lt r l r nd l P l t : R r d n nd R nPr l t r n L t r t r n th n t d t t

L r n F. H nl

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 38, Number 3, Fall 1992, pp.715-732 (Article)

P bl h d b J hn H p n n v r t PrDOI: 10.1353/mfs.0.0858

For additional information about this article

Access provided by San Francisco State University (24 Jun 2015 18:22 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mfs/summary/v038/38.3.hanley.html

CULTURAL WORK AND CLASS POLITICS:RE-READING AND REMAKINGPROLETARIAN LITERATURE IN THE UNITED STATES

OffLawrence F. Hanley

I

Shortly after the Second World War, the editors of Partisan Reviewpublished the results of a survey they had sent out to America's mostprominent writers and literary critics. In his contribution to "The Stateof Writing in America, 1948," one young critic summed up an emergingpost-war consensus on the relations between literature and politics byasserting that: "The absolute claim to freedom in the creative act . . .challenges many political systems. An honest devotion to writing hypothetical-Iy attacks Stalinism, tests its pretensions against our own analysis at once;what cannot endure the practice of the most human of activities is theEnemy" (Fiedler 875). It was time, Leslie Fiedler claimed, for contem-porary writers to turn away from the leftist politics of the previous decadeand to realize that matters of social conscience rested in "the ultimate

humanity, the essential morality, the necessity of the practice of [thewriter's] art, and he is tempted to trust his metaphors, his meters morethan himself" (871). If a writer balked at the existential and romanticterms of this new politics of writing, Fiedler offered a simple therapy:"There is, after all, on his shelf that monument to an opposite approach,momento mori and souvenir of his beginnings in one, Proletarian Literaturein the United States" (871). Published in the same month that WhitakerChambers was fingering Alger Hiss as a high level Soviet agent, Fiedler'sadvice carried practical overtones: to reconstruct their cultural authorityin the Cold War era, American writers might have to enact a kind ofritual suicide, killing off and interring that earlier, less morally acute selfand time.

Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 38, Number 3, Autumn 1992. Copyright © by Purdue Research Founda-tion. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

715

Fiedler's use of Proletarian Literature in the United States as a symbolfor the indiscretions of the 1930s was a particularly apt one. After all,this anthology of radical verse, fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism hadbeen hailed by most critics in 1935 as a major expression of the new,powerful presence of radical politics in American culture. Lauding theanthology's contributions from established writers such as John Dos Passos,Langston Hughes, Malcolm Cowley, and Josephine Herbst, as well asthose from newcomers such as Jack Conroy, Meridel Le Sueur, and TillieLerner (later to publish under her married name of Olsen), LouisKronenberger declared that: "one need not be ardently sympathetic withthe movement which this anthology represents to agree that artisticallythe movement has begun to stand on its feet. There is more to it nowthan vitality and purposefulness; there is a growing amount of literarysignificance" (600). Writing in the New York Herald Tribune, HoraceGregory judged the anthology to be "extraordinarily successful" and "in-valuable to the student as well as to the general reader" (vii). In his review,Newton Arvin claimed that the anthology announced "a new and, now,healthy chapter in American literature" even as it "shows how an oldpromise, an old potentiality in our culture from the beginning, is goingto be fulfilled and made a reality" (12). Although reviewed unfavorablyby that bulwark of middle-class taste, Henry Seidel Canby's Saturday Reviewof Literature, even he acknowledged the serious status of proletarian literatureby assigning two long, detailed reviews of the anthology to Mary Columand Bernard DeVoto. A short while before this flurry of attention, WilliamPhillips had argued in Partisan Review that "revolutionary literature" hadpermanently displaced the "lost generation" to claim modernism's man-tle as "the most significant and strongest literary current" in contem-porary literature (52). With the publication and reception of ProletarianLiterature in the United States, Phillips' claim seemed to find its most decisiveand concrete proof.

It was the memory of this cultural prominence and authority thatLeslie Fiedler sought to convert into a "momento mori" in 1948, andI offer this instance of historical revision as a specific example of whatRaymond Williams calls the "selective tradition." To forge continuitywithin historical change, selective traditions both destroy and create; thepast is cancelled and preserved, although in displaced and disguised forms.The selective tradition is an active process that incorporates and remakesthe possibilities of the past within the new cultural and social configura-tions of the present; it is, as Williams says, "an intentionally selectiveversion of shaping past and a pre-shaped present, which is then power-fully operative in the process of social and cultural definition" (115).Everywhere one looks in the late forties and fifties, proletarian literatureserves critics such as Fielder, Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, William Phillips,and Irving Howe, as the ghostly reminder of what literature once was

716 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

and must never again become.1 The end result of this process for con-temporary critics is a situation best summed up by Cary Nelson in hisstatement of the dilemma that faces literary history today: "what andwho we are now is already in part a result of what we no longer knowwe have forgotten" (3). This essay sets out to gauge how much we haveforgotten about proletarian literature and radical culture in the 1930s and,consequently, to what extent this determined forgetfulness has shaped ourunderstanding of modernism and its cultural and political possibilities.Rereading Proletarian Literature in the United States through and within itsspecific historical contexts, we defamiliarize our canonical sense of modern-ism and stand to recover a moment in American literature and culture

that speaks powerfully to a renewed interest in the politics of representa-tion and difference.

