonist’s relationship to the collective – to his school and college, to
the mixed-race and gendered hierarchies of the Brotherhood, to Ras the
Exhorter and the militarized black nationalists, even his fetishized sexual
relations with the white feminist activist, Sybil – paradoxically ratifies what
Adorno spells out as the death of jazz: its ‚standardized‛ improvisation; its
exchange value posing as use value; its totalitarian tendencies hidden beneath
a democratic veneer; its repressive eroticism; its newness, which is really only
a return to ‚primitive‛ form and the ‚music of slaves.‛234 Ellison counteracts
dancers signify ‚a – certainly frequently very uncontrolled [and] necessarily unconscious –
escape from a tradition in which it is, at most, only now a literary discovery that there is also
a Dionysian art and cult experience in addition to an apollonian,‛ an intoxication that had
been excised from the otherwise systemized life of the masses. Quoted in Hurley, The Return
of Jazz, pp. 40-1.
232 Richard Leppart, ‘Commentary,’ Essays On Music, p. 328.
233 Ellison, Shadow and Act, p. 297.
234 Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, p. 100.
276
such cultural standardization and alienation through the manifesto of the
Prologue; Invisible Man’s monologue performance reveals the extent to which
that music, like literature, is both an individual and collective cultural labor,
and therefore intersects with Marx’s historicized determination that ‚only
music can awaken the musical sense in man and the most beautiful music has
no sense for the unmusical ear, because my object can only be the
confirmation of one of my essential powers *<+ the cultivation of the five
sense is the work of all previous history.‛235
Positioning Ellison’s improvisation within Marx’s discourse of historical
‚cultivation‛ complicates its previous assignment in the insightful readings of
critics such as Gates and Kimberly Benston;236 yet it may broaden the scope of
what ‘improvisation’ means generically, historically, and stylistically for
Ellison in terms of music and literature alike as inherently cultivated forms of
expressing subjectivity. An ‘improvised’ Bildungsroman inaugurates a
generic paradox, replacing teleology with a state of limitless becoming, rather
than a fixed trajectory towards an expected state of ‘maturity.’ Ellison’s use of
literary genre mirrors the black-white historical narrative of jazz’s
development, a material history of free expression negotiating itself within
the limits of both instrumentation and market forces. In Ellison’s recount of
his own musical development in his Living with Music essay, jazz is
characterized by the performance of the individual, yet their expressions of
creativity must fructify within the traditions of an existing framework, and a
235 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, trans. Rodney Livingston and Gregor
Benton (London: Penguin Books and New Left Review, 1992), p. 353.
236 Kimberly Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (London
& New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 248-9.
277
sound technical knowledge of the instrument and artform; this is the
reduction of the ‚chaos of living to form.‛237
In terms of theme, by parodying the kitsch jazz vernacular and identity
Adorno criticizes above, Ellison is able to resolve its effects of alienation by
connecting the blues to the debate of the many ‘blueprints’ of African
American writing. Consider the following incident, which almost certainly
intertextually ‘signifies’ upon Wright’s style, as Gates, Jr. has broadly argued;
yet also seems to relate itself to Hurston and her ‚speakerly-text‛ method as
the ‘counter-revolutionary’ pole to Wright’s ‚black cultural maelstrom.‛238
Ellison’s jazz allegory unfolds in a less than subtle manner when he meets the
cartman, Peter Wheatstraw:
Close to the kerb ahead I saw a man pushing a cart piled high with
rolls of blue paper and heard him singing in a clear ringing voice. It
was a blues, and I walked along behind him remembering the times
that I had heard such singing at home. It seemed that here some
memories slipped around my life at the campus and went far back to
things I had long ago shut out of my mind. [141]
Such inescapable reminders area mediated by the following lyrics and
interchange:
‘She’s got feet like a monkey
Legs like a frog – Lawd, Lawd!
But when she starts to loving me
I holler, Whoooo, God-dog!’ *141+
237 Ralph Ellison, ‘Living With Music,’ Shadow and Act, p. 190.
238 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 182.
278
Continuing the novel’s characteristic wordplay, Ellison affixes the blues to
blueprints, symbolizing two different directive systems of political ‘scoring’
or ‘notation,’ in the musical sense. Ellison most obviously parodies Wright,
intertextually Signifying upon his ‘Blueprint.’ Gates, Jr. notes how Ellison
‚tropes with‛ the black presence and visibility of politically ‚re-acting‛
protagonists Bigger Thomas or Richard of Black Boy, reducing Invisible Man
to nothing but a voice who ‚shapes, edits, and narrates his own tale, thereby
combining action with the representation of action and defining reality by its
representation.‛239 Invisible Man, despite his common racial heritage with ‘the
jazz man,’ his whitewashed Booker T. Washington education has erased his
familiarity to folk vernacular. A comedy of linguistic errors ensues for the jazz
ingénue:
‘Oh, goddog, daddy-o,’ he said with a sudden bluster, ‘who got the
damn dog? Now I know you from down home, how come you trying
to act like you never heard that before! *<+ Why you trying to deny
me?’
Suddenly I was embarrassed and angry. ‘Deny you? What do you
mean?’
‘Just answer the question. Is you got him, or ain’t you?’
*<+ I was exasperated. ‘No, not this morning,’ I said and saw a grin
spread over his face. [142]
Words he has heard ‚all *his+ life‛ are suddenly estranged: ‚why describe
anyone in such contradictory words? *<+ the cartman’s song *became+ a
lonesome, broad-toned whistle now that flowered at the end of each phrase
into a tremulous, blue-toned chord. And in its flutter and swoop I heard the
sound of a railroad train highballing it, lonely across the lonely night *<+ God
damn, I thought, they’re a hell of a people!‛ *145+ Invisible Man can’t decide
239 Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey, p. 106.
279
whether ‚pride or disgust‛ ‚suddenly flashed‛ over him. *145+ Like the
‚shellshocked‛ black veterans at the Golden Day Inn, as they ‚straggled
down the highway‛ beyond the railroad tracks like ‚a chain gang on its way
to make a road,‛ *62+ the suppressed blues, brought above ground, compels
fear and misunderstanding in Invisible Man, as a direct contradistinction to
the harmony of his beautiful college that pikes his musical imagination in the
apostrophized manner of a sonnet: ‚Oh, long green stretch of campus, Oh,
quiet songs at dusk, Oh, moon that kissed the steeple and flooded the
perfumed nights, Oh, bugle that called in the morning, Oh, drum that
marched us militarily at noon – what was real, what solid, what more than a
pleasant, time-killing dream? For how could it have been real if now I am
invisible?‛ *34+
The significance of the cartman’s work, couriering ‚‘Blueprints, man,‛
reminds Invisible Man of his impossible political, cultural, and indeed generic
in-betweenness: ‚Folks is always making plans and changing ‘em,’‛ says
Wheatstraw. [143] Invisible Man logically connects this to his falsified letters,
his own matriculation and employment aspirations, retorting, ‚‘that’s a
mistake. You have to stick to the plan.’‛ The jazz man gravely responds, ‚You
kinda young, daddy-o.’‛ *143+ Ellison’s generic chafing here, mediated by the
blues, uncomfortably recalls the dialects and memoir structure of the slave
narrative genre – reminding Invisible Man of his generic alienation from both
his folk roots and the Bildungsroman. When Brother Tarp later reveals to
Invisible Man a portrait of Douglass, Invisible Man only knows from what his
ex-slave ‚grandfather used to tell me about him‛; and when Invisible
attempts to thank his ‘Brother’ for portrait, he is met with the following
ambiguous remark: ‚‘Don’t thank me, son *<+ He belongs to us all.’‛ *305-6]
280
Electric Shock: Fate and ‘The Fate Motif’
If the use of novelized musical subjectivity was still a novelty in literature by
Ellison’s era, it is worth recalling that classical music had long evidenced
modernity’s subjective vicissitudes as a narrative of formation. Regarding
Adorno’s influential categorization of Beethoven’s ‚late style‛ devised to
address essential issues of aesthetics and social philosophy, Peter E. Gordon
stakes the following claim:
Adorno understood Beethoven’s music as providing something like
documentary evidence for the vicissitudes of modern subjectivity. The
development of thematic material in particular was interpreted as a
personal narrative of education and fulfillment, analogous to the
bourgeois novel of self-formation, or Bildungsroman.240
Some critics have constellated the jazz insights of Adorno and Ellison;241 yet
what has been significantly overlooked regarding Ellison’s Künstlerroman
may find comparative translation in the above statement, and in Adorno’s
proposal that Beethoven’s late style broke with ‚formal unity‛ and the
Hegelian ideal of ‚expressive totality‛ suggestive of a bourgeois
‚individualistic style‛ by turning overwrought ‚conventions *<+ against
240 Peter E. Gordon, ‘The Artwork Beyond Itself: Adorno, Beethoven, and Late Style,’ in The
Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory, eds. Warren Breckman, Peter E.
Gordon, A. Dirk Moses, Samuel Moyne and Elliot Neama (New York & Oxford: Berghahn
Books, 2011), p. 82.
241 James M. Harding’s analysis of the role Louis Armstrong plays in Invisible Man’s prologue
and epilogue, as evidence of the narrator’s Adornian attitude to the critique of jazz, is
particularly exemplary in this regard. See James M. Harding, ‘Adorno, Ellison, and the
Critique of Jazz,’ Cultural Critique vol. 31 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 144-5.
281
conventions.‛ 242 The style of Ellison’s Bildungsroman perforates the same
flattened generic soundscapes of decentred individualism and homogenized
subjectivity that Adorno attends to in much of his musicological corpus, and
not just those seven essays that specifically concern jazz. In the opening to the
Quasi Una Fantasia collection, a section entitled ‘Music and Language: A
Fragment,’ Adorno situates music as a forceful yet inevitably ‚doomed‛
human attempt to ‚name the Name, not to communicate meanings,‛ an
anonymity that resonates with Invisible Man’s reluctance to name and
therefore concretely identify himself. 243 When Beethoven instructs the
musician who attempts one of the bagatelles from Opus 33 to play it parlando,
Adorno traces how he ‚only makes explicit something that is a universal
characteristic of music‛; that is, music’s futile impulse to appeal to the
conventions and authority of speech.244
Adorno’s dialectical analysis of the failure of language systems and music
alike to move beyond the totality of the concept finds a comparable
expression in Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s development of a dialectical formulation
of blue-black expression in American form. The blues, in Baker’s model,
facilitates a vernacular matrix and expressive politics of form that may speak
the unspeakable experience of African American life through encoded
language systems and, as I interpret, recorded sound and subjectivity.245 In
The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism (1980), Baker developed
a theory of a ‚speaking subject‛ who creates ‚language (a code)‛ which
requires deciphering by the commentator; however, in Blues, Ideology, and 242 Gordon, ‘The Artwork Beyond Itself,’ pp. 82-3.
243 Theodor Adorno, Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone
(London and New York: Verso, 2011), p. 2.
244 Ibid., p. 1.
245 Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory
(Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 172-3.
282
African American Literature, he reliquefies his former notion, proposing a
determinant negation of his earlier symbolic-anthropological scope of African
American culture by conveying language or code as that which ‚speaks‛ the
‚decentred‛ subject.246 These inquiries into sound and subjectivity, whether a
communicating subject for Adorno, or a sounding subject for Baker, explicate
systems of language (musical expression, or written words) that encode the
message of the decentred subject, assisting my proposal that Invisible Man
might be read as a sounding, stylistic Künstlerroman of ‚technical assault.‛
This brings us secondly to how Invisible Man’s formal structure technically
assaults the tradition of the sonata form of symphonic and particularly
concerti music, particularly its transitionary period as exemplified by
Beethoven, who was certainly a paramount artistic influence in Ellison’s early
life,247 and also appears as an integral motif within the novel and in Ellison’s
nonfiction tome at large. This is evidenced by the episode in which Invisible
Man is institutionalized in the Liberty Paints’ ‚factory hospital,‛ where the
medical attendants attempt to reprogram the incapacitated worker by
lobotomizing him under the ‚concept‛ of ‚Gestalt.‛ *192+ The ‚Gestalt
concept‛ refers to the Berlin School of experimental psychology, its ethos
exemplified by Kurt Koffka’s divisive proposal that the ‚whole is other than
the sum of its parts, because summing is a meaningless procedure, whereas
the whole-part relationship is meaningful.‛ 248 Gestaltism attempts to
246 Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, pp. 1-2.
247 In particular, Arnold Rampersad emphasises that Ellison’s teacher, William Levi Dawson,
Professor of Music at the Tuskegee Institute, composed the acclaimed Negro Folk Symphony
(1934) during this era, and also Beethoven were Ellison’s early figures of aspiration; when a
young Ellison’s ‚desire to write music‛ was ‚darn near killing‛ him, Ellison reminded
himself that he had to ‚learn the principles. Dawson spent years in school. Beethoven was
somewhat a dumbbell until forty so there’s hope for me.‛ Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, p. 41.
248 Kurt Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology [c.1955] (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 176.
283
comprehend how meaningful perceptions are regulated by self-organizing
tendencies to make sense of a chaotic world, by proposing that fragmentation
is formed and governed by the perceptual system towards the global whole.
The impulse or reflex to unity comes under Ellison’s scrutiny in a similar
spirit to Adorno’s career-long wariness of Gestalt psychoanalytic theory, and
the positivistic or absolutist philosophical traditions. As Steven Helmling
contends, Gestalt, like Kant’s unity of apperception or Husserl’s
intentionality, raises the issue of mediation for Adorno, for if the ‚mind
synthesizes or integrates bits of sense-data into a coherent whole or pattern,‛
this operation inherently constructs a ‚virtual model of the operations of
ideology.‛249 Ellison explicitly relates content here – the precarious nature of
subjectivity – to the vexed question of the novel’s episodic form. The
individual’s will to improvise, as a gesture of individuation, chafes against
the structural impulse of the Bildungsroman to naturalize a strictly coherent
identity that makes sense to the social whole, what Wilhelm Dilthey called
Das Ganze: the metaphysical attempt, as Moretti determines, ‚to build the Ego,
and make it the indisputable centre of its own structure‛ to exemplify the
definition of ‚normality.‛250
Shock treatment as psychiatric practice was developed in the mid-twentieth
century to subdue ‘hysterical,’ ‘disturbed,’ or ‘deranged’ individuals who did
not fit into the quotidian social pattern; as James Gilbert notes, the increase in
these treatments also responded to a generational paranoia towards the
increased exposure of youth to a new media ecology – film, radio, and the
television – which were believed to be directly contributing to this rise in
249 Steven Helmling, Adorno’s Poetics of Critique (London and New York: Continuum
International Publishing Group, 2009), p. 109.
250 Moretti, The Way of the World, p. 11.
284
widespread ‚juvenile delinquency.‛251 Yet in this incident, Ellison also seems
to directly Signify upon Wright’s ‘shocking’ style of naturalism, by literalizing
the administration of psychological ‘shock’ in the novel’s musical terms. As
Ellison later argued by deconstructing Wright’s ‘blues’ through
psychoanalysis, Wright’s reactionary protest art, reduced by some critics to a
violent distortion of his own reality, ‚had as little chance of prevailing against
the overwhelming weight of the child’s unpleasant experiences as
Beethoven’s Quartets would have of destroying the stench of a Nazi
prison.‛252
When Invisible Man is connected to the machine, the device itself replicates
the infamous motif which initiates the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony as vibrations downloaded into his body:
Somewhere a machine began to hum and I distrusted the man and
woman above me. I kept hearing the opening motif of Beethoven’s
Fifth – three short and one long buzz, repeated again and again in
varying volume, and I was struggling and breaking through, rising
up, to find myself lying on my back with two pink-faced men
laughing down. [189]
Invisible Man’s body becomes a broadcasting station of musical mediation.
As Matthew Guerrieri likewise motions, the ‚Beethoven reference is not just a
251 James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 3-5. As we have seen in Catcher but also in
Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), this was a widespread psychiatric response to youth culture in an
age of supposedly increased juvenile delinquency, thought to have been brought about by
mass technologies such as television, the radio, and film. Unlike Holden Caulfield or Esther
Greenwood, there is no parental signatory who is financially accountable for an invisible
young black man.
252 Ellison, Shadow and Act, p. 82.
285
throwaway,‛ for here Ellison clearly ‚builds his gambit into a whole
movement, the entire experience itself echoing the opening of the Fifth.‛253
The electrical conductor both regulates and therefore alienates the rhythmic
temporality of the leitmotif, counteracting the free expression of duration that
an orchestra’s conductor manipulates to demonstrate their personal
interpretation of the Beethoven to the audience: that is, the length for which
the two fermatas (pauses) are held. As in Beethoven’s whole symphony, the
four-note ‘Fate’ motif recurs ‚again and again‛; the machine dislocates the
motif and thereby allegorizes what Adorno argued of the ‚degenerated‛
leitmotif in post-Wagnerian musical history: a reduction of music’s emotional
expression to a mechanical process, a degeneration which reifies in its fullest
intensity in the machine age.254 Beethoven’s Fifth, translated into radiowaves,
is ‚not Beethoven’s Fifth but merely musical information from and about
Beethoven’s Fifth,‛ Adorno earlier determined in a 1941 essay, ‘The Radio
Symphony.’255
Caught in a surrealist sound-loop, the machine dehistoricizes the cultural
significance of Beethoven’s opus, and Invisible Man melds to its
industrialized interpretation of information; his pain occurs only after he sees
the ‚pink-faced men‛ laughing at his visceral bodily reflex, a simulated petite
mort, to the great motif of ‘white’ music and culture.256 As an even more
253 Matthew Guerrieri, The First Four Notes: Beethoven’s Fifth and the Human Imagination (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), p. 237.
254 Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 2009), p.
36.
255 Theodor Adorno, ‘The Radio Symphony: An Experiment in Theory,’ in Essays on Music, p.
262.
256 There is also a troubling allusion to the great attempts made by the Third Reich to create a
Volksgemeinschaft to racially unify and organize German community life and zeitgeist through
286
peculiar inversion of emotional manufacturing in popular culture, is this not
the same orgasmic response to aural stimulation for which Adorno
notoriously ridicules the ‚emasculated‛ male jazz fan, in which the listener’s
bodily response conflates ‚clichéd *<+ jazz dance music and sexual prowess,‛
as Leppart has interpreted his argument?257 Whilst James Harding soundly
argues that the attendants cruelly encourage the ‚dancing‛ (convulsing)
Invisible Man to ‚Get hot, boy!‛ *193+, believing that ‚improvisation‛
redoubles the lobotomy’s effectiveness in castrating this ‘primitive’ character
trait,258 therefore literalizing the homogenizing effect of popular music, as in
Adorno’s polemical prosopopeia launched against hot jazz: ‚‘Give up your
masculinity, let yourself be castrated,’ the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band
both mocks and proclaims.‛259 I offer another complementary interpretation
to Harding’s dialectical reading of Ellison’s ‚degrading side of jazz‛260; that is,
Invisible Man’s struggle splinters his subjectivity between two musical selves:
the ‘hot jazz’ that belongs to his cultural repertoire; and the classical music
which elicits his unconscious, whole body response. If the simulated
lobotomy is performed to eliminate any ‚major conflict of motives,‛ *193] his
conflicting musical motifs thus undermine the Gestalt effect of the lobotomy.
His disorientation, his existential crisis, in fact preserves his subjectivity from
erasure only through fragmentation and contradiction, not unity. 261
an appeal to populist Germanic folklore, art, and (tonal) music, such as Bach, Mozart,
Beethoven, Wagner, Strauss, and the Italian Opera.
257 Richard Leppart, ‘Commentary: Music and Mass Culture,’ Essays on Music, p. 352.
258 Harding, ‘Adorno, Ellison, and the Critique of Jazz,’ p. 151.
259 Adorno, ‘Perennial Fashion – Jazz,’ Essays on Music, p. 129.
260 Harding, ‘Adorno, Ellison, and the Critique of Jazz,’ p. 151.
261 In the soundscape of Wagner and his successor Strauss, Adorno condemns the conceptual
impulse of the leitmotif to ‚*a+llegorical rigidity‛ in the manner of an ‚infect*ion+‛ or
‚disease,‛ a ‚gesture‛ now ‚frozen as a picture of what it expresses.‛ Infected, diseased in its
287
Matthew Guerrieri’s argument that the opening to the Fifth informs the
unfolding narrative structure of the hospital episode can be significantly
extended, particularly in tracing Invisible Man’s growing awareness of the
different styles of improvisation. Ellison’s structure and characterization both
mimic Beethoven’s ‘mid-style’ Fifth Symphony, composed in the sonata-
allegro form, in a much broader sense. In the sonata form, we observe a basic
sectional pattern for each movement of the opus beginning with a slower
introduction, an exposition introducing the thematic material, a more
elaborate development section, followed finally by a recapitulation often
concluded by an excited coda or codetta; this variation of dynamics and
tempos in a romantic concerto better encapsulates the style of Ellison’s novel
than jazz or the blues can alone, which primarily affix to one stable tempo and
mood: Ellison recalls of his early desire to become a symphonic composer:
‚our ideal was to master both *jazz and classical+. It wasn’t a matter of
wanting to do the classics because they denied or were felt to deny jazz, and I
suppose my own desire to write symphonies grew out of an attractive to the
bigger forms and my awareness that they moved many people as they did me
in a different way. The range of mood was much broader.‛262
Beethoven’s great innovation of form was to modulate the exposition into a
relative minor key (particularly in the ‘late Beethoven’ style, to a somewhat
unexpected mediant or submediant) for the entirety of that movement, which
creates a dialectical harmonic effect that robs the audience of the music
dislocation, the use of motif as a thematic device succumbs ‚directly to cinema music where
the sole function of the leitmotif is to announce heroes or situations so as to allow the
audience to orient itself more easily.‛ The mechanized leitmotif becomes a symbolic gesture
of totality in that it is only attached to a singular feeling without any development. See:
Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London and New York:
Verso, 2009), p. 36.
262 Ellison, Shadow and Act, pp. 9-10.
288
resolving their sonic expectations of the traditional listening event.263 In a
sonata-form concerto movement, which resembles the individualist structure
of Invisible Man as Künstlerroman, the repeated exposition features both a
tutti and a solo statement that complicates the nature between musical subjects
and collectives. In this individualist form, certain themes or motifs in the
accompanying orchestra are attributed to particular instrument families as
characterization based on the timbre of their sound production (pitch range,
tone color, dynamic capabilities), and the movement routinely finishes with
an improvisatory cadenza played by the soloist as a ‘first person monologue’
gesture. The improvisatory monologues that form the idiom of Invisible Man’s
Prologue and Epilogue are clearly inspired by the rhythms of a modernist
stream of consciousness as well as the polyphonic, ad-libbing jazz
subjectivity; yet the narrative arc also reflects the individual virtuosity of a
solo exposition and the illusion of an ‘improvised’ cadenza statement as
recitative. In terms of ‘instrumental’ statements of characterization, from Ras
the Exhorter’s imperative West Indian diction, to Trueblood’s disorderly but
spellbinding common-tongue, or Mr. Norton’s well-rounded and elevated
speech, Sybil’s sensuous drunken slurs, to the cacophony of unspecified
voices throughout the gatherings of Harlem and the Brotherhood, Ellison’s
persistent dependency on sounding characters – vernacular and dialect
stereotypes – rather than developing interiority reflects the separation of
thematic gestures by idiomatic instrumentation in a concerto or a jazz band
263 I leave myself open to a logical contradiction, for as Adorno makes clear in ‘The Radio
Symphony,’ however easy it is to ‚identify all those typical constituents‛ of symphonic
analysis, ‚they are essential not abstractly, but only within the interplay of the
inexchangeable content of each work;‛ to analyse Beethoven’s tome in such a simplistic way
is to falsely ‚deliver listening up to a mechanical process in which any symphony can be
replaced by any other which has the same framework.‛ See: Adorno, ‘The Radio Symphony,’
in Essays on Music, p. 254.
289
alike. What the sonata-allegro hypothesis offers is a historicized redefinition
of what it means for Ellison to harness the unspoken qualities of instrumented
sound, of art expression which pushes beyond voice and dialect and genre
itself to project modernity as a transitional fantasia of decentred subjectivity
and unharmony.
In broadening our sense of Invisible Man’s place in the spectrum of musical
development, we can observe how Ellison reverts the Bildungsroman to the
Du Bois’ ‚talented tenth‛ elite of cultural criticism, pushing back against the
current of Wright’s attempts to direct African American art towards the
politics of the radical left; or even to an extent, distancing himself from what
Wright called Hurston’s folkloric ‚minstrelsy‛ (which I shall return to in
Chapter Three). 264 In a short piece for the Crisis magazine in June 1923
entitled, ‘On Being Crazy,’ Du Bois published the following short piece:
The work’s day done, I sought the theatre. As I sank into my seat, the
lady shrank and squirmed.
I beg your pardon, I said.
‚Do you enjoy being where you are not wanted?‛ she asked coldly.
Oh no, I said.
‚Well, you are not wanted here.‛
I was surprised. I fear you are mistaken, I said. I certainly want the
music and I like to think the music wants me to listen to it.
‚Usher,‛ said the lady, ‚this is social equality.‛
264 ‚Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the
Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh,‛
Wright complained of Hurston’s writing. Richard Wright, ‘Between Laughter and Tears,’ New
Masses (October 5, 1937), in Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, eds.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993), p. 17.
290
No, madame, said the usher, it is the second movement of
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.265
As a speaking subject, the working-class (the specific nature of his work is not
given, his collar could be white or blue) narrator of this excerpt is rendered
epiphenomenal in that his speech is not punctuated by quotation marks, like
the presumably white bourgeois lady. The lack of quotation marks for the
voice of the usher, whose race is undisclosed, positions him in accord with the
story’s protagonist. Du Bois renders the ‘black’ voices here as rhetorically
silent or aurally invisible characters at the level of style. The paratactic
narrative is driven by an instinctive movement towards fulfilling modern
mankind’s basic spiritual needs, which the ‘invisible’ speaker seeks out in an
odyssey of public urban spaces: food in a restaurant, music in a theatre,
shelter in a hotel, company on a sidewalk. Each time he comes upon a white
person who rebuffs his right to join in these basic sources of enjoyments and
nourishment of the soul, leaving the alienated speaker to conclude that
‚either you are crazy or I am.‛266
What I propose, in correlation to Ellison’s genre work, is the role that the
ancestral musical motif – and specifically classical music, of which
Beethoven’s influence is notably recurrent throughout his entire oeuvre of
fiction and nonfiction – plays in the dialectical development of the urbanized
subject, as much as theatres and productions of music in the twentieth 265 W. E. B. Du Bois, Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1986), p. 1200.
266 Du Bois, Writings, p. 1200. Furthermore, The andante con moto, the lyrical second movement
of Beethoven’s Fifth, is scored in a major key, and it is characterized by a double variation
form; it does ironically indicate, in this sense, an inherent ‚social equality‛ between two
distinct themes mutually asserting themselves within the wider movement by that are
ultimately responsive to one another, the black and the white bound to a common situation
and ‘fate.’ Its message does not belong to any class or race except in the segregated vicinity of
its public performance.
291
century attempt to classify who may participate in certain musical genres.
This trait of inclusion and exclusion is shared with the longstanding debate
surrounding African American literature and folk culture revivalism in the
1920s and 30s. Invisible Man at large evinces Du Bois’ scepticism of the
capitalist rhetoric that directs its speech to certain demographics of consumers
as a means of controlling the public by dictating to them what they ‘want’ to
hear as an act of regressive listening; as Adorno and Horkheimer sponsor in
Dialectic of Enlightenment: ‚The effrontery of the rhetorical question, ‘What do
people want?’ lies in the fact that it is addressed – as if to reflective
individuals – to those very people who are deliberately to be deprived of this
individuality.‛267 The ‘invisible’ and thereby deracinated music aficionado
holds the potential to transcend this pseudoindividuality by seeking out the
music that he ‚wants‛ as a means of rebellion and non-violent protest, as in
Du Bois’ anecdote, rather than that which has been reserved for him by the
socioeconomic structure of the market. The recording device, a technology of
such importance in Invisible Man, therefore holds the ambivalent potential to
democratize the experience of music beyond class and race, shifting the
public experience into the personal.
A troubling subjectivity emerges to emplot these vibrations of the Beethoven
beside the listening event in Invisible Man’s surrealist prologue, in which the
narrator plays Louis Armstrong’s recording of ‘What Did I Do to Be so Black
and Blue?’ on his radio-phonograph. Invisible Man states that there is ‚a
certain acoustical deadness in my hole, and when I have my music I want to
feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body.‛ *7+ Ellison is
not only thinking about the musical information; he is thinking about the
power and limitations of the technological medium itself to communicate.
267 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming
(London and New York: Verso, 2010), pp. 144-5.
292
The statement reverberates against the most controversial of Adorno’s 1950s
polemics towards the jazz subject (Adorno’s strikes not against jazz music
perse so much as the commercialized jazz identity). The deracialized jazz
subject possesses similarities to the authoritarian personality for Adorno, the
‚sado-masochistic type described by analytic psychology *<+ who chafes
against the father-figure while secretly admiring him‛ and ‚derives
enjoyment from the subordination he overtly detests.‛268
‚What is remarkable about Ellison’s account of his adventures in high fidelity
is the degree to which his investments in technology, in every sense, keep
shifting between a fetish for its material forms and a fantasy of its ideal
invisibility,‛ Mark Goble proposes in regards to Ellison’s ‘Living With Jazz’;269
this is all the more true in the case of Invisible Man read as a Künstlerroman.
The double logic of an insistence on listening to music in high fidelity, on
playing ‚recorded music as it was intended to be heard,‛ negotiates itself
against music which by definition is ‚performed in order to be reproduced,‛
even if emerges from the genre of ‚live‛ recording where the listener
experiences recorded music ‚as ‘intended.’‛270
Invisible Man Becoming Artist: High Fidelity and a Record of Youth
The response to Ellison’s Bildungsroman consistently returns to this chafing
between two discrete sides of the stabilized ‘American identity’: whether he
268 Adorno, ‘Perennial Fashion,’ p. 121.
269 Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2010), p. 162.
270 Ibid., p. 163.
293
demonstrates high fidelity, here to mean fealty, to black or white culture; to
the blues or indeed to Beethoven. ‚Whether lauded for evading literary
ghettoization or criticized for sacrificing blackness on the altar of Eurocentric
archetypes,‛ as Foley describes this friction, ‚Ellison’s use of folkloric motifs
has been widely interpreted as his means of transcending (or attempting to
transcend historical and racial specificity‛ by drawing and stressing
‚connections between Negro folklore and transhistorical patterns of myth and
ritual.‛271
Whilst in content, Ellison is Signifyin’ upon Wright’s Bildungsroman
blueprint, in Gates’ understanding of the term, the remaining question of
style, the fragmentation of the stream of consciousness technique through
which Ellison organizes the narration of the electroshock segment bears
comparison to the aesthetic program of Joyce, whose novel form describes not
‚the problem of the man-becoming-art, but the problem of the man-
becoming-artist.‛ 272 The prologue has already violently parodied Joyce’s A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; when Invisible Man counterattacks the
‚tall blond man‛ who collides with him, his yells for this man to ‚Apologize!
