assignment 5

Andrew McCormick

ENGL 701/Graduate Methodology

Prof. Richter

25 Oct. 2010

Assignment 5: Critical Voice--

Dickstein and Solomon on 30’s fiction and political matters

Part One

The two readings I have chosen for this assignment are: a chapter from Morris Dickstein’s recent book, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (chapter two: “The Tenement and the World: Immigrant Lives”); and an American Literature article by William Solomon (1996), “Politics and Rhetoric in the Novel in the 1930’s.”

From the chapter in Dickstein’s book, several important names/works that emerge are: Alfred Kazin, whose introduction to Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep I have read and referred to in previous assignments, and whose book Starting out in the Thirties, as well as other works, I intend to check out in light of Dickstein’s citation in the chapter’s footnotes; Michael Harrington (a former Queens College political science professor), whose 1963 book The Other America: Poverty in the United States, which Dickstein discusses in the context of how mainstream American ideology has often, outside of major recessions, tended to forget about or ignore poverty, looks like it may give some useful historical context regarding ideology as well as statistics about poverty during and after the Great Depression; and, finally, a familiar name, Allen Guttmann, whose article “Think Back on the Thirties” I have already put on my tentative bibliography, and whose book The Jewish Writer in America (1971) Dickstein discusses in relation to Mike Gold and Henry Roth, both of whom are likely to be major parts of my project, especially concerning the differences between more overtly political writing (“proletarian” novels) versus less political work which is more commonly perceived as drawing its primary influence from modernism like Joyce, Eliot, Proust, etc. (Dickstein 15-90; Kazin xii-xvi, in the introduction to Roth’s Call It Sleep). So Guttmann’s book and perhaps some of his other works are probably worth investigating.

From Solomon’s article, some books cited in the notes section seem promising, particularly in their relative recentness: Walter Kalaidjian’s 1993 book American Culture between the Wars: Revolutionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique; Michael Staub’s 1994 Voices of Persuasion: Politics of Representation in 1930’s America; also potentially interesting to look for is a not-so-recent but potentially useful-sounding article by Marcus Klein, “The Roots of Radicals.” And, since Solomon opens up his article by building directly off of her work, I intend to examine works, including the one listed, by Paula Rabinowitz. (Full MLA citations for all the potential sources from Dickstein’s chapter and Solomon’s article can be found at the end of this assignment).

Part Two

Re-reading the second chapter of Dickstein’s book has allowed me to really see how the author is positioning himself in relation to a major question about 30’s fiction, especially its more political side: whether critics have largely simplified and falsely labeled some works in 1930’s political fiction as lacking in nuance and sophistication (and, by rather direct implication, in literary or artistic merit). Dickstein’s discussion of Mike Gold’s oft-labeled proletarian novel Jews without Money echoes a now familiar position about some of the fiction of the time (one shared, as I will discuss shortly, by William Solomon in his 1996 article), taking the position that some works of the time which have been traditionally criticized as too left-leaning and thus unliterary actually deserve more praise for their sophistication and layered literary content—in other words, there’s more than meets the eye to many 30’s works with political undertones. In the task of arguing for a defense of the literary merit of Gold’s novel and for a revised conceptualization of this work as not, strictly speaking, a proletarian novel like the “strike novels” of the time, Dickstein employs that classic they say/I say trope[1], explaining, 

Some would say that Gold’s work is fatally damaged by the ethical morass into which this blind faith led him; most of it is. But until the last page, Gold was able to keep outright politics and ideology out of Jews without Money. He turned his recollections into grimly effective vignettes without belaboring their message. To an unusual extent for a Communist writer, he let the material speak for itself. (22)

            This passage seems to be a good example of a critical voice; Dickstein acknowledges the partial validity of opposing interpretations, noting the basis for some of their criticisms of this particular writer in question, but then decidedly challenges the notion that Gold’s writing, namely one of his better-known novels, is without merit or complexity. Similar, later examples of this kind of critical voice also pertain to Gold’s novel. In one, Dickstein argues,

Even if we grant, as few critics have done, that Gold created a powerful style all of his own, a style sharply different from documentary naturalism or socialist realism, this doesn’t explain why Jews without Money…should become a seminal text of the Depression years. Though the book was completed by the end of 1928, well before the [Stock Market] Crash, its appearance early in 1930 helped place poverty, ethnicity and human misery on the cultural agenda, just as the depression was putting them of the political agenda. (24)

            Adding to the legitimacy of his critical voice here, Dickstein supplements his point with the words of another author shortly after this. He explains that the “future,” the new time, that is, which America was facing (one distinctly and frighteningly different from its recent past, one Henry James was startled by when he returned home after twenty years in Europe to see New York’s tremendous diversity and class disparities) “had arrived.” To further this assertion, Dickstein refers to another critic, adding, “and, as the critic Marcus Klein added in Foreigners, cultural outsiders like Gold were better equipped to write about [this future] than the sheltered scions of New York or New England gentility” (24). Dickstein then punctuates and closes out the paragraph with his culminating point, that “the ghetto of 1900 [of Henry Roth’s and Mike Gold’s childhood experiences turned fiction]…suddenly spoke volumes to the acute social distress of 1930” (24).