II

In its broadest historical context, proletarian literature might be readin relation to the waves of strikes and labor militance—at Toledo, SanFrancisco, and Minneapolis—that rocked American society in 1934 andthat precipitated, as one labor historian writes, "the highwater mark ofthe class struggle in modern American history" (Davis 54). More par-ticularly though, Proletarian Literature in the United States represents the pro-letarian movement at one particular moment in its own brief history.Collecting and re-contextualizing texts published or performed elsewhere,anthologies are highly selective instruments of definition, and ProletarianLiterature is no exception to this principle. Organizing its texts under theterm "proletarian literature," the anthology disorganizes our receivednotions of American literary history in powerful ways: fiction by JohnDos Passos, Josephine Herbst, and Erskine Caldwell rubs up against thework of now forgotten writers such as Ben Field and Albert Halper, poetryby Kenneth Patchen and Langston Hughes competes for our attentionwith poems by Don West and H. H. Lewis, and the anthology's sectionon literary criticism features work by Malcolm Cowley, William Phillips,Phillip Rahv, and Michael Gold. This is an unfamiliar, even confusinglandscape. But through its choice of texts and writers, the anthology in-terprets the meaning of proletarian literature in particular ways to mapa hidden geography of literary history. Most significantly, Proletarian

'The literature on the New York Intellectuals in the thirties and after is extensive.General histories include James B. Gilbert's Writers and Partisans, Terry Cooney's The Riseof the New York Intellectuals, and Alexander Bloom's Prodigal Sons. Alan Wald's The New YorkIntellectuals is by far the best account of the post-war political and cultural realignmentsof intellectuals such as Trilling, Howe, Fiedler, and Rahv, especially 267-374. Also valuablehere for a reading of the cultural and political revisionism of the fifties is Thomas Schaub'srecent American Fiction in the Cold War.

HANLEY 717

Literature in the United States officially represents the proletarian movementin relation to a series of ongoing developments within the radical literaryculture of the thirties.

Chief among these developments was the Depression's sudden influxof disaffected intellectuals and writers such as Edmund Wilson, KennethBurke, Matthew Josephson, and Josephine Herbst into the orbit of theCommunist Party.2 Moving into closer association with the organized Left,these men and women, and many others like them, discovered the in-stitutions, audiences, and media of a pre-existent radical culture nurturedthrough the desolate years of the twenties by Party intellectuals such as JosephFreeman and, especially, Mike Gold. The John Reed Clubs, the Filmand Photo League, the Workers Laboratory Theatre and the Prolet-Buhne:these organizations comprised the groundwork for a proletarian counter-culture presided over by Freeman and Gold in the pages of the New Masses.But as established writers brought their cultural authority and criticalexpertise into the movement, the rapid infusion of cultural capital intothe Left precipitated a sustained crisis of identity between the years 1932and 1935.

At the John Reed Club national convention in 1932, for instance,the Clubs' young worker-writers seemed to have spent most of their timein Chicago excoriating the sudden presence and prestige of fellow-travelersin the radical movement. Speaking from the podium, Mike Gold triedto reassure them: "You who are here believe in proletarian writing orcolloquial or journalistic writing, and some middle-class liberal believesin Proustian writing—but I say bring him into the movement if he isa writer of influence and talent. We cannot afford to have aesthetic quar-rels" (Johnson 14). In his report to the convention, not published until1934, Joseph Freeman asked Club members to recognize the changingsituation of the Left since 1929: "the problem we have to face is thatthe original basis upon which the New Masses was founded has beendestroyed by the realignment of social forces brought forth by the economiccrisis, and we have failed to build a new base" (23). As he later recalled,Freeman then outlined his plan for the Left's response to this new historicalsituation:

These people [liberal intellectuals] could not be won over by the magazine asit then existed. We could guide them along the correct path only if we changedthe character of the magazine. I suggested, therefore, that we reorganize the NewMasses from top to bottom; that we change its staff, its format and its contents;that we make it a magazine which a trained reader would listen to with respectand with intellectual profit. (22)

While the John Reed Clubs would continue to carry on the aspirationsof a proletarian counter-culture, in 1934 the New Masses did transform

2The standard account of this process remains Daniel Aaron's Writers on the Left

718 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

itself to earn respect and authority from its new constituencies: themagazine changed its page size and layout, started publishing weekly,began carrying more articles by writers such as Kenneth Burke, EdmundWilson, and Malcolm Cowley, appointed the Ivy League-educatedGranville Hicks to be its new literary editor, and essentially converteditself into a more radical, militant competitor to liberal weeklies like CommonSense and The Nation.

The incorporation of fellow-travelers into the movement opened upnew outlets and new audiences for radical writing and brought differentassumptions and expectations about "literariness" into the movement.At the same time, however, the bourgeois backgrounds and credentialsof these new members complicated the political identity and meaning ofa literature produced in the name of the proletariat. Adding to these com-plications, Louis Adamic, a well-respected independent radical and socialcritic, published the unsettling results of his survey of proletarian readersin a December 1934 issue of Saturday Review of Literature. According toAdamic, working-class readers generally remained unaware of the pro-letarian novel. Even when he gave novels like Catherine Brody's NobodyStarves or Robert Cantwell's Land of Plenty to factory girls and labor leaders,these working-class readers rejected the novels as either too inaccurateor too difficult to afford any pleasure or knowledge. "Most proletarianliterature carries within itself its own defeat and futility as propagandaamong the workers," Adamic concluded. "It is defeated by the authorsthemselves even before it reaches the propaganda channels" (322).Responding to Adamic, William Rollins, Jr., the author of the much-toutedproletarian novel The Shadow Before (1934), admitted that because of their"middle-class antecedents" he did not consider himself or most of his

fellow radical novelists to be "writers, in the real sense, of proletarianliterature." Despite his best efforts to portray working-class life, Rollinsalso admitted that he "could no more hope to express the actual beingof the proletariat than I could, were I, say, an ardent Francophile, hopeto express what under such circumstances I would probably call the soulof France" (23). Novels no longer written or read by proletarians wereone thing but, as Rollins confessed, the idea that such novels were noteven really about the proletariat itself seemed to unhinge the very senseof a term like "proletarian novel."

