Andrew McCormick
ENGL 701: Graduate Methodology
Prof. Richter
18 October 2010
Assignment 4 (“Overwhelming Question”)
My Question(s)
Firstly, can seeds of what many critics nowadays think of as postmodernism (as an artistic and especially as a literary lens) be encountered in different works of literature, namely fiction, of the Great Depression? Can we, now several decades into a time in which the “postmodern” is rather a given, in retrospective find elements of it in some of the fiction that emerged from this rather dire chapter of U.S. history, the 1930’s? Secondly, stemming from this, if indeed we can talk about elements of the proto-postmodern in some works of this time period, are we primarily limited to certain kinds of depression-era fiction? That is, would the elements of an early, pre-emergent or emerging postmodernism be primarily, or for that matter only, encountered in a particular corner or corners of the fiction that emerged from the American 1930’s? Would this phenomenon be limited to or more common to works written, say, in the first-person? The third-person? Would it be limited to certain writers? To a particular time within the 1930’s? To certain subjects? Also related to the first, originally posed question (as to whether we can find seeds of the postmodern in 30’s depression literature), what would be the function(s) of this emerging, early postmodernism in relation to the political ideologies and discourses of the time? In particular, how might it operate in the portrayal of some of the especially impoverished or disenfranchised that were the subject of depression writers? Then, circling back to broader, philosophically oriented literary and cultural questions, does the presence of the postmodern in this time period and the aforementioned themes in question necessarily stand to undermine politically charged messages or readings? Can one who has claimed to have identified and explored seeds of postmodernism in 1930’s depression-era fiction that portrays the disenfranchised, still stand on firm ground in asserting that there are political messages in the work? Or has one negated this possibility by positing the presence of postmodern tropes in the works in question? Or, put more simply, what are the politico-ideological implications of an early, emerging/proto-postmodernism in depression fiction as we retrospectively view it today?
From Whence It Came
My interest in what would become these interrelated questions originated, as far as I can tell, with an examination of a 30’s short story by William Saroyan that I wrote a paper on a year or so ago. The criticism I read on the story, “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” seemed preoccupied, among other things, with just how to classify the author. One critic argued that Saroyan was a “Romantic Existentialist,”[1] another viewed his work as fundamentally more naturalistic than modernist, and others considered him a late modernist stretching the edges of the modernist envelope, so to speak. One particular critic, the most recently published I was able to find at the time, reflected back on Saroyan’s work as belonging to that bridge, or that “ critical point of least convenience between the first wave of Modernism […] and that new wave of Postmodernism—Kerouac, most obviously—that he is shown to have influenced” (Locklin NP). This critic goes on to point out that Saroyan can be seen as “our contemporary” (in the 1990’s, the time the critic was writing) given his way of “eras[ing] boundaries.”
This particular encounter with disputes about Saroyan prompted me to write that essay on a postmodern reading of the short story (“The Daring Young Man…”). Exploring theoretical readings and introduction-to-theory type books on postmodernism, I became more interested in the postmodern lens, especially as it stands to deny a wholeness of identity or essence, and to deny or complicate meta-narratives, as well as to embrace rather than flee from the identity-blurring madness that is the modern condition (as opposed to modernism, which some critics I have read argue to be characterized by a nostalgia for pre-modernism times, where things were, people like to think, more neatly lined up).[2]
These were the seeds of my interest in the emergence of the proto-postmodern in earlier to mid-twentieth century literature (namely fiction), particularly that of the depression-era. Then, when I began searching databases this semester for publications on thirties, depression-era literature and modernism/postmodernism, the pivotal piece of scholarship I came across, which has thus far shaped, validated and given impetus to this interest, was T.V. Reed’s article arguing for the presence of “Postmodern Realism” in James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s interdisciplinary book on poor southern farmers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. As I discussed in the previous two assignments, Reed argues that although the term or concept of the postmodern, as we know it, was obviously not yet in usage in the 1930’s, much of what we now acknowledge as postmodern is undoubtedly at play in Agee’s prose and Evans’s photographs.
So this article on Agee and Evans has definitely put me on my current path, which I have continued down by reading more about postmodernism itself. Along the way so far, I have consulted the two intro to theory books footnoted below, articles from Steven Connor’s Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, and, finally, begun putting together a tentative list of some novels of the 1930’s (which I am beginning to tackle now). As mentioned, this currently includes Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, some more of Saroyan’s 1930’s work, and perhaps some Steinbeck. I will also be reading Agee and Evans at some point, hopefully soon.
Where I See It Going
Some issues I expect to see arise include the need to narrow down the type of 1930’s writers of fiction and depression era books, maybe developing as I go along some parameters—type of narrator, specifically, or kinds of people portrayed, or setting, maybe urban vs. rural, etc. (some of this I’ve already foreshadowed in my opening paragraph outlining my interrelated questions). As is, I have a very tentative and frankly rather eclectic grouping; Roth’s novel seems, as Alfred Kazin points out in the book’s introduction, very modernist, stream-of-consciousness driven in some places, centered around the child’s perception of the outside world rather than offering a free-standing and independent world outside which he is subject to, and, in turn, perhaps having some affinities with Joyce’s Ulysses[3]. Agee and Evans, from what I have read of it in Reed’s article and from the bits I have skimmed so far, seems a much different kind of book from Roth’s and my other tentative titles in several ways, the least of which is that it is openly and self-consciously interdisciplinary (or discipline and genre eluding, as per Reed). Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, though Dickstein’s discussion of it in Dancing in the Dark and the bits I’ve skimmed do give me the impression that it is a generally appropriate candidate to explore my theme of interest, sounds like it differs in some perhaps major ways from Roth and Agee/Evans. This might include its first person, omniscient narrator, and more compellingly, what Dickstein describes as a kind of ironic, black humor that works with cultural stereotypes, moving beyond them in subtle ways (96-99). This too might very well be read as a kind of emerging postmodernism, but likely a very different kind than what Roth’s young protagonist does in Call It Sleep. So the question I find myself facing early on is, will I need to gradually narrow it down to a few books that share, in addition to the desire to portray the impoverished, some common rhetorical grounds like type of narrator, setting, even tone? I think I likely will.
On the other hand, I am definitely sensing some nice parallels in style and content between Roth and Saroyan, leading me to believe that these two writers will remain parts of this gradually developing project. Perhaps I will be starting with Roth’s Call It Sleep and some of Saroyan’s works that are similar in a few key ways to Roth, and looking for other 30’s works that have these similar kinds of traits.
I am, at any rate, noticing that a flaw in my approach has been to front the theory and criticism aspect of the research and do the reading of the fiction itself later; I should probably ease off on the theoretical research (research about the theory which will inform the project) for a while and just plow into the novels and stories I might like to use (since I do know my time period, themes and what related theory I am interested in bringing in), and later on down the road, once I’ve selected and found patterns in some works of fiction, then return to the theory/criticism aspect.
[1] Thelma Shinn; “William Saroyan: Romantic Existentialist.”
[2] Mary Klages in Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed; also Peter Barry in Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory.
[3] Kazin, xii-xiv; introduction to: Roth, Henry. Call It Sleep (1934). New York: Picador, 1991. Print.
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