            But Dickstein’s most notable use of a critical, scholarly voice in this chapter can be found, in my opinion, toward the chapter’s end. It is here that he enters rather explicitly—and boldly—into a debate that is entirely in the high-stakes realm of theory, couching his rich reading of Henry Roth’s work smack in the middle of the rather pervasive rift between liberal-humanist, pre-post-structural critics and post-structural ones; in so doing, Dickstein identifies which side he occupies of the rather gaping ideological and philosophical chasm running through the world of literary scholarship since the 1960’s. Dickstein posits a compelling, anti-post-structuralist position (a liberal-humanist one, that is) in his final words on Roth’s novel Call It Sleep, in a paragraph worth quoting in its entirety here:

It’s hardly possible to do full justice to the role language plays in Call It Sleep. Like the modified stream of consciousness Roth uses in the narration, the characters’ language is subjective in the ways it expresses the complexity of their lives. Though poststructuralist literary theorists have argued that language is conventional and duplicitous, an arbitrary set of signifiers, and that selfhood is little more than an illusion sustained by language, Roth’s mentors [Proust, Joyce, Eliot and other modernists, as Dickstein has discussed earlier in the chapter] were the first generation modernists who taught him to use language to convey the shape and rhythm of individual awareness. This enabled him to keep his characters from being reduced to stereotypes of the poor, from being turned into social data, which is what some thirties writers, turning back to naturalism, had begun to do. (47)

            The above seems like an excellent case study in rhetorical moves that both put forth an original thesis while entering into wide, long-enduring discourses from the world of literary theory that rather pervade and perhaps constrain the discipline. He identifies and acutely sums up what poststructuralism has claimed, for better or worse, and offers a crisp alternative to it. And in the process, he feeds one of the book’s major arguments—that much of the allegedly junior-ish work of the time period was more literary, more clever, more at discourse with other movements, philosophies and debates, than people have traditionally acknowledged. Shortly thereafter, Dickstein closes out the chapter, whose primary raison d’être has been to examine oft-simplified and mis-labeled as proletarian or ultra-leftist works in a finer light, couching them in more of a modernist tradition, by asserting that Roth’s celebrated novel deserves its praise because “unfashionably, he makes his language a vehicle of self-analysis, almost a Freudian case-study.” He adds that the novel “insists that [social meaning] can be approached only by way of the individual experience,” and that in so doing, “Roth gave the proletarian novel its richest and most haunting text” (49).

            In a 1996 article with very similar motivations and interests as Dickstein’s recent book, William Solomon also takes issue with the ways in which novels of the 1930’s had often, until fairly recently, been characterized (wrongfully) as belonging to a “period without interest, a time in which most American novelists other than Faulkner regressed, unable to pick up where their more modernist precursors left off” (Solomon 799). Referring to another critic, Paula Rabinowitz, who used the proletarian novel Marching! Marching! to argue that even overtly political, formulaic leftist books “resisted the ideological closure of the realist text,”[2] Solomon then joins this side of the debate, arguing,

If Rabinowitz is correct, and I think she is, it follows that the place of this decade in the history of the American novel is more complicated than past scholarship has acknowledged. For if we accept that even this novel—one often used to epitomize what went wrong with the novel in the thirties—may be interpreted as an attempt to go “beyond” realism, we begin to suspect that past characterizations of the period as extremely naïve with respect to literary representation may be inadequate. (799)

            It seems more than safe to consider the above a sophisticated rhetorical move in which the writer springboards off of an existing argument to arrive at his thesis, which he presents as follows:

I am convinced that in the thirties an entirely different way of looking at the relationship between politics and literature was struggling to emerge, and that the failure of past critics to acknowledge this fact has obscured valuable ideas and precise observations. My contribution to the current collective critical enterprise will be to demonstrate the way in which a few leftist novelists in the thirties made rhetoric—as defined below—the ground of their innovations into the political. (800)

            Solomon then goes on to discuss the three pertinent novels referred to above: Edward Dahlberg’s From Flushing to Cavalry (1932), Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing (1935), and a particular section of John Dos Passos’s 1919 of the USA Trilogy, “The Body of an American.” I won’t go into detail at this time about the many relevant passages illustrating Solomon’s critical voice in his analysis of these three works, but suffice it so say that the article has been highly illuminating in regards to the debates surrounding 30’s political works; moreover, it is worth noting that Solomon’s argument coincides with what are at this point familiar positions taken by other critics (Dickstein, Kazin, and others), making it a valuable resource.

Full MLA Citations

(of sources I’ve been pointed towards from the two above-discussed readings)

Dickstein, Morris. Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. New York: Norton, 2009. Print.

Guttmann, Allen. The Jewish Writer in America. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971.

Harrington, Michael. The Other America: Poverty in the United States. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.

Kalaidjian, Walter. American Culture between the Wars: Revolutionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993.

Kazin, Alfred. Starting Out in the Thirties. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1965.

___________, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. (1942). Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1956.

Rabinowitz, Paula. Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Solomon, William. “Politics and Rhetoric in the Novel in the 1930’s.” American Literature. 68.4 (Dec. 1996): 799-818. JSTOR. 22 Oct. 2010. Web.

Staub, Michael. Voices of Persuasion: Politics of Representation in 1930’s America. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994.

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[1] Of course, now the name of a very successful composition and research textbook by Gerald Graff et al: “They Say, I Say”: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. New York: Norton, 2009. I employ the phrase with this in mind.

[2] Rabinowitz, Paula. Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1991. The words quoted above are Rabinowitz’s, quoted by Solomon, p. 799. All other MLA citations for relevant works from Dickstein and Solomon are at the end.