Under pressure to expand and take advantage of the new culturalterrain before them and confronting the contradictions raised by Adamicand Rollins, Party intellectuals like Gold, Freeman, and Edwin Seaverstruggled to negotiate the definition and purpose of "proletarian literature"within a radically new reading formation, one that increasingly connected"proletarian" texts produced by middle-class writers not to the proletarianmasses, but to middle-class readers. The significance and meaning ofProletarian Literature in the United States must, then, be located within the

HANLEY 719

changing cultural and social situation of "proletarian literature."3 Thiswas a shift in the production and circulation of radical culture officiallyrecognized and underwritten by Communist Party leader Earl Browderwhen, at the 1935 American Writers Congress, he defined the New Massesas "one of the links between the cultural field and the broader life of

the masses; addressed primarily to the middle classes, its task is to linkthem up with the working class, the bearer of a new socialist society"(AWC 70). Browder's remarks were aimed at decisively resolving the ten-sions that had fueled conflict on the Left for half a decade, but they stillleft the status and meaning of "proletarian literature" up in the air.

Two papers presented at the Congress set out to address directly thiscrisis of representation: Edwin Seaver's "The Proletarian Novel" andKenneth Burke's "Revolutionary Symbolism in America." Despite a re-cent revival of interest in Burke that tends to abstract his work out of

its historical contexts or to misread these contexts, these two essays byBurke and Seaver represent similar efforts to respond to the new situa-tion of radical culture. What joins the two essays most strongly is theircommon recognition that culture does not simply reflect society and that,in fact, the political meanings of a text are decided by the work it doeswithin the terrain of culture. Seaver begins his paper, originally publishedin Partisan Review as "What Is a Proletarian Novel?," by flatly reiteratingthe current, paradoxical status of the proletarian novel: "It is notnecessarily a novel written by a worker, about workers or for workers.It is possible for an author of middle-class origin to write a novel aboutpetty-bourgeois characters which will appeal primarily to readers of thesame class, and yet such a work can come within the classification,Proletarian Novel" (5). By arguing that the "proletarian" in "proletariannovel" does not necessarily correspond to an economic or social referent,Seaver was implicitly endorsing Burke's more controversial formulationthat, in cultural terms, the "proletariat" referred not to an economic orsocial thing, but to "a secondary order of reality." Burke calls this secon-dary order "myth," a term which he uses to designate the cultural sym-bols that perform a "necessary function" as "systems for binding peopletogether" (170). Viewing the term "proletariat" as it works within theterrain of culture, both Seaver and Burke assert the essentially discursivenature of the "proletariat," how this term might be used to organizetexts and the social relations between texts and readers.

3My effort to see proletarian literature as a developing response within radical culturecontradicts the more static picture presented by Walter Rideout in his invaluable The RadicalNovel in the United States, especially Chapter 7. For a helpful view of the way proletarianliterature actively shifted cultural authority within American literature to the outsider, theforeigner, and the social "margins," see Marcus Klein's Foreigners: The Making of AmericanLiterature, 1900-1940, especially Part II, "Who Owns America?"

720 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

Like Burke, Seaver too was arguing for a relational meaning to theterm "proletarian." Thus when it came to defining the "proletariannovel," he pointed to the "present class alignment" and "ideological ap-proach" (7) of the writer and his text, not to any particular content oraesthetic form. The "proletarian novel" in the United States, Seaverasserted,cannot be defined only in terms of aesthetics, or in terms of characters or subjectmatter. It can be defined only in terms of history and philosophy: the materialistdialectic, recognition of the class struggle, acceptance of the proletariat in the for-mation of a new and socialist society. It is the revolutionary purpose of [thenovelist's] work, his aim not merely to understand the world, but to change it.Without the presence of all these elements in a given work, it seems to me, wecannot have a genuine proletarian novel. (8)

For Seaver, the "proletarian novel" designates the contingent politicaluses and effects that a novel might perform at a particular historicalmoment; categorizing a text as a "proletarian novel" depends not onwhat a novel is, but on what a novel does, particularly the kind ofideological work it does. The more flexible scope of this definition wasnot lost on some contemporary critics. Commenting on Seaver's paperin his article "The Literary Left Grows Up," John Chamberlain, thechief book reviewer for the New York Times, wrote approvingly: "In otherwords, if Proust and Joyce, for instance, serve to make a reader dissatisfiedwith our civilization, and willing to explore the communist or socialistproposals for a way out, Proust or Joyce is functioning on a 'revolutionary'level to a certain extent" (3). Seaver's definition is, however, potentiallymuch more flexible than Chamberlain's deliberately "literary" examplesimply. Given his functional and functionalizing definition, there's no reasonwhy, for instance, Seaver could not value both Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!and Pearl Buck's The Good Earth for their different political effects on dif-ferent readers.

As Edwin Berry Burgum noted in his response to "What Is a Pro-letarian Novel?," Seaver defined the proletarian novel in its "politicalrather than its social or aesthetic respect" (9). If anything, however, itwas Burke who drew out the more explicit and concrete political implica-tions of this new discursive approach to the "proletariat." Burke's "myth"has material effects as "real as food, tools, and shelter" because it makes"various ranges and kinds of social cooperation possible" (88). In its"propaganda aspect," then, the relative value of any particular "myth"rests on its success "as a device for spreading areas of allegiance" (89).Here, Burke pointed out, the Left faced a conflict between its "univer-sal" ambitions to organize the masses in toto and the limited, "exclusive"effects of the "proletariat" as a persuasive symbol. "In practice," hewrote, the "proletariat" operates as a "negative" symbol because it "tendsto focus a writer's attention upon the traits that enlist our sympathies—whereas by a positive symbol, I mean one that enlists not only our sym-

HANLEY 721

pathies but also our ambitions" (171). To win over the allegiance of thelower middle classes, Burke argued, the Left needed to adopt the moreorganically American and inclusive symbol of "the people": "As a propa-gandizer," he wrote, it is not the writer's work "to convince the convinced,but to plead with the unconvinced, which requires him to use theirvocabulary, their values, their symbols, insofar as this is possible" (92).By adopting "the people" instead of the "proletariat" as its unifyingsymbol, Burke believed that the Left would be able to articulate its radicaldemands and programs more successfully within a rich, multifariousAmerican idiom of national and popular protest.

Whatever his conclusions about the need to articulate a radical politicsaround the symbol of "the people," both Burke and Seaver wereacknowledging the new situation of radical culture in the 1930s. Writersand readers of "proletarian literature" were most likely to come fromthe middle classes and that, with the crises of economic collapse and—increasingly—the rise of fascism, this was a fertile new constituency forthe movement's radical politics. To adapt to this change, Seaver and Burkewere asking the Left to rethink the relations between "proletarianliterature" and the emergence of these more complicated cultural andsocial challenges to radical politics. For both critics, proletarian literaturewas not necessarily about the proletariat at all, nor did it comprise a par-ticular aesthetic. Instead, "proletarian literature" named a relationshipbetween readers and texts, a relationship whose specificity was definedby the political effects it produced.4 Radical culture, for Burke and Seaver,was concerned less with "political correctness" than it was with sym-bolically constructing social relations of solidarity around a common goalof radical social change. To understand how proletarian literature mightperform this cultural work, I turn now to Proletarian Literature in the UnitedStates.

Ill

At age 27, Robert Cantwell, the author oí Laugh and Lie Down (1931)and The Land of Plenty (1934), was a rising young star of the radical move-

4If Seaver insisted on retaining the term "proletarian literature," perhaps this wasbecause he valued the possibility of alliance politics but equally feared that, under pressureto accomodate sympathetic liberal and middle-class allies, the Left might lose sight of itsbasic, defining commitment to class struggle under capitalism. This at least was the argu-ment for retaining the term later offered by Joshua Kunitz in 1938: "It is just at the verymoment when the proletariat emerges from its political torpor and draws to itself othereconomic and social strata interested in preserving and extending the people's democraticrights," Kunitz wrote in the midst of the heady, alliance-building years of the Popular Front,"that the proletariat must exercise its greatest care to maintain the purity of its revolu-tionary ideals and Socialist aims" (146).

722 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

ment when he published "Hills Around Centraba" in the proletarian an-thology. Set in 1914, shortly after the real Wesley Everest, a memberof the I. W. W., was lynched by the townspeople of Centraba, Washington,the climax of "Hills Around Centraba" occurs when two Wobblies, hidingfrom an angry mob, encounter two boys in the woods. When the twomen realize how powerfully the Wobblies have been misrepresented tothe boys as evil, anarchic "progermen," one of the men resorts to thepower of narrative to convert his enemies into allies: "This is the truth,"the old man said softly. 'Listen to me now' " (54). The old man tellsthe true story of Wesley Everest to the boys. The curiosity of KellyHanrahan, the younger boy, has already drawn him toward the Wobbliesand, though we never find out for sure, the story implies that Kelly mayaccept if not the truth of the words he hears, at least their disturbingcontradiction with the official version of Everest's death. This is a nar-

rative about crossing and initiation, as the two boys cross from the secureworld of the town into the frightening presence of the Wobblies and asKelly is initiated into skeptical consciousness. But the climax of "HillsAround Centralia" is also a narrative scene, embedded within a fictionalnarrative, that doubles and models the relations in "Hills AroundCentralia" between that story's narrator, text, and reader: Kelly Hanrahanis the resistant reader and the old Wobblie's goal is to narrate him outof the ideological domination of myth and illusion.

I take this climactic scene as, in Kenneth Burke's words, a "represen-tative anecdote" for the whole of Proletarian Literature in the United States.

The episode is representative in two ways. First, like Cantwell's story,the fiction, drama, poetry, and reportage of the anthology consistentlydepict the initiation of characters, usually middle-class or otherwise un-committed like Kelly, into knowledge of class conflict and hence intosolidarity with the oppressed, subordinated working classes. I call thisthe theme of "crossing." Second, however, like the Wobblie's story-telling within Cantwell's story, a majority of the texts in Proletarian Literaturealso comment self-reflexivity on their own power and purpose as narrativerepresentations, or representation in general. This often occurs, as in "HillsAround Centralia," through the use of embedded scenes of narration,scenes and episodes which depict the act of storytelling and its receptionand hence model at least one possible way in which readers might usefictional narrative in the "real" world. Most often, the chief effect ofstorytelling represented by the anthology's texts is to transport listeners,like Kelly, across the class boundaries that divide proletariat andbourgeoisie. In short, the various texts of Proletarian Literature in the UnitedStates consistently theorize their own relations to the world; like thenineteenth-century fiction Ross Chambers discusses in Story and Situation,these stories textualize the narrative situation of storyteller and listenerand consequently "theorize the act of storytelling in and through the actof storytelling" (23). Describing their own contexts of reception, proletarian

HANLEY 723

texts delineate the relations of power and knowledge that govern theirpossible relations with the reader. And the power of narrative, so theanthology insists, is the power to mediate social relations of solidaritybetween middle-class readers and the proletariat.

Clifford Odets' "Waiting for Lefty" is a good example of the an-thology's unexpected preference for stories of class crossing. Althoughtypically seen as a representative example of proletarian literature, theclass origins of the taxi drivers in "Waiting for Lefty" are actually dividedbetween the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Of Odets' four protagonists,Phillips, the young actor, drives a taxi because he cannot find any jobson Broadway, and Barnes, a young doctor, has been driven out of hisprofession by anti-Semitism. Both these men experience the Depressionas a shattering of their youthful illusions about respectability and statusand, like the play's more clearly proletarian characters, their conversionto radicalism depends on their painful initiation into the way society reallyworks. What this means for each of the play's characters, bourgeois orproletarian, is the return to a self that has been alienated by and withinbourgeois society: "In a rich man's country," Barnes comments at theend of his story, "your true selfs buried deep" (295). Within thismetaphorics of self and social role, nature and civilization, and perhapseven the Marxist opposition between base and superstructure, to crossclass boundaries and to identify with the proletariat is simultaneously torecover a more vital and fundamental self.

Like Odets' play, the anthology's particular attention to middle-classalienation indicates one central target of its narrative and textual strategies.The title of Orrick Johns' poem "Cleavage," for instance, refers to thedistance between the dessicated, bourgeois life of the speaker's family andthe new revolutionary commitments of the speaker himself who "mustbreak, break as lava breaks the crater to go outward" (168) and whofinds his "feet caught in the hurrying tide of history" (169). The an-thology's excerpt from Josephine Herbst's novel, The Executioner Waits(1934), takes its title, "Cloud of Fire" from Jerry Stauffer's loss of youthfulambition, a young wife, and a foreclosed farm, all of which have led tohis anomic life as a white-collar clerk: "Everything important that hewanted was done for. He could have little pleasures, like music and books.The cloud of fire that led some people was not for him" (93). But whena strike breaks out in the plant where he works, Jerry crosses the picketlines to rediscover the "cloud of fire" absent from his deracinated, petty-bourgeois life and to recover a sense of desire that is personal and, byimplication, historical: "Not since they had grabbed him into the armyaway from Rosamund had he felt so light-hearted. The war hadn't beenhis war, but then he hadn't known how to get out of it. He could getout of this. He was getting out. He got out into the cold air" (97). Jerryends the story crammed into a police van with the striking workers:

724 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

"Someone on the seat began to sing. Jerry wished he knew the words.If he wasn't kicked to death, he'd learn them" (98).

Herbst's analysis of Jerry's alienation in "Cloud of Fire" agrees withthe classical Marxist interpretation of the middle class: stuck betweencapital and labor, the bourgeoisie inhabit a treacherous, liminal worlddefined by the volatile currents of upward and downward mobility, up-ward into the owning classes or downward into the proletariat. EdwinSeaver later summed up this situation in the title of his novel about thedecay and disintegration of the middle class, Between the Hammer and theAnvil (1937). Surprisingly perhaps, rather than explicating the anthology'stexts or pronouncing a manifesto, Joseph Freeman's introduction to Pro-letarian Literature specifically addresses itself to the situation of middle-class,liberal readers and focuses almost exclusively on the dangers of this mid-dle space between classes. Because bourgeois critics mistake in-betweennessfor impartiality, Freeman first argues, their claim to "universal"judgments really conceals an ideological allegiance to capitalism. "Nor-mally," Freeman points out, "is the significant word ... in the entirecampaign which bourgeois ideologues have been conducting against pro-letarian literature" (Hicks 14). To be in-between is also however to bedivided in two, and the second part of Freeman's introduction narratesthe internal conflict of the middle-class liberal writer who supports "theproletariat in politics and the bourgeoisie in poetry; politics deal[s] withthe class struggle, with will and action; poetry deal[s] with 'life,' whichpresumably ha[s] nothing to do with will, action, or the class struggle"(24). As writers "went left" in response to the Depression crisis, Freemancontinues, so too did they begin to recognize the need to politicize theirpoetry as well. Freeman's own narrative culminates, like so many othersin the anthology, with the fructifying contact between middle-class liberalsand the working classes: "One more thing was needed to complete thattransformation: direct contact with the proletarian audience" (27).Bourgeois liberalism is figured here as a space of bad faith and inauthen-ticity, a position whose ambivalence Freeman narrates, with the help ofthe "proletariat," into clarity and wholeness.

Logically enough, the anthology consistently represents this liminalposition through the motif of the hybridized, grotesque scab who standsboth inside and outside the working class. After the death of his fatherin Jack Conroy's "A Coal Miner's Widow," Larry Donovan's dreamsare filled with images of danger and vulnerability: "The darkness teemedwith fearsome shapes—miners moaning beneath cave-ins, graves yawn-ing at midnight to disgorge the undead, and vampires ranging abroadto slake their grisly thirsts" (57). But the "monster" who visits his fam-ily's remote home late one stormy night and throws his mother and himselfinto terror is not a vampire, but a scab who "staggered in and ploppedheavily on a chair. He had evidently been badly beaten. One eye wasclosed. The other glistened chalky white. His lips were battered" (58).

HANLEY 725

Although fed and doctored by Larry's mother, the strikebreaker is thensent back out into the night. Because he confuses class identity and self-interest, appearance and reality, the scab also becomes a powerful figurefor narrative duplicity and secrecy. His elimination from the story oftencorresponds to the disambiguifying power of narrative closure. Thus inAlbert Halper's story, "Scab!," narrated in the first person, we learnthat the scab's taxi has been dented and smashed though we do not findout how this happened until the story's last few paragraphs. There, thenarrator's explanation to his wife unlocks the story's enigma and revealsthe truth he has concealed from the reader: "And then I told Ethelsomething I promised myself I would never tell to anybody. I parkedin a side street and took out my tire-wrench and bashed in the fendersof my cab and then broke every goddammed window with my own hands.I screamed that out to her" (91). Forced into narrative duplicity by hiscontradictory position, only the scab's final act of "telling" the truth tohis wife straightens out his twisted narrative for the reader and revealsthe secret class message he codes into the wreck of his taxi.

Halper's story reminds us however that the middle space is also thespace of the reader, that space between initation and closure governedby the play of meaning we call narrative suspense. Lest the reader be"scabbed," the fiction in Proletarian Literature accordingly identifies theresolution of narrative suspense with the resolution of the reader's ownclass allegiance. The enigmatic identity of the hitchhiker in Albert Maltz's"A Man on the Road" is thus experienced by both the story's narratorand its readers through distinctly textual metaphors. The man's eyes arecovered by a "dull glaze, a far away, absent look as though behind theblank, outward film there was a secret flow of past events" (119). "Con-sumed by a curiosity to know" (120), Maltz's narrator keeps unsuccessfullyasking questions intended to "pierce the shell in which he seemed to beliving" (119). Decoding the "Man on the Road" depends on the coopera-tion of this mysterious proletarian, and narrative closure only arrivesthrough the mutual authoring performed by Maltz's narrator and his hitch-hiker: "Ah've got a letter here that ah done writ to mah woman, buta can't write very good," the hitchiker tells the narrator, "Would youall be kind enough to write it ovah for me so it'd be proper like?" (121).This moment of textual production, where the narrator rewrites the hitch-hiker's letter, might be taken as a primal fantasy of proletarian literaturein general: producing the proletarian text as a palimpsest of the worker'soriginal writing, the narrator performs a service for both the hitchikerand the story's middle-class reader. His cultural authority mediates thenarrative and social transactions between the representatives of these twoclasses. What we learn from the letter, however, is that the hitchiker isa miner who has lost his health and job to silicosis. To avoid being aburden, he has left his wife and family. But in Maltz's story, the elimina-tion of narrative suspense through this story within a story also models

726 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

one response to the proletarian text: "We sat together," the narrator tellsus after he reads the letter, "In me there was only mute emotion—pityand love for him, and a cold, deep hatred for what had killed him" (122).Resolving the story's narrative suspense, the disclosure of the hitchiker'smeaning and significance also clarifies, or fixes, the reader's relations tocapital and labor.

Maltz's scene of reading and writing theorizes the power of narrativeto move its readers across the "river of fire" that divides classes in modern

capitalist society. Usually, however, the anthology theorizes the culturalwork of representation in even more explicit social and political terms.In "The Body of an American," for instance, John Dos Passos counter-poses the simple, human desires and rich personal experience of ananonymous World War I doughboy to the abstract symbols of Stateauthority: "We are met today to pay impersonal tribute," PresidentHarding consecrates "The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier," "as a typicalsoldier of this representative democracy he fought and died believing inthe indisputable justice of his country's cause" (64). Established powerrepresents its authority by universalizing concrete historical experienceinto timeless ideological truths, a point echoed in Muriel Rukeyser's poem,"City of Monuments," when the speaker's gaze deciphers the ironiesbetween monumental texts and historical reality: "the infirm column of/ the high memorial obelisk / erect in accusation sprung against / a barrensky taut over Anacostia" (188). Anacostia Flats was the place whereFederal troops had routed the Bonus Marchers in 1932. Dominantrepresentations, however, solicit particular kinds of readers and readings.In Conroy's "A Coal Miner's Widow," a Mother's Day card serves torepresent one anti-model of power, interpretation, and reading. Afterobserving a middle-class mother and her son, Larry Donovan reflects onclass difference and motherhood: "So when they spread the goo onMother's Day, I don't get any lump in my throat. What could you sayto a coal town mother ironing away at midnight on someone else's clothes?I never found one of those Western Union canned greetings that fittedmy mother" (62). The class-coding of gender relations and identities isa consistent theme in both of Conroy's novels, The Disinherited (1933) andA World to Win (1935). But Conroy's "A Coal Miner's Widow" is no"goo," and his story's gritty portrait of working-class motherhood drawsa clear line between the reader who buys into Western Union's idealizedrepresentations and the reader who recognizes with outrage, not senti-ment, the real experience of working-class women.

Conroy's embedded text glosses the situational meaning and effectsof his own text; by figuring in the possibility of misinterpretation, thismise en abyme of the text and its possible reception works to guide thereader in his work of correctly reading and interpreting the meaning ofthe story. In her study of didactic novels, Susan Suleiman uses the term"authoritarian fictions" to designate these kinds of texts that encode their

HANLEY 727

readers and interpretations in explicitly ideological ways. But ProletarianLiterature grants different degrees of authority to its texts and readers. In"The Iron Throat," Tillie Lerner uses metaphors of voice to show severalcompeting ways of representing working-class life: the "iron throat" ofthe mine whistle which tears into the Holbrook family's daily life "likesome guttural voiced metal beast" (103); Mrs. Kvaternick's poetic visionof the mine as "da bowels of the earth" and the coal that "oughta bered, and let people see how they get it with blood," a series of imagesthat Jim Holbrook discounts as "woman's blabbling" (108); and Mazie'sdescription of the mine clum's flickering flames, "like babies' tonguesreaching out to you" (109). Each of these metaphors implies a differentway of seeing the mine and its workers, and each implies a different wayof interpreting working-class experience and of identifying with Lerner'sproletarian families.5

The reader's implicit choice between different roles in Lerner's textis more restricted in the anthology's excerpt from Grace Lumpkin's novel,To Make My Bread (1932). There, a young mill worker named JohnMcClure, trying to understand his family's poverty, seeks out an olderradical, John Stevens. Instead of advice, Stevens offers John a parable:You take a rattlesnake, or the copperheads. From their side, they shouldn't beblamed. They grew up on the earth, but just because I know they can harmme or mine, I know I've got to kill one when I see it: and it isn't because Ihate the snake, but because of the poison in his mouth. (113)

Stevens' story is about class struggle and capitalists, but the episodebetween Stevens and McClure is also about creating the right reader forLumpkins' own text. Like Lumpkin's novel about Southern textile workers,Stevens' story within a story promises his listener knowledge of socialdifference. What the parable teaches John McClure is not however anyone thing, but instead a way of decoding stories: "Now he had receivedsome words from John Stevens and those must be sorted out, so thathe could try to fit them with the things which had happened. If he coulddo so, well and good. If he could not, he would perhaps try something

Olsen makes this point more explicitly in a later version of "The Iron Throat" whenher narrator challenges the story's readers to "make a cameo" of the Holbrooks and theirexperience and "pin it onto your aesthetic hearts" (Yonnondio 20). Distancing this "aestheticiz-ing" reading of her story, Olsen also means to distinguish perhaps between "immature"readers, those like Mazie who see metaphor as purely play and pleasure, and "mature"readers like Mrs. Kvaternick who use metaphor to grasp the painful, half-repressed truthsof social experience. In any case, Olsen's self-reflexive nod to the relations between textsand readers certainly does not reflect, as Amy Godine argues, ' 'the fear that art fakes, necessarilymisrepresents reality; the intuition that it somehow betrays the given truth of firsthand ex-perience" (199). Olsen, like the rest of her proletarian colleagues, accepts and even exploitsthe discursive nature of representation; what Olsen fears is that certain readers might useher text to misrepresent the Holbrooks, an entirely different issue.

728 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

else" (115). Interpretation, in Lumpkin's model of reading, is a questionof testing the fictional and figurai language of the text against everydayexperience. The successful reader is thus a reader like John McClure,one who uses the text to figure out his relation to class struggle and todiscover his solidarity with the working-classes. If the relations betweenStevens and McClure theorize the proper uses and effects of fiction,Lumpkin's own interpretation of her novel's situation in the world is clear:fictional narrative mediates the reader's symbolic relations to class andclass difference.6

IV

Historically, proletarian literature's exclusion from literary history hasbeen based on its overpowering worldliness: scored too deeply by theradical politics of the thirties, proletarian texts fail to achieve thetranscendence from history that, traditionally and ideologically, definesaesthetic value.7 My argument instead accepts the worldliness of proletariantexts, their common ambition to reflect and mediate real historical ex-perience. The politics of proletarian literature follow, however, neitherfrom specific content nor from any specific literary form but from whatKenneth Burke pointed to as proletarian literature's "addressedness," "thestrong sense of an audience one gets when reading this anthology. Thisliterature is writen to people, or for people. It is addressed" ("SymbolicWar" 140). In his review of the anthology, Burke focused on "the mat-

6In Lumpkin's novel, John McClure's lesson from John Stevens also signals a shiftof narrative authority from Emma McClure, the clan's matriarich who brings her familydown from the Appalachians into the mills, to Stevens, who oversees the final proletarianizationof the McClures and guides them into revolutionary class consciousness. The anthology'sselection of the Stevens episode also reveals the important gender bias of the anthology'seditors, especially in their excerpts from the many proletarian texts by women. Herbst's"Cloud of Fire" is equally symptomatic of the male editors' tastes: her magnificent trilogyof novels about the Trexler family (Pity Is Not Enough [1933], The Executioner Waits [1934],and Rope of Gold [1939]) centers on the fortunes and fate of the Trexler women: Anne,Rosamund, and Victoria. Given the epic scope and ambition of the trilogy, Jerry Staufferappears as a very minor character. The issue of women writers and Leftist culture is discussedextensively in Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz's recent anthology, Writing Red: AnAnthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940, as well as articles by Joseph Urgo and, inoddly familiar anti-Stalinist terms, by Constance Coiner.

7This argument received its definitive and authoritative expression in Philip Rahv's1939 essay, "Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy," where he claimed that becauseproletarian literature substituted the "theses of the Cominterm" for "a realistic and in-dividualized portrayal of social experience" (624), it necessarily defaulted on its properallegiance to literature and literariness. Recent studies, based on extensive factual and historicalevidence, have pretty much discredited the hoary anti-Stalinist myth of Moscow's controlover proletarian literature in America. See, for instance, James Murphy, The Proletarian Moment,and Laurence Schwartz, Marxism and Culture: the CPUSA and Aesthetics in the 1930s.

HANLEY 729

ter of functions" rather than the " 'absolute' tests of excellence" (147)because, as in his "Revolutionary Symbolism in America," he was in-terested in what proletarian literature does, or attempts to do, within agiven culture at a particular historical moment. Following Burke's lead,the politics of proletarian literature consists in the cultural work it setsout to do, a project theorized by and within the anthology's texts as thework of representing social difference to middle-class readers in the in-terests of cross-class solidarity. In this sense, the politics of ProletarianLiterature in the United States are, as Burke might call them, "congrega-tional."