Apologize!‛ in allusion to Stephen Dedalus’ refrain, ‚Apologize, / Pull out his
eyes, / Pull out his eyes, / Apologize.‛273 For Alan Nadel, the image of blindness,
and the allusion to Portrait assists ‚us to see Invisible Man as a portrait of
271 Foley, Wrestling With the Left, p. 80.
272 Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (Oxford
Scholarship Online, 2011), p. 126.
273 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1971),
p. 8.
294
society as a young man,‛ by explicitly suggesting that ‚the search for artistic
individuality is also a social not only a personal issue.‛274
This ‚ancestral‛ fidelity to the style of Joyce’s Portrait has been cited ad
nauseum, even by Ellison himself;275 however, building upon the juncture of
Nadel’s above analysis, I counteroffer a new perspective based upon my
unfolding theory of Ellison’s Künstlerroman. If Joyce creates a visual portrait
of Stephen Dedalus, Ellison clearly distinguishes that Invisible Man’s
Künstlerroman is more of a sounding record. As Jed Esty vitally discriminates,
the fragmentation of form ‚allows Joyce to address the worlds of
commodification and reification – those forces that displace Bildung so
comprehensively *<+ with a somewhat subtler hand.‛276 Where Joyce’s Irish
Künstler responds to the ‚economic and intellectual conditions of his
homeland‛ that ‚do not permit the individual to develop,‛ 277 Ellison
modulates a similar sense of cultural inflexibility, Joyce’s formal response to
the ideological chasm between modernism and imperialism, into an
American aesthetic of racial displacement. Ellison’s syntax stylistically hinges
on ‘spontaneous’ arhythms and tonal modulations in these peak moments of
the struggle between self-awareness and self-unawareness, rather than a
logical flow of words or sentences; most particularly in the beginning and end
of the novel. This is what gives Ellison’s novel a distinct musical idiom of
improvisation tracing back to and building upon Joyce’s modernist
Künstlerroman, as opposed to the realist generic tradition of the
Bildungsroman.
274 Alan Nadel, Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon (Iowa City: University
of Iowa Press, 1991), p. 35.
275 Ralph Ellison, ‘The Art of Fiction: An Interview,’ Shadow and Act, p. 168.
276 Esty, Unseasonable Youth, p. 126.
277 Ibid., p. 127.
295
At this junction, I therefore stress that Ellison’s class-consciousness, and its
relation to Bildung, enters the style of the narrative form as tissues of inputs
and outputs – indicating how these series of connections between
transhistorical patterns become technologies in and of themselves:
soundwaves and electrical currents. What seems most significant in the
development of the artist within the hospitalization segment of Invisible Man,
but may be extended to a consideration of the work’s entire gamut, stems
from the apprenticeship of handicapped artistry in relationship to evolving,
modernizing technologies. Where the layering of Stephen Dedalus’ parodic
‚hyperindividuation,‛ as Esty describes it,278 flows into the style of identity
formation through a holy and profane ‚hydraulic system of images: pools and
puddles, rivers and reservoirs, tides and currents, sweat and spittle,‛ 279
Ellison recurrently returns to tropological devices of oscillation to likewise
‚manage the flow of time and story line,‛ in this case, soundwaves and
electrical currents. When Invisible Man hears the now atonal motif of ‘Fate’ as
an informative pattern of vibrations, Ellison places his Künstler in the
tradition of a deafened Beethoven, who scored his late music based on
notating the vibrations he felt when pressed against the instrument of his
customized pianoforte; or indeed, in the American tradition of a hearing-
impaired Edison, the father of high fidelity, who would ‚check the
amplitude‛ of a telephone signal by ‚touching the needle‛ to transfer the
‚functions of his ear to his sense of touch.‛280
Ellison elsewhere described the ‚intimate source of noise‛ that gets ‚beneath
the skin‛ and works ‚into the very structure of one’s consciousness – like the
278 Esty, Unseasonable Youth, p. 148.
279 Ibid., p. 144.
280 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and
Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 28.
296
‘fate’ motif in Beethoven’s Fifth or the knocking-at-the-gates scene in
Macbeth.‛281 The quasi una fantasia of the young black man’s electrified and
musical experience with the machine – the electroshock machine, and the
phonograph – punctuates the connection between music and violent cultural
indoctrination and technological fetish. The crisis of Bildung insists upon a
young man, who, as Ellison describes of his own musical education, is
‚caught actively‛ between two competing traditions and ‘styles’: ‚that of
Negro folk music, both sacred and profane, slave song and jazz, and that of
Western classical music.‛282 The negation of the negation, in which musical
expression is irretrievably subjected to technological determinism, forms the
nodal point of the Künstler’s development, and one of extreme dislocation
and alienation, but also illumination and enlightenment.
If something democratic or universalist responds to the mediation of music
that is ‚wired to reach ‘the unconscious levels of the mind’‛ on the ‚lower
frequencies‛ as Invisible Man suggests, *468+ its powers to broadcast the
individual aspiring artist must overcome ‚considerable static,‛ as Goble
suggests.283 High fidelity as a broadcasting medium therefore resonates with
the oversaturated market of the American ‘history of the young man’ genre
that is still guided by cultural and political demands that limit what may be
represented by the black artist. At the same time, to work within the
Bildungsroman genre is always to risk ratifying bourgeois ideology that has
set black life as a by-product of the dominant culture. Even prior to late
capitalism, individuation was always already at stake in the economies of the
novel and the Bildungsroman genre, where titles such as Wright’s Black Boy
and Ellison’s Invisible Man ‚underscore how white understandings of
281 Ellison, Shadow and Act, p. 189.
282 Ibid., p. 190.
283 Goble, Beautiful Circuits, p. 163.
297
blackness exclude African-American males from any aspiration to visible
manhood.‛284 Ellison therefore releases new sounds of individualism that may
hold the potential to problematize and overcome these generic limitations.
The ‚frighten*ed+‛ last line of the novel, ‚Who knows but that, on the lower
frequencies, I speak for you?‛ *468+, certainly resonates on the same optative
wavelength as the democratic ‚lessons‛ of Whitman’s song of America almost
a century before it, which rises up to transform ‚worms, snakes, loathsome
grubs‛ to ‚sweet spiritual songs‛ in the poem ‘Wandering at Morn’:
Then may I trust in you, your fortunes, days, my country:
— Who knows that these may be the lessons fit for you?
From these your future Song may rise, with joyous trills,
Destin’d to fill the world.285
The prevailing urge to resolve Ellison’s many contradictory ideological and
political positions lifts by attending primarily to Ellison’s style of
Bildungsroman. The individual’s record, the Künstlerroman, affirms
modernity’s chaotic, noisy soundscape through polyvalent resistance,
embracing and extracting the contradictions and multitudes of the historical
present, rather than recoiling into a defeated paralysis of ‚acoustical
deadness.‛ *7+ To express to his audience his own history beyond the fabula
demonstrates the trials and errors that have brought Invisible Man to his
present state of musical and artistic awakening as a recorded event – a double
meaning emphasized in both the cyclical structure and his drug-fuelled
adventures in high fidelity in the novel’s frame sequences. This is how Ellison
284 Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson (eds.), ‘Haunted Bodies: Rethinking the
South through Gender,’ in Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts (Charlottesville and
London: University Press of Virginia, 1997), p. 3.
285 Walt Whitman, ‘Wandering at Morn,’ *c.1881+ in The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman
(Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1995), p. 365.
299
Chapter Three:
The Southern Plantation Fringe Bildungsroman
Introduction: Before and Beyond Crop Year 1936
Incest and Inheritance: Keeping the Bildungsroman in the Plantation
Family
Like Faulkner’s past that ‚is never dead,‛ the past that is ‚not even past,‛1 the
Bildungsroman has become an unvanquishable fixture of Southern literature
in the twentieth century. Marc Redfield leads the chorus of Bildungsroman
scholars who describe the genre at large in terms of the undead: ‚The more
this genre is cast into question, the more it flourishes *<+ a more historically
and philosophically precise understanding of Bildung does not appear either
to keep the Bildungsroman healthy and alive, or to prevent its corpse from
rising with renewed vigor each time it is slain. The popular success of
vulgarized notions of the Bildungsroman simply repeats, on a grander scale,
this genre’s indestructibility within the specialized literature.‛ 2 An
indestructible, phantom genre serves as the natural vehicle for the New
Southerners in the first half of the twentieth century, who attempt to work
through the hainted past of slavery and the long aftershock of the Civil War,
and all the dead that refuse to lay silent. The Bildungsroman not only prevails
against what Melanie Benson Taylor describes as Faulkner’s ‚anxiously
modernizing New South, a temporal and geographic space where the
1 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1960), p. 81.
2 Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 42.
300
burdens of history nourished the soil and suffused a man’s character, and
where the possibilities of regeneration were ceaselessly thwarted by the
aftershocks of a harrowing past‛; the phantom Bildungsroman all the more
feeds upon these fertile grounds of creative destruction.3
From the celebrated frigidity of the body of the white Southern lady, to the
castrated, lifeless body of the black lynching victim, ‚no bodies ever appeared
more haunted by society‛ than those of the American South, argue Susan V.
Donaldson and Anne Goodwyn Jones. 4 In Georgia of 1949, Lillian Smith,
writing her powerful sally into the national apartheid,5 Killers of the Dream,
describes the intuition of all Southern children to the ‚ghosts‛ of segregation:
‚To them, it is a vague thing weaving in and out of their play, like a ghost
haunting an old graveyard or whispers after the household sleeps *<+ The
children know this ‘trouble’ is bigger than they, bigger than their church, so
big that people turn away from its size. They have seen it flash out like
lightning and shatter a town’s peace, have felt it tear up all they believe in.‛6 If
3 Melanie Benson Taylor, ‘Faulkner’s Doom: The Undead Inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha,’ in
Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture, ed. Eric Gary
Anderson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015) p. 88.
4 Susan V. Donaldson and Anne Goodwyn Jones (eds.), ‘Haunted Bodies: Rethinking the
South Through Gender,’ in Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts (Charlottesville and
London: University of Virginia Press, 1997), p. 1.
5 When referring to de jure segregation, Leigh Anne Duck preferences the Afrikaans term of
apartheid, in order to rhetorically emphasize how U.S. racial segregation was systemically
codified and enforced by lawgiving agencies as well as social institutions. ‚U.S. nationalism
has generally represented southern apartheid as a cultural practice tolerated by the liberal
state.‛ Duck’s usage of the term apartheid therefore accurately locates the systemic forces
behind Lillian Smith’s ghostly metaphor of cultural segregation. Leigh Anne Duck, The
Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism (Athens and London:
The University of Georgia Press, 2006), p. 4.
6 Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1994), p. 25.
301
the Bildungsroman is indeed a phantom genre, the Southern novelist is
acutely aware that plantation system means certain individuals will always be
phantasms who are unable to equally participate as Bildungshelden.
As Richard Wright wrote of his youth in the Mississippi, the entire cultural
and educational system of the South ‚had been rigged to stifle‛ the
dreamscape and self-cultivation of the black youth; through literature,
through education, a young Dick begins to feel ‚the very thing that the state
of Mississippi had spent millions of dollars to make sure that I would never
feel‛; he becomes increasingly ‚aware of the thing that the Jim Crow laws had
been drafted and passed to keep out of my consciousness‛; he acts ‚on
impulses that southern senators in the nation’s capital had striven to keep out
of Negro life.‛ 7 He becomes an autonomous subject of action who ‚dream*s+
the dreams that the state had said were wrong, that the schools had said were
taboo.‛8
It is a dream that can only be fully realized when Dick leaves the South
behind both physically, and in the act of writing itself; the past continuous
tense of his reflection indicates the clear extent to which he exhumes the early
mode of plantation fiction, the slave narrative, as Frederick Douglass had
hybridized it with the Künstlerroman almost a century earlier. Douglass’
representation of the slave’s unhappy consciousness filters into Wright’s
threatening mediated imagery of the living dead: ‚In me was shaping a
yearning for a kind of consciousness, a mode of being that the way of life
about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the penalty of
death had been placed. Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life
had switched onto the wrong track and, without my knowing it, the
7 Richard Wright, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (New York and London: Harper
and Brothers Publishers, 1945), p. 148.
8 Ibid.
302
locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading
for a collision<‛9
Since 1865, the ‚black man‛ had ‚loom*ed+‛ over America’s sense of national
identity ‚like a dark ghost on the horizon< the child of force and greed, and
the father of wealth and war,‛ writes Du Bois.10 Even after the Civil War, the
ghost did not dissolve; the ‚old anti-Negro labor rivalry between white and
black workers kept the labor elements after the war from ever really uniting
in a demand to increase labor power by Negro suffrage and Negro stability,‛
Du Bois argues; and the perpetuity of the South’s psychic and physical
divisions facilitated the ‚tremendous dictatorship of capital‛ which arose in
the North to increase in power. As a result, the South, as an imaginative
narrative construct passed down through its generations, remained ‘hainted’
by the hierarchical relationships of race, class, and gender, a social system that
reveals itself in the ‚interlocking logics of dichotomy – masculine and
feminine, white and black, master and slave, planter and ‘white trash,’
Cavalier and Yankee.‛ 11 It is haunted, in other words, by bloodlines,
dynasties, and atavism, traditions which are increasingly called into question
with the modernization of the South.
For Jessica Adams, the cartography of the postbellum landscape acts as the
unfolding, unfading palimpsest of its phantom past, marking its territorial
expansion along the railroad tracks leading to the North, and out to the sunset
West. 12 Whilst the metaphor of the locomotive symbolized the fear of
9 Wright, Black Boy, p. 148.
10 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company,
1935), p. 239.
11 Donaldson and Goodwyn Jones, ‘Haunted Bodies,’ p. 1.
12 Jessica Adams, Wounds of Returning: Race, Memory, and Property on the Postslavery Plantation
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp. 3-4.
303
progress in a dangerously atavistic South in Wright’s Black Boy, these same
tracks, the increasing connection and progress of the machine age that they
symbolize, inspired the mulatto activist Homer Plessy, whose phenotype was
white though he was of ‚octoroon‛ descent, to board a train upon the East
Louisiana Railroad and perform his powerful visual protest against Jim Crow
laws by riding in the white-only carriage. ‚Ownership and property are
revealed as eerie, disturbed phantoms,‛ Adams writes of this material legacy,
‚*<+ the anxieties they contain continue to effect life on the post-plantation
South.‛13 These tracks also fuelled the imaginings of writers such as Faulkner,
standing at the crossroads between feudalistic agrarianism and technological
modernity. Regarding the third act of Requiem for a Nun (1951), Julian
Murphet contemplates how Faulkner’s ‚ironically‛ natural trope describing
the Redmond-Sartoris-Compson 1876 railroad as ‚veined oak leaf‛ prompts
the reader to consider ‚exactly what is ‘natural’‛ in the breached borders and
temporal distance of the ‚small regional town’s density.‛14
Murphet’s example may extend to other ‘naturalized’ constructs of identity
and regionalism in the Southern literary ecology. Faulkner’s veined oak
railroad compares to the peculiarly feminized plot of Eudora Welty’s Delta
Wedding (1946) five years earlier, which begins with the name of a train: the
Yazoo-Delta ‚mixed train,‛ going by the local earmark ‚the Yellow Dog.‛15
The wedding of Bildungshelde Laura McRaven’s cousin, Daphne Fairchild,
which is to be the apex event of the Shellmound plantation’s otherwise
queerly unremarkable year, is very nearly aborted by the plantation’s violent
contact with mediated modernity; Laura, a group of the Fairchild women, the
13 Ibid.
14 Julian Murphet, ‘Introduction,’ in William Faulkner in the Media Ecology, eds. Julian Murphet
and Stephen Solomon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), pp. 1-2.
15 Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding (London: Virago, 1986), p. 3.
304
black servants, and the patriarch Uncle George at their centre, wander along
the tracks and are nearly run down by ‚the Dog‛ when cloud cover makes
them forget the transit schedule. If the Fairchilds seem reluctant to
acknowledge the ‚outside world,‛ whether historically or geographically, as
Susan Donaldson corroborates,16 the barking of the train serves as the novel’s
recurrent reminder of the plantation’s vexed relationship to timekeeping:
between finitude and infinitude, atavism and composite modernity, the
individual and the collective history. Yet ‚*f+or a little while it was a charmed
life<‛ for the Bildungshelde and her kin, as the omniscient narrator surmises,
a life lived under the nimbus of the crumbling Delta plantation legacy.17
The regional chasm between North and South, which increasingly distorts
with modernization, boils down to the nature of the South’s core structure:
‚the household,‛ the lens and lever of the plantation system, as it has been
defined by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.18 Partly, the decline of ‘the household’ in
the North on the one hand and its salience in the South on the other stems
from the latter’s retention of an agricultural economy based upon a plantation
mode of production. Southern slavery, and its ‚persisting rural character‛
after Abolition in the problematic form of sharecropping, continued the
‚network of households that contained within themselves the decisive
relations of production and reproduction.‛ 19 The ‘household’ of the South
largely relegated matters of both labor relations and gender relations ‚to the
private sphere,‛ as opposed to Northern division of labor, which
16 Susan V. Donaldson, ‘Gender and History in Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding,’ South Central
Review vol. 14, no. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 5-6.
17 Welty, Delta Wedding, p. 166.
18 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old
South. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 38.
19 Ibid.
305
‚increasingly ascribe*d+ them to the public spheres of market and state.‛ 20 As
a private and commercial institution, the household vouchsafed its specific
social hierarchies in all spheres of southern communal life, from the ‚law,
political economy, politics, and slaveholders’ relations with yeomen and other
nonslaveholding whites.‛21
Susan Donaldson and Anne Goodwyn Jones contend that even as the North
commercialized, urbanized, and underwent industrial changes, the South
remained largely preindustrial and agrarian long into the twentieth century.
As a result, social categories, such as race and gender, remained unchallenged
within the household and on the plantations. During the antebellum period,
white men of all classes ‚did not typically leave home for long daily hours at
a factory or a business *<+ men’s ‘business’ was typically at home,‛
reinforcing a household model and division of labor that still privileged white
men of all stock as ‚lords and masters.‛22 ‚In the front yard was a patriarchal
system,‛ the classroom of ‚sin, sex, segregation, and the overestimation of
money,‛ Lillian Smith outlined of her own Southern childhood; ‚in the back
yard, a matriarchy.‛23 The Plantation Americas caused familial, racial, gender,
sexual, and cultural boundaries to crumble ‚on either side of the master-slave
line,‛ Loichot further describes, 24 with enormous implications for the
possibility of individuation. ‚The violent imposition of abusive borders
between binary categories of humans – free and enslaved, black and white,
women and men, blessed and wretched – symptomatically points to the
20 Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, p. 38.
21 Ibid.
22 Donaldson and Goodwyn Jones, ‘Haunted Bodies,’ p. 3.
23 Smith, Killers of the Dream, p. 117.
24 Valérie Loichot, Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literature of Faulkner, Glissant,
Morrison, and Saint-John Perse (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2007),
p. 6.
306
moribund state of the Plantation,‛ she concludes. 25 The question at hand,
therefore, is what is might look like to represent a Southern individual who
comes of age – who by definition must transition into some new state – in this
strictly Janus faced, black and white milieu, segregated in every respect, and
always caught in between two states: whether the past or present, the white
or Other, masculine or feminine.
In excavating the legacy of this plantation mentality in the ‚postslavery‛
literary imagination, Elizabeth Christine Russ offers the following remark:
that ‚the plantation, in a literary context, *is+ not primarily a physical location
but rather an insidious ideological and psychological trope through which
intersecting histories of the New World are told and retold.‛26 The chorus of
the plantation regime denied the ‚voices of those whose exploitation and loss
were most intense‛ under slavery, silencing, marginalizing these members
within ‚the official archives of history.‛ 27 The two types of plantation
literature that predominated in the nineteenth century both reflect the
silencing nature of the plantation trope as a literary historical archive: firstly,
general plantation fiction; and secondly, the slave narrative.
Michael P. Bibler writes that from the early 1800s, John Pendleton Kentucky
and others published the first significant plantation novels, ‚literary
narratives about the plantation have typically revolved around issues of
marriage and reproduction, whereby the continuity of the entire plantation
system depends on the continuity of the white, slaveholding family.‛28 During
25 Loichot, Orphan Narratives, p. 6.
26 Elizabeth Christine Russ, The Plantation in the Postslavery Imagination (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 3.
27 Ibid.
28 Michael P. Bibler, Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern
Plantation, 1936-1968 (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2009), p. 2.
307
the 1880s, the plantation tradition established itself ‚as a literary mode
glorifying the Old South through nostalgia connected to the image of an
aristocratic white society served by a contented slave force.‛29 Thomas Nelson
Page and Joel Chandler Harris were primary figures who ‚fashioned to sell
this vision‛ by appropriating and co-opting the African American voice;
Page’s 1887 collection of stories, In Ole Virginia, is the defining instance of this
antebellum ‚enchanted version of plantation mythology.‛ Page’s
enchantment establishes the master as ‚gentleman,‛ the mistress as ‚lady,‛
and the slave as the ‚center around which the plantation revolves‛; his stories
are told by ‚elderly African American family retainers who sustain, protect,
and restore their white owners both in their stance as narrators and their acts
of devotion as characters.‛30 The prevalence of this docile racial fantasy right
up until the 1960s makes it hard to imagine that forty-two years prior to the
publication of Page’s In Ole Virginia, Frederick Douglass had astonished
readers with his account of fighting Mr. Covey, a white slave breaker,
forcefully speaking to the representational irony of Bildung for the South’s
many disenfranchised members: ‚You have seen how a man was made a
slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.‛31
Post-Reconstruction popular fiction formed ‚the imaginative expression of
the ‘New South Creed,’‛ a vision that Richard King describes as an attempt
for the South to emphasize through culture ‚the need for industrial
development, diversified agriculture, sectional reconciliation, and racial
29 William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster and Trudier Harris (eds.), ‘Plantation Tradition,’
in The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997), p. 580.
30 Ibid.
31 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written By
Himself (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009),
p. 72.
308
comity, with black placed in a subordinate position.‛32 From Reconstruction
until well into the twentieth century, these plantation romances – whether
slave narratives or plantation fiction, on both sides of the ideological chasm
surrounding race – ushered regional and national ‚anxieties‛ regarding
‚sexual exploitation and racial mixing‛ to the forefront of the literary
imagination.33
The fear of mixing race and gender divisions urgently extended to form itself.
When plantation fiction writer William Gilmore Simms published his review
of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he declared the novel a ‚Mosaic
monster‛ that ‚violated the formal canons‛ of the ‚structure of the romance‛
by injecting it with social protest. 34 As Lucinda H. MacKethan puts forth, a
romance writer could not ‚enter the realm of social critique,‛ for genres at
their core ‚become a way to restrict‛ people to their acceptable roles; to mix
genres was to throw the ‚southern fictions of the plantation into a chaos of
genres and genders.‛35 As I shall return to in the first section of this chapter,
the productive ‘violation’ and ‘mixing’ of the generic borders between the
plantation romance, the Bildungsroman, and social protest fiction forms an
important strategy for twentieth century writers such as Zora Neale Hurston
– and indeed, anyone from Faulkner, Welty, Richard Wright, William Styron,
Nat Turner, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, to Arna
Bontemps – to critique and reconstruct Southern history and identity.
32 Richard H. King, A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930-
1955 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 30.
33 Bibler, Cotton’s Queer Relations, p. 2.
34 Lucinda H. MacKethan, ‘Domesticity in Dixie: The Plantation Novel and Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’
in Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, eds. Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V.
Donaldson (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1997), pp. 238-9.
35 Ibid., pp. 238-9.
309
The Bildungsroman came to being as the product of bourgeois Enlightenment
and universalist thinking during the same time period as the rise of plantation
fiction. However, neither a ‚culture of individualistic equality nor modern
economic growth‛ – the wellsprings of Germanic Bildung philosophy – could
be considered salient to the postbellum South.36 Jay Mandle outlines how the
failure of land reform denied the mobility of poor laborers, in particular, the
now ‘free’ black workers.37 The prevalence of the Bildungsroman in the South
during the twentieth century responds directly to the widespread individual
deprivations issued by the Southern mode of production at the level of style
and content. Rather than fortify the concept of the bourgeoisie, the Southern
Bildungsroman scrutinizes the continuation of the Southern ‚‘middle-class,’
broadly construed,‛ in which ‚some people‛ had not only ‚own*ed+ others,‛38
– some three million others, no less – but were now all the more violently
divided over the continuation of this private property ownership system.
Richard Godden argues that the social revolution in the South after the
Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 failed largely because Congressional
Republicans were prepared to ‚deprive planters of their illegitimate
property‛ but not ‚dispossess them of what were held to be their legitimate
rights in property.‛39 Without the fulfilment of the forty acres and a mule, per
freedman, ‚the slave went free; stood for a brief time in the sun; then moved
back again toward slavery,‛ as Du Bois put it.40 The Bildungsroman could
36 Jay R. Mandle, Not Slave, Not Free: The African American Economic Experience since the Civil
War (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992), p. 67.
37 Ibid.
38 Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, p. 41.
39 Richard Godden, ‘A Difficult Economy: Faulkner and the Poetics of Plantation Labor,’ in A
Companion to William Faulkner, ed. Richard C. Mooreland (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing
Ltd., 2007), p. 8.
40 Quoted in Godden, ‘A Difficult Economy,’ p. 8.
310
only respond to the young individual’s role within this social system in two
ways: either to produce idealized representations of the decaying values of
the Old South; or to revise and protest its continuation.
The watershed moment in this representational fissure peaks circa 1936. This
degree of separation occurs in juxtaposing two ‘historical epic’ novels
released that year, both of which merged traits of the plantation romance
tradition and the Bildungsroman. On the one hand, Margaret Mitchell
titillates us with an introduction to Southern belle and Bildungshelde Scarlett
O’Hara’s romantic, whitewashed homestead in rural Georgia. Witness the
springtime of the Tara Plantation in full bloom:
The moist hungry earth, waiting upturned for the cotton seeds *<+
The whitewashed brick plantation house seemed an island set in a
wild red sea *<+ It was a savagely red land, blood-colored after rains,
brick dust in droughts, the best cotton land in the world *<+ a
pleasant land of white houses, peaceful plowed fields and sluggish
yellow rivers, but a land of contrasts, of brightest sun glare and
densest shade *<+ mysterious, a little sinister, the soughing pines
seeming to *<+ threaten with soft sighs: "Be careful! Be careful! We
had you once. We can take you back again."41
The springtide ‚peaceful plowed fields‛ of Tara recapitulate the florescent,
harmonious myth of chattel slavery and the rubbed-raw backbone of
American capitalism; personified clay earth, ‚moist‛ and ‚hungry,‛ waiting
‚upturned for the cotton seeds‛ as if the only natural course for this ravenous
cotton plantation, the crème de la crème of the American domestic product, is to
be reaped. Mitchell’s clotted imagery alludes not to the blood spilled by
overworked, well-disciplined slaves; these tropes symbolize the white
41 Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (New York and London: Pocket Books, 2008), pp. 9-
10.
311
lifeblood that thrives in an environment of sublime beauty, and the Anglo-
American bloodshed in warfare between white planter brothers. More
importantly, the imagery of Tara personified lives and breathes as any human
organism – a specifically white organism at that, holding back the guilty
conscience of the black, sinister forest – to the same effect as Du Bois ‚ghost‛
of the black man.42 Through its personification, Tara signifies, in this symbolic
sense, the salience of strictly managed bloodlines to the plantation system;
this is the social ideal which Scarlett’s Bildungsromance must ratify. Duck
proposes that Mitchell’s historical romance, all the more after Hollywood
remediated it in 1939, reverted the representation of American nationhood to
‚an unproblematic resource for nationalists who sought greater balance
between tradition and modernization.‛43
Mitchell’s Bildungsromance plot distracts any scrutiny towards these racist
ideological underpinnings, misleadingly presenting its ideology as
authoritative reality. The historical romance and its reinvigoration of the
romantic mythology of the plantation familia, served liberal empiricism to
resolve the crisis of America’s failed Bildung, in contradistinction to the
pervasive reality of the South’s contemporary poverty and the long accepted
expression of ‚southern backwardness.‛44 Mitchell upholds the whitewashed
plantation Bildungsromance, in which enslaved black inhabitants want to be
members of this estate, a part of the security it offers and its civilized order,
too, for it is the only home they know. Standing in defence of the peroxided
beauty, harmony, and unadulterated virtue of this ‚whitewashed brick
plantation house,‛ Tara openly yearns for the same racist historical
revisionism as Thomas Dixon’s the Klan trilogy, remembered for The
42 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, p. 239.
43 Duck, Nation’s Region, p. 52.
44 Ibid.
312
Clansman’s (1905) adaptation into the silent filmic epic, The Birth of a Nation
(1915).
From the same year of publication, an antagonistic plantation image rises up
from the earth, revealing the more sinister implications of Southern
dynasticism in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! The Bildungsheld Quentin
Compson, regenerated by his appearance in this complementary work to The
Sound and the Fury, reflects on the rise of the Sutpen’s Hundred plantation:
It seems that this demon – his name was Sutpen – (Colonel Sutpen) –
Colonel Sutpen. Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon the
land was a band of strange niggers and built a plantation – (Tore violently a
plantation, Miss Rosa Coldfield says) – tore violently. And married her sister
Ellen and begot a son and a daughter which – (Without gentleness begot,
Miss Rosa Coldfield says) – without gentleness. Which should have been the
jewels of his pride and the shied and comfort of his old age, only – (Only they
destroyed him or something or he destroyed them or something. And died) –
and died.45
The italicized, dialogic stream of consciousness occurs between two sides of
Quentin Compson’s identity ‚now talking to one another‛: the pre-Harvard
student, the intelligent Southerner headed north to be educated, following the
Erziehungsroman tradition; and the Compson ‘heir,’ born and bred of the
deep South, alongside all the other ghosts returned to the dust of Jefferson –
two sides of the same self, recalling a vicious, black-and-white past in which
Thomas Sutpen tore a plantation and family legacy from the soil of
Yoknapatawpha County. The second Quentin – syntactically the less
privileged voice as it is reduced to the afterthought of brackets – recalls the
memories Miss Rosa passes down of ultraviolence, a defining lack of
gentleness, the destruction of hubris and racialized/classist revenge that
45 William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (Middlesex and New York: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 5.
313
ravaged all races of the estate under the reign of the originating Sutpen
patriarch.
