Abstract
This essay argues that the urban collective novel serves as an important modernist
precursor to network narratives. The collective novel is a literary form, particularly
popular during the 1930s, that explores a wide context through a decentered narrative.
Previous discussions of these novels have focused on them as exemplars of modernist form
in proletarian literature. However, this essay shows another origin for the form in
concerns about the metropolis and mass culture that complicates our understanding. Drawing
on examples from novels by John Dos Passos, Daniel Fuchs, Albert Halper, Josephine Herbst,
William S. Rollins, Jr., and Josephine Herbst it shows how these texts offered not only
radically ambivalent assessments of networked existence but often a pessimistic view of
the possibilities of political community, extending at times to specific critiques of
communist politics. In its conclusion, the essay draws links between these novels and the
cinematic network narratives that became popular in the first decade of the 21st century.
The introduction to New York Panorama, the first volume of
the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) guide to New York City, invokes the “rumor of a great city,” which:
goes out beyond its borders, to all the latitudes of the known earth.
The city becomes an emblem in remote minds; apart from the tangible export of goods and
men, it exerts its cultural instrumentality in a thousand phases: as an image of
glittering light, as the forcing ground which creates a new prose style or a new
agro-biological theory, or as the germinal point for a fresh technique in metal sculpture,
biometrics or the fixation of nitrogen.
[Federal Writers' Project 1984, 3]
As the metropolis grew in influence through the concentration, production, and then
dissemination of products and ideas, FWP editors argued, it assumed the character of a
distinct thing and a cause, and, in particular, a shaper of culture. As both object and
agent, the metropolis catalyzed the development of several modes of writing including
realism, “yellow” journalism, and naturalism. The FWP writers, like many
other critics of the 1930s, likely also had in mind a more recent narrative innovation: the
collective novel, a prose form in which the interconnection among character plots is
disrupted to the point that social aggregates and their environment become primary. In
particular, they would have been aware of the broad influence of John Dos Passos, the form’s
most lauded American practitioner, whose writing helped shape the styles of Daniel Fuchs,
Albert Halper, Josephine Herbst, William S. Rollins, Jr., and Edwin Seaver, among
others.
[1] Growing out of the influence of both
modernism and cinema, this early version of network narrative became so influential in
leftist cultural movements during the 1930s that critics today often neglect its
metropolitan origins. Unfