William Dow

Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude: Glimmers in a Reach to Authenticity

Abstract Paul Austers The Invention of Solitude uses and questions the validity of post-modem typologies and thus properly can be read in light of recent postmodernist theory. At the same time, Invention challenges the idea that autobiography issues from a pre-existing self or a unique and autonomous self.

Dorothy Day and Joseph Kessel: ‘A Literature of Urgency’

One way of expressing the impact and purpose of the form that has become known as “literary journalism” would be to use the term that Jean-Louis Jeannelle recently coined in reference to Joseph Kessels World War Two reportage: a “literature of urgency.” For Jeanelle, this certain kind of literature had to be written, to help sort out the complexities of the time, to express the immediacy of death and war, to chronicle the various tragedies of suffering and deprivation. It is a literature that can only be produced from a specific context and circumstance. And it is a literature that, in its international dimensions, is beginning to displace the emphasis from a body of literature to a mode of reading. This essay seeks to explore and define the mode of reading demanded by two literary journalists, Dorothy Day (1897–1980) and Joseph Kessel (1898–1979), who in their “literature of urgency,” can help us better understand the relationship between the narrative modes – fiction and journalism – the “literariness” of these modes, and the importance of their writings to the history of literary-journalistic forms. In bringing together these two unlikely suspects, I suggest here how the forces of literary journalism actually bring into being a polemical mode of discourse concerned foremost with the material world. In the process, I hope to demonstrate how their respective forms of literary journalism supply a rich potential for literary study, and for narrative and cultural theory.

Body Tramping, Class, and Masculine Extremes: Jack London’s The People of the Abyss

Rendering their physical environments foremost in terms of sensory impressions, Davis and Crane tried to come to terms with the social transformations that brought different class worlds (e.g., middle- and upper-class, middle- and lower-class) together. Accordingly, Life and Maggie handle class anxieties at a more properly aesthetic level, though with unsettling literary approaches to the nature of class difference and mobility. Like many other nineteenth-century writers, Davis and Crane increasingly saw the urban environments of America as a focus of the widening class rift between the poor and rich. Both writers created the identity of a middle-class reader in direct contrast to the commonly believed barbarism, perversion, and chaos embodied in the slum, working-class, and lower-class worlds.1 At the same time, wishing to bring into view what is hidden from the general view, what is unofficial, subversive, and even scandalous for their perceived readership, Davis and Crane generated stunningly new instances of cross-class perspectives.

Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass: “Hard Work and Blood”

No poet matters more to the literary history of class in America than Walt Whitman. Whitman’s registration of lived experience is a juncture of class and his poetry: a picture of an individual subject’s relation to the totality of class structures. As an artisan in the 1840s, the young Whitman was part of the Jacksonian lower-middle class, a class experiencing the nationwide change from an agrarian, artisan existence to an urban market culture.1 Participant in this shifting order, Whitman saw the old master-and-apprentice paradigm being replaced by a seemingly unbridgeable gap between capital and labor, the older ideologies of genteel patriarchy and individual artisanship giving way to a new middle-class (Whig) ideology of competitive individualism. As a response to these changes, the 1855 Leaves of Grass, while championing the cause of individual potential and freedom, holds that labor as opposed to property should be the dominant feature of the social order in which all work, both manual or mental, should be recognized and rewarded equally while fraternal association and apprenticeship should still serve as the structuring principles of society.

Class, Work, and New Races: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth

Meridel Le Sueur’s principal attention in Salute to Spring and in her literary journalism is on the everyday, blended into distinctive attitudes or forms of consciousness. For Le Sueur the experiences of the everyday, particularly those of the American underclass and workers in the 1930s, can offer a form of resistance to dominant political strategies of power. Metaphors of the everyday in Le Sueur’s fiction and literary journalism predominantly involve women—her representative markers and victims of daily existence. Women are symbolic of dulling domestic repetitions, the targets of violence, abuse, neglect—the figures who most strongly convey the life-destroying routines of capitalism. But in Le Sueur, women as laborers (and all are in some form) resist the polarization of the “feminine” repetitive everyday to the “masculine” rupture and revolution—one of Le Sueur’s ways of taking to task “proletarian works” that elide the experience of women workers by demoting their work and refusing to recognize it as “wage labor.” Le Sueur, as we’ve seen, constantly brings to the reader’s mind the relations of work to mobility versus the insufficiency of the middle-class imaginary to interpret such mobility. Paralleling in their texts many of Le Sueur’s concerns, Agnes Smedley and Zora Neale Hurston give work a new representative twist and, in so doing, provide us with exemplary models for articulating the relations of gender to class.