The privileged Quentin voice romanticizes the siege of Sutpen upon the land,
recalling his story as one might recall the mythology of some fallen tyrant of
the ancients. Sutpen is the self-made patriarch, as the Christian God on the
seventh day, announcing let there ‚Be Sutpen’s Hundred like the oldentime Be
Light.‛ Yet within six months of this narration, we already know that Quentin,
the inheritor to nothing except ‚noblesse oblige,‛ will commit suicide to
symbolically vouchsafe his sister’s innocence, or remove himself for a world
where the ‘genteel’ Compsons bear the same similarity-in-difference to the
savagery of Sutpen’s plan. Sutpen’s Hundred here recasts the narrative of
America’s unshakeable haint into a legacy of deranged white power-hunger
and bloodlust, driving Southern history and its literature from the false
narrative of the plantation as harmonious, familial utopia .
To close this gap between literary genre and the generic reality of the
plantation (by which I mean the closed systems of reading bodies as a
plantation ‘family’), but also to complicate the ‘Americanness’ of the text’s
relation to the genre, returning to Bildungsroman theory itself may be of
assistance, particularly Michael Minden’s categorization of the Germanic
Bildungsroman as operating under the Oedipal circularities of ‚incest and
inheritance.‛ ‘Incest’ here refers to a ‚motif expressing the quintessence of
desire‛ towards the maternal source, the ‚collapse of difference‛ in the
pursuit of heterosexual determination – such as a narrative that culminates in
marriage, and by implication, reproduction. 46 ‘Inheritance’ is simply the
guarantee of masculine identity constructed through the principle of
46 Michael Minden, The German Bildungsroman: Incest and Inheritance (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), pp. 1-2.
314
primogeniture: the continuance of masculine authority. 47 As much as the
Bildungsheld attempts to autonomously realize his potential in this model,
his narrative can only achieve limited individuation insofar as he eventually
willingly submits to these two laws. The American South, whether ‘Old’ or
‘New,’ might seem a far cry from the novelized worlds of a Novalis, Wieland,
or Goethe; but this same generic principle of incest and inheritance ultimately
frames the great concern of the Southern Bildungsroman guided by
plantation logic in a strictly disharmonious, indeed dystopian fashion.
As Richard King outlined in the groundbreaking if problematically selective
compendium, A Southern Renaissance, Freud’s original conception of the
‚family romance‛ described the alarming moment of a child’s disillusionment
towards the ideal of his or her parents, no longer seeing them as ‚sum of all
human virtue.‛ 48 Otto Rank’s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, in which Freud
introduces this concept, traces this pattern into the collective of myth making,
where romances fashion narratives of heroes whose defining moment is to
return home to displace the father and marry the mother. ‚Thereby he
assumes the high or noble station which is rightly his,‛ King writes.49 The
family romance, as defined by King, serves as the regional translation of the
complex that had always driven the Bildungsroman: the cycle of incest and
inheritance. The most significant difference is the habitus that connects the
Southern individual to their society: their position within the plantation
household.
The Sound and the Fury serves as the most literal manifestation of the Oedipal
connection between the Bildungsroman and the plantation, where Faulkner
sublates the fantasy of incest and inheritance within the four male heirs of the
47 Minden, The German Bildungsroman, pp. 2-3.
48 King, A Southern Renaissance, p. 28.
49 Ibid.
315
crumbling Compson plantation dynasty. Quentin Compson’s consciousness,
like that of his younger brothers Jason and Benjy, cannot transcend the
immobilizing fixation with their sister Caddy’s sexuality; at the level of
narrative, his cognizance is stuck in the prelapsarian past prior to Caddy’s
(and therefore the entire Compson dynasty’s) sexual ‘Fall’: ‚If it could just be a
hell beyond that: the clean flame the two of us more than dead. Then you will have
only me then only me then the two of us amid the pointing and the horror beyond the
clean flame.‛50 For this reason, Doreen Fowler, in a Lacanian reading, positions
Caddy and her daughter (also named Quentin, itself suggestive of the
plantation’s desperate urge to ‘keep it in the family’) as the maternal sites of
the return of the repressed.51
The incestuous fantasy serves in The Sound and the Fury to alleviate the anxiety
of the plantation’s breached borders – signified by Caddy, the text’s would-be
Southern lady, and the familial disgrace of her broken hymen – by containing
the bloodline to members of the same family. The sole, unbreakable purpose
and commerce of the plantation is to continue the bloodline; therefore, the
cult of Southern Womanhood as the emblem of purity was affixed to
Southern institutions by the color white, the symbol of the unbroken dynastic
hymen, as Richard Godden here proposes:
By means of *the young lady’s+ propriety, husbands, fathers, and sons
whitewashed their property and its sustaining institutions. However,
the cult of Southern Womanhood raised the standard of the
unbreachable hymen precisely because miscegenation breached the
color line throughout the prewar South. Plainly, if the iconic item was
50 William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (London: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 98.
51 Doreen Fowler, ‘‚Little Sister Death:‛ The Sound and the Fury and the Denied Unconscious,’
in Faulkner and Psychology: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1991, eds. Donald M. Kartiganer and
Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994), p. 5.
316
to withstand the iconoclastic force of the evidence, it needed support
that white males found in the incest dream. Where the hymen
quarantines the family ‚blood,‛ protecting it from risk of
contamination through crossing, incest ensures that where crossing
has occurred it shall be between like ‚bloods.‛52
For Godden, the quarantined household ‚founded on plantation wealth‛
comes apart at all the seams: an alcoholic father, and invalid mother, as well
as the ‚idiocy, suicide, promiscuity, and commerce‛ that inhibits the
development of the children into functional adults. 53 ‚Yet, from the
perspective of 1929,‛ he counterargues, ‚the house coheres; at least to the
point at which a rotting gutter, or a black boy practicing on a musical saw in
the cellar, are symbolic indices rather than structural factors.‛ 54 This
coherence, however precarious, is dependent upon the presence of Dilsey and
her extended black family, he concludes. The three male sibling narrators
from the Compton bloodline, who are fixated with rebuilding the appearance
of their sister’s lost virginity, only make obvious what has always been at risk
in the Southern ‚family romance.‛ What is at risk in The Sound and the Fury
has everything to do with not only the type of household to which the young
Compson men belong, a plantation dynasty; what is at risk is the way the
plantation itself takes shape within the novel through the individual histories
of these young men. The fragmentation of Faulkner’s structure, a
Bildungsroman splintered between four narrators, and moving in and out of a
single day of their ‘present’ tense reveals at the level of form how this
plantation structure is doomed to cave in upon itself; this disintegration
occurs before we even factor in the disfiguring generic effect that the use of
internal monologue incurs regarding the linearity of the ‘history of the young 52 Godden, ‘A Difficult Economy,’ p. 17.
53 Ibid., p. 12.
54 Ibid.
317
man’ form. 55 In Faulkner’s plantation Yoknapatawpha, and in each of the
three cases to follow in this chapter, miscegenation encompasses the fear of
infecting or disturbing bloodlines through impure relations, where the
plantation serves as a literal and tropological receptacle of ancestral blood.
Yet in the chaotic threnody of the plantation’s dissolution, the bright hope of
social progress may be gleaned by embracing the possibility of generic
mixture at all levels.
Minden’s definition of the Bildungsroman serves the same logic as the
Plantation: the continuation of the social and economic system through
reproduction, where individuals negotiate their sense of civic duty against
their individual desires for freedom from social constraint. ‚Within this house
that slavery built,‛ to borrow Valérie Loichot’s phrase, the family portrait of
Southern authors ‚share a common inheritance of economic, sexual, and
epistemic violence.‛56 As regards the South, we cannot read this continuation
of the Bildungsroman’s generic inheritance and incest without urgently,
radically expanding these concepts in relation to race and gender, finding the
means to overcome the imperishable dynasties which resist any change to
these hierarchies – which is precisely what the plantation fringe
55 The question of whether a Bildungsroman scaffold can bear the weight of such a splintering
– that is, whether or not we can call a novel a sustained multi-first person protagonist text a
Bildungsroman – remains open. Unlike a Bildungsroman text such as Studs Lonigan or Their
Eyes Were Watching God (as I shall presently attend to in the coming chapter), The Sounds and
the Fury not only shifts focalization between consciousnesses; it entirely discards of a
narrator’s perspective once their section has reached its completion. Yet, certainly the first
three chapters of the novel function as coming-of-age apparatuses in their own right,
certainly if put into conversation with the other texts this thesis has considered using my
method for reading the American Bildungsroman. The Sound and the Fury, in this regard,
serves as the most extreme narratological limit between what constitutes a Bildungsroman
and what does not, sustaining the problematic case for the ‘indefinability’ of the genre.
56 Loichot, Orphan Narratives, p. 15.
318
Bildungsroman calls upon its reader to do. The definition I have constructed
for the plantation fringe Bildungsroman is characterized by a narrative’s
impulse to receive and then unravel its troubling inheritances by overriding
its neat borders, classifications, traditions. The individual overcomes the
Plantation’s essentialist attitudes by rejecting the genre’s impulse to
universalism in acts of generic ‘self-destruction.’ Quentin throwing his
weighted body into the Charles River would be one clear example of this
symbolic generic sacrifice; Ike McCaslin’s abdication of property and
bloodline in Go Down Moses (1942) illustrates another form of the anti-
dynastic Bildungsheld figure in Faulkner.
The self-destruction of the individual to service the ‘termination’ of the
plantation trope is not always so literally conveyed in the Bildungsroman
genre. Essentialist (transhistorical) and universal categories of subjectivity,
such as race, class, and gender, cannot describe the experience of individuals
living in a society where slavery, even long after Abolition, remains the core
fact of life, and where the collective social mentality denies individuals their
inalienable rights. In the growing dissatisfaction of the twentieth century
towards civil rights, the Southern climate produces a prolific amount of
Bildungsromans that transfigure the genre’s realist tendencies into what we
would associate with the Southern Gothic: grotesque, fragmented versions of
its imperishable generic template. Leigh Anne Duck emphasizes the
insecurity of the ‚national or regional gothic,‛ where the identifiers of social,
psychological and physical ‚human extremit*ies+,‛ sustained by the ‚gloomy
style‛ of narrative production, appeal to the endemic threat of all generic
mutation: to resemble and disfigure the forebear.57 A mere glance at the style
57 Leigh Anne Duck, ‘Undead Genres/Living Locales: Gothic Legacies in The True Meaning of
Pictures and Winter’s Bone,’ in Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and
319
in the aforementioned works of Faulkner and Welty (despite the latter’s
protestation in an interview with Alice Walker, ‚They’d better not call me
that!‛),58 or Erskine Caldwell (Georgia Boy), Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward,
Angel), and Truman Capote (Other Voices, Other Rooms) would evidence this
gothic Bildungsroman trend; as do the works of Carson McCullers and
Flannery O’Connor, which I will consider at length in the final two sections of
this chapter. As Sarah Gleeson-White argues, the ‚contorted and fragmented
bodies that fill these writers’ stories own up to a tragic history in which they
have partaken, even in silence,‛ a historical revisionism not only geared to
resolve the ‚burdensome models of femininity,‛ but furthermore to attend to
slavery as the ‚tragic legacy and a literally fatal regional patriotism.‛59
I shall examine the breaching of the plantation system through these outlets of
intermixture in the Bildungsromans of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were
Watching God, Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding, and as the final
section of this thesis, Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear it Away. As these
three texts do not directly focus on plantation spaces in the same way that the
postplantation literature of Faulkner or Toni Morrison visualize plantation
space, for instance, I will argue that these texts belong to what I call a
‘plantation fringe’ system in literature. These Bildungsromans may remove
the plantation architecture, whilst scrutinizing the ‘Southern household’ and
parodically mimicking the plantation’s internal domestic social construction
of the familia. This compendium reveals the remarkable ways in which
Culture, eds. Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, and Daniel Cross Turner (Baton Rouge,
Louisiana State University Press, 2015), p. 175.
58 Quoted in Susan V. Donaldson, ‘Making A Spectacle: Welty, Faulkner, and Southern
Gothic,’ The Mississippi Quarterly vol. 50, no. 4 (Fall, 1997), p. 567.
59 Sarah Gleeson-White, ‘A Peculiarly Southern Form of Ugliness: Eudora Welty, Carson
McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor,’ The Southern Literary Journal vol. 36, no. 1 (Fall, 2003), p.
46.
320
Southern authors of the mid-twentieth century revisited this same old generic
conflict between tradition and progress I have outlined, and came to exhume
the dynastic plantation trope through the phantom Bildungsroman, if only to
transfigure both these traditions into powerfully composite, contradictory
forms. In the three texts I have selected, the individual Bildungsheld/e
becomes the multiple and dialectical sum of the South’s contradictory social
relations, a vessel of affirmative dissimilarity rather than harmonious unity
we associate with the finite ‘maturation’ or ‘self-cultivation’ of Bildung. In
order for this affirmation to resound, the Bildungsroman and the generic
institution it signifies must violently ‚go under,‛ in Nietzsche’s sense. The
plantation fringe Bildungsroman cannot make good on its promise to
construct or reconstruct its Bildungshelden to appease the civic duty of the
South, signified in the insidious plantation trope; rather, at all levels of form
and content, the narrative must succumb to deconstruction and creative
destruction, as this chapter shall continue to unpack and assert.
In the tradition of the Southern Gothic or the Southern grotesque, the South’s
many disabled, freakish, and intermixed bodies form sites of resistance
against the containment of generic unity framed through bourgeois
individualism and the plantation mode of production. In her consideration of
postplantation literature, Valérie Loichot untangles the semantics of
differentiation in Southern literature theory, applying Édouard Glissant’s
Antillean discourse to organize the exceedingly entangled terms in plantation
theory: creolization, miscegenation, and métissage. Creolization, she contends,
requisites a cohabitation of racial elements within an object; miscegenation
implies a crossbreeding or hybridization of racial elements; métissage, on the
other hand, is not a term mutually inclusive of race, and can refer to the
blending and blurring of all social and cultural elements, including race and
321
gender. 60 For Glissant, ‚métissage exists in places where categories making
their essences distinct were formerly in opposition. The more métissage
became realized, the more the idea of it faded. As the baroque became
naturalized in the world, it tended to become a commonplace, a generality
(which is not the same as a generalization), of a new regime. Because it
proliferated rather than deepened a norm, it is unable to consent to
‘classicisms.’‛61
Whilst the three primary texts of this chapter consider the relationship of the
Bildungsroman to Southern reproduction, these authors breach these
plantation borders, and from the fringe of the plantation system, reconfigure
the dystopia of the plantation social hierarchy through creative destruction,
which I shall examine through these discourses of mixture. If the South will
rise again, and will always rise again, these texts radically propose that it will
never resurface in the image it was before. This reimagining of the
Bildungsroman’s earliest utopian impulse to dream into being an ‘ideal’ social
configuration specifically relates to the reproduction of the relations of
production in Southern fiction: that is, the literal emphasis on preserving
patriarchy, bloodlines, and dynastic reproduction, none of which had
anywhere near the same bearing on the urban Bildungsroman.
60 Loichot, Orphan Narratives, p. 117.
61 Édouard Glissant. Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan Press, 1997), p. 92.
322
I The Mulatto and the Minstrel: the Postplantation Between
Laughter and Tears in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were
Watching God (1937)
Ledgers and Laws of Genre
In this opening section to the Southern Bildungsroman, I focus my discussion
of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) on the methods
through which she problematizes the inflexible laws of generic reading
practices. In particular, I contrast her novel against two core lineages of
Southern plantation documentation: the tragic mulatto, as a key expression of
the slave narratives to humanize the barbarity of the South’s racist
institutionalization of life; and the plantation ledgers that tediously recorded
the conditions and management of plantation life.
‚In the beginning,‛ writes Valérie Loichot, ‚the planter created the ledger.‛62
Plantation ledgers, such as the meticulous diary kept by Mississippian planter
Francis Terry Leak (the inspiration behind Faulkner’s recurring ledger motif,
such as in ‘The Bear’), were ‚part of the tradition of diary writing that arose in
plantation culture.‛ 63 Through writing and record keeping, plantation diaries
fostered ‚an efficiently run plantation‛ that assisted ‚farmers by noting
successful farm practices, advice, and instruction for plantation owners.‛64
These diaries record ‚the realities of plantation management: the plagues and
62 Loichot, Orphan Narratives, p 165.
63 Patrick E. Horn, Jessica Martell, and Zackary Vernon, ‘Reading the Forms of History:
Plantation Ledgers and Modernist Experimentation in William Faulkner’s ‚The Bear,‛’ in
Fifty Years After Faulkner, eds. Jay Watson and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: The University Press of
Mississippi, 2016), p. 168.
64 Sally Wolff, Ledgers of History: William Faulkner, an Almost Forgotten Friendship, and an
Antebellum Plantation Diary (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), p. 5.
323
other illnesses that befell members of the community; planting practices; the
cotton price fluctuations *<+; what they paid for slaves; the typical and/or
unusual punishments for slaves who violated their rules; the prices of sugar,
coffee, and other goods; the weather and other meteorological conditions and
their effects on farming practices; religion; God; travel; their social lives, and
the approach of Civil War.‛65
As Loichot observes, the ledger ‚was the dominant and often sole written
document to be found on the plantation. This cannibalizing writing silenced
all other texts, such as written testimonies, poems, tales; a world dominated
by the ledger was a world in which all human qualities reduced to numbers,
exchangeable commensurable units stripped of personhood, violently denied
the basic right of expressing their subjectivity.‛66 In the postplantation fiction
of Faulkner, Glissant, and Morrison, Loichot observes a tendency in which
‚the Ledger,‛ as a structural concept, meets ‚constant opposition and
inevitable failure.‛67 This ‚desperate and absurd crunching of humans into
numbers,‛ where property and objects form the master-slave language
system that ties Southerners to atavistic edifices and institutions, can be used
to demonstrate the how Hurston’s plantation fringe Bildungsroman is caught
actively between ledgers and narratives.68
I consider the ways in which Hurston unstitches the reductive residues of the
plantation Ledger as documentation of Southern life, by proposing that the
regulation of the Bildungsroman – certainly as it served the purpose of social
65 Ibid., pp. 5-6.
66 Loichot, Orphan Narratives, p. 165.
67 Loichot, Orphan Narratives, p. 165.
68 By ‘textual simultaneity,’ I refer to Loichot’s reading of Handley’s Postslavery, which resists
privileging either Faulkner, Morrison, or in this case Hurston, as the relative ‚master text.‛
See: Loichot, Orphan Narratives, p. 164.
324
document fiction – might actually function as a generic ledger that dictated
how accounts of subjectivity must be categorized and represented, a generic
ledger that indeed, may be overcome through intermixture.
Hurston’s novel ironically relates to generic invigilation regarding two
particular outcries from within the Harlem Renaissance set, namely those of
Richard Wright and Alain Locke. Alain Locke’s review of Eyes in Opportunity
extols Hurston’s contribution to folklore fiction, only insofar as it yoked a
provisional but ‚overdue replacement‛ for ‚faulty local color fiction.‛69 He
asked when Hurston would finally come to ‚maturity‛ by participating in the
generic task of ‚motive fiction and social document fiction.‛70 ‚Having gotten
rid of condescension,‛ declares Locke, without detectable irony, ‚let us now
get over oversimplification!‛ 71 ‘Between Laughter and Tears,’ Wright’s
likewise scathing review, accuses his colleague of indulging an ideologically
defunct ventriloquism, playing ‚the minstrel‛ theatrical stereotype who eases
white audiences’ atavistic expectations through comfortable displays of non-
threatening African primitivism:
Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which
was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel
technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh. Her characters eat and
laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum
69 Alain Locke, ‘Review,’ Opportunity (June 1, 1938), reprinted in Zora Neale Hurston: Critical
Perspectives Past and Present , eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah (New York:
Amistad, 1993), p. 18.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid.
325
eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see
the Negro live: between laughter and tears.72
The reviews of Eyes by Wright and Locke demonstrate that the local and
medial afterlives of this immature and thereby dishonest novel shattered core
assumptions within the wider debate regarding racial genres and semiotics as
biological and literary phenomena, particularly where these readings intersect
with regional fiction and gender. The radical urgency of Jacques Derrida’s
opening to ‘The Law of Genre,’ that ‚*g+enres are not to be mixed,‛ redoubles
in the historical case of reading African American novels of the individual. All
the more emphasized by the feminist slant of Avita Ronell’s influential
translation of the essay, the ideological power of the statement waxes yet
again in the case of women’s literature.73 The inherent commodification and
politicization of any ethnic genre – whether genre forms a method of
inscribing race, or of reading literature in relation to social reality, as
Derrida’s essay unpacks – rendered the artist’s representations of black
subjectivity as matter of great contention in the first half of the twentieth
century.
The primitive ‚minstrel mask‛ was associated with early plantation literature:
of black performance in the ‚spirit of denial,‛ which Baker argues had ‚for
generations on end‛ been ‚so persuasively captivating, so effectively
engaging in its seeming authenticity‛ that even later intellectuals such as
Constance Rourke might confuse it with ‚an adequate and accurate sign of a
‘tradition’ of ‘Negro literature’ predating the ‘cult’ of Afro-American
72 Richard Wright, ‘Between Laughter and Tears,’ New Masses (October 5, 1937), reprinted in
Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A.
Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993), p. 17.
73 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre,’ trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry vol. 7, no. 1
(Autumn, 1980), p. 55.
326
expressivity she found so wearying in the 1940s.‛74 To resist the persisting
legacy of slavery that had commodified African American bodies and cultural
forms, African American artistry moved towards expressions of subjectivity
that counteracted the ‚inevitable co-optation of their self-representation
within a system of capitalist exchange and racialized patronage,‛ as Brian
Carr and Tova Cooper contend. 75 An ‚Afro-American spokesperson who
wished to engage in a masterful empowering play within the minstrel spirit
house needed the uncanny ability to manipulate bizarre phonic legacies. For
he or she had the task of transforming the mask and its sound into negotiable
discursive currency,‛ argues Baker.76
Their Eyes Were Watching God navigates outlets for positive creative expression
for the Southern Bildungsroman in a changing Southern mode of production,
where documents of the dominant racist structures had romanticized and
mythologized the absurd and disturbing balance of white paternalism as
normative ways of life through social document fiction (in this sense the
Ledger), but also through co-opting the more emotive slave narratives by
presenting the black American as a crude minstrel in melodrama. Fredric
Jameson’s proposal that genres function as ‚literary institutions, or social
contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify
the proper use of a particular social artifact‛77 teases the question of how a
female writer of Hurston’s era may have found stable ground when caught
between genres that inscribe the historical present of Southern experience
74 Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 17.
75 Brian Carr and Tova Cooper, ‘Zora Neale Hurston and Modernism at the Critical Limit,’
Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 48, No. 2 (Summer, 2002), p. 288.
76 Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, p. 24.
77 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 105.
327
within the lineations of capitalism’s political, sexual, and economic discourses
of experience.
Critical practice has predominantly characterized Eyes as an ‚individual quest
for fulfilment‛ that ‚becomes any woman’s tale,‛ as Sherley Anne Williams
and Cheryl A. Wall maintain.78 Like Rita Felski, I am sceptical of the tendency
towards universality in the theorizations of gender acquisition, which
problematically sacrifice the ‚magnitude of the social, economic, and
ideological barriers which have obstructed women’s self-realization in the
public world.‛79 For Felski, in theorizing the novel of self-discovery, critics
cannot commit localized historical insight into women’s narratives simply by
‚referring to an abstract ideal of ‘feminine’ consciousness‛; rather, criticism
must scope the ‚complex interplay between the social and material conditions
affecting women’s lives and the relatively autonomous influence of dominant
cultural representations of gender, which do not simply constitute ‘external’
determinants but are embedded at the deepest level of psychosexual
identity.‛ 80 Female self-realization, the generic core of a Bildungsroman’s
narrative assembly, processes public and private consciousness governed by
the patriarchal regime and its mode of production, with the expectation that
discipline is largely internalized and self-policed at the level of form.
The Southern Bildungsroman’s inherent exclusions and marginalizations
regarding race and gender offset a ‚long tradition in which sex and sexuality
are central to representations of the southern plantation,‛ where a hierarchy
78 Quoted in Cheryl A. Wall, ‘Zora Neale Hurston: Changing Her Own Words,’ in Zora Neale
Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah
(New York: Amistad, 1993), p. 76.
79 Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Harvard
University Press, 1989), p. 123.
80 Ibid., pp. 123-4.
328
of difference is necessary to the enduring commerce of the familial structure.81
I consider what might be gained in overcoming the Bildungsroman’s impulse
towards representing a ‘universal’ subject as a very particular set of
contradictory and individualistic categories within a shifting mode of
production: to be mixed-race, a landowning woman, a Southerner and an
American. If criticism that derides Hurston’s abilities as a novelist – such as
Lillie P. Howard, Bernard W. Bell, and Robert E. Hemenway – submits that
‚her folk material‛ cannot ‚do orderly duty in a literary format,‛ as Catherine
Gunther Kodat summarizes, this is to ignore the obvious counterargument
that ‚the southern black folk tradition itself‛ renders the already instable
‚feminine quest for independence problematic.‛82
The task of the African American writer of the 1920s was to make visible the
American double standard of race through formal attention to what Du Bois
called black ‚double consciousness‛: a ‚peculiar‛ sensation ‚of always
looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by
the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.‛ 83 Gates and
Keresztesi both evaluate the elitism of Du Bois’ ‚Talented Tenth‛ that
facilitated ‚nationalistic, masculine, bourgeois, and heterosexist tone*s+‛
within the New Negro movement. Deborah K. King contextualizes black
feminist ideology as a schema of unravelling the ‚multiple jeopardies‛ and
‚multiple consciousnesses‛ of black women,84 terminology that responds to
81 Bibler, Cotton’s Queer Relations, p. 1.
82 Catherine Gunther Kodat, ‘Biting the Hand That Writes You: Southern African-American
Folk Narrative and the Place of Women in Their Eyes Were Watching God,’ in Haunted Bodies:
Gender and Southern Texts, eds. Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson
(Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1997), p. 321.
83 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk [c. 1903] (New York: Pocket Books, 2005), p. 7.
84 See: Deborah K. King, ‘Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black
Feminist Ideology,’ Signs vol. 14, no. 1 (Autumn, 1988), p. 44.
329
Hurston’s generic formulation. As Cheryl A. Wall’s Women of the Harlem
Renaissance investigates, even within this younger movement of black
intellectuals, capitalizing upon the potentiality of youth to counteract the
traditions of apartheid proved divisive. 85 Likewise, Rita Keresztesi’s
revisionist study of modernist Harlem discusses how the artistic community
formed ‚an artificially constructed ‘imagined community’ of unified ideas
and a common heritage,‛ propping her argument against the ‚black cultural
sublime‛ theory posited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 86 Whilst Locke and Du Bois
charged the young African American voice with the task of inspiring colored
advancement, collapsing progress upon an ‚emphasis of youth‛ within the
New Negro movement, various members of the New Negroes ‚were not
young,‛ according to Wall.87 Yet the Harlem fixation upon the rhetoric of
‘youth’ as synonymous with artistic potentiality and political vision did not
compel a single man within the movement to ‚take years off his age,‛ whilst
‚several of the women did,‛ including Jessie Fauset, Georgia Johnson, and
Nella Larsen. ‚Hurston,‛ Wall writes, ‚as usual, was the most dramatic; she
was a full decade older than her contemporaries believed her to be.‛88
This imbalance certainly filters into the Bildungsroman form itself. The racial
imbalance surrounding female representations of youth meant that unlike
their white counterparts, black women writers generally did ‚not concentrate
only on youthful recognition by the dominant society,‛ as Geta LeSeur has
argued; these novels alternatively departed from the ‚‘usual’ Bildung model‛
by ‚collectively depict*ing+ the Black woman’s internal struggle to unravel the 85 Cheryl A. Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1995), p. 12.
86 Rita Keresztesi, Strangers at Home: American Ethnic Modernism Between the World Wars
(Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005) p. 18.
87 Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance, p. 12.
88 Ibid.
330
immense complexities of racial identity, gender definition, and the awakening
of their sexual being.‛ 89 Many generic laws were at stake. These ‘young’
women were expected to respond not only to their unique position within the
movement as ‘young black women,’ but also to elders of the African
American community, to the Southern history of black individuality and
collectivity, to the folklores and customs of the African ancestral past. They
were tasked with conferring the developments of white modernism and
modernity in relation to New Negro art, by engaging with the same ‚political
and aesthetic questions irreducible to modernism,‛ as well as its ‚formal
preoccupations‛ and ‚elite codifications,‛ 90 whilst speaking specifically to
nationalistic questions of race, class, and economic ideology. A New Negro,
male or female, was shadowed by the ancestral ‚African-American literary
tradition as it has emerged out of the history of slavery in the United States.‛91
By recalibrating Kodat’s invaluable assertion that the folk tradition renders
the female Bildungsroman problematic, I want to substantiate the following
claim: that the Bildungsroman is productively problematized by Hurston, its
inefficiencies carried to the surface by its juxtaposition against the folk
tradition. She is not willing to do away with the Bildungsroman entirely,
given its powerful potential to humanize the experience of individuals whose
histories had otherwise been ‘silenced,’ and this unresolved dialectic is
certainly worth greater consideration. If, as I propose, the Bildungsroman
symbolizes the supremacy of white bourgeois form and patriarchal cultural
logic in the domain of literature just as the Ledger does at the level of the
social economy, and the folk vernacular and storytelling traditions represents
89 Geta J. LeSeur, Ten Is the Age of Darkness: The Black Bildungsroman (University of Missouri
Press, 1995), p. 101.
90 Carr and Cooper, ‘Zora Neale Hurston and Modernism,’ p. 288.
91 Ibid.
331
the black (predominantly) male voice reasserting itself against this apparatus,
Hurston brings the two American strains together in unresolved suspension.
Hurston cannot break the circularity of this dialectic, and an uncomfortable
generic hybridity stylizes Janie’s complexly mixed narrative, demonstrating
what Anne Cranny Francis argues of ‚feminist writers‛ who ‚are forced to
develop innovative strategies for dealing with what appears at first a no-win
situation.‛92 However uncomfortable this tension between forms may be, the
novel form still holds the potential to overcome its generic incursions for
Hurston.
In her purview of the Bildung concept in black American women’s literature,
Sondra O’Neale argues that Hurston was the first author to have made ‚the
most artistic statement about Black feminine development‛ in allowing her
Bildungshelde, Janie, to ‚achieve full fruition,‛ 93 a reading of the conclusion
with which I do not effusively agree, and the reasons for which disagreement
I shall outline in the final section of this section (if true individuation is not
possible, how can full fruition really be achieved?). Geta LeSeur’s Ten Is the
Age of Darkness, a taxonomy of Caribbean and African American male and
female initiation narratives, likewise observes how African American women
writers were ‚not confined to the ‘usual’ Bildung model.‛ 94 However
beneficial these formulas are to our assessment of Hurston, they
problematically reinforce a critical practice of racial and gendered segregation
that still firmly implants Hurston within a fixed structure of differentiation.