Foregrounding the self-reflexivity and narrative self-consciousness ofthese proletarian texts, however, one is also prepared to challenge LeslieFiedler's exclusionary tactics in "The State of American Writing."Locating art in its widest historical and social contexts in essays like "TheStoryteller" and "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc-tion," Walter Benjamin saw modernism as one response to the newlyindustrialized and commodified conditions of representation in capitalistsociety. With Benjamin in mind, we can see that the texts of proletarianliterature share with modernists such as Faulkner a common preoccupationwith the cultural status and power of representation in the "age of infor-mation." The multiple endings of Faulkner's own Depression novel Lightin August (1932), for instance, self-reflexively interrogate the possible uses,functions, and effects of narrative as a social practice. In Percy Grimm'srelentless and violent desire for total narrative, and hence, social closure,Light in August contrasts the epistemological value of narrative with theerotic and pleasurable effects of storytelling that govern the novel's finalscene of narration between the furniture dealer and his wife. Faulkner's

storytellers prefer the setting of the bedroom or parlor, proletarianstorytellers the city streets or the shadows of the factory. Both, however,concern themselves with theorizing the fate of narrative in the social world,an ambition antithetical to post-war critics busily using myth, romance,and manners to separate literature from history. Rather than contaminatingliterature and literariness, however, proletarian literature foregrounds thesecret ambition of all modernist writing: to redeem the social power ofrepresentation and narrative.

730 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

WORKS CITED

Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York: Harcourt, 1961.Adamic, Louis, "What the Proletariat Reads." The Saturday Review of Literature

11.20 (December 1934): 321-322.Arvin, Newton. "A Letter on Proletarian Literature." Partisan Review and Anvil

3.1 (February 1936): 12-13.Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1969.Bloom, Alexander. Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World. New

York: Oxford UP, 1986.Browder, Earl. "Communism and Literature." American Writers' Congress. Ed.

Henry Hart. New York: International, 1935. 66-70.Burgum, Edwin Berry. "Discussion." Partisan Review 2 (April-May 1935): 8-9.Burke, Kenneth. "Revolutionary Symbolism in America." American Writers'

Congress. Ed. Henry Hart. New York: International Publishers, 1935. 87-94._____"Symbolic War." The Southern Review. 2 (Summer 1936): 134-147.Chamberlain, John. "The Literary Left Grows Up." Saturday Review of Literature

12.2 (May 1935): 3, 4, 7, 18.Chambers, Ross. Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction.

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.Coiner, Constance. "Literature of Resistance: The Intersection of Feminism and

the Communist Left in Meridel Le Sueur and Tillie Olsen." Left Politics andthe Literary Profession. Ed. Lennard Davis and M. Bella Mirabella. New York:Columbia UP, 1990. 162-185.

Cooney, Terry. The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle.Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1986.

Davis, Mike. Prisoners of the American Dream. New York: Verso, 1986.Fiedler, Leslie. "The State of Writing in America, 1948" Partisan Review 15.8

(August 1948): 870-875.Freeman, Joseph. "Ivory Towers—White and Red." New Masses 13.11 (December

1934): 20-24.Gilbert, James B. Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America.

New York: Wiley, 1968.Godine, Amy. "Notes Toward a Reappraisal of Depression Literature." Prospects

5 (1980): 197-239.Gregory, Horace. "Criticism from the Left." New York Herald Tribune Books 24

(November 1935): vii.Johnson, Oakley. "The John Reed Club Convention." New Masses 8 (July 1932):

14-15.

Klein, Marcus. Foreigners: The Making of American Literature, 1900-1940. Chicago:U of Chicago P, 1981.

Kronenberger, Louis. "Literature on the Left." 7ne Nation 17 (November 1935):600.

Kunitz, Joshua. "In Defense of a Term." New Masses 28.3 (July 1938): 145-147.Lumpkin, Grace. To Make My Bread. New York: Macaulay, 1932.Murphy, James. The Proletarian Moment. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991.Nekola, Charlotte and Paula Rabinowitz, eds. Writing Red: An Anthology of American

Women Writers, 1930-1940. New York: The Feminist, 1987.

HANLEY 731

Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modem American Poetry and the Politics of CulturalMemory, 1910-1945. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989.

Olsen, Tillie. Yonnondio: From the Thirties. New York: Dell, 1974.Phillips, William. [Wallace Phelps]. "Three Generations." Partisan Review 1.4

(September-October 1934): 49-55.Hicks, Granville, et al., eds. Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology.

New York: International, 1935.Rahv, Philip. "Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy." The Southern Review

4 (Winter 1939): 616-628.Rideout, Walter. The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1940. Cambridge:

Harvard UP, 1956.Rollins, William, Jr. "What is a Proletarian Writer?" New Masses 14.5 (January

1935): 22-23.Schaub, Thomas. American Fiction in the Cold War. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991.Schwartz, Laurence. Marxism and Culture: The CPUSA and Aesthetics in the 1930s.

Port Washington: Kennikat, 1980.Seaver, Edwin. "The Proletarian Novel." American Writers' Congress. Ed. Henry

Hart. New York: International, 1935. 98-103._____"What Is a Proletarian Novel? Notes toward a Definition." Partisan Review

2.7 (April-May 1935): 5-12.Suleiman, Susan. Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre. New

York: Columbia UP, 1983.Urgo, Joseph R. "Proletarian Literature and Feminism: The Gastonia Novels

and Feminist Protest." The Minnesota Review 24 (Spring 1985): 64-84.WaId, Alan M. The New York Intellectuals. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1987.Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

732