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

1

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.

3

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.

4

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.

5

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.

7

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.

8

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

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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.

298

turns ‘convention against conventions’ in form and content within the

Künstlerroman tradition.

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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Fitzgerald, Francis Scott Key. This Side of Paradise. Cambridge and New

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