Geographically relocating Hurston’s Eyes towards a mixed-race Southern
92 Anne Cranny-Francis., Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction (Cambridge and
Oxford: Polity Press, 1990), p. 19.
93 Sondra O’Neale, ‘Race, Sex, and Self: Aspects of Bildung in Select Novels by Black
American Women Novelists,’ MELUS vol. 9, no. 4 (Winter, 1982), p. 30.
94 LeSeur, Ten Is the Age of Darkness, pp. 101-2.
332
anthology of Bildungsromans, at this point, may be of assistance. Moreover, a
dialectical approach towards the most intriguing valences of her generic
process, particularly in an attempt to desegregate the laws of genre, is
required.
Mulatto: the Political In-Between
Is it possible to turn generic taxonomies and their inevitable incursions into a
strategy against capitalism’s deindividuation of the subject? This complex
query can only start to be unravelled by analyzing Hurston’s motif of
mixture, particularly as it is embodied in the light-skinned Janie. The mulatto
character is a significant recurring trope throughout the biographical and
fictional works of Hurston. In her ethnographic-autobiographical venture,
Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), her consideration of racial miscegenation in the
societies of the South would once again come together in the co-existent
towns of white Maitland and ‚Negro Eatonville,‛ the first entirely black
Southern community of its kind. The latter town is the ‚burly, boiling, hard-
hitting, rugged-individualistic setting‛ into which her father enters, ‚a tall,
heavy-muscled mulatto,‛ with the intention to ‚put down roots.‛95 These
roots, ostensibly, are beyond the soil of the ‚white man’s plantation‛ where
his ‚*p+lantation life‛ working as a sharecropper ‚began to irk and bind him,‛
but his desire to vacate Southern Alabama also stemmed from suspicion by
the black community as to his light skin color; for even his in-law relatives
(Hurston’s mother’s family) only referred to him as ‚dat yaller bastard‛ even
after his marital union to their ‚dark-brown‛ daughter.96
95 Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography [c. 1942] (London: Virago
Press Ltd., 1986), p. 12.
96 Hurston, Dust Tracks, p. 15.
333
Hurston’s account of her father presupposes that being in-between holds an
ambivalent power of individual exceptionalism, facilitating the subject to
attain self-fulfilment if not self-determination – what I would consider the
quintessential Bildungsideal. Yet to fully understand the significance of
Hurston’s dialectical generic mixture or miscegenation within Eyes, we must
recast the term ‘mulatto’ itself against its historical shadow of supreme
alienation. The mulatto, as a stock character, was a ‚nearly white, racially
mixed character,‛ an ‚extremely popular figure‛ of the nineteenth century
American letters.97 They were presented ‚most often *as+ a beautiful young
woman tragically victimized by slavery,‛ according to Jonathan D. Little; the
original political impulse was to ‚elicit sympathy, pity, and support from
white readers,‛ and it ‚quickly evolved into the stereotype of the tragic
mulatto.‛98 Yet the tragic pathos that attached itself to the term in literature
was not always the case in terms of the mulatto as a racially discursive
supplement. As Murphet describes, the mulatto as a categorical supplement
to racial discourse came to salience in a ‚shifting and stuttering between a
‘both/and’ and a ‘neither-nor’ binary logic of racial identification,‛ producing
a ‚peculiarly homeless signifier that hesitates in the no-man’s-land between
monolithic racial alternatives and casts an immanent doubt upon both their
houses.‛99
I position Hurston’s Bildungsroman in both these houses of doubt, and this
doubt itself as to the status of the postplantation mulatto forms her
97 Jonathan D. Little, ‘Mulatto,’ in The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, eds.
William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, & Trudier Harris (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997), p. 512.
98 Ibid.
99 Julian Murphet, ‘The Mulatto: an unspeakable concept,’ Working Papers on the Web, Volume
5 (2003); accessed online at http://extra.shu.ac.uk/wpw/race/murphet.htm, on 31/03/2016.
334
‚springboard of societal progress,‛ 100 in revising the early twentieth
speculations and discourses of racial intermixture and its repressive bearing
on representing individual subjectivity. Plantation ledgers commonly ‚noted
the racial attribution for each of the enslaved workers,‛ defining ‚each
member of the enslaved population by gender, occupation, age, race, and
whether they were African-born or Creole‛ through essentialist racial
categories of reproduction such as ‚black, sambo, mulatto, and quadroon.‛101
The Bildungshelde and the mulatto whose identity quest must overcome the
stigma of the supplement, for Hurston, form powerful figures of possibility to
correct the Southern apartheid that had become ‚so acculturated to racial
segregation‛ on both sides of an enforced black-white divide, as Leigh Anne
Duck observes.102 It is all the more significant to consider her complication of
gender roles, of finding means to empower the female protagonist rather than
depict her maturation as a process of social ‘growing down,’ a process that is
sublated in a plantation agricultural system where slavery had ‚by its very
definition *<+ limited the range of occupations a woman could pursue in her
life.‛ 103 The ‚tasked-based operations‛ of Southern agrarianism, both
agricultural fieldwork and domestic services, were subject to ‚a gender
based-division of labor‛ in which a broader range of positions were available
to men. Indeed, James Delle’s retrospective of gender roles in the Jamaican
plantations outlines how ‚women were relegated to what were destined after
emancipation to become lower-paying and lower-status jobs as domestic
100 Murphet, ‘The Mulatto,’ n. p.
101 James A. Delle, ‘Gender and the Division of Labor on Jamaican Coffee Plantations, 1790-
1834,’ in Lines That Divide: Historical Archaeologies of Race, Class, and Gender, eds. James A.
Delle, Stephen A. Mrozowski, Robert Paynter (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press,
2000), p. 178.
102 Duck, The Nation’s Region, p.181.
103 Delle, ‘Gender and the Division of Labor,’ p. 178.
335
servants and unskilled field laborers.‛ 104 Janie’s exceptional aesthetic as a
liminal figure, simultaneously young and old, masculine and feminine, black
and white, attracts community interest, yet ultimately alienates her within the
historical legacy of this enduring, engendered division of labor.
I therefore want to reposition the legalistic and sociological supplement that
categorizes the aporetic history of the term mulatto, its signification of the
South’s extreme regulation of sexual and economic reproduction to the letter,
against Hurston’s relationship to the American laws of genre. I do so by
proposing that the social laws which regulate racial in-betweenness in her
work mutually inform those generic laws that standardize the representation
of the transitionary self within the Bildungsroman tradition. A mutual
flexibility exists between Hurston and her Bildungshelde Janie, who both
position themselves outside binaristic social laws that inscribe a subject as one
essential state or another: either male or female, black or white, young or old,
naïve or mature, and more complex binaries such as laborer or capitalist,
slave or freewoman, human or creature. Yet I shall also lastly consider the
ways in which the text, compelled by the traditions upholding the
Bildungsroman genre as a rule, violently shores up its borders against these
breeches, which actively nullifies those claims that Hurston ‚naïvely‛
capitulates to the simplistic wish-fulfilment of the romance genre.
Hurston presents the mulatto character as a sublation of the Bildungshelde
figure – who by definition exists in a state of ‘in-between’ possibility – in the
way it offsets the tragic mulatto ‚passing‛ tradition adopted by several of her
Harlem contemporaries.105 As Deborah Plant suggests, Hurston’s ‚mulatto‛
104 Delle, ‘Gender and the Division of Labor,’ pp. 178-9.
105 I refer to works such as Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing, and Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun
and Comedy: American Style. Her reluctance to portray Janie as a tragic victim of mixture
336
and white characters are usually ‚cast in a fairy-tale-like ambience and have a
spellbinding effect on those around them.‛ 106 Her characters’ racial features
‚become fetishes as Hurston’s writings reveal a fixation on light or white skin
and, particularly, a fixation on ‚righteous moss,‛ that is, straight or ‚‘fine’
hair texture.‛‛107 The tragic passing of the mulatto as a narrative pathos that
‚will out,‛108 as in Twain’s Roxana (Pudd’nhead Wilson *1894+) or Faulkner’s
Joe Christmas (Light in August [1932]), and where even the possibility of a
breach in the ‘one drop rule’ inevitably exposes itself as a devastating
revelation, does not explicitly factor into Hurston’s plot formulation. This is
not to say that Eyes does not react against this tragic tradition.
That said, this text openly knows the positive and negative consequences of
mixing. Janie’s ambiguous physical nature alienates her from the outset; the
townsfolk scrutinize her attractive feminine form by deliberately contrasting
it against her desexualized agrarian attire (overalls). Her appearance
materializes a contradiction of bourgeois aesthetics, and the reader is
positioned by the frame narrative to scrutinize the mixed genres of physis by
the petit bourgeois townsfolk,109 who instinctively deconstruct these signs and
cues only to arrive at state of confusion. The text therefore allows for two
accounts of how these generic signifiers of appearances are misleading
indicators, with dangerous implications.
evokes the fin de siècle mulatto Bildungsromane of Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) and
Pauline Hopkins’ Contending Forces (1900).
106 Deborah G. Plant, Every Tub Must Sit On Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora
Neale Hurston (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), p. 150.
107 Ibid.
108 Murphet, ‘The Mulatto,’ n. p.
109 I use the term physis here in Derrida’s description of generic dissemination. See: Jacques
Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre,’ trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry vol. 7, no. 1 (Autumn, 1980),
pp. 60-1.
337
Firstly, consider Janie’s account of her first initiation in West Florida: the
moment she realizes she is not white, what should be a Southern moment of
self-recognition as ‘other.’ Janie describes a situation in which her Grandma
and her white neighbours, the Washburns ‚white folks,‛ raised their children
in cooperative childrearing. Janie’s harmonious early childhood alongside the
white Washburn children whom her own grandmother helped in rearing
decays in a moment of Lacanian self-recognition:
‚Ah was wid dem white chillun so much till Ah didn’t know Ah
wuzn’t white till Ah was round six years old. Wouldn’t have found it
out then, but a man come long takin’ pictures *<+ So when we looked
at de picture and everybody got pointed out there wasn’t nobody left
except a real dark little girl with long hair *<+ Dat’s where Ah wuz
s’posed to be, but Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark chile as me. So Ah
ast, ‘where is me? Ah don’t see me.’ Everybody laughed.‛110 [21]
Remarkably, humour underlines the annunciation of Janie’s differentiation
event. Neither is it a mean-spirited or ‘black’ humour, in the comic generic
sense; inverting the racial hierarchy that privileges the presence of whiteness,
the ‚chillun‛ at Janie’s school ‚got to teasin’ me ‘bout living’ in de white folks
backyard,‛ rather than the other way around [22]; yet it is only her first lesson
in being a ‚peculiarly homeless signifier.‛111 Janie’s response echoes Hurston’s
statement from the oft-cited 1928 essay, ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me’:
I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in
my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not
belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature
somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feeling are
110 Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (London: Virago Press, 1987), p. 21.
Subsequent references to page numbers hereafter cited in text for this current section.
111 Murphet, ‘The Mulatto,’ n. p.
338
all hurt about it < No, I do not weep at the world – I am too busy
sharpening my oyster knife.112
Shelby L. Crosby reads Hurston’s statement as her answer to Du Bois’
rhetorical question of double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk, where he
smiles reticently in the face of the following scenario: ‚Between me and the
other world there is ever an unasked question *<+ How does it feel to be a
problem? I answer seldom a word.‛113 Hurston makes the similar claim in
Dust Tracks that ‚Negroes were supposed to write about the Race Problem,‛
yet ‚the human beings I met reacted pretty much the same to the same
stimuli.‛ 114 Her autobiographical work reflects a conscious comprehension
that race and gender are nothing more or less than social constructs, and
should be met with the refusal to feel shame or even acknowledge these
‚*c+ircumstances and conditions having power to influence‛ as obstacles.115
Alternatively, by reading Hurston’s tendency towards positively
characterizing bodily appearances of intermixture as aesthetic ‚fetish,‛
Deborah Plant concludes that because ‚intraracial color prejudice was a major
issue during the Renaissance,‛ Hurston’s profession as a cultural
anthropologist and ethnographic writer led her to ‚simply *portray+ Black
self-contempt, [as] a result of internalized white standards of beauty.‛116
112 Zora Neale Hurston, ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me,’ in The Norton Anthology of African
American Literature, eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay (New York and London:
W. W. Norton and Co., 1997) pp. 1008-11.
113 Quoted in Shelby L. Crosby, ‘Complicating Blackness: The Politics and Journalism of Zora
Neale Hurston,’ in (eds.) Cynthia Davis and Verner D. Mitchell, Zora Neale Hurston: An
Annotate Bibliography of Works and Criticism. (Lanham, Toronto, and Plymouth: The Scarecrow
Press, Inc., 2013), p. 110.
114 Hurston, Dust Tracks, p. 206.
115 Ibid.
116 Plant, Every Tub Must Sit, p. 151.
339
However, close analysis of the novel’s genre-work demonstrates how the
internalized standardization Hurston portrays is at times more problematic
than either of these lines of assessment might first indicate, particularly if we
consider the normalization of ‘breached’ racial frontiers as a supplement both
potentially dangerous and beneficial. Chapter Two sets up the negative,
indeed dangerous, valence of this dialectic. The narratology shifts to a third
person frame-narrative account of Janie’s history of self-identification,
recounting grandmother’s story of Janie’s mother’s birth, given as a
cautionary lesson to use her exceptional beauty – her exceptional lightness
and darkness – to find bourgeois security through marriage and property
ownership.
The historical slap Nanny administers in telling Janie her history, ‚forc*ing+
her head back so that their eyes met in a struggle,‛ is a symbolic and literal
use of force, demanding that Janie recognize her mixed-race heritage with the
full weight of its violent coming-into-being. During the Civil War, when the
‚young boys‛ were ‚driv*ing+ de Yankees back into Tennessee,‛ the white
patriarch impregnated Janie’s grandmother, as was his prerogative over his
chattel ‘property’:
‚It was de cool of evenin’ when Mistis come walkin’ in mah door.
She throwed de door wide open and stood dere lookin’ at me outa
her eyes and her face. Look lak she been livin’ through uh hundred
years in January without one day of spring *<+ ‘Nigger, whut’s yo’
baby doin’ wid gray eyes and yaller’ hair?’ She begin tuh slap mah
jaws ever which a’way. Ah never felt the fust ones ‘cause Ah wuz
too busy gittin’ de kivver back over mah chile.‛ *33-4]
In this micro ‘slave narrative,’ the plantation Ledger visibly enforces its lawful
prerogative to discipline mixing, with punishment administered to shore up
the pure familial hymen against miscegenation. The plantation mistress
340
threatens to have her slave ‚whipped till de blood run down to yo’ heels!‛
and ‚dat brat,‛ Janie’s mother, ‚as soon as dat brat is a month old Ah’m going
to sell it offa dis place.‛ *34+ Through physical violence, the plantation
mistress unconsciously humanizes Janie’s mother and child as beings-for-
themselves through violent struggle to domination, as understood through
Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. For all the mistress strips Nanny of her free-
will, and the child of nominalization by commodifying her as an ‚it‛ to be
bartered on the market, the logic follows that a human does not whip, slap, or
draw blood from a material object.
Janie’s grandmother wants her to overcome the curse of the tragic mulatto,
which she presents as a familial inevitably; Janie’s own mother was sexually
assaulted, and her life was one of violence and tragedy. However, the
grandmother proposes to exchange the tragic mulatto stereotype for the role
of financially kept housewife and mother, rather than to become an
autonomous, self-determined character. A formal paradox appears in the
sectionalization of the récit of Nanny’s violent chapter, and the opening to the
subsequent Chapter 3, where Hurston reverses the dialectic:
There are years that ask questions and years that answer. Janie had
had no chance to know things, so she had to ask. Did marriage end
the cosmic loneliness of the unmated? Did marriage compel love like
the sun the day? [38]
If the disparate vernacular bridging these two passages is not sufficient
evidence of both intergenerational and mixed-race différance in gear, structure
will out. The framing of these two incidences in such close proximity,
deliberately cordoned off by the sectionalism of chapters, brings the
ultraviolence of black female American history as a slave narrative into
absurd contact with the Southern Romance as a courtship Bildungsroman,
341
loaded with the mode’s emotional naivety and heightened romantic imagery
in both senses of the term. Thus, the historical narrative that places the
African American presence within the plantation as an ultraviolent,
hypersexualized dialectic of segregation and miscegenation problematically
distils into something banal, commonplace, and edging towards a
reappropriation of the white plantation romance. The cosmic, seasonal and
diurnal imagery of Janie’s environmental imaginative processes within this
gear-shift between her lineage and her own experiences of the world
emphasizes the vast chronotopic distance between the slave narrative and the
female courtship plot bound together in their historical coordinates. The past
and present reground in a decisively problematic generic gesture, all the more
intensified by the short narrative distance separating the two antinomical
characteristic motives at work. In both the application of genre and récit,
Hurston therefore advances two further accounts of miscegenation: one
literary (mixing textual and generic cues); the other, historical (the
interbreeding of the past and present, which redoubles again in the event of
the retroactive narrative framework). A heavy symbolic burden belongs to a
second generation child of mixed descent, and the genealogy of Janie’s
character at this point poises uneasily upon a liminal taxonomy: the
exceptional mulatto.
We may frame Janie’s resolution to accept her inherited position of tragic
miscegenation through a particular insight from Du Bois’ Dusk of Dawn, in
which intermixture forms an ideological arsenal for the author at the level of
signification; I refer to Du Bois’ recollection of overcoming the pathos of his
being ‚a mulatto,‛ where the ‚external walls between races‛ no longer ‚seem
so stern and exclusive‛ as he begins to instead ‚emphasise the cultural
342
aspects of race.‛117 We may further consider the full extent of its hopeful
futuristic meaning, to which Valérie Loichot reassigns it regarding Caribbean
slave narratives, where the ‚enslaved women escape from the anonymous
numeral status reserved from them in plantation ledgers to acquire
personhood and leave their mark in history,‛ symbolically reclaiming the
sterile and ‚fragmented Word‛ of miscegenation belonging to the ‚Big
House.‛ 118 Janie’s coming-to-being may be read through the same method
Hurston uses in the materialistic construction of the self in Dust Tracks, where
Zora describes how we must read her narrative: ‚Like the dead-seeming, cold
rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make
me. Time and place have had their say.‛119
Likewise, the unconscious regional history of the term ‘mulatto’ remains
jacketed in all the negative connotations and historical spectres of an evolving
semantic aporia between ‚appearances and essences‛ at the level of language
and taxonomy, as Murphet has described this process.120 The novel does not
make clear whether these genres seek to will the other out of existence, or to
hybridize; and this generic ambivalence is precisely its most vital effect.
Hurston certainly could not have been unaware of the polemical proposition
embedded in aesthetics composed of such wilful blending and shading; and
there is a shocking power to this ambiguity that I believe she both anticipated
and facilitated as a polemical statement criticizing structures of ‚inherent
difference‛ that she did not support.121
117 W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New
York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 101-2.
118 Loichot, Orphan Narratives, p. 65.
119 Hurston, Dust Track, p. 4.
120 Murphet, ‘The Mulatto,’ n. p.
121 Hurston, Dust Tracks, p. 206.
343
Patricia Yaeger describes the cause-and-effect of such microcosmic political
and aesthetic loading in Southern women’s literature as ‚quite literally, crazy
with meaning, a craziness that includes the prevalence of throwaway bodies
in an economy based on white privilege, a national epistemology of racial
unknowing (of consuming trauma as a media event but not absorbing the
implications for those traumatized)‛ so as to ‚stir up new ways of thinking
about labor and object relations.‛122 In the case of Eyes, Yaeger demonstrates
Hurston’s grounding of the leitmotif of literalized pollution, of Janie’s and the
supplementary characters’ fixated desire for dirt, muck, mud, earth, and soil
as working ‚past the contamination of place by dispensing pollution‛ as a
source of aesthetic resistance against a society that ‚cleans*es+ itself.‛123
To recast this aesthetic ‚cleansing‛ in terms of the Bildungsroman genre, I
argue that Hurston ironically constructs the Ledger (here to mean the textual
bylaws) of Janie’s Bildung upon the polluted soil of the region’s plantation
history, with all its reductive stereotypes and generic cues; however, Janie’s
inherent affinity with the other aspect of the African American past, its rich
folklore, reveals itself as a positive and equally powerful conductor of
collective historical consciousness. This dialectic becomes particularly
noticeable in the Eatonville chapters which outline Janie’s married life to Joe
Starks. These Eatonville chapters unfold in a dialogic narrative focalization
switching back and forth between the vernacular ‚signifyin’‛ conversations of
the men of the hamlet and Janie’s own consciousness;124 the latter of these is
122 Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 254.
123 Ibid., p. 256.
124 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 181 and p. 189.
344
narrated in an elevated register – distinctly not the dialect in which Janie
speaks to other characters.
If Janie’s upbringing was considered ‘tainted’ by her closeness to the white
neighbours’ children, Joe Starks’ own education has been both whitewashed
and urbanized; yet his perceived common racial heritage enables him to enter
this town, gain the citizens’ trust, and seize total control without raising alarm
before it is too late to usurp him. He is the pragmatic product of social and
ideological miscegenation; he intuits how to fix the system of America’s
uneven development in the emancipated South to his economic benefit. His
net worth in assets, the valuation mechanism he uses to impress power over
this ‘free’ town, was financed both in terms of ideas and capital by his time
amongst urban white society. He erects an entire power structure in which he
is more than capitalist, more than plantation lord, more than mayor, king or
emperor: he is God, and his power only increases quite literally.
In ushering Eatonville and Janie along with it into modernity, creating a
housing market, financing nocturnal lightness to the town via Sears and
Roebuck streetlamps [71-3+, Joe Starks’ annunciation reverberates against
Faulkner’s Absalom, particularly Quentin and Rosa Coldfield’s sublated image
of Thomas Sutpen as the figural God, tearing modern capitalism from the
earth itself, announcing the first words of the ledger: ‘‚Be Sutpen’s Hundred
like the oldentime Be Light.‛ Stark’s oration reads:
‚Folkses, de sun is goin’ down. De Sun-maker bring it up in de
mornin,’ and de Sun-maker sends it tuh bed at night. Us poor weak
humans can’t do nothin’ tuh hurry it up nor to slow it down. All we
can do, if we want any light after de settin’ or befo’ de risin,’ is tuh
make some light ourselves.‛ *72-3]
345
Starks’ utterance, spoken in vernacular, renders the orator not so much in the
image of the messiah (as the spiritual lyrics alludes), but as an illusionist
speaking the language of the consumer, who harnesses the fetish character of
the commodity. Starks’ illuminate spell blinds the village-folk as it harnesses
the hot, white light into magical circuits of energy. Sears & Roebuck,
modernity’s mecca of the commodity, delivers an electric shock to the black
South. A triangulation of capital, religion, and folklore irreversibly bleeds into
the fray of the countryside through the unleashed commodity. As Walter
Benjamin sets forth in a fragment entitled, ‘Capitalism as Religion,’ this text
likewise recognizes a religion of capital at the level of mysticism, a
worshipping of a false idol to abate ‚the same anxieties, torments, and
disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.‛125 In this case,
Starks manipulates the collective consciousness of inadequacies the townsfolk
never realized they ought to feel until modernity was impressed upon them,
mirroring the medial individual event of Janie holding up the photograph to
recognize her non-whiteness.
In a peculiar tension between composite modernization and atavistic fidelity
to cultural traditions, the townsfolk remediate and localize this conflation of
commodity fetishism and faith through the communication channels of
spirituals and prayer. They ‚*chant+ a traditional prayer-poem‛ with
variations, as the new lights go on and cast off the darkness (with all the racial
implications of such imagery):
As the word Amen was said, [Joe] touched the lighted match to the
wick, and Mrs. Bogle’s alto burst out: We’ll walk in de light, de
beautiful light / Come where the dew drops of mercy shine bright /
125 Walter Benjamin, ‘Capitalism as Religion,’ trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Selected Writings,
Volume 1: 1913-1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA and
London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 288.
346
Shine all around us by day and by night / Jesus, the light of the world.
[73]
Starks’ literal will to power mediates Janie’s lesson in the essentialisms of
reading race and gender, but also class. ‚*E+very type of vehicle‛ – mule
drawn carriage, automobile, bicycle – brings swarms of disciples and
believers to the pulpit of modernity and industrial capitalism [72], Starks’
avaricious vision for ‘his’ people. As the town expands, only one house rises
up from the squalor and dirt: The Starks’ house stands as a formidable
erection of power, with its ‚two stories with porches,‛ its hard, slick
‚bannisters and such things‛ that casts and castrates the rest of the town into
the aspect of ‚servant’s quarters surrounding the ‘big house’‛ painted a
‚gloaty, sparkly white.‛ [75] Starks’ appearance and demeanour,
supercharged with chauvinist (in its dual sense) power and authority,
transfigures before her eyes into the whitewashed Jacksonian, Vandepoolian
stereotype, ‚biting down on cigars‛ and spitting his chewing tobacco into a
‚gold-looking‛ vase, an object emblem of the deceptive tromp l’oeil holding
the town spellbound to Stark’s power.
The essences and appearances of the white-black divide have been washed
out; Janie, in acquiring fine ‚wine colored‛ dresses and a ‚little lady-size
spitting pot‛ decorated with floral displays to outshine the other womenfolk
who spit into ‚tincans,‛ becomes concomitant in this establishment of
hegemony. Her venerable position as ‘mayor’s wife’ causes her to sense how
it is ‚bad enough for white people, but when one of your own color could be
so different it put you on a wonder,‛ like a Freudian experience of the
uncanny in ‚seeing your sister turn into a ‘gator. A familiar strangeness.‛ *76+
The internal genre struggle sublates even as it sublimates the ideological
miscegenation between white capitalism and a postbellum black agrarianism
347
unevenly, rapidly developing into an industrialized modernity, a liberal
democracy with all its feudalistic residues: trains, lumber, electricity,
automobiles, and commodities shepherding a new epoch into the remotest
corners of the South. This technological and material tension between past
and future, tradition and progress, all concretizes in Janie’s removal to
Eatonville. In this respect, Janie’s Bildung hinges on her attempts to ‘find her
voice’ amongst the collective polyphony of voices, including the frame
narration, and as it emerges from a narrative practice of indirect and free
indirect discourses in which it not only becomes difficult to distinguish the
separate dictions of the black characters’ discourse (particularly during the
Signifyin’ games on the shop porch); it furthermore becomes ‚extraordinarily
difficult to distinguish the narrator’s voice from the protagonist’s,‛ as Gates
proposes.126 To extend Gates’ formal analysis, I argue that Hurston sublates
Janie’s sense of alienation in patriarchal Eatonville, as the unfolding of her
individual history becomes increasingly conflated with the material history of
economic emancipation of the black community on both a personal and
allegorical level.
Janie’s experience as an unpaid laborer in her husband’s store frames a
microcosmic scope of a populace who are seduced into the modernized laws
of power and capital by her second husband, the white-educated capitalist,
Joe Starks, through the sleight-of-hand manipulation of their labor. The
previous relationship with the landed gentile, Logan, who discourses with
Janie about chopping wood, ploughing, and peeling potatoes, conflates
domestic and agrarian labor, complicates the gendered division of rural labor
within the domestic mode of production: small scale agriculture. However, in
her second relationship with Starks, an entire micro-material, mock history of
industrial capitalism embeds its logic in Janie’s educational scope, her
126 Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey, p. 191.
348
alienated position which she must learn to recognize if she is to escape its
entropy. As Duck observes, it is Janie’s inherent collective consciousness,
distilled into a deep ‚determination to prioritize folkloric pleasure over social
status,‛ which facilitates the reconciliation between Starks’ modernization
and Eatonville’s folkloric values.127 Janie is instrumental in convincing Starks
to host a funeral for the hamlet’s famous ‚yelluh mule,‛ the in-between
creature who brings the community together in humour and ‘signification,’
thereby demonstrating that a mixture of culture has alleviating benefits to
overcome the worst aspects of capitalism’s instinct to alienate.
Judgments: Reinstating the Generic Law
As Rachel Blau DuPlessis observes, Janie’s frame narrative, recounted to
Phoeby upon her return to Eatonville, shapes itself ‚like a trial.‛128 The double
meaning of trial resolves into the motif of a trial-and-error pattern of
initiations throughout Janie’s maturation, where each one of her romantic
ventures mediates those lessons that ought to bring a Bildungshelde to a
higher state of social awareness, if not self-autonomy. Like DuPlessis, I extend
the motif of the trial beyond the obvious synecdoche late in the novel in
which Janie is acquitted of murdering the diseased Teacake, both a mercy
killing and an act of self-defence. In that specific instance, the social
condemnation staged by the black men of the muck community, who decry
the double-standard of her legal privileges of womanhood and ‚lightness,‛ is
127 Duck, Nation’s Region, pp. 137-9.
128 Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ‘Power, Judgment, and Narrative,’ in New Essays on Their Eyes
Were Watching God, ed. Michael Awkward (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
p. 105.
349
wrong even if it is for the ‚right reasons,‛ as DuPlessis argues. 129 However,
Janie is legally acquitted because her unmistakable ‚whiteness‛ and her
‚romance‛ spellbind the white jurors and lawgivers, who rightfully acquit
her actions ‚possibly for the wrong reasons.‛130
The fact that Janie is forty in the frame narrative, yet does not seem to have
aged physically, certainly goes a long way to indicate that her individuation
stands in for a larger allegory of embracing social fluidity, drawing Hurston
into LeSeur’s categorical black female Bildungsroman;131 it also complicates
the concept of human development as a binary between two supposedly
exclusive states of being: youth and adulthood, maturation and immaturity.
Where the text notices that its narrative strays too far from the generic ledger,
the generic unconsciousness attempts to reassert its petit bourgeois laws upon
the individual consciousness by reinstating the expected laws of the courtship
plot: it puts the Bildungshelde on trial.
To hypostasize an outside beyond the most repressive collective laws for the
individual, the text is ‚‘gointuh‛ have to ‚do something crazy’‛ at such a
point. [190] Rejecting a trajectory of bourgeois affluence, expunging the
powerful ‚*t+races of the kinds of bourgeois instrumentality – rapid
industrialization at any cost *<+ regardless of local conditions,‛ as Robert
Seguin describes,132 Teacake and Janie elope to the Everglades to work on ‚de
muck‛ as agriculturalists with the nomadic seasonal workforce, a ‚big,‛
‚strange‛ gesture of relocation into an environment where ‚*w+eeds that did
well grow to waist high up to the state‛ and ‚ground so rich that everything
129 DuPlessis, ‘Power, Judgment, and Narrative,’ p. 105.
130 Ibid.
131 LeSeur, Ten Is the Age of Darkness, p. 101.
132 Robert Seguin, ‘Cosmic Upset: Cultural Revolution and the Contradictions of Zora Neale
Hurston,’ Modernism/Modernity vol. 16, no. 2 (April, 2009), p. 240.