Class “Truths” in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) stands between James Agee’s “best perceptions” and “best intentions” and a “performance” (Praise 30) that is deeply earnest and highly political. An admixture of stylized sermonettes, lyrical meditations, straightforward journalism, confession, ethnographic field studies, newspaper clippings, and invective, Famous Men challenges Jan Mieszkowski’s doubting assertion that “[Literature] is the site where systems of ethics and politics fail to reconcile themselves to a common aesthetic paradigm in which a representational model of language would also serve as a model of human praxis” (111). The crucial point is that Agee confronts a number of quandaries concerning the relations between representation, expression, self-determination, and social “truths” in moments that go up against the “dormancy, idleness, or irrelevance” of the work’s “poetic spirit” and its struggle “to establish itself as a wholly reliable medium or means to an external end” (Mieszkowski, “Breaking” 111).3 Indeed, constantly seeking out, in Sontag’s words, his “deepest places” and in Rukeyser’s, his “use of truth,” he claimed to find them in Praise but only when his most intimate writing and his most personal experiences came together.

“Always Your Heart”: Class Designs in Jean Toomer’s Cane

Barbara Foley, one of the most astute of Toomer critics, has rightly argued that class has been seriously omitted in most Toomer criticism, “divest[ing] Toomer’s work of a crucial social and historical dimension” and that beginning with a “high modernist a priori lens,” most critics have, in trying to come to terms with Toomer’s “design,” sought “a representation largely untrammeled by specific historical reference” (“Washington” 312). By arguing that “class matters” in Toomer’s work, Foley has stressed that in “many readings” of Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), “race is decoupled from class: Toomer’s articulation of the problematic of racial identification is construed largely in isolation from considerations of economic power and social stratification” (“Washington” 291). But while seeking to establish the relation of “historical features” to “fictional features” (“Sparta” 748) and in making her case not to treat “the South of Cane as a mythic realm defying the incursions of history” (“Sparta” 748), Foley tends to fall into the inverse danger of setting some expectations for Toomer as author that overlook his own idiosyncratic contributions to political critique.2

Class and the Performative in Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills, and Stephen Crane’s Maggie

At the forefront of Whitman’s cultural program, class was publicly scrutinized by the nineteenth-century novelists of realism and naturalism in ways that would expose the normally invisible and often deliberately concealed affairs of political and economic life. If the effacement of self was one of the effects of nineteenth-century naturalism, as one critic has recently argued,1 then the foregrounding of a world in which action and meaning are inextricably connected to cultural transformation was another. Providing a voyeuristic yet also an analytic view of the lower classes, Naturalism was a perspective (and mode) of cultural change, emphasizing, among much else, the conflicts and changes with class attitudes in the United States. The naturalist obsession with atavism, brutality, and economic squalor offered a compelling way of representing the disruptive forces of class domination, warfare, and social change.2 The erasure of the self and the spotlight on social forces led inevitably to the oft cited naturalist characters’ disposition toward atavism and transgression. More particularly, naturalist characters generally represent unsettling questions about social inequities within the mid- and late nineteenth-century system of industrial capitalism. Going far from Whitman’s “divine” workmen and workwomen, naturalist characters brought to the consciousness of a literary America the existence of the under- and working classes, now cast as subjects worthy of treatment and concern.

Meridel Le Sueur’s Salute to Spring: “A Movement Up Which All Are Moving”

A belief shared by all of the writers examined thus far is the notion that the lower- and working classes could not adequately represent themselves and therefore required representation. Especially with Whitman, Davis, London, and Toomer, this representation is crucial because the class they had in mind was as yet inchoate and unformed: a class of the future, in varying degrees and categories, egalitarian, democratic, transracial, spiritually renewed and rescued. Representation, these writers believed, conduced to class formation and definition—not as Adorno might have it, in the form of a “politics migrat[ing] into autonomous art” (32) when the moment for “political art” abates, but rather in an open-ended reader–narrator relationship. The poet in Leaves and the first-person narrators in Cane, Abyss, and Life all held that language, the representation of an event, encounter, or incident is just as significant as its experience. Whitman, Davis, London, and Toomer all insist that the relationship between the reader and the laboring and poor masses must be other than one of mere witnessing. Particularly in their narratively performative forms, they all emphasized the need for blurring the divisions between the self and the other; they all insisted on class transactions, on changing one world for another throughout. It is in this kind of ideology of artful exchange that perspectives on class can appear at their most revealing.