350
went wild.‛ *191+ This gesture romantically overturns the Southern labor
regime that had reduced its workers to machinery, in complicating the
subsisting relationship between work and fulfilment. Janie’s initiation into the
world gives way to a historicized investigation of America as it stands in the
long wake of Reconstruction, torn between progress and violent archaisms of
Southern antebellum atavism.
However, to an extent, Hurston rejects the impulse towards lawless
individualism as a utopia beyond generic expectation. Against the canvas of
freedom and fulfilment, a great nimbus of violence reinstitutes the narrative
law: ‚when Janie looked out of her door she saw the drifting mists gathered
in the west – that cloud field of the sky – to arm themselves with thunders
and march forth against the world.‛ *234+ The ‚time was past for asking the
white folks what to look for through that door. Six eyes were questioning
God.‛ *235+ In one of the novel’s remarkable final gestures, the narrative
focalization shifts to Tea Cake after a mighty tornado ravages the Everglades.
Dale Pattison outlines such dialogic movements as presenting a liminal site of
indeterminate, competing voices facilitating a ‚fluid and dynamic *approach+
to political discourses‛ requiring interpretation, 133 logic I find particularly
productive in a tensional reading of Hurston’s productively ‘unlawful’
relation Bildungsroman’s literary apparatuses by shifting Janie’s perspective
into the historical unconscious beyond sentimental realism.
The novel returns to a style of narration distanced from the vernacular free
indirect discourse of Eatonville; Tea Cake, in one such adjacent dialogical
moment, stumbles upon ‚the hand of horror on everything‛ in the aftermath
133 Dale Pattison, ‘Sites of Resistance: The Subversive Spaces of Their Eyes Were Watching God,’
MELUS vol. 38, no. 4 (Winter, 2013), p. 19.
351
of a Southern tornado, and act of divine violence: ‚Houses without roofs, and
roofs without houses.‛ *251+
Tea Cake found that he was part of a small army that had been
pressed into service to clear the wreckage in public places and bury
the dead. Bodies had to be searched out, carried to certain gathering
places and buried. Corpses were not just found in wrecked houses.
They were under houses, tangled in shrubbery, floating in water,
hanging in trees, drifting under wreckage.‛ *252+
It is a moment of furious revelation, in the biblical sense; in this ‚last resort‛
of the novel to arrest its generic insurgents acting upon free will and primal
instinct, the ‚very task of destruction‛ suggests that ‚violence might be able
to call a halt to mythic violence,‛ as Benjamin submits.134 The corpses had died
with ‚fighting faces,‛ with ‚eyes flung wide open in wonder‛ as if Death had
‚found them watching, trying to see beyond seeing.‛ *252] The process to
bury the dead is pressing, yet the task is lawfully delayed by a militia of
armed white men – common men, as demonstrated by their vernacular, yet
abundantly armed with the hard, metallic, phallic authority of rifles, who
insist upon segregating the dead under the invisible ‚orders from
headquarters.‛ [253] Through this horrific, black and white snapshot of a
discriminating burial rite, Hurston finally initiates all characters, Janie and
Tea Cake included, into a macabre Jim Crow and Uncle Sam power structures
enforcing the division of labor against a backdrop of systemic horror: Janie
hidden inside the house, ‚sad and crying,‛ Tea Cake and the ‚miserable,
sullen men, black and white under guard‛ *252+ digging graves and searching
for bodies, separating white parts and black parts for specific customs: coffin
134 Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’ *c. 1921+, trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected
Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA and London: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 249.
352
burials and mass graves. Two simultaneous (dis)embodied histories surface
upon this cratered allegorical graveyard, horrors that cannot be wholly
reduced to the numerical ledgers of historical recording: the Civil War, World
War I as ‘organized’ state-sanctioned violence, the mock trials of the
Scottsboro boys, and all the unregistered massacres of the African Americans
lynched, raped, dismembered, and the state sanctioned genocide of the
Native Americans as indigenous ‘final solution’ (‚Native Indians,‛ as they are
passingly referred to in the text).
The Bildungshelde, and the reader along with her, is once more relocated,
dislocated even, from the genre of individuality into the mass graveyard of
the historical collective through aesthetics of violence and pollution: mass
graves of bodies broken, beaten, yet bloodless. If ‚mythic violence is
lawmaking,‛ writes Benjamin, ‚divine violence is law-destroying; if the
former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic
violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if
the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is
lethal without spilling blood.‛135 This is a site of destruction at the level of
deconstruction: of laws, language, mores, against the tide of a racist struggle
for the state and regime to reconstruct and reassert its Ledger contracting
characters to their assigned gender and racial roles. The text succumbs to
genre after the purge, by and large; it submits to law, balance, restoration.
Janie and Teacake leave shaken yet physically uninjured, but they are
narrativistically doomed; Teacake is killed-off soon after, and Janie is quite
literally put on trial for ending his life.
If there is some naïvety in Hurston’s commerce of violence as a non-
naturalistic state suspended between laughter and tears, as Wright suggested
135 Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence,’ p. 249.
353
(a statement Hurston inverts and invalidates with the final remark of Dust
Tracks: ‚from hard searching it seems to me that tears and laughter, love and
hate, make up the sum of life‛),136 some of this charge nullifies in reading
these moments as hypostatic indexations of revolutionary and messianic
violence, adjacent to Walter Benjamin’s postulation in ‘Critique of Violence.’
Janie’s adjacent position to these moments of violent contact direct her gaze
‚only at what is close at hand‛ in order to ‚perceive a dialectical rising and
falling in the lawmaking and law-preserving formations of violence‛ in which
all regimes, all violence except the divine, are likewise destined to their
inevitable state of decay. 137 The female protagonist is unmarked by the
climactic violence itself, but her fate is irreversibly altered by it, moved by a
wreckage of violent histories that cannot be imaged, verbalized, described –
for all the Southern cultural has paradoxically facilitated an entire economy of
war re-enactment.
This would be the case, if not for the remarkably overlooked cadence upon
which the inner narrative ends: Tea Cake’s parting gift to Janie, which is to
infect her with rabies. As a simultaneous mercy-killing and act of self-defence,
the climax of her narrative of becoming is a literal and symbolic purification
against his contamination. Catherine Gunther Kodat is one of only two critics
who have seriously considered the mortal implications of Janie’s coup de grace
in embracing the rabies-infected Tea Cake’s deadly bite, 138 and as her
argument cogently defends, this is not a narrative from which any characters
survive in the sense they previously existed.
Whatever synthesis the Bildungsroman apparatus restores between
dissonance and harmony is precarious; if the totality of genre is reasserted, 136 Hurston, Dust Tracks, p. 348.
137 Ibid, p. 251.
138 Kodat, ‘Biting the Hand That Writes You,’ pp. 319-20.
354
Hurston, as an outlaw of genre, certainly leaves her unique and ambiguous
bite-mark upon it. The text succumbs to genre, completing the revolution of
its neat frame narrative with the image of a protagonist who draws in all her
experiences of her make-up ‚like a great fish-net‛ in a decidedly violent
gesture, as much as it could be considered optative. [286] The metaphor
indicates the inefficiency of novelized story-telling, and accepting the things
that might be lost in such records or documents of one’s history – those
meanings that might slip through the net of the generic Ledger. The
ambiguity of Janie’s long-term survival ensures to infect the surface of realism
with a deadly, allegorical jawlock of productive violence as dissent.
We might therefore resituate Eyes alongside ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me,’
which advances one minor yet implicitly innovative philosophical outlook
upon Bildung: "At certain times I have no race, I am me."139 The text likewise
probes and problematizes the relationship between public and private
constructs of selfhood, and its relationship to the collective and culture.
Patricia Yaeger, in calling upon Virginia Woolf’s axiom that women write
back to the mother, returns to the implications of an extreme mixed-raced
South as a site of literary production, where little white girls are raised by
black women; where a writer such as Alice Walker traces her literary
matrilineage to Hurston as well as to O’Connor, whose house was proximate
to the sharecroppers’ shack rented by Walker’s parents and ‚was made with
slave labor.‛ 140 How indeed do we respond to Woolf’s assertion in
Bildungsromans where a young black girl’s first initiation into sexual
discourse is to learn that she is the forbidden product of her grandmother, a
slave and concubine, who was raped by the white plantation patriarch, and
139 Hurston, ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me,’ pp. 1008-11.
140 Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 253.
355
herself the product of rape, that she is therefore neither belonging to the black
nor the white and yet both?
Hurston’s simple and radical innovation of the Bildungsroman is to remove
the objectivity of ‘the individual’ bound to their fatalistic position in the social
hierarchy, replacing it with subjectivity of ‘the me’ who finds means to exist
outside racial inscriptions. A Bildungshelde whose generic position is liminal
and transitive may therefore reconfigure their selfhood rather than negotiate
their assigned generic role as social commodity within the complexly mixed-
race histories of the South.
356
II Dismembered Bildungshelde, Dismantled Plantation: The
Métis and the Multiple ‚Me‛ in Carson McCullers’ The
Member of the Wedding (1946)
The Métis and Me
Regarding the nineteenth century Bildungsromans of Goethe and Austen,
Moretti frames the question: ‚how is it possible to convince the modern –
‘free’ – individual to willingly limit his freedom?‛ He insists, ‚in marriage:
when two people ascribe to one another such value as to accept being ‘bound’
by it.‛141 The title of Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding (1946)
appears to support the bourgeois custom of the institution of marriage as an
enterprise of capitalism’s social reproduction. The social contract of marriage
appears to affirm the ‚famous words: ‘life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness,’‛
as Moretti outlines; however, ‚the ‘happiness’ of Schiller and Goethe is the
very antithesis of that imagined by Jefferson and Saint-Just. For the latter,
happiness is the accompaniment of war and revolution: it is dynamic, de-
stabilizing.’’142 The promise of McCullers’ title to its social contract never
eventuates, with McCullers rejecting the vehicle of the female courtship plot
from start to finish, therefore revealing how the happiness of the
Bildungsroman tradition is the ‚opposite of freedom, the end of becoming,‛
and that revolutionary behaviour and the pursuit of liberty must come ‚at the
cost, if necessary, of war and revolution.‛143
141 Moretti, Way of the World, p. 22.
142 Ibid., p. 23.
143 Ibid.
357
For McCullers, that revolution of one begins in deploying modes of the
Southern Gothic to the small-town world of her three primary characters:
twelve year old Bildungsheld Frankie Addams, her six year old cousin John
Henry West, and the Addams’ black housekeeper, Berenice Sadie Brown.
Pamela Thurschwell describes McCullers’ Southern Gothic style as filled with
scars, wounds, disability, dismemberment, and queerness, refusing ‚to ratify
or even fully recognize the significance of the event in its title‛ as a means of
cannibalizing the reductive traditional category of ‘female Bildungsroman,’ to
which heteronormative marriage is always the expected finale. 144 Whether
Frankie, F. Jasmine, or Frances, the protagonist embodies a ‚liminal‛
category; I apply this term in an acute sense, as outlined by Bjørn Thomassen,
referring to ‚moments or periods of transition during which the normal limits
to thought, self-understanding and behaviour are relaxed, opening the way to
novelty and imagination, construction and destruction.‛145 By assuming this
indeterminate position, the ‘unremarkable’ protagonist, Frankie Addams,
radically subverts the function of the Bildungsroman’s static or stabilized
subject.
Recent scholarship offers the categories of the freak and the grotesque to
account for Frankie’s multiple metamorphoses. Ihab Hassan’s now somewhat
out-dated assessment presented McCullers’ grotesque style as an ‚eccentric
form‛ of incongruousness, with all the markings of an alienated individual
straining against the ‚traditional pull of community.‛146 Sarah Gleeson-White
144 Pamela Thurschwell, ‘Dead Boys and Adolescent Girls: Unjoining the Bildungsroman in
Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding and Toni Morrison’s Sula,’ ESC (English Studies
Canada) vol. 38, no. 3-4 (Sept. – Dec., 2012), p. 110.
145 Bjørn Thomassen, Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between (London and
New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 1.
146 Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 207.
358
finesses the idiom of the grotesque and the freak in McCullers’ adolescents,
finding these unsettling paradoxes and contradictions to be a productive
outlet of these tension and constraints upon the individual.147 Read through
the Bakhtinian grotesque, Gleeson-White’s argument provides a key insight I
wish to expand: that rather than succumb to unproductive nihilism,
McCullers’ grotesquery affirms the chaos of existence as if to say, ‚but
anyway I am alive.‛148 Or to rephrase via Lukács, McCullers consents that
‚Art always says ‘And yet!’ to life.‛149
What reality does McCullers’ novel attempt to overcome firstly by rejecting of
the Bildungsroman’s sacrament marriage plot as the bourgeois social contract,
and secondly, by rejecting its unity of characterization? In this section, I
address this question by connecting McCullers’ ‚postslavery imagination‛ –
the way her texts of adolescence revise the assumptions of the plantation’s
‚insidious ideological‛ trope – to her use of the Bildungsroman genre to
subvert the legacy of the symbolic plantation’s silencing, marginalizing effects
upon its members. I do this by considering the following: McCullers’
subversive bodies; her characters’ utopian thinking; and lastly, the question of
individuation in the South’s ‘plantation’ social hierarchy. Building upon my
consideration of Hurston’s review of the Southern Bildungsroman’s
increasingly strained relationship between the individual and universal, this
section investigates the ways in which McCullers problematizes the most
essentialist generic practices of reading subjectivity regarding categories of
147 Sarah Gleeson-White, Strange Bodies: Gender and Identity in the Novels of Carson McCullers
(Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2003), p. 125
148 Sarah Gleeson-White, ‘Revisiting the Southern Grotesque: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Case of
Carson McCullers,’ in Carson McCullers: New Edition, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase
Publishing, 2009), p. 58.
149 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great
Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), p. 72.
359
race, gender, and sexuality. My approach draws upon Elizabeth Abel’s
method of reading, which ‚*pivots+ not on skin color, but on size, sexuality,
and the imagined capacity to nurture and be nurtured, on the construction of
embodiedness itself as a symptom and source of cultural authority.‛ 150 I
consider how McCullers unravels preconceived representations of Southern
identity, including race, sexuality, and gender, by dismantling the elevation
of the everyday or the culmination of the marriage plot and pursuing liberty
through a métis, contradictory understanding of character.
A more pliable cross-cultural category than mulatto, and without its aporetic
historical legacies, the term métissage may extend to other crossings and
mixings than race.151 In Loichot’s Glissantian reading of Light in August, the
threat of a métis protagonist, Joe Christmas, demarcates a dualistic world in
which atavistic and composite societal models are delimited in perpetuated
tension, at a ‚tormented crux‛ or crossroads:152
An atavistic society, built on a single imagined line of descent,
privileges one race and works towards eliminating the other by
destruction or assimilation. At the other end of the spectrum, a
composite society includes a multiplicity of components challenging
categories distinguishable in their differences *<+ What renders Light
in August *<+ so interesting in Glissant’s dual model is that it exposes
the irresolvable tension between the death of atavistic structures
150 Elizabeth Abel, ‘Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist
Interpretation,’ in Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, eds.
Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian and Helene Moglen (Berkley, Los Angeles, London:
University of California Press, 1997), p. 105.
151 Loichot, Orphan Narratives, p. 124.
152 Ibid., p. 117.
360
based on the stable categories of the pure and the impure and the
constant desire to maintain or retrieve them.153
If Loichot, via Glissant, sees the dualistic societal model of Joe Christmas as
exportable beyond the Southern regionalist lens, we may consider how
authors such as McCullers transplant this very same system-in-tension to
smaller slices of Southern space. The Member does not overtly ruminate on the
miscegenetic threat of the ‚one drop rule,‛154 as in Joe Christmas’ speculated
impurity of bloodline; yet Frankie and Berenice stand at the same crossroad
between the atavistic and composite as métisses, who ‚exist, and can only exist
in the interstitial space of tension between the two.‛155 Berenice and Frankie
perform the two sides of the symbolic mulatto: the black woman who
internalizes the white, and the white woman who internalizes the black.
Propinquitous to the Bildungsroman trend I observed in Hurston, I reground
McCullers’ freakish brand of affirmation, where Frankie embodies a radical
revision of the Whitmanesque democratic multitude that declares intimacy
with every stranger; I opposition my argument to early assessments, such as
Hassan’s, that Frankie’s alienation against the ‚pull of the collective‛ in the
Southern hierarchy means she recoils from society and recontains the self in a
more selective Dickinsonian slant of subjectivity: ‚The Soul selects her own
Society – then shuts the door – ‛156 Perhaps Frankie’s naïve ‚the we of me‛
motif distances itself from the democratic affirmation represented in
Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself,’ in that Frankie spends the majority of the novel
moving in and out of a state of self-loathing, determining at every corner to
become somebody else. Frankie’s youthful potential for change represents a
153 Loichot, Orphan Narratives, p. 124.
154 Ibid, p. 118.
155 Ibid, p. 123.
156 Emily Dickinson, The Selected Poems, ed. James Reeves (London: Heinemann, 1982), p. 25.
361
wider dialectical socio-political vision for McCullers’ New South. Here, I
build upon the rich platform of terminology of contemporary criticism on
McCullers, such as freak, grotesque, or queer, to introduce the lexis of the
métis to apply to Frankie, Berenice, and John Henry.
The asymmetric color of Berenice’s irises – heterochromia as a result of one of
her four previous husbands, who inexplicably turned ‚crazy‛ and plucked
out her eyeball – renders Berenice the somatic mulatto figure.157 One blue eye
is always ‚bright and astonished‛; the other sable and expressive. [113]
Frankie’s own eyes are grey, and can be ‚seen straight through‛ according to
Berenice, or as John Henry repeats over and over in a childish nervous tick:
‚Grey eyes is glass.‛ *123-5] Berenice’s disability signifies the tragic
miscegenation of the plantation history, feeding into the aporetic supplement
of the mulatto discussed in the previous section. As a servant of this white
household, Berenice’s entire identity outside of the kitchen is defined by her
current and former male counterparts; she would not be considered a
participating member of the family lineage, despite her rearing of the
children. She bemoans in one instance that she only earns six dollars a week,
and therefore allows and expects the many gentlemen who call upon her to
pay her way. [98]
McCullers’ métissage Southern kitchen repeals many of the concerning limbs
of the plantation social system; as a microcosm of the wider Southern culture,
the mixed household organizes its own contradictory internal values beneath
the atavistic justice system of an undetectable white patriarch who Frankie
has grown to begrudge since she become ‚too big‛ to sleep in the same bed as
him. [31] Frankie, despite her youth and lack of life experience, exerts
authority over Berenice through the power of the white gaze of a budding 157 Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding (London: The Cresset Press, 1946), p. 35.
Subsequent references to page numbers hereafter cited in text for this current section.
362
Southern Lady; she determines that Berenice cannot be considered beautiful
because of the color of her skin, viciously putting Berenice back into her place
within the plantation fringe hierarchy: ‚‘I think you ought to quit worrying
about beaus and be content with T.T. I bet you are forty years old. It is time
for you to settle down.‛’ *97+ The small Southern town, the kitchen, and even
the individual all contain the same inherent internal power dialectic in which
the Other is violently reviled, outcast, purged from the Plantation organism
because its very existence threatens the neat borders, classifications, structural
integrity of the value system that preserves order. Yet as in Hegel’s master-
slave dialectic, the authority of the master only exists as long as the Other
recognizes the master’s sovereignty.
The Member lingers uneasily in the doorway between two states: firstly, the
domestic novels of female courtship that characterize the female
Bildungsroman. Secondly, the violent, machismic and racialized history of the
South we associate with the masculine quest or picaresque Bildungsroman,
that expansive Southern geographical breadth of plantation novels such as
Faulkner’s The Unvanquished (1938) or Intruder in the Dust (1948), and the
narrative momentum and political latitude the latter’s wide opening of space
encourages. These texts interrogate the relationship between traditional form
and progressive content can be read against the wider political vision of
McCullers’ South: a decentralized region technologically modernizing yet
lagging in the process of civil rights, a time where writers ‚struggle*d+ with
the question of how to represent regional time, which contained multiple and
contradictory influences,‛ as Duck outlines.158
The Member yearns to be in states of both passivity and action, a generic
tension between the traditional masculine and feminine models of 158 Leigh Anne Duck, The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S.
Nationalism (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2006), p. 210.
363
Bildungsroman, where both systems are found to be inadequate. If the racist
mentality that upheld the plantation system survives from generation to
generation through learned constructs of violence, segregation and
oppression, McCullers’ novel offers refuge from this generic continuation by
giving outlets to these ‚silenced‛ postslavery voices, to apply Russ’s phrase.159
The Member demonstrates at all levels how progress and ideas may be
exchanged through the internalized polyphony of social voices, tones, and
accents: those inseparable entities that constitute ‚the we of me.‛
Frankie, as one third of her ‚we of me,‛ is characterized as an ‚unjoined
person‛ who ‚hung around in doorways‛ *1] in an unremarkable Southern
town. Like several of the post-1940s novels this dissertation has considered,
the narrative action of The Member takes place over a problematically short
chronology for the Bildungsroman form, a season defined by Frankie first
discovering that she does not like herself: ‚that green and crazy summer‛
when Frankie ‚had not been a member,‛ *7+ during the year ‚when Frankie
though about the world‛ not like the ‚round school globe, with the countries
neat and different-colored,‛ but as ‚huge and cracked and loose and turning a
thousand miles an hour.‛ *29+ The Member breaks with Bildungsroman
variants such as Catcher, which, for all its temporal brevity, outwardly
expands its locality through the energetic, if harassed movement of its picaro
from New Jersey through the streets of New York City. In The Member,
inescapable boredom presides over the energetic movement of the
protagonist’s vibrant imaginative processes. Frankie’s unusually tall
prepubescent body signifies an individual who is growing into an identity
that is too ‚large‛ for her predetermined character – to borrow Patricia
Yaeger’s term, which she uses to describe a character who conveys the
159 Elizabeth Christine Russ, The Plantation in the Postslavery Imagination (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 3.
364
South’s ‚historical consciousness‛ that belonged to white male writers, as
Richard King’s A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the South,
1930-1955 (1980) notoriously contended.160
In this sense, The Member’s aesthetic claustrophobia more closely aligns itself
with Wright’s Native Son than with any other novel this thesis examines. For,
in the ghettos of Bigger Thomas’ Chicago and The Member alike, a comparable
suppression fatalistically propels the individual to violence, social dissent,
alienation, all fuelled by an insatiable American hunger to become ‘more’ via
accruing more of the world: a desire for financial, social, and experiential
amassment. In both Bildungsromans, a hunger for the freedom,
independence, and autonomy afforded by physical movement (and
particularly social mobility) can never be satisfied due to the unshakeable
strictures of socioeconomic determinacy that contain and close in upon them.
Frankie is increasingly restless, instable, and frustrated as the unmotivated
narrative limps and ambles through episodes of banality towards its
(anti)climax, in which we presume the defeated protagonist assumes the
character of ‘Frances,’ a respectable budding Southern belle, having already
removed two cloaks of identity as the freakish tomboy spectacle Frankie, or
the hyperbolic performance of femininity as ‘F. Jasmine.’ Frankie, like Sayre’s
escaped Southern belle, Alabama, routinely fixates on neatening her body and
self-fashioning, even ritualizing alienation and self-harm as corporeal coping
mechanisms. If in fairy-tale folklore, erotica, commercial fashion, and even
high art, young women’s feet are historically fetishized, appearing as dainty,
minute, soft as a porcelain doll, 161 Frankie carves away at this vision but
160 Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 115.
161 Here, I recall Freud’s 1907 essay, ‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva,’ in which he
analyzes how Wilhelm Jensen’s hero, Norbert Hanold, ‚suddenly develop*s+ a lively interest
365
peeling dead skin off her oversized, indelicate, masculine feet with a knife, for
example. [37] Frankie obnoxiously inverts the image of Sayre’s prima
ballerinas, with their tiny toes wedged into painful pointe-shoes, those
beautiful silk exteriors belying the labor, disfigurement, and agony behind the
exquisite expression of female elegance. The Southern belle aesthetic status
comes at a price: Alabama practices until her feet bleed and her body shrinks
into a prepubescent leanness. ‚Both the powerlessness of the adolescent girl
to remake her world and the long shadow of slavery’s dispossession of selves
and bodies gets turned around by McCullers’ *<+ adolescent girls, black and
white, who turn violence on themselves in attempts to assert self-
determination,‛ argues Thurschwell.162
The only curative measure against the individual’s powerlessness within the
social machine of the plantation hierarchy, for McCullers, must be
revolutionary social upheaval initiated in the younger generation. Something
must break the dog days spell; something must change. The Bildungsroman
genre itself demands that some climactic event must occur; thus, when it
becomes clear that a harmonious marital spectacle won’t fulfil that generic
requirement, the narrative attempts to recontain its ‘insurgent’ characters
in women’s feet and their way of placing them,‛ particularly a childhood playmate with a
‚peculiarity of a graceful gait, with her toes almost perpendicularly raised as she stepped
along.‛ *41+ Freud traces this fetishistic emergence from its repressed derivation in the ‚erotic
impressions in childhood.‛ *41+ Freud’s determines that the archaeologist, ‚obsessed by the
problem of whether this posture of the feet‛ in the ancient Gradiva reliefs he studies
‚corresponded to reality, *and+ began to make observations from life in order to examine the
feet of contemporary women and girls.‛ *44+ See: Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and
Literature (Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press, 1997).
162 Thurschwell also recalls the ‚orgiastic‛ moment in which Mick, Bildungsheldin of The
Heart is a Lonely Hunter, punctures her hands and legs with rocks in frenzy after hearing the
sublime intonations of Beethoven for the first time. See: Thurschwell, ‘Dead Boys and
Adolescent Girls,’ p. 115.
366
with other forms of growing up and growing down, a generic dialectic of
sacrifice and symbolic rebirth through self-destruction in character and form.
Here, I expand upon Thurschwell’s understanding of the ‚incoherent‛
adolescent girl’s body as they are ‚tied to narratives of development and
growth,‛ such as Frankie’s ‚freakishly, rapidly, expanding‛ body and her
explicit fear of ‚growing up, of literally growing too tall.‛ 163 Thurschwell
proposes that the novel’s ‚shadowy freakishness‛ is a variation of Kathryn
Bond Stockton’s term ‘growing sideways,’ ‚a textual strategy coalescing
around the figure of the child that works to subvert heteronormative
development teleologies.‛ 164 Stockton’s Queer Child posits the ‘sideways
growth’ of the queer child (a clear variation of the Bildungsroman) as
‚something related but not reducible to the death drive; something that
locates energy, pleasure, vitality, and (e)motion in the back-and-forth of
connections and extensions that are not reproductive.‛ 165 Stockton’s
theorization draws upon Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s ‚protogay child,‛ as the
child who forms an identity in cultural resistance to heteronormativity –
children who ‚by reigning definitions can’t ‘grow up’ grows to the side of
cultural ideals.‛166
Gleeson-White also locates McCullers, along with Eudora Welty and Flannery
O’Connor, in a band of female Southern writers who vex, contradict, and
ironize the beautified role of white females in the Southern ecology, rejecting
the Southern belle ideal by ‚*taking+ responsibility for and then *refusing+ this
163 Thurschwell, ‘Dead Boys and Adolescent Girls,’ pp. 115-6.
164 Ibid.
165 Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, Or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 13.
166 Stockton, Queer Child, p. 13.
367
image.‛167 Elsewhere, Gleeson-White locates the ‚warped and crooked‛ self-
estimation of Frankie within two aspects of adolescent otherness: first,
Bakhtin’s bodily semiotics of Rabelaisian grotesquery as a ‚liminal,‛
‚unfinished‛ state of becoming, a theory which lends itself the visual
spectacle in the theorization of ‚the freak‛ figure in literature.168 The critical
point within this dual reading concerns how McCullers’ focalization of
intersexed young women, Frankie and Mick included, positions the reader to
observe the heteronormative feminine ideal and its masculine counterpart as
the more grotesque, freakish figure.
The same logic may be extended to McCullers’ representation of race, which
forms the text’s primary imagistic preoccupation; most of the recurring
speaking characters are black, and the novel appears bruised by a palette of
aporetic racial imagery associated words such as ‚dark,‛ ‚black,‛ ‚grey,‛ and
‚purple‛ persistently return throughout the novel, suspended against
Frankie’s recurrent dream to find a place where there is pure white snow. The
relationship between the novel’s true ‚we of me‛ – Frankie, John Henry, and
Berenice – in this manner compares to Toni Morrison’s remarkable reading of
the relationship between the children Huck and Tom to Jim the adult slave:
‚Jim’s slave status makes play and deferment possible – but it also
dramatizes, in style and mode of narration, the connection between slavery
and the achievement (in actual and imaginary terms) of freedom.‛ 169 In
putting the readers through ‚hell,‛ Twain’s masterwork ‚simulates and
describes the parasitical nature of white freedom,‛ which Morrison then
167 Sarah Gleeson-White, ‘A Peculiarly Southern Form of Ugliness: Eudora Welty, Carson
McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor,’ The Southern Literary Journal vol. 36, no. 1 (Fall, 2003), p.
49.
168 Gleeson-White, Strange Bodies, p. 29.
169 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge and
London: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 57.
368
traces back to the unmanageable ‚silence of impenetrable, inarticulate
whiteness‛ haunting the planters of Poe’s ‘The Gold-Bug,’ ‘How to Write a
Blackwood Article,’ and Pym.170 Morrison argues that the snow metaphor that
offsets all the ‚journeys into the forbidden space of blackness‛ in Faulkner’s
Absalom, Styron’s Nat Turner, or Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro,’
signals the foreclosed allegory of ‚the wasteland of unmeaning, unfathomable
whiteness.‛171 Frankie’s dream to escape to wherever the snow falls – Winter
Hill, Alaska – signifies how McCullers’ New South is yet to overcome the
yoke of its parasitical nature in relation to freedom.
Prelapsarian perspectives are mediated through a pervasively free indirect
third person discourse that magnifies the ‘revolutionary,’ deeply politicized
aspects of McCullers’ freakish adolescents by rendering them the ‘norm.’
These transitional bodies form powerful political symbols, the biopower of
the political unconscious, as paraphrased in Yaeger’s ‚gargantuan‛
reassessment of Southern female writers: ‚*T+he body, whether masculine or
feminine, is imbricated in the matrices of power at all levels.‛ 172 The
transitional bodies of the queer child, or the intersex, and their rejection of
Southern stereotypes of the white cavalier planters and belles, indicate a
liminal moment in Southern the literary characterization of gender and race.
Tracing the emergence of this ‘politicized’ body as a site for potential social
upheaval, I turn to Betsy Erikkla’s analysis of the nascent intermingling of
blood and sex in the American historical consciousness: ‚*T+he language and
iconography of the American Revolution incited women to imagine and act
on fantasies of agency, citizenship, pleasure, and power that could not and
170 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, pp. 57-8.
171 Ibid., pp. 58-9.
172 Yaeger, Dirt and Desire, p. 123.
369
would not be controlled once the war over.‛ 173At this point in Southern
history, the public sphere entered the domestic sphere in order to demonize
the ‚female world‛ by ‚*turning+ it upside down and inside out‛; 174
controlling the private, feminine spaces was a disciplinary manoeuvre
designed to maintain order and prevent unwanted cultural growth or social
change regarding gender and race. Clear rhetorical associations with
Bildungsroman discourse, such as physical and psychological maturation,
arise in these symbolic social revolutions or reordering. The widespread
anxiety towards women and transition can be outlined through Erikkla’s
summary of a grotesquely composed 1775 political cartoon; as the cartoon
pejoratively exercises, when women cross boundaries,
women turn into men; men turn into women; black women slaves
carry pens and mingle freely with manlike women; babies mingle
with animals; food mixes with excrement. What belongs outside flows
in and what belongs inside flows out as dogs urinate on the floor and
women empty tea into the hats of beggars.175
At the level of imagery, the Southern plantation trope shores up its sexual and
racial borders in a manner that recalls Julia Kristeva’s abjection as the horror
within: ‚Urine, blood, sperm, excrement then show up in order to reassure a
subject that is lacking its ‘own and clean self.’ The abjection of those flows
from within suddenly become the sole ‘object’ of sexual desire – a true ‘ab-
ject’ where man, frightened, crosses over the horrors of maternal bowels and,
in an immersion that enables him to avoid coming face to face with an other,
173 Betsy Erikkla, Mixed Blood and Other Crosses: Rethinking American Literature from the
Revolution to the Culture Wars (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), p. 10
174 Ibid., p. 11.
175 Ibid.
370
spare himself the risk of castration.‛176 Female writers of the New South evoke
these abject fears of radical destabilization and literalize these satirical
constructs by embracing figures of the in-between character: the queer, the
intersex, the miscegenetic, the mulatto, the child.
As if The Member’s generic Bildungsroman scaffolding preconsciously pre-
empts these fears of the maternal body as possible site of political growth or
change, McCullers problematically eliminates the white maternal influence
within the novel altogether. The role that Frankie’s mother plays compares to
Addie Bundren’s posthumous monologue in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930),
where the American mother refuses to go gentle into that good night by
commanding her own deadened language, waxing lyrical on the concept of
childbirth as fatality and finitude, rather than cyclical reproduction and
infinitude of bloodline. The only trace of Frankie’s birth mother hides beneath
a pistol in Mr. Addams’ right-hand bureau drawer (like Addie, concealed but
unburied in this wooden coffin of sorts), which Frankie has been ordered to
keep away from by her father. [92] More information trickles out as Frankie
contemplates the notion of death (now going by the ultra-feminine name ‘F.
Jasmine’ at this later point in the novel), her mother being the first of seven
people she outlines in an oblique obituary of people she has known who have
died:
F. Jasmine thought back to the other seven dead people she knew. Her
mother had died the very day that she was born, so she could not
count her. There was a picture of mother in the right-hand drawer of
her father’s bureau: and the face looked timid and sorry, shut up with
the cold folded handkerchiefs in the drawer. [106]
176 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 53.
371
Pushing the parameters of the complementary Bildungsroman trope of absent
or inattentive parenting (Frankie having one of each, at least in terms of
biological parentages), the lifeless mother in McCullers is contained to such a
passing, minutely framed episode, sotto voce and understated, her silence
forming a powerful paradox against the extract's rich historico-political
subtext. The last relic of the Southern lady, the vessel whose preservation
marks the continuation and preservation of the Old South values, has been
literally and symbolically ‚shut up‛: silenced, entombed, alienated from life
and the familial unit; the reproducer of the nuclear family, who embodies the
continuation of the social order, was ironically terminated through the act of
procreation. Frankie’s birth directly severs the connection of mother to
daughter in an act of matricide, evoking the horror trope of the foetus as a
life-sucking parasite and therefore directly aligning McCullers’ and
Faulkner’s respective narrative matricides.
Frankie’s initiation into inevitable sexual and social disconnection ironically
begins in utero, the universal first moment of connection, an act that sutures
the circuit of life and death. The mother, memorialized through the hidden
photograph, haunts the household through this visible anchor, for all Frankie
tells herself she won’t consciously dwell on her mother’s death. The
‚tautological‛ Photograph serves as a funerary, immobile medium – which,
as Roland Barthes proposes in Camera Lucida, ‚always carries its referent with
itself, both affected by the same amorous or funeral immobility, at the very
heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the
condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures.‛ 177 The Photographic
signifier gives weight to a reading of McCullers where the miniaturized,
domestic, and trivial proceedings magnify a socio-political importance
177 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), pp. 5-6.
372
beyond the immediate object the longer you gaze into them: ‚Whatever it
grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it
is not it that we see.‛178
In silencing the white, puritanical Southern lady figure, thereby unstitching
the seams of the American nuclear family, McCullers turns her thematic gaze
upon the black mother surrogate in the Southern ‚forced family,‛ a violent
model that is outlined by Valérie Loichot in her portrait of the plantation
household: ‚Slavery threw slaves, masters, indentured workers, and their
offspring into the same house, creating tormented, yet creative, family
models.‛179 McCullers’ foregrounds a re-evaluation of the plantation ‚black
mammy‛ trope, which as Jessica Adams outlines, emerged as a means of
subduing the enduring ‚significant position of influence‛ of the black female
caregiver over wealthy white families, and of denying the ‚authority of black
caregivers from becoming absolute.‛180 Whilst the modest wealth of Frankie’s
middle-class ‘family’ comes from her father’s small business ownership, the
stunted, glass-eyed, five-times-divorced Berenice raises her. The black
caregiver supersedes the role of the maternal mother figure in the narrative,
the white Victorian mother who has been symbolically ‚shut up,‛ implying a
sort of maternal miscegenation native to the plantation but removed from its
atavistic white supremacist discourses.
Both familial miscegenation and the development of female friendship within
designated female zones provide a means for McCullers and other Southern
writers to discuss homo-relations and queer ambivalence, as recent lines of
Faulkner studies have correlated for the masculine Southern plantation
178 Barthes, Camera Lucida, pp. 5-6.
179 Loichot, Orphan Narratives, p. 15.
180 Jessica Adams, Wounds of Returning: Race, Memory, and Property on the Postslavery Plantation
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp. 70-1.
373
novel.181 Yet very little scholarship attends to the positive social miscegenation
encouraged in Berenice and the circle of colored men she brings into the home
– particularly the creative yet troubled Honey, Berenice’s foster brother, who
looks ‚as though he came from some foreign country, like Cuba or Mexico‛;
his ‚light skinned‛ appearance is ‚almost lavender in color‛ *46+, and his
‚lavender lips‛ ‚could talk like a white school-teacher.‛ *47+ Barbara White
suggests that he functions as the tragic double of Frankie herself, 182 an
elemental Bildungsroman trope. Honey’s inevitable incarceration, serving
eight years on the chain-gang, would therefore signify one way in which the
novel problematically obstructs the mulatto facets characterizing its white-
skinned protagonist – such as Frankie unwillingness to accept Berenice or her
effeminate cousin John Henry West as vital parts of her identity and social
DNA. Berenice’s influence internalizes a dialectical black and white
association within the developing Frankie, as much as to the masculine and
feminine, and what this crossing of ‘bloods’ (race) and sexes might signify for
the state and vision of the New South.
Beyond the Social Contract: Imagining Bildung and a Plantation Fringe
Utopia
In one key instance, McCullers’ plantation fringe imagination folds in upon
itself under the weight of this political pressure, when the three principal
métissage voices in the novel, Frankie, Berenice, and John Henry, contest
rather than uplift one another in polyphony. What is significant is the topic of
181 See: Michael P. Bibler’s Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the
Southern Plantation, 1936-1968 (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press,
2009), pp. 63-4.
182 Barbara White, ‘Loss of Self in The Member of the Wedding,’ in Carson McCullers, ed. Harold
Bloom (New York and Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers., 1986), p. 133.
374
their confrontation, which is at first, a seemingly casual debate regarding the
possibility of utopia; here, I recall Luk{cs’ Theory of the Novel, where he raises
the ‚ethical problem‛ of utopian thinking in aesthetics, where the artistic
solution ‚presupposes, in accordance with the formal laws of the novel, that a
solution has been found to the ethical problem.‛ 183 McCullers’ plantation
fringe imagination thinks beyond the scope of romantic disillusionment
proposed by Luk{cs: how a ‚rounded correction of reality‛ can correspond to
an outward system where the individual might obtain self-sufficiency, to
think through the concept of freedom, individuation, and an ideal state.
In a strange past-tense fugue, The Member’s narrator relays the trio’s
conversation over a card game in which the three characters ‚criticize the
Creator,‛ discussing what they would improve. [111] The game signifies a
revolutionary utopian imagination, where individuals attempt to dream a
better system of social governance, without restraining themselves to logic.
John Henry, a ‚happy and high and strange‛ childlike voice, proposes a
world that is a ‚mixture of delicious and freak‛; *111+ his concept that ‚people
ought to be half boy and half girl,‛ *112+ an absurdity that provokes Frankie
to sell him to the Freak Pavilion at the local fair, is every bit as delicious and
agreeable a fantasy to him as ‚chocolate dirt‛ and ‚candy flowers.‛ *111+
Berenice, as black female small-town God, builds upon his improvements for
fluidity of identification in the ‚strong,‛ ‚deep,‛ ‚soar*ing+‛ tones of a
preacher:
But the world of the Holy Lord God Berenice Sadie Brown was a
different world *<+ all human beings would be light brown color with
blue eyes and black hair. There would be no colored people and no
white people to make the colored people feel cheap and sorry [...] No
183 Lukács. Theory of the Novel, p. 115.
375
colored people, but all human men and ladies and children as one
loving family on the earth. [111]
Where John Henry as a six-year-old ideologue seeks to unravel the
biomechanics of rationality and possibility, of changeable limbs and fluid
imaginations (queering the imaginative body), Berenice envisions freedom
and equality within the pre-existent social schemas (miscegenation as
equality). Two immediate symbols of civil reorder strike the reader as
imperative in Berenice’s pacifist utopia: first, the mulatto figure as peaceful
revolutionary, an operative of social harmony rather than as a repellent
hybrid degrading the borders of civilization. Secondly, the importance of
music embodied in the black body comes to the fore.
Darkness is a form of beauty in Frankie’s appreciation of music; yet it doubly
signals the dystopia of the current social system. Consider how the motif
surfaces here:
Somewhere in the town, not far away, a horn began a blues tune *<+
the sad horn of some colored boy *<+ The tune was low and dark and
sad *<+ the horn danced into a wild jazz spangle that zigzagged
upward with saucy nigger trickiness. At the end of the jazz spangle
the music rattled thin and far away. Then the tune returned to the first
blues song, and it was like the telling of that long season of trouble.
She stood there on the dark sidewalk and the drawn tightness of her
heart made her knees lock and her throat feel stiffened. Then, without
warning, the thing happened that at first Frankie could not believe.
Just at the time when the tune should be laid, the music finished, the
horn broke off. All of a sudden the horn stopped playing. For a
moment Frankie could not take it in, she felt so lost. [53-4]
The ‚tune was left broken, unfinished,‛ causing Frankie to lash out and beat
her face with her own fists. [54] The sporadic slippage between subgenres –
376
between the blues, and hot jazz – indicates the allegorical transition from two
types of cultural liberation, neither of which are enough to bring about social
equality; the sadness of the moment foreshadows the inevitable incarceration
of the well-dressed and articulate Honey, whose talent and potential is
extinguished by prejudice.
Against Berenice’s harmony resounds Frankie’s dialectical vision of a militant
utopia, which in a structural course of argument similar to their many other
debates, builds upon and ultimately undermines or colonizes Berenice’s
gentler viewpoint:
She did not completely agree with Berenice about the war; and
sometimes she said she would have one War Island in the world
where those who wanted could go, and fight or donate blood, and she
might go for a while as a WAC in the Air Corps *<+ She planned it so
that people could instantly change back and forth from boys to girls,
whichever way they felt like and wanted.
Unlike John Henry, who envisions ideal subjectivity a constant state of
intersex, Frankie envisions a gender fluid world, where one can enter the
many different compartments (symbolized by the adventureland of War
Island) of gendered activity simply by assuming a new identity or identifier –
such as a name. Frankie’s aviation dreams, what Barbara White calls her "red-
hot‛ envy towards the soldiers who freely frequent and exit her town, can be
likened to Wright’s Bigger Thomas, whose throat painfully constricts ‚like
somebody’s poking a red-hot iron down *it+‛ as he and Gus discuss the
financial and racial limitations upon their ability to become aviators like only
white men can. 184 McCullers’ vision of subjective liminality furthermore
proves that Frankie is not so much fixated with the institution of marriage as
184 White, ‘Loss of Self in The Member of the Wedding,’ p. 131
377
much as with the idea of institutions, including glorified war and imperial
conquest. Her general fixation concerns power, establishment, discipline,
order. Frankie’s more disturbing travel aspiration to donate blood to the Red
Cross, stems not from her desire to help with the war-effort in some
permissible feminine method, but rather that her genes might literally flow
through the veins of soldiers, entering them as some alien occupying a body,
imperializing foreign countries through the flow of her (pure, white) blood.
The imagery of blood again elevates those racial and gendered superstitions
of purity so critical to plantation institutions and postplantation imagination;
however, the material itself cannot visibly betray any identification of race or
gender to the naked eye, and therefore flows outside of the discourses of
power.
To substantiate the magnitude of Frankie’s institution fixation, I turn once
more to the motif of unfinished music within the novel: the scale that ends on
the seventh, or the imperfect melody without a finalizing cadence, which
codifies a threshold of imminent change throughout the soundscape of the
novel; yet danger and pathos characterize this liminality. The recurring
‚August piano,‛ for instance, tuning to the sound of unfinished scales is such
a disturbing presence to Frankie, Berenice and John Henry [100], and the
narrative weight given to this seemingly innocuous event dramatizes the
discord between small-town and global events: the sequence of sound images,
beginning with a tone that ‚climb*s+ higher,‛ building into a ‚long scale‛
which ‚slid downward,‛ all leading to ‚bottom bass note was struck six
times,‛ indicates an initiating allusion to world politics through a blitzkrieg
assault. The tuning creeps closer and crescendos, as Axis gunfire closing in on
the provinces of Europe:
The piano tuned. Whose piano it was F. Jasmine did not know, but the
sound of it tuning was solemn and insistent in the kitchen, and it
378
came from somewhere not so far away. The piano-tuner would
sometimes fling out a rattling little tune, and then he would go back to
one note. And repeat. And bang the same note in a solemn and crazy
way. And repeat. And bang. The name of the piano-tuner in town was
Mr. Schwarzenbaum. Then sound was enough to shiver the gizzards
of musicians and make all listeners feel queer. [104]
The scale itself is a regime of tonal discipline; however, political codification
appears in the name of the piano tuner: schwarzer meaning ‘black man,’ and
baum translating to ‘tree,’ evokes harrowing localized imagery of lynching; or
alternatively, in line with Frankie’s recurrent aviation fantasies (with Icarus
themed implications), it could also indicate the many downed fighter pilots
whose burnt bodies litter the forests of Europe. This nominal horror of a scale
irrupting the sonic pleasantry of the quiet domestic space is compounded by
the establishment of a Germanic association, which given both the era of
setting and Berenice’s diatribe against the German and Japanese in her vision
for a global utopia, seems to form a clear sign of anti-Nazi discomfit within
the kitchen: ‚‘No war,’ said Berenice. ‘No stiff corpses hanging from the
Europe trees and no Jews murdered anywhere. No war, and the young boys
leaving home in Army suits, and no wild, cruel Germans and Japanese.’‛
[111]
The repetition of violent imagery embedded in the scale – the negative
wartime associations of ‚bang,‛ ‚rattling,‛ ‚solemn,‛ ‚shiver,‛ ‚gizzards‛ –
verbally reinforces two accounts of systemic and systematic violence: the
localized violence of Jim Crow and racial prejudice, and the globalized
violence of ideological world war which is both ‚solemn and crazy‛ and
‚somewhere not so far away‛ from the setting of the novel, even if its events
have not found equivocal transcript as a formal ‘historical’ account. Like
Icarus, men of all races who fly too high end up dangling from the trees, as in
379
Billie Holiday’s haunting rendition of ‘Strange Fruit’ (1939): whether the
fighter pilot, shot down from the sky; or the dark-skinned man who makes
himself to visible to the hive of Southern racism. This dual reading concretizes
in F. Jasmine’s jitteriness as she tells her cousin and nanny that, ‚They tell me
that when they want to punish them over in Milledgeville, they tie them up
and make them listen to piano-tuning.‛ *100+ It remains unclear to whom the
‚they‛ who relayed this information to Frankie refers, or why certain citizens
are to be disciplined; yet the prisoner-of-war allusion is undeniable and
politically momentous, and is immediately forgotten within the next
paragraph of banal conversation. The Bildungsroman form cannot seem to
allow itself to stray too far from the juvenile rationalizations of its protagonist,
Frankie; it buries the political unconscious under layers and layers of
ambiguity.
A socially alienated Frankie longs to know everybody in the world, to finally
leave the small-town imprisonment and find her place in the global collective;
Berenice, who has seen a much darker side of humanity than the child
Frankie, coolly reminds her that some people in the world not worth knowing
*133+; instead of specifying the South’s own violent racist history as an
example, Berenice peculiarly deflects in giving Frankie the caricaturized
scapegoat of ‚the Japanese‛ and ‚the Germans. ‚Whilst Berenice and Frankie
discuss the strangeness that ‚I am I, and you are you,‛ and ‚I can’t ever be
anything else but me, and you can’t ever be anything else but you,‛ *132+ the
sounds of a children’s baseball game filter into the room: ‚Batterup! Batterup!
Then the hollow pock of a ball and the clatter of a thrown bat and running
footsteps and wild voices,‛ *133+ followed by a faceless child who was ‚quick
as a shadow‛ disappearing into the pale stillness of twilight. *134+ In this
liminal, shadowy twilight, given the magnitude of the conversation between
Frankie and Berenice over which these sounds prevail, it becomes difficult to
380
tell whether the innocent nostalgia of the children playing actually might
index a more sinister past time: the thud of the baseball bat, the running
footsteps and wild voices, the child quick as a shadow seems in this context to
index the hidden onset of a lynching frenzy.
Whilst McCullers signifies, codifies even, several regimes of evil ideology
(whether fascist or redneck) and the practices of unspeakable horror and the
primal Southern scene through Frankie’s innocent inquiries into Bildung
(what makes me ‘me’ and you ‘you’?), or through the illogical and the absurd,
the recurring references to Frankie’s brother’s wedding event and the
slowness of commonplace routine ensures that the historical events remain
just that: kept at a distance, somewhere close but removed.185 McCullers via
Frankie rancorously breaks down gendered conceptualizations of violence
and aggression. Violence is displaced to the commonplace or the allegorical
(Frankie’s violent outbursts, or listening to the war updates on the wireless),
as well as morbid fixations with death and war, and ambiguous sexuality and
race, as a means of bringing magnitudes of self-expression into the
historically ‘miniaturized’ female domain.
McCullers stimulates in these otherwise trivial encounters a political and
historical disconnection, which surfaces via its own negation or absence
against the triviality of these unremarkable kitchen episodes. As Patricia
Yaeger suggests in her analysis of female Southern writers, Southern
literature in McCullers’ era onwards developed a ‚politicized abyss‛ between
185 Here, my argument is indebted to but moves beyond Doreen Fowler’s vital
psychoanalytical reading of The Ballad of the Sad Café. Fowler argues that McCullers’ work is
driven by the Lacanian symbolic order of the ‚primal scene,‛ which she argues accounts for
the prevalence of loneliness in the oeuvre of the author. See: Doreen Fowler, ‘Carson
McCullers’ Primal Scenes: The Ballad of the Sad Café,’ in Carson McCullers: New Edition, ed.
Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009), pp. 73-86.
381
male novelists such as Faulkner, Warren, Styron, and Wolfe, writing a
‚panoramic view, the big picture‛ of the South, and women writing of the
‚unrevolutionary,‛ mundane everyday. 186 The juxtaposition of horror,
uncertainty, obscenity, and absurdity represented against a commonplace,
banal, and everyday context drives McCullers’ politick and powerfully
sutures her work to the Southern historical consciousness. Yaeger argues that
the ‚sweep of history‛ so prevalent in the novels of the canonized male
writers of the South is supplementary to the ‚complex connections‛ between
the ‚body’s intimacies and its civic demands‛ in the writing of the ‘New
South’ women. 187 These complex connections open up a female world of
‚hybrid bodies‛ emergent in public spheres, ‚shov*ing+ the ‘trivial’ and the
‘historical’ close together,‛ for it is ‚southern women themselves who set the
terms for their texts’ official separation from history’.‛188 It is the liminal child,
the harbinger of possibility and the mimicry of observed adult behaviours
and hypocrisies, who brings this searing vision of structural contradictions to
the foreground.
By Any Other Name
Gleeson-White reads the end of both The Member and Lonely Hunter as leaving
their protagonists with open-ended possibilities, positioning the young
females as the symbolic rejection of subjective stasis, a proposal that is worth
186 Yaeger, Dirt and Desire, p. 152.
187 Ibid. Yaeger further argues that the immediacy and elevation of the trivial ‘everyday’ in
the short stories of Porter, Welty, and O’Connor demonstrate a Southern female writerly
preoccupation in visualizing a ‚slice of life‛ through form: the short story bearing ‚its
shrewd, half-made torsos, its bodies in shreds,‛ p. 153.
188Ibid., p. 155
382
some consideration in relation to the métis. 189 Frankie experiments with
different names and attitudes for herself in the hope that nominalization will
force an instantaneous achievement of Bildung (like Studs Lonigan, smoking
and pouting in front of the mirror), here to be read more as a transformation
into somebody else entirely rather than as a transition into an enhanced self.
The conclusion of the novel pivots upon the South shoring up its own
atavistic symbolic sanctity by preserving the purity of the white girl: despite
Frankie’s ‚freakishness,‛ she is unable to act out, run away. With no escape,
she is forced to submit to her cultural position, befriending Mary Littlejohn
the Southern belle with dimples and ‚long braids‛ with ‚ribbons fastened at
the ends‛ *181+, the implication being that she will be educated in such ways
by the new friendship. It is important to note how the South (a receptacle of
symbolic order signified by the enclosed novel form itself) reckons with its
other insurgents: Honey, a creative but troubled character who has been
considered by some to be Frankie’s male avatar, is imprisoned; the queer and
effeminate cousin John Henry is violently killed off in an unexpected case of
meningitis; Berenice settles for marrying a fourth husband. These cultural
sacrifices are made in order to protect the positivist emblem of Southernness:
the ladylike white female.
The Bildungsroman genre itself demands these personal sacrifices, in line
with the shoring up of Southern cultural values, norms, and expectations;
however, McCullers sanctions these sacrifices in such a cruel, sudden, and
ironic manner, that by doing so, the text self-consciously makes apparent its
own generic hypocrisies and ironies. Frankie’s radical shape-shift at the
conclusion, her conversion to the moderate belle, Frances, is so irreconcilable
to the expectations of character that it is almost humorous in its counterpoint
to the despair that provokes such a sudden change. Frustrating as it is for
189Gleeson-White, Strange Bodies, p. 11.
383
McCullers to succumb to generic order, a strong undercurrent of ironic
dissent prevails. An unresolved tension between form and content looms over
the conclusion like a ‚dog days storm‛: that such a radical text in content
inevitably bows to the formal constraints of the Bildungsroman genre, in
which every eccentricity and excess is curtailed, and every ‚freakish‛ or
abnormal character arrives in their ‘rightful’ place rather than becoming the
self they desire to become, constructs a rich and problematic tension in and of
itself.
The debate between Berenice and Frankie over what she might rename herself
sparks a rudimentary philosophical debate on American self-fashioning. For
even in self-fashioning, limitations arise; as Berenice notes, one set of rules
exists for people of her color, and another for little white girls. [137] This is
what ‚normality‛ looks like in the Jim Crow South. In this way, the seemingly
‘small’ absurdity of everyday racism and inequity in the South, its arbitrary
sets of rules and governances even at the level of appearances, powerfully
illustrates the foundational instability of an entire national social policy and
historical moment. This debate over Frankie’s ability to rename herself cuts a
plane through The Member’s generic operations, demonstrating a fundamental
self-reflexion of Bildung philosophy. The name, not the body, is the thing
around which a person’s meaning accumulates, according to Berenice.
Whether Frankie, F. Jasmine, or Frances Addams:
‘Because things accumulate around your name,’ said Berenice. ‘You
have a name and one thing after another happens to you, and you
behave in various ways and do things, so that soon the name begins to
have a meaning. Things have accumulated around the name. If it is
bad and you have a bad reputation, then you just can’t jump out of
your name and escape like that. And if it is good and you have a good
reputation, then you should be content and satisfied.’ *130+
384
Berenice believes that people are ‚caught‛ by the sum of their name: ‘‚I born
Berenice. You born Frankie. John Henry born John Henry. And maybe we
wants to widen and bust free. But no matter what we do we still caught.’‛
*137+ Berenice tells the stunned children that she is ‚‘caught worse than you is
*<+ *b+ecause I am black *<+ they done drawn completely extra bounds
around all colored people. They done squeezed us off in one corner by
ourself.’‛ *137+ However, the things that characterize a person by Berenice’s
definition seem reductive to Frankie, whose youthful naivety precludes her
awareness of historical and sociopolitical issues of race, gender, and sexuality
at work in the bored familiarity of these everyday tête-à-têtes. If Berenice
cannot see a ray of hope in human activity to move beyond these shackles,
Frankie turns once more to the chiasmus of revolutionary violence. At the
thought of Berenice and of Honey being caught, of all human being caught in
the plantation’s many trapping, ignites Frankie’s violent desire to ‚break
something *<+ I feel like I wish I could just tear down the whole town.‛’ *137+
In S/Z, Roland Barthes ruminates upon the systemic implications of proper
nominalization:
*<+ Sarrasine is the sum, the point of convergence, of: turbulence,
artistic gift, independence, excess, femininity, ugliness, composite nature,
impiety, love of whittling, will, etc. What gives the illusion that the sum
is supplemented by a precious remainder (something like
individuality, in that, qualitative and ineffable, it may escape the
vulgar bookkeeping of compositional characters) is the Proper Name,
the difference completed by what is proper to it. The proper name
enables the person to exist outside the semes, whose sum nonetheless
constitutes it entirely.190
190 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1974), p. 191.
385
The sum of Frankie’s many multiplicities plagues her, as if the Proper Name
gives her the authority to self-fashion – rather than belonging to the regulated
‘individuality’ assigned to her by external forces and achieved in a process of
Bildung. Ellison’s ideological rejection of the Proper Name in Invisible Man at
least partially reads a means of obscuring identification in order to retreat
from the oppressive constructs of the ‘self-reliant’ Emersonian collective as a
means to realise his potential – a retreat from all the inescapable history that
accumulates around a name, as Berenice’s demarcation of naming suggests.
Yet Frankie’s much more juvenile and yet equally radical deliberation of
nominalization is certainly worth similar serious consideration.
In deliberation of the same S/Z passage, Julian Murphet unpacks the illusion
of the seme, the literary receptacle of multiplicity posing as unity:
Like a sun drowning out the billion stars of the night sky, the proper
name sutures us into identification via its unique supplement to the
sheer accretion of semes. This is the ‚one‛ into which all that
multiplicity is resolved and sublated, an alchemical substantiation of
compositeness into unity. It is not exactly that the new critical interest
in character has forgotten this basic fact *<+, but it pays to remember
the semiotic economy whereby the character always pulls the rabbit
out of the hat of the multiple.191
A deeply American logic enhances McCullers’ approach to the multiple, a
logic that originates with Emerson’s attempt to synchronise multiplicity and
metamorphosis, a logic adopted to the poetic form via Whitman, and
novelized in Melville’s The Confidence Man (1857). In all these assortments of
forms, the idea of American character attempts to embody and perform a
series of democratic, inherently contradictory multitudes. The development of
191 Julian Murphet, ‘The Mole and the Multiple: A Chiasmus of Character,’ New Literary
History vol. 42, no. 2 (Spring, 2011), p. 256.
386
Frankie as a subject intensifies this enquiry, as her identity comes to being
through a process of wilful negations of her many prior selves. Frankie,
transitioning to Frances, should prove that the American character is
‚resolved‛ and ‚sublated‛; a rabbit is indeed pulled out of the hat of the
multiple, in favour of traditional gender and racial assignments.
However, McCullers does not end the novel without problematizing the
finitude of character; a defeated Berenice, who contemplates what has gone so
horribly wrong, why the adjacent characters are conveniently displaced vis-à-
vis death and incarceration, lucidly questions the sacrifices of the individuals
who exceed their generic entitlement. Her dismay juxtaposes against the
sudden violent delight of Frances answering the ringing of the doorbell [183]
– and the call of the belle.
If self-identification forms the dialectical crisis of Bildung, the roman, as a
bourgeois individualistic form, requires regulated linearity of character
development. Identification of character forces the reader to lose sense of the
multiplicity in favour of unity, in other words, loses sight of the forest for the
trees that reinforce its materialization. It would be convenient to leave this
thought here, perhaps accusing McCullers of succumbing to Theodor
Adorno’s ‚ready made enlightenment,‛ expunging the ‚painful secrets of the
individual history‛ for the masses of organized culture, a ‚terror before the
abyss‛:
They are accepted, but by no means cured, being merely fitted as an
unavoidable component into the surface of standardized life. At the
same time they are absorbed, as a general evil, by the mechanism
directly identifying the individual with social authority, which has
long since encompassed all supposedly normal modes of behaviour.
Catharsis, unsure of success in any case, is supplanted by pleasure at
being, in one’s own weakness, a specimen of the majority; and rather
387
than gaining, like inmates of a sanatorium in former days, the prestige
of an interesting pathology case, one proves on the strength of one’s
very defects that one belongs, thereby transferring to oneself the
power and vastness of the collective.192
The temptation here only to read McCullers’ primary characters as each
dissenting but then being reabsorbed by the terrific power and vastness of the
collective, overturns through an act of impulsive catharsis: of Frankie
suddenly becoming the normalized Frances within the space of only a few
pages. Whilst reverting to the complementary Bildungsroman and atavistic
plantation logic obviously forms an act of deadpan parody by McCullers in
line with Adorno’s cynicism of the absorption of the individual into the
collective, to leave it at that would be to disregard what she productively
challenges in this assumption: which is a fierce discrepancy between form and
content. By rejecting the binaries of static identity, yet raising this polemic
from within an individualistic Bildungsroman form that unravels at every
point except its catharsis, she ironically conciliates the paradox of its jarringly
‘harmonious’ completion.
To echo Yaeger’s sentiment in reading Welty’s short story, A Memory: ‚Have I
gone too far? Can a Southern female child really represent the ‘power
structure’?‛ 193 Can a child’s initiation into conformity represent a tension
between individuals and the regimes of order, those tiered apparatuses which
define the social body? Such a reading undoubtedly enriches the possibilities
for approaching a genealogy of the Southern Bildungsroman. In the writings
of Althusser, the lessons of the schoolhouse teach children the rules of good
behaviour appropriate to the context of the state apparatuses to which they
192 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Notes of Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London:
Verso, 2005), p. 40.
193 Yaeger, Dirt and Desire, p. 135.
388
belong.194 Rather than situating the adolescent figure as the symbolic centre of
harmonious reproduction of the capitalistic bourgeois institution, but rather
as the localized and embodied site of social insurrection, she becomes a social
mediator whose self-regulated movements and thought-processes mock the
atavistic regimes which mechanize her regional power structures. Can the
imagined in-between Southern female child destabilize the sexual and racial
orders of the plantation history into the modern schema, illuminating the
‚(sometimes teeth-gritting) ‘harmony’‛ converging all three levels of
Repressive and Ideological State Apparatuses through her ability to move
through all circles of the society invisibly, undetectably?195
As the final speculation of this section, I draw attention to the miniaturized
politics, the ‚infinitely small of political power,‛ in Foucault’s Discipline:
With the police, one is in the indefinite world of a supervision that
seeks ideally to reach the most elementary particle, the most passing
phenomenon of the social body[.]196
Not in the epic but in the miniature, the most elementary particle of the social,
political, and historical, may we gauge the extent of the indefinite world of
supervision. This discipline of the social body mirrors Frankie’s own sense of
innocent criminality and law-breaking against Honey’s sense of corrupted
innocence. The colloquial metonymy of the Law, to specifically refer to the
police, brings self-discipline into a linguistic convention that overrules the
relationship between the supervisors and the supervised:
194 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an
Investigation),’ in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York and
London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 132.
195 Ibid., p. 150.
196 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage Books, 1995), pp. 213-14.
389
Besides being too mean to live, she was a criminal. If the Law knew
about her, she could be tried in the courthouse and locked up in jail.
[28]
And in a later instance:
Early that evening, F. Jasmine passed before the jail; she was on her
way to Sugarville to have her fortune told, and, though the jail was
not directly on the way, she had wanted to have one final look at it
before she left town forever. It was an old brick jail, three stories high,
and surrounded by a cyclone fence topped with barbed wire. Inside
were thieves, robbers, and murderers. The criminals were caged in
stone cells with iron bars before the windows, and though they might
beat on the stone walls or wrench at the iron bars, they could never
get out. They wore striped jail clothes and ate cold peas with
cockroaches cooked in them and cold cornbread. [142]
Frankie’s personal development stands as the miniature of a cultural dialectic,
through which McCullers productively problematizes the totalitarian power
of the binary, and the role the binary plays in the narrative of Southern
political history. The habitual changing of Frankie’s name, the wilful
shedding of identity, signifies a powerful uncertainty of the self, which the
protagonist tries to find herself through performing three prominent female
stereotypes of the age: the tomboy Frankie, the over-exaggerated belle F.
Jasmine, and the inconspicuous young woman cut down to size, Frances. In
doing so, Frankie challenges the permanency of her and others’ assigned
positions in the entire Southern social order, a rejection of the spell of the
‚dog days‛ that index the stasis and density of place and self in the novel,
destabilizing the apparatuses perpetuating the binaries of Southern character
within the plantation imagination: masculine or feminine, black or white, rich
or poor, innocent or corrupt, liberated or enslaved, Northern or Southern. At
390
the same time, McCullers wilfully rejects the feminine diminution associated
with women’s writing, particularly female coming of age narratives.
Despite McCullers’ preoccupation with the typical dilemmas of the
Bildungsroman – such as inquiries into subjectivity, alienation, and belonging
and so forth – the scale of her enduring vision is much larger than that: it
‚contradicts *itself+‛, as Whitman once declared of his democratic self; it
‚contain*s+ multitudes.‛197 McCullers’ method privileges trifling threads of
meaning that, once pulled, may unravel an entire false sense of Southern
unity still under the authority of atavistic plantation logic; in this
disentanglement, she fashions a literary place and receptacle for the
composite multiplicity of the reconstructed South to undergo more radical
redevelopment and redefinition. Just as McCullers contracts the enormity of
history and politics into the miniature of the mundane everyday, the
collectivism of the South is reground into its most infinitesimal seme: the
métis Frankie. An unremarkable child and yet a revolutionary Bildungsheld,
she embodies the paradoxical multiplicity of Southern character rather than
participating in the traditional binaries of individuality or identity within the
regime of the collective.
197 Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself,’ *c. 1881+, in The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman
(Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1995), p. 84.
391
IV Feralized Form in the Bildungsroman Bloodline: Southern
Dynasticism as Eternal Recurrence in O’Connor’s The Violent
Bear It Away (1960)
In the first act of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the prophet
protagonist makes an annihilating assertion:
‚Could it be possible? This old saint has not yet heard in his forest
that God is dead!‛198
Thus begins the paradoxical lesson of the Übermensch, whose purpose is to
teach humankind to overcome the human by going under: to seek creation
through destruction, to embrace sacred life on earth. From her mid-1950s
Southern vantage, O’Connor characterized the modern condition as a ‚dark
night of the soul‛: this worldview, O’Connor says, ‚is what Nietzsche meant
when he said God was dead.‛ 199 O’Connor willfully overlooks the
affirmationism of Nietzsche’s nihilism to meet her own philosophical ends;
she reads the South as the resting place of a God that will not remain dead,
for all his children have been asphyxiated by the despiritualization of
modernity and the human will to power visibly governing the divisions of
social hierarchy. It should not be underestimated that O’Connor’s
Bildungsroman formula in both The Violent Bear It Away (1960; hereafter
198 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York and London:
Penguin Books Ltd, 1969), p. 41.
199 Quoted in Richard Giannone, ‘Dark Night, Dark Faith: Hazel Motes, the Misfit, and Francis
Marion Tarwater,’ in Dark Faith: New Essays on Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away,
ed. Susan Srigley (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), p. 12.
392
referred to as The Violent)200 and her earlier work Wise Blood (1952) follows the
prototypical mystical journey to Bildung of Zarathustra, with skepticism.
I argue of O’Connor’s second novel that the death of God initiates the
prophecy of an eternal recurrence that must be fulfilled through a dialectical
process of belief and unbelief in the systems that govern the individual. We
must not read this as an exclusively spiritual or moral dilemma in the case of
The Violent. Creation through destruction, becoming through unbecoming, is a
sacrificial proposition in an age of social, economic, and technological
advancement still visibly haunted by the specters of the antecedent South.
This sets O’Connor’s spiritual discourse of individuals who come of age
through destruction against an ‚unusual‛ Southern ‚labor environment,‛ in a
‚perennial gale‛ of staggered free market development typified in Marx’s
economic concept of ‚creative destruction‛ in capitalism, particularly as it
was developed in the 1960s by Joseph Schumpeter.201
O’Connor’s novelistic powers thrive upon such contradictory valences. She
maintained conservatism close to apoliticality in her correspondences, yet
wrote volumes of fiction scrutinizing social and class division during vast
reformation in her home state of Georgia. She was profoundly religious in an
increasingly secular culture, yet the mystical and spiritual appear
productively vexed in her works; as Louise Westling argues, ‚Most of us are
*<+ well-acquainted with her intention to portray an apocalyptic grace that
smashes through the pride of her reluctant prophets, her sour intellectuals,
her grasping widows, her self-congratulatory Pharisees to reveal their
200 Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away [c. 1960] (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1969).
Subsequent page numbers hereafter cited in text.
201 Daniel Jacoby, Laboring For Freedom: A New Look at the History of Labor in America (New
York: M. E. Sharpe Inc., 1998), p. 64.
393
helplessness and their need for faith.‛202 Her private outlooks infiltrate her
narratives at an objective level, but her narrators are almost always
ambiguously satirical and detached, thus the author never dictates a precise
intent. Whilst her writing and letters tender an overt affinity with southern
fanaticism, critics such as Robert Brinkmeyer have read her faith as a
dialectical fundamentalism motivating the dynamic foundation of works; this
voice is ‚best understood as a transgressive self that, in a continuous ascetic
interplay of resistance with her Catholicism, engages, pressures, and tempts
her faith.‛203
Like Faulkner, O’Connor was raised in a comfortable if reduced Southern
landowning bloodline, most of her life spent on a modest farm adjacent to
Milledgeville (partly due to the poor health of her later years). However, at
length she chronicled the divisions of labor, race, and class dichotomy with
acerbic cynicism. Richard Giannone notes that she ‚follow*ed+ the customs of
her country, the Deep South not yet changed by the civil rights movement,
and gives white males supreme power over blacks and white females,‛204 all
the while rejecting the sentimentalism of the Southern romance that yearns
for the white prosperity of the Southern past. Citing O’Connor’s 1959 snub of
James Baldwin, in which a ‚chronicler of trouble and disturbance who can
find love in mass murder, acquiesced to racial bias,‛ Giannone charges
202 Louise Westling, Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson
McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1985), p. 136.
203 Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., ‘Asceticism and the Imaginative Vision of Flannery O’Connor,’
in Flannery O’Connor: New Perspectives, eds. Sura Prasad Rath and Mary Neff Shaw (Athens:
The University of Georgia Press, 1996), p. 179.
204 Richard Giannone, ‘Displacing Gender: Flannery O’Connor’s View From The Woods,’ in
Flannery O’Connor: New Perspectives, eds. Sura Prasad Rath and Mary Neff Shaw (Athens: The
University of Georgia Press, 1996), p. 76.
394
O’Connor with an ‚egalitarian treatment of race and gender *that+ is frankly
inconsistent with certain of her well-known rigidities.‛205
O’Connor’s resolute Southern vernacular truncates the profound intelligence
of her thought and craft, dialects associated with ‘low culture’ that Faulkner
had gone to such lengths to repurpose towards the literary. Part of her
linguistic idiom, ‚peppered with the expressions of the poor whites she
brings to life in her stories,‛ is attributed to the author’s rejection of the
‚Southern lady‛; 206 this goes a long way to demonstrate that however
‚gruesome or irrational‛ her narrative clemency, hers is a God ‚without
gender,‛ who ‚knows no gender,‛ as Giannone contends.207 Despite rejecting
the outright influence of Faulkner in interviews, the sui generis of her
expression certainly inherits and complicates many of his writerly idioms,
gestures, and motifs. Sarah Gordon argues that despite early ambitions to
mimic Faulkner’s style, such as the stream of consciousness, O’Connor
confessed she was daunted to write beneath the nimbus of the great Southern
novelist: ‚The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great
difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do.‛208
O’Connor’s trepidation invites irony, none the least at the level of gender
(may the female author permit herself to creative licenses that a male author
may not after Faulkner?), as she masters something parallel to Faulkner’s use
of language, in which words are able to delay the oblivion and false
consciousness of history by perpetually restating it from multiple
perspectives. Her farm-set stories display ‚obsessive patterns‛ of reworked
205 Giannone, ‘Displacing Gender,’ p. 76.
206 Westling, Sacred Groves, p. 135.
207 Giannone, ‘Displacing Gender,’ p. 76.
208 Sarah Gordon, Flannery O’Connor: The Obedient Imagination (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 2003), p. 202.
395
material that seem governed by her concern with ‚issues of feminine identity
and authority,‛ as Westling describes.209 The Violent is not typically considered
a novel belonging to the Faulknerian lineage of plantation fiction, given that
despite its rural setting, no material plantation architecture supports the
narrative. In applying Valérie Loichot’s definition of the Plantation as a
‚perpetuation and regeneration of the effects of a dead structure‛ as ‚a unit of
space and time whose individual elements are fused by gaping holes between
them: a community defined by its inherent discontinuity, pain, and violence,‛
the great concern of Faulkner’s plantation fiction – the entropy of dynasticism
and atavism – also forms the great concern of O’Connor’s Bildungsromans.210
O’Connor is not unmindful of the plantation hierarchies we see at work in
Faulkner, as well as in Welty, McCullers, Capote, and so forth.211 The dynastic
relationship of the Tarwaters to the Powderhead property in The Violent
undoubtedly indebts to the postplantation fiction of Faulkner and these
literary antecedents; yet whilst outlining this tradition is a productive start to
an analysis of The Violent, a caveat must preface these associations: O’Connor,
like her Bildungshelden, does not inherit any formal or generic trait without
underlying dialectical skepticism.
209 Westling, Sacred Groves, p. 137.
210 Valérie Loichot, Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literature of Faulkner, Glissant,
Morrison, and Saint-John Perse (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2007),
p. 21. Also see: pp. 117-8.
211 Whilst O’Connor acknowledged Welty’s influence, she was far less inclined to disclose the
instrumentality of McCullers due to personal differences. As Westling notes, The Member of
the Wedding certainly resonates in stories of vexed female adolescence and identity crisis, such
as ‘A Temple of the Holy Ghost.’ Yet McCullers was reportedly jealous of both O’Connor and
Capote’s successes, believing this younger set of Southern writers were ‚poaching on her
territory.‛ See: Westling, Sacred Groves, p. 137.
396
The antinomy between intent and content, tradition and invention, forms a
rich basis for appraising O’Connor’s contribution to the Bildungsroman. If
Hurston’s ironic gaze sharpens upon the mythical plantation and the
Floridian muck, and McCullers’ lens telescopes to the diurnal small-town
scale, O’Connor herself replants the setting of Bildung on a third estate of the
postbellum South: the rural farmland, as well as the unworked wilderness.
O’Connor’s panoramic vision also induces then swiftly bastardizes a distinct
mythological aesthetic: a revived American feudalism, a Eurocentric pastoral
of farmland, yeoman and harvesters, working the unpolluted edenic Garden
of America. Of this archaic edenic aesthetic, mid-twentieth century theorists
such as Henry Nash Smith, R. W. B. Lewis, and Leo Marx observed the role
that the pastoral or agrarian myth played in the early development of the
‘American national image.’ Smith argued that the rural image purported to
shape ‚character and destinies of the nation‛; for Lewis, with it presented
‚figure*s+ of heroic innocence and vast potentiality.‛ L. Marx accounted for
the pleasantry of ‚a countryside of the old Republic, a chaste, uncomplicated
land of rural virtue.‛212 Jon Lance Bacon assesses the cultural influence of this
critical tradition, repurposing the pastoral politick into a Cold War excursus
of O’Connor’s works, particularly her short stories, in which the peaceful land
is relentlessly invaded with violent forces both politically and
technologically. 213 Barrenness, ferocity, alienation, and hardship dramatize
both O’Connor’s Southern topography and her characters that dwell there;
the redoubled impact conjoins Cold War anxiety with the scrutiny of the
increasing dependency of mankind, and particularly youth culture, upon the
capitalist routines of industry and mass culture.
212 Jon Lance Bacon, Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), pp. 14-15.
213 Ibid., p. 8.
397
However, if J.O. Tate’s account of O’Connor’s Milledgeville source material is
to be believed, O’Connor did not intentionally participate in the political
marque of the Southern Agrarians who violated this pastoral myth,214 the set
we associate with John Crow Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle,
Allen Tate, even Caroline Gordon. Despite personal acquaintance with many
of ‘The Fugitive Agrarians’ as they were otherwise labeled, O’Connor was
relatively unfamiliar with their work and manifesto. 215 O’Connor remains
cautiously on Faulkner’s writerly ‚continuum‛ of ‚extremes‛ as Joel
Williamson describes, where ‚man lives in a state of nature on one side and in
modern society on the other,‛ yet only in nature are ‚the real and the ideal‛
merged as one.216 The Bildungsideal in Faulkner and O’Connor alike can only
be brought about by the individual’s critique of Southern society,
‚cataloguing *<+ its failure to bring the human values inherent in man,
evident in the natural setting, into the modern world.‛217 If there is some
divinity in the natural order for Faulkner in Williamson’s assessment, where
birth, death and even violence are simply ‚functions of ongoing life,‛ then
slavery, ‚like the Snake in the Garden,‛ had ‚married‛ the South to the sin of
property ownership, to the belief that ‚some people could own other people
as well as the land.‛218
O’Connor’s vision, according to Sarah Gordon, was infinitely larger than that
of the Agrarians, on the scale of a universal historical consciousness. Gordon
quotes J.O. Tate, who contends that what is most commonly misread as
214 Gordon, The Obedient Imagination, p. 200.
215 Ibid
216 Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993), p. 358.
217 Ibid., p. 359.
218 Ibid., p. 358.
398
O’Connor’s localized ‚Southern historical memory‛ is actually in the tradition
of the universal Catholic eschatology. Tate reads O’Connor’s ‚piety‛ as one
of world-historical consciousness as embodied in the Hebrew Bible
and the Gospels, the writing of the Church Fathers, the institutional
memory of the Roman Catholic Church as an embodied communal
image of the history of the Western world extending all the way back
to the sacred history that begins with the first chapter of Genesis.219
As Walter Benjamin puts forth, ‚In individual acts of creation (Genesis 1:3
and 1:11) only the words ‘Let there be’ occur. In this ‘Let there be’ and in the
words ‘He named’ at the beginning and end of the act, the deep and clear
relation of the creative act to language appears each time.‛ 220 Language,
creation/becoming, and destruction are enmeshed in a similar ‚manifold
rhythm‛ in O’Connor: a messianic process of Bildung. Like Thomas Sutpen,
who ‚[t]ore violently a plantation‛ by declaring ‚Be Sutpen’s Hundred like the
oldentime Be Light,‛221 the dialectic of violence and creation depict material
histories through messianic allusion in the work of O’Connor and Faulkner
alike. A more precise understanding of O’Connor’s Bildung philosophy
therefore only occurs in fusing these separate historicized accounts of form:
one local, the other theological. Such a synthesis is achieved via genre work.
In the shocking displays of the will to power through self-interested violence
and grotesquery, O’Connor’s Southerners are not only weak beings who find
themselves subject to divine mercy; they are common folk forced to affront
the localized afterlife of both feudal and chattel residues. Her radical and
219 Quoted in Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History, p. 358.
220 Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,’ *c. 1916+ trans.
Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael
W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2004), p. 68.
221 William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (Middlesex and New York: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 5
399
revolutionary characters dissent by committing unthinkable events of
ultraviolence and immorality, actions which dialectically uproot the Southern
foundation of good Christian manners, graces, honor.
Many of O’Connor short stories thereby demythicize static Southern selfhood
in the era of segregation, in response to the conflicting generational views of
the fiscally reduced white class. And as Giannone vitally illumes, ‚in
*O’Connor’s+ world the tables are always turning in household arrangements
of power.‛222 Whilst almost all O’Connor criticism appeals to questions of
spirituality, gender, class division, or even on occasion the issue of race,
O’Connor’s true anterior source of conflict is the arrangement of dynasty and
familial powers that encompass all these human divisions at their most
fundamental level. Within these localized dynastic arrangements, O’Connor
religiously shatters all social preconceptions of Southern uniformity as in St
Paul’s epistle: ‚There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free,
there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.‛223 The one
thing that unites the divided human collective in this ‚age of wrath‛ is
subordination to death. Marshall Bruce Gentry correlates O’Connor’s fixation
with spectrums of skin color to this passage to problematize a ‚redemptive
miscegenationist‛ impulse in her works; 224 however my own thesis is
concerned with the underlying generic paradox such spiritual
deindividuation might effect upon the Bildungsroman, particularly in
O’Connor’s surprising echo of Adorno and Horkheimer’s claim that
222 Giannone, ‘Displacing Gender,’ p. 74.
223 AKJV Galatians, 3:27-28.
224 Marshall Bruce Gentry, ‘O’Connor as Miscegenationist,’ in Flannery O’Connor in the Age of
Terrorism: Essays on Violence and Gore, eds. Avis Hewitt and Robert Donahoo (Knoxville: The
University of Tennessee Press, 2010) p. 193.
400
‚*i+ndividuation has never really been achieved.‛225 For in order to dislocate
the traditional ways of ‘reading’ the individual through literature (i.e.
through race, gender, age, class), O’Connor sacredly marks these
democratizing moments of coup de grâce with shocking acts of individual
ultraviolence.
O’Connor originally published The Violent as a short story in the New World
Writing journal under the title, ‘You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead’
(1955).226 If we declaim this as the working title to The Violent, the spiritual
themes of the surface narrative coincide with the local mode of production,
and the alienated individual becomes inscribed within the economic divisions
of labor. If McCullers and Capote trace the micropolitical in the diurnal via
episodic or vignette configurations, in which events return in cyclical
rotations ensuring that nothing ‘significant’ ever ‘happens,’ O’Connor’s
alternative achievement concerns her ability to make the absurd, fantastic,
violent, even horrific moments appear as naturalistic, commonplace details
that flow onwards into the much larger constellation of thought and meaning.
In stories such as A Good Man is Hard to Find (1953), The Displaced Person
(1955), and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1961),227 the typecast middle-
aged white woman holds steadfast to the Old South worldview. The younger
generation of Southerners, most often indexed as young liberal males,
challenge this perception. There’s dianoetic Julian of Everything That Rises: a
poor, self-styled white intellectual of fallen Southern pedigree, who dresses
225 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming
(London: Verso, 2010), p.155.
226 The story now features standalone in O’Connor’s Complete Stories, although it features the
same characters and similar material to the opening of The Violent.
227 Original publication date; however, it was republished posthumously in the 1965
eponymous story collection: Everything That Rises Must Converge.
401
like a common ‚thug‛ to the shame of his mother; she herself is a penurious
middle-aged Southern lady in fiscal denial due to her extreme omnipresent
romanticism of their dynastic history.228 There’s The Misfit in A Good Man,
who regards himself as the mediator of divine judgment, bloodily
adjudicating those white, middle class Southerners who overestimate the
goodness and godliness in their own character; in the story, the grandmother
embodies this ‘good woman’ type. Or consider The Priest and the Holocaust
refugee in The Displaced Person, who undermine Mrs. McIntyre’s tight-smiling
racism and pecuniary micromanagement of her black and white workers,
ideologies she inherited from her late husband, The Judge: ‚‘Money is the
root of all evil,’ she said. ‘The Judge said so every day. He said he deplored
money. He said the reason you niggers were so uppity was because there was
so much money in circulation.’‛ *CS, 215] As Sarah Gleeson-White advances,
The Displaced Person, a Polish refugee, sees no difference between the
plantation mistress and the African American workers, as he has ‚not yet
learned how to be ‘white,’ which involves recognizing and maintaining the
hierarchies of difference.‛229 The plantation mentality continues to run deep in
these enactors of white proselytization and indoctrination, still underpinning
its racial divisions of labor as ‘Southernness,’ always signified by the fixation
upon the presence of the white Southern lady.
The young characters’ inherited image of a plantation whitewashed and
gleaming [CS, 408] is pervasively juxtaposed against the present decayed state
in these stories as a means of symbolizing the refusal of the older generation
228 Flannery O’Connor, Complete Stories (New York and London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 2009),
p. 409. Subsequent references to page numbers hereafter cited in text for this current section.
229 Sarah Gleeson-White, ‘A Peculiarly Southern Form of Ugliness: Eudora Welty, Carson
McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor,’ The Southern Literary Journal vol. 36, no. 1 (Fall, 2003), p.
54.
402
to renege the affluent and puritanical ‘glory days’ of the Old South. Consider
Julian’s discourse with his mother in Everything That Rises:
‚Your great-grandfather was a former governor of this state,‛ *Julian’s
mother+ said. ‚Your grandfather was a prosperous landowner. Your
grandmother was a Godhigh.‛
‚Will you look around you,‛ he said tensely, ‚and see where you are
now?‛ and he swept his arm jerkily out to indicate the neighborhood,
which the growing darkness at least made less dingy.
‚You remain what you are,‛ she said. ‚Your great-grandfather had a
plantation and two hundred slaves.‛
‚There are no more slaves,‛ he said irritably. [CS, 407-8.]
Julian, with his mediated imagination of a modernized youth culture, knows
‚every stop, every junction, every swamp along the way‛ and ‚the exact
point at which her conclusion would roll majestically into the station.‛ *CS,
408] The ironically material metaphor to undermine the racist atavism is
prevalent not only in O’Connor, it also echoes Faulkner; indeed, Julian
resembles Quentin Compson,230 in that their worldviews subsist under the
nimbus of ancestral ‚mixed feelings,‛ Julian having unconsciously absorbed
the ranting ‘lessons’ of his mother and her dynastic fidelity. The mother
habitually romanticizes the Godhighs plantation bloodline before it came to
230 I think also of Ted Atkinson’s Lacanian reading of the carriage episode in The Sound and the
Fury, in which Mrs. Compson rides through town in a ‚failing carriage,‛ and declares that the
family’s plight is ‚the effect of divine judgment.‛ Benjy’s sense of loss in the pony
transfigures into ‚the loss of the land,‛ in Atkinson’s reading. ‚In a Lacanian sense,‛ he
writes, ‚the dispossessed property has undergone sublimation; it has become an elusive
object of desire that promises a sense of wholeness but, alas, never delivers.‛ The Compson
brothers therefore ‚reproduce their own frustrated desire by longing to recover what they
never truly possessed.‛ Ted Atkinson, Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology,
and Cultural Politics (Athens & London: The University of Georgia Press, 2006), p. 92.
403
post-chattel ruin: ‚‘reduced or not, they never forgot who they were.’‛ *CS,
408] An Erbe who is unable to ‚rise above‛ his inherited scruples to thereby
‚converge‛ with the free enlightened spirits of the world, Julian wrestles with
his family’s dispossessed plantation legacy:
‚Doubtless that decayed mansion reminded them of their reduced
circumstances,‛ Julian muttered. He never spoke of it without
contempt or thought of it without longing. He had seen it once when
he was a child before it had been sold. The double stairways had
rotted and been torn down. Negroes were living in it. But it remained
in his mind as his mother had known it. It appeared in his dreams
regularly. He would stand on the wide porch, listening to the rustle of
oak leaves, then wander through the high-ceilinged hall into the
parlor that opened onto it and gaze at the worn rugs and faded
draperies. It occurred to him that it was he, not she, who could have
appreciated it. [CS, 409]
What is vital here to our discussion of The Violent as Bildungsroman is that
Southern youth posits an impossible inheritance within O’Connor’s stories;
individuals are torn between regionalized legacy and national progress,
caught in the interface between rural ancien régime and the motley urban
forces of modernity. Yet the opposition must resolve in favor of the latter, for
the xenophobic plantation mentality cannot keep pace with the techno-
industrial arms race of modern production that energetically unseals the very
distances and borders that perpetuate mythologies of regionalized identity.
The feudal lore combusts in the smoking ascendance of steam, iron ore, and
coal; train lines, automobiles, buses, and aeroplanes all nationalize, globalize
the South through energy and movement. All the while, electricity, television,
telecommunications mediate the economies of culture and domesticity,
dictating the ways that the consuming public absorbs ideas of identity and the
historic. Hence O’Connor recurrently links the dialectic between the past and
404
present on the plantation to the antinomical crisis of what ‚good‛ white
Southernness meant in her despiritualized, mediated era of mass culture.
Whilst Julian’s mother in the above instance believes she ‚‘always had a great
respect for my colored friends’‛ and for her ‚‘old darky who was my nurse,’‛
[CS, 409], her law is that of feudal segregation and racial superiority. Her
belief that all ‘others’ are somehow fungible, automated machinery makes
Julian feel that he must ‚sit down beside a Negro‛ when they enter a bus to
atone ‚for his mother’s sins.‛ *CS, 409] In ironic ambiguity, Julian’s
embarrassment is unclear, whether shamed by his mother’s racist ‚sins‛ of
bigotry, or her denial of her tremendous class hypocrisy. Inheriting the past,
tensions between the educated and ignorant, in addition to reified relations of
race, labor, and economics all formulate the idiom driving these stories.
Read in the intractable afterglow of these mordant political short stories, The
Violent’s analyzes of the divisions of wealth, class, race, and gender outside of
the urban world of capital and modernity tend to sharpen. Consider the
description of the Powderhead as a decaying monument to the ‘plantation’
ecology:
Powderhead was not simply off the dirt road but off the wagon track
and footpath, and the nearest neighbors, colored not white, still had to
walk through the woods, pushing plum branches out of their way to
get to it. Once there had been two houses; now there was only the one
house with the dead owner inside and the living owner outside on the
porch, waiting to bury him.231
Fourteen-year-old Bildungsheld Francis Marion Tarwater is burdened with an
extreme religious predestiny, which he has been conditioned to believe (yet
231 Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear it Away (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), p. 12.
Subsequent references to page numbers hereafter cited in text for this current section.
405
simultaneously disbelieves) he must fulfill in order to come of age. O’Connor
selects four males of the same Southern dynasty as the subjects of her
Bildungsroman; the paternal power-play between the quadrant of kinsmen,
none of whom is the true patriarch of the bloodline, forms the vicious phalanx
of the protagonist’s development. Wrestling with the voice of the ‚stranger,‛
composed in highly fragmented free indirect discourse, Tarwater ruminates
upon moving the fencing, as if to claim ownership, believing that he will
‚kill‛ his blood relative if ‚any school teacher comes to claim the property,‛
which has technically passed down to his uncle. [12] If Joel and the Sansom
dynasty are sinking in the plantation bayou in Capote’s Other Voices, Other
Rooms, the Tarwater dynasty is comparatively drowning in the thick Georgian
Piedmont quagmire of heritage symbolized in their own surname (although
O’Connor does not interrogate the societal heritage as directly as in her short
fiction).
In Part One of the novel, we ascertain through highly colloquialized free
indirect discourse that after the violent death of Tarwater’s parents, he was
fostered by his mother’s brother, Rayber, an uncle he knows only as ‚the
schoolteacher.‛ As a seven year old, he was kidnapped by his septuagenarian
great-uncle of the same maternal bloodline, Mason Tarwater (to whom the
boy primarily refers as ‚the old man‛) *4+, whose sudden death at the
breakfast table marks the structural commencement of the narrative. Prior to
his passing, Mason resided in an isolated cabin in the reclusive scrubland, his
whole life dedicated to obeying the raging edicts passed down to him by his
Christian God; his visions heavily draw upon the fiery destruction of The
Book of Revelations. He believed himself to be a prophet and chosen one of
the Lord, and was raising the younger, dispossessed Tarwater in this mind-
frame.
406
O’Connor surgically removes the displaced adolescent from the mediated
world of modernity. Tarwater is a feralized child, raised outside of
civilization in the image of a hermetic fanatic:
The old man, who said he was a prophet, had raised the boy to expect
the Lord’s call himself and to be prepared for the day he would hear
it. He had schooled him in the evils that befall prophets; in those that
come from the world, which are trifling, and those that come from the
Lord and burn the prophet clean for he himself had been burned clean
and burned clean again. He had learned by fire. [5]
A violently deranged Mason believes young Tarwater to be his prophet-heir,
having failed to convince his schoolteacher nephew to fulfill his own destiny
as the male successor; however, a second component to the upbringing of
Tarwater is that the young boy must one day be able to fulfill the old man’s
personal burial wish, as he is convinced that he will find no peace in the
afterlife if he is not properly laid to rest. By delaying this task, Tarwater
evokes an atavistic curse, in which a voice known to him only ‚the stranger‛
possesses his mind; whether a legerdemain hallucination of the devil posing
as his guide, or the undead voice that possessed his great uncle has
transferred into him. Part One of the three-part novel outlines young
Tarwater’s activities in the twenty-four hours after the old man perishes yet
refuses to lie silent.
Young Tarwater’s only other social influence over years of isolation seems to
have been with the poor blacks, such as Buford Munson, who reside nearby in
the forested farmland. The narrative begins with the death of the uncle,
leaving the Bildungsheld without family, social awareness, and only the old
man’s lessons to guide him as he reenters civilization; the Zarathustrian
connection of the prophet-heir abandoning the solitude of the forest visibly
resonates, preempting Tarwater’s ‚going under.‛ In the Southern plantation
407
mythology and ideology in which the white male family heir of reproductive
age (the quintessential Bildungsheld) is vital to the continuation of the
plantation dynasty and consanguinity, and his reproduction is necessary in
order to continue the bloodline of the patriarchal estate.232
In the racial fabric of The Violent, the narrative telescopically sharpens towards
the impoverished outskirts of the city, the darkness in the forest areas along
the highway, where an underclass of black Americans too poor and without
means to move away from the South reside. The novel actually begins with
the actions of Buford Munson, a local ‘Negro,’ and not Francis Tarwater;
Buford in fact fulfills young Tarwater’s assigned destiny to bury his uncle in
the ‚decent and Christian way‛:
Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day
when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro
named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish
it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting
and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Savior
at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from
232 Richard H. King writes of the prevalence of the association between region and family,
particularly how the plantation was ‚conceived of as structured like a family.‛ See: Richard
King, 1980. A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930-1955
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 27. The slaveholder-descended plantation
Bildungsroman oeuvre of Faulkner employs elements of the family saga genre, exploring the
challenges of Bildung that the male heir faces as he comes to terms with his predestiny to
continue the family line for the good of the plantation and Southern community, all the while
subverting those sextuated hierarchies. For instance, Michael P. Bibler observes how an entire
critical tradition of Faulknerian scholarship has attested to Quentin and Shreve’s narrative
reproduction as one method by which Faulkner bypasses the impasse of biological
reproduction in the plantation of Absalom, Absalom! See: Michael Bibler, Cotton’s Queer
Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968
(Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2009), p. 68.
408
digging it up. Buford had come along about noon and when he left at
sundown, the boy, Tarwater, had never returned from the still. [3]
Through her isolated protagonist abandoning his prophetic post to seek out
his last living blood relations, thus coming into contact with the coenobitic
civilization for the first time, O’Connor conceives undeveloped youth as the
site of totalitarian ideological indoctrination. Children inherit the ideologies
of the immediate world into which they are initiated, but as they come into
contact with the adult world in adolescence, they process and challenge these
preconceived notions and social predestinies. The quotidian Hegelian-
Goethean dialectical processes between acknowledgment of social
indoctrination (education) and the formation of authentic selfhood
(experience) plays out on the stage of the pastoral Bildungsroman form
already fraying at the edges. The dialectic also transpires in a localized
Southern culture that either reveres or loathes its own history and
mythologies; the outcome of the dialectic is nevertheless pointless either way
if the past cannot be escaped. O’Connor shares Faulkner’s nihilistic view (I
think here chiefly of Quentin in The Sound and Absalom) that regardless of
whether the individual rejects these histories and mythologies, one cannot
escape the dynastic binds of family and must inevitably succumb to the
existential suffering of inescapable atavism.
Tarwater’s uncle Rayber cogitates this same dilemma in his assessment of the
feral nephew:
The affliction was in the family. It lay hidden in the line of blood that
touched them, flowing from some ancient source, some desert
prophet or polesitter, until, its power unabated, it appeared in the old
man and him and, he surmised, in the boy. Those who it touched
were condemned to fight it constantly or be ruled by it. The old man
409
had been ruled by it. He, at the cost of a full life, staved it off. What
the boy would do hung in the balance. [114]
Like Julian of ‘Everything That Rises,’ Rayber is a rational, atheistic man of
learning who understands the theoretical implications of indoctrination;
however, he cannot match the experiential spiritual power it holds over the
individuals of his male bloodline. Thus he shelves the conditioning, in which
Mason passes down his fanatical beliefs to the impressible children of the
bloodline, into the territory of a hereditary madness. In this, an overwhelming
Faulknerian attendance of the (unburied) dead who will not stay dead
transpires, familial revenants who continue to haunt the living with their
posthumous words and influence, as in As I Lay Dying. Tarwater is partly an
autonomous individual, yet the specter of Mason harbors within his thoughts,
speeches, actions; even the rational Rayber must fight with his every energy
to suppress the same terminal influence. He believes that either succumbing
to the madness or practicing stringent asceticism are the only treatments for
the symptoms of this blood curse; there are no cures for heredities.
As an unseasoned critic reflecting upon the metaphysics of youth, a young
Walter Benjamin postulated that, "Daily we use unmeasured energies as if in
our sleep. What we do and think is filled with the being of our fathers and
ancestors. An uncomprehended symbolism enslaves us without ceremony."233
This thought-experiment may assist in demonstrating how dynasty relates to
the above dilemma of individual becoming in O’Connor’s Bildungsroman.
The unconscious, atavistic ‚longing‛ (Rayber’s words) to revert to the
paternal-ancestral is ‚like an undertow in *Rayber’s+ blood dragging him
backwards to what he knew to be madness.‛ *114+ In Tarwater’s eyes, shaped
233 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Metaphysics of Youth,’ trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Selected
Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA
and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 6.
410
and colored with the old man’s genealogical imprint, Rayber feels his own
self-determined image is threatened, ‚subjected to a pressure that killed his
energy before he had a chance to exert it.‛ *115+ If the spirit of the ancestor
Mason is the conductor of energy, Rayber’s removal from the familial
influence through academic education forms an electrical resistance through
which energy is lost. However, the destiny of the bloodline towards madness
is redoubled by Tarwater’s isolation, as he is unable to question his own
indoctrination against any societal influence or education. Despite Rayber’s
late attempts to make him aware of his indoctrination, Tarwater still feels the
need to become ‘a man of action,’ to fulfill God’s prophecy for the Tarwaters
passed down to him by Mason. To then transplant Benjamin’s aphorism from
the symbolic into the literal, the drive of this novel converts to one of
resistance to predestined Bildung, in which the ‚‘I’‛s enslavement to the
ancestor is both felt and comprehended, resisted and surrendered, and its
persistence does in fact present as ceremonial: the baptism.
Part Two of the novel considers the events after Tarwater returns to his last
living ‚blood connection‛ *54+: Rayber, the schoolteacher, and his disabled
child, Bishop, whom Mason was never able to baptize. Here, through generic
lineage, O’Connor returns us to the earliest concept of masculine
Bildungsroman theory; for in Christianity, the first ceremonial rite of passage
in identity formation is the baptism, the naming as communion with God as
creative production.234 In most unusual narratology for a Bildungsroman, this
second section shifts to a focalization of consciousness on Tarwater’s uncle,
Rayber, who by introduction is defined through the pedagogical caliber of his
234 ‚By giving *proper+ names,‛ as Benjamin elsewhere extrapolates, ‚parents dedicate their
children to God;‛ by doing so, ‚each man is guaranteed his creation by God, and in this sense
he is himself creative‛ See: Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such,’ p. 69.
411
education and profession.235 The schoolteacher’s educational modus operandi,
or Bildung philosophy in the vernacular of this thesis, comes into contestation
with the Mason Tarwater ideology of spiritual, experiential education and
blind faith that he has been chosen by God to mediate the creative language
and (proper) name, as Benjamin describes. Manhood is separated into two
mutually exclusive educational entities: the man of speech; and the man of
action. Tarwater struggles against the prophecy for an heir of the Tarwater
bloodline to baptize his intellectually disabled cousin, Bishop, whilst Rayber
struggles against his own subconscious paternal destiny to kill the ‘mutant’
child through drowning as some perverse act of mercy. It is Tarwater who
acts on Rayber’s macabre destiny to infanticide the incurable child – as
Rayber is a theorist not an actor, according to Mason, an opinion that
Tarwater inherits; however, he compulsively baptizes the child against his
own better instincts, triggering his Tarwater curse to go forth in the world
and baptize all the sinful children of God.
O’Connor grotesquely transfigures this religious rite of passage into a
paradoxical act of premeditated and unpremeditated murder and blood(line)
sacrifice: the destiny to baptize Bishop. It is both premeditated and
unpremeditated because Tarwater proves ambivalent to the last as to which
235 Many of O’Connor’s characters are ironically named for their profession or characteristics,
a trait shared with the Southern romance and the Western genres in folklore and literature
(i.e.: The Misfit, the Judge, the Displaced Person, and the Schoolteacher). However they are
also frequently mentioned for their familial position: the nephew, the uncle, the son etc. This
functionally forces characters into the presupposed fate of their static archetype in the mind
of the reader, an expectation of teleosis that O’Connor commonly subverts. Characters are
assigned roles through these stereotypes, and their actions dialectically confound this
expectation; this is one feature through which O’Connor destabilizes Southern identity.
Cormac McCarthy’s characters The Kid and The Judge of the anti-Bildungsroman/revisionist
Western, Blood Meridian (1985), stems from this same ironic O’Connorish local idiom.
412
indoctrinated voice in his mind he will act upon, and in the end, his actions
become physically involuntary. Whilst the murder of his young relative
suggests a lack of autonomy, thus rendering Tarwater a problematic
Bildungsheld, Bishop’s drowning also symbolizes a deranged ‚going under‛
for the Tarwaters, an act of finitude and infinitude in submerging the
‘crippled,’ ‘weakened’ bloodline. A crudely sardonic synecdoche conjoins the
fate of the disabled Tarwater bloodline with Bishop’s Down syndrome.
Rather than empathically responding to Bishop’s situation, O’Connor’s
disability characterization forms a ‚signifier of sacred or ritual processes,‛ a
category of disability representation that Ato Quayson outlines in his study of
aesthetic nervousness. 236 Taking the Greek literary exemplars of Oedipus,
Philoctetes, and Ajax for this typology, Quayson remarks how ‚their
transgressions are considered as marking them with ritual danger, so that
they have to be driven out to avoid the total destruction of the rest of the
community.‛237 Whilst Bishop’s only transgression is being the product of
Rayber’s familial sin in rejecting his spiritual heritage and becoming an
atheist, the Tarwater dynasty stands in for ‚the wider society‛ that desires ‚to
acquire or at least gain access to a boon that these disabled characters possess
and which is seen as critical for the well-being of the society.‛238
Part of the hypocrisy, irony, tragedy of Mason’s position is that his own
disability – his failing mental health – has already discontinued what he
believes is the purity of bloodline, rendering him an impotent patriarch,
sidelined as uncle or great uncle but never the true father and lord figure he
believes himself to be. Any display of female sexuality disgusts his ascetic
236 Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 46.
237 Ibid.
238 Ibid.
413
religious sensibilities; there has never been a possibility for his own
procreation. The impotence he experiences resonates with the queer
impotence of both Absalom, Absalom! and The Unvanquished, in which Faulkner
recognizes and deconstructs the plantation fixation with the preservation of
whiteness and the unbroken family hymen. In The Violent, Mason deludes
himself that both the schoolteacher and Tarwater secretly view him as the
father they never had, even if the face of their verbal and physical displays of
disdain for the old man.
In the case of O’Connor, the omnipresence of the masculine dynasty is
profoundly linked to the male quest narrative and the Oedipal search for the
‚father‛ – who, in this case, is overtly the Christian father. 239 Katherine
Hemple Prown has addressed the question of female authorship in a text that
expunges all traces of the women’s bildungsroman as outlined as a process of
‘growing down,’ as theorized by Abel, Hirsch, and Langland in The Voyage In:
Fictions in Female Development. 240 O’Connor’s narrative conforms to the
‚masculinist model‛ upon first assessment, sharing the philosophy that ‚the
self is coherent, that personal growth is possible‛ and takes place in a
‚definable time span and a particular social context.‛ 241 Yet for ‚women
writers and their characters, the coherent self does not necessarily equate with
the autonomous self, nor does development usually take place uninterrupted
by the pressures of social constraints.‛ Thus, ‚like the quest narrative,‛ these
239 This type of agrarian quest reigns in Faulkner’s The Unvanquished; however, as I
determined of Capote’s Other Voices, the Oedipal quest merely serves the wider purpose of
addressing a certain Southern politick.
240 Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland (eds.), ‘Introduction,’ in The
Voyage In: Fictions in Female Development. (Hanover, NH: University of New England, 1983), p.
5.
241 Katherine Hemple Prown, Revising Flannery O’Connor: Southern Literary Culture and the
Problem of Female Authorship (University of Virginia Press, 2001), p. 138.
414
non-quotidian Bildungsromans ‚assume a form that more closely reflects the
limitations of traditional female experience and development.‛242
Prown’s assessment acknowledges O’Connor’s contradiction of form in both
ratifying the masculine Bildungsroman quest narrative yet retaining many of
the traits of the women’s Bildungsroman, such as an ending not of
‚individuation but in marriage, death, or sexual awakening.‛243 Tarwater’s
‚journey from youthful ignorance and rebellion to a mature understanding of
his relationship to the ‘children of God,’‛ characterizes him as the traditional
Bildungsheld of the masculinist order; however, Prown concludes that his
maturation quest complies with the feminine traits also, in that it does not
‚end in the achievement of autonomous selfhood,‛ but in the realization that
he must ‚rejoin the social order from which he has isolated himself and that
he views with such contempt.‛244
This gendered antinomy of form and genre may be resolved through a
dynastic reading of the text within the plantation hierarchy. The plantation
order performs an analogous purpose to the church that institutionalizes
socialization through a regime of parochial stability. The patriarchy is
internalized within the form of the novel, a paradoxical attempt to suppress
the figure of the Other: the black indentured servants, sharecroppers, and
rural underclass. Buford Munson, it is revealed, has laid the dead to rest,
plowed Mason’s cornfields, all whilst Tarwater was ‚laid out drunk‛ *240+
and otherwise attempting to fulfill his destiny to take control of this
overgrown ‘plantation’ where he believes he is ‚in charge there now.‛ [217]
There is otherwise the minority of ‚whore‛ mothers of a diaconate Tarwater
line (‚whore,‛ being the biblically derived vocabulary of Mason Tarwater’s
242 Prown, Revising Flannery O’Connor, pp. 137-8.
243 Ibid., p. 137.
244 Ibid., p. 138.
415
apparent Madonna-whore complex, which he extends to his own sister).
There is also the social worker, Rayber’s ex-wife and mother of Bishop, who
abandons her disabled child in horror of his Down Syndrome. Like Other
Voices, physical and developmental disability forms a volatile threat to the
Bildungsideal, and to the ‘familial’ plantation structure.
Sacrifice and destruction are the culmination of Tarwater’s Bildungsroman,
not self-fulfillment or self-awareness or societal conciliation; as a violent
paradox, sacrifice and destruction both bring about a narratorial harmony
and productive purpose for the Bildungsheld and his future. The ‘benevolent’
murder of the disabled child, Bishop, initiates a dualistic bloodline sacrifice.
In the last pages of the novel, Tarwater flees the crime and familial pull, and is
drugged and presumably sexually assaulted in the forest near Powderhead by
a stranger in a lilac and cream colored automobile. It is the fulfillment of a
second curse put upon him by his uncle: ‚You are the kind of boy *<+ that the
devil is always going to be offering to assist, to give you a smoke or a drink
or a ride.‛ *58+ Unlike Capote and McCullers, with distanced histories of
patriarchal brutality, dismemberment, and rape by both black and white
perpetrators categorically and functionally defining their black female
characters, O’Connor presents us with the impossible Southern scenario in
which it is the ascetic white male heir who is narcotized, raped, deflowered,
victimized by the queerer, as opposed to the ‘black mammy.’ Such a reversal
would revolt against the enduring myth of the black woman as predestined
victim of sexualized violence in the South, and further reject the trope of the
white woman who is pressured and coerced by masculine social forces into
forfeiting her ‘sacred’ virginity in order to prematurely enter womanhood.
However, there are no African American women in this narrative, or even a
female character at all who exists outside of secondhand stories orated either
by the narrator or principal male characters.
416
Doreen Fowler cites the trend of criticism that has read this incident in the
Freudian/Lacanian narrative of O’Connor’s ‚insistence on purposive
violence,‛ an insistence she ties to the later echo of Kristeva, who claims
violence is ‚productive.‛ Fowler extrapolates upon Freud’s notion that ‚entry
into a cultural order organized by polarities begins with a fear of castration,‛
or for Lacan a ‚symbolic castration‛ that ‚introduces socialization.‛ 245 In
O’Connor’s narratives, a common reading of Tarwater’s sexual assault, the
theft of Joy-Hulga’s prosthetic leg, or Mrs. May who is gored by a bull,
suggests a functional violence that ‚works to stabilize hierarchy and positions
of dominance within the Oedipal formula.246
Fowler cites the role of the Roman Catholic writer, in kinship with feminist
theorists, as ‚bear*ing+ a complicated, adversarial relationship to Freud’s
theories,‛ theories that by and large have a phallocentric and Western
‚exclusionary narrative of social individuation.‛247 It follows that Christian
redemption, or the attainment of ‚grace,‛ must involve destruction in order
for the resurrection of the individual to occur, ironically in an identikit arrival
as the amor fati of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science.248 Fowler’s interpretation of
245 Doreen Fowler, ‘Flannery O’Connor’s Productive Violence,’ Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of
American Literature, Culture, and Theory vol. 67, no. 2 (Summer, 2001), p. 128.
246 Ibid.
247 Ibid.
248 Although he does not include specific or local readings of O’Connor’s works, Henry
McDonald traces the paradoxical relevancy of O’Connor’s moral views to the anti-Christian
Nietzsche, in particular, his concept of amor fati: ‚Nietzsche inveighed against any radical
separation of body and spirit; like O’Connor, he counselled an ethic of acceptance and
engagement with the world, promulgating his doctrine of amor fati, or love of fate; and like
O’Connor, he opposed the modern tendency toward the privatization of morality,
denouncing in terms similar to those of O’Connor’s a ‚popular pity‛ which would sever
feeling from reason, personal conduct from public conduct.‛ See: Henry McDonald, ‘The
Moral Meaning of Flannery O’Connor,’ Modern Age (Summer, 1980), p. 280.
417
grace does not exclusively necessitate castration, although this certainly
characterizes Tarwater’s assault in the instance of the novel. Undoubtedly, the
Roman Catholic reading is bound to Flannery O’Connor’s works, and easily
verifiable in the overt religious overtones of The Violent. Yet, in terms of the
generic tradition, once more we find an American writer repurposing the
same narrative trope in which Bildungshelden must suffer, self-flagellate,
perish, and by doing so endure rebirth in order to fulfill their narrative
destiny. In the localized genre, it is once more a narrative destiny to escape
the blood ties of family, or submit to the consanguinity, atavism, and dynasty.
Therefore, O’Connor’s narrative of redemption operates within an American
Bildungsroman tradition, suggesting that the violence of Tarwater’s Christian
redemption is also a generic concern. For Fowler, O’Connor’s fiction ‚rewrites
and corrects a Western assumption that the social order is a hierarchy wholly
dependent on separation and division‛ in that her representations of
‚socialization and civilization depend on a disintegration of the ego, in
combination with a resistance to destruction, that forges alliances with others;
and this communion is figured as the action of grace.‛249 I argue that this
hierarchy of division and separation is fundamental to all historical narratives
of the plantation and the Bildungsroman alike; if the action of grace should be
redemptive to the cthulic forces in the land of O’Connor’s works, particularly
The Violent and Wise Blood, the opposite could just as easily be argued. Grace,
in the ecumenical Christian construal, is the only force within the novel able
to ‚overcome and dissolve a human will to supremacy, that is, the desire of
individuals, nation states, religious and ethnic groups, etc. to achieve power
and autonomy by dominating others.‛250 Here is where the earlier paradox of
religious democracy through grace and the deindividuation of the capitalist
249 Fowler, ‘Flannery O’Connor’s Productive Violence,’ p. 129.
250 Ibid., p. 130.
418
mode of production fissures inconclusively; for O’Connor does not actually
end the Bildungsroman with communion, but with alienation, and a will to
dominate through replication of the indoctrination process that mimics the
conveyor belt of machine age production line. Tarwater turns back to society
not with the intention to integrate but to ‘educate’ all God’s ‘sleeping
children,’ to enforce upon them the same fiery rite of Bildung he has endured
– in other words, to deindividuated through reproduction (of ideas).
Part of the narratological achievement of such a discomfiting narratorial
energy stems from the residual dichotomy between the objective narrator’s
tone and the weight of the events narrated: matter-of-factness where there
ought to be exclamation, silence where there ought to be revelation,
disordered affect. For instance, the reader almost certainly knows in advance
that the child will be drowned, for only through this sacrifice may the
Bildungsheld ‚go under,‛ to return to the Zarathustrian sameness; the
disconsolate suspense circulates upon which Tarwater heir will be the one to
drown him, and precisely when. The moment develops into the filmic: we are
distanced from the horror through glassy-eyed perspective of Rayber,
observing his nephew drown his son in the lake from behind a window, who
in an act of technological mediation, has to turn on ‚the metal box of his
hearing aid as if he was clawing at his heart‛ to hear the bellow of their
struggle. [202] O’Connor also teases readerly expectations in the sign-posting
of dreaded events; the reader wants to believe these possibilities so grotesque
that surely the narrative will abort, yet they still occur. If the reader suspects
and dreads that Tarwater will be assaulted if he gets in the stranger’s lilac car,
the event occurs regardless. In a second cinematic methodology, horror is
mediated, a phantom that occurs outside of the frame of narration in this
event; by expunging the event itself from the sequence, the reader’s
419
imagination renders them both the perpetrator and the victim, the subject and
object, of this horrific act of violence.251
In reading O’Connor’s tradition of morality, Henry McDonald argues that her
uses for the ‚grotesque‛ are not so much trying to shock the reader into the
political so much as into the spiritual, citing the author’s complaint that
Catholic writers of her era were stifled by a ‚lack of a large intelligent reading
audience which believes Christ is God.‛252 To redouble this eschatological
proposition, the causality of conditions that have brought about the Fall of the
South and ascendance of the secularist state, in more than just a religious
sense, must be tuned. Whilst criticism is naturally compelled to read
O’Connor in a universal spirit, criticism fails when it dislocates and
depoliticizes the Southernness of her writing, or considers it epiphenomenal
to her religiosity. Fate has not causally driven the Tarwaters into the forests of
Georgia; Powderhead is built upon the alienated afterlives of white poverty
and pride. Their dynastic mindset reflects what Leigh Ann Duck describes of
the sociopolitical residues of capitalism’s uneven regional developments,
where and when a conservative rhetoric commonly emerges from a perceived
251 Of the novels this thesis has considered, only Wright’s Native Son upholds the same level of
violent dissociation between the moral reader and the immoral actions of the Bildungsheld.
On the one hand, Wright humanizes the perpetrator as a victim of a racist socioeconomic
structure, and through the court scene, ensures the reader is aware that they are part and
parcel of the same corrupt system that condemns a young black man to his predetermined
fate. Rather than alienate the reader with violence, O’Connor makes them aware of their
spiritual concomitance with the sinner, thus reasserting the Galatians ethos that after the Fall,
mankind was equalized for all are now sinners in the eyes of God.
252 Henry McDonald, ‘The Moral Meaning of Flannery O’Connor,’ p. 274.
420
‚minority group seeking to protect cultural traditions threatened by an
advancing and adversarial modernization.‛253
In this light, the entire story of Tarwater’s redevelopment functions in the
economy of a sociopolitical allegory during a time of international, national,
and local ideological crises; as with Everything That Rises, A Good Man, etc.,
this novel interrogates methods through which the impoverished white South
mourns its past and anticipates its own mortality. The afterlife, mourning,
and redemption are economic grounds for reading the Fall of the Tarwater
dynasty as much as they are messianic grounds in this work. Like Capote,
even more so like Faulkner (Absalom, As I Lay Dying, and The Unvanquished),
the micropolitical and generic bloodlines of the ‘Father’s spirit’ are
antecedents to be overcome by the Bildungsheld; the Oedipal quest of the
protagonist enters into the spectral realm of labor associated with the dead
that will not stay dead. Jacques Derrida considers such a labor of afterlife and
mourning in Specters of Marx:
Vigilance, therefore: the cadaver is perhaps not as dead, as simply
dead as the conjuration tries to delude us into believing. The one who
has disappeared appears still to be there, and his apparition is not
nothing. It does not do nothing. Assuming that the remains can be
identified, we know better than ever today that the dead must be able
to work. And to cause to work, perhaps more than ever. There is also
a mode of production of the phantom, itself a phantomatic mode of
production. As in the work of mourning, after a trauma, the
conjuration has to make sure that the dead will not come back: quick,
253 Leigh Anne Duck, The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S.
Nationalism (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2006), p. 179.
421
do whatever is needed to keep the cadaver localized, in a safe place,
decomposing right where it was inhumed *<+254
Once more to revisit to the proposed working title, ‚You Can’t Be Any Poorer
Than Dead,‛ the interrelation of the political and spiritual eternal return
sublates in light of Derrida’s statement. Death is no exit from the Southern
division of wealth; it leaves a phantamonic inheritance of alienation and
impoverishment, the young man caught between the Old South and the new
American regime, continuing the cycle of sameness. Yet Charles Rubin and
Leslie Rubin, in reading the religious vision of regime in O’Connor short
stories, see the author’s most profound moral insight as stemming from the
alienated individual who signals the ability for collective change, however
‚deeply unrealistic‛ such ‚profound reform‛ may be:
Here is the only hope: Regimes are based on the collective ways of life
of citizens and their families. When those citizens and families become
more attuned to the best way of life, perhaps the regime will also
become better. All reform must grow out of the individual and his
place, whereas most actual attempts at reform in contemporary
society-desegregation laws, psychological social work, economic and
technological advancements are made from the outside.255
Such an outlook leaves possibility for individual destruction and redemption
as Bildung, even as ambiguity of the novel’s denouement leaves the question
of the South’s societal advancement untouched. Through the wild
conflagration at the end of the novel, the revenant Tarwater exerts his clout
over Powderhead in a fiery will to power: authority over his dead great uncle
254 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 120.
255 Charles T. Rubin and Leslie G. Rubin, ‘Flannery O’Connor’s Religious Vision of Regime
Change.’ Perspectives on Political Science vol. 31, no. 4 (2002), p. 221.
422
and his deceased disabled cousin, over his living uncle, over his sodomizer,
over his former weaker socialized self, and even over Buford Munson – the
true man of action in the novel, who gives Mason his ‚decent Christian
burial.‛256 When Tarwater sets Powderhead alight, he therefore becomes the
prophet of a dark and violent message. In this sense, he ascends to the role of
patriarch of the estate, to the role of manhood; however, this is no
whitewashed plantation Tarwater inherits, as Giannone explicates:
Tarwater’s experience and decision at the end are all about darkness,
the dark of his plight, of faith, and its dangers. As Tarwater arrives as
Mason’s grave, the ‘encroaching dusk seemed to come softly in
deference to some mystery that resided here.’ The scene fades ‘in the
gathering darkness.’ ‘By midnight’ the ‘boy’s jagged shadow’ with
eyes ‘black in their deep sockets’ sets out ‘toward the dark city.’ He
will bring the sleeping children of God the message of mercy
pounding in his blood.257
Like Faulkner, O’Connor redoubles the quest of her male protagonist to
interrogate the integrity of Southern Reconstruction, reimagining the
revolutionary politick of Redemption in the New South for the impoverished
white and black men – divided by color but united by destitution – who were
both figuratively and literally bankrupted and crippled by resistance and
256 That Tarwater does not bury his uncle covertly reinforces the racist institutions of death as
I have previously outlined of Bigger Thomas, who cremates Mary Dalton therefore erasing
her body in a way customary of the lynched black corpse, and is not coincidentally the very
method of disposal that Mason fears most. [24] Or that which Zora Neale Hurston satirized in
Their Eyes Were Watching God, in which white law enforcers roam the tornado-ravaged muck,
forcing Teacake and other young black men to separately bury the black and white victims of
a cyclone’s divine rage as an infinite gesture of racial discourse: black bodies tossed into mass
graves, white bodies laid to rest in coffins.
257 Giannone, ‘Dark Night, Dark Faith,’ p. 27.
423
defeat of the Confederacy, which O’Connor described as the messianic Fall of
the South.258 Violence and redemption are bound in Southern history, just as
they are bound in the history of Francis Tarwater. This is partly a
commentary on the Christian community as universal family, which
O’Connor believed had become corrupt, lip-servicing institution alienated
from the truth of her God in Georgia and beyond. O’Connor, however, is not
in two minds about the loss of the Old South, a dialectical impulse Faulkner
arguably capitalizes upon for the majority of his oeuvre. Her redoubled take
on such Southern nihilism is that of mantic grace; suffering is decisive,
humbling, and mystical for the individual, a method to rise above the sins of
humanity that perpetuate the horrors of civilization. The final cadence of the
novel does not resolve any crisis of faith or identity; Tarwater, turning back
towards the municipality with intent to go forth and bring the message of his
God to the sleeping community only proves the eternal return of the dynastic
and generic curse.
Thus in place of any resolution, we are instead propelled forward into the
wider systemic crisis of genre resisting its formal antecedent, decomposing in
the essence of its unvanquishable afterlife.
258 Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. The Art and Vision of Flannery O’Connor (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1989), p. 26.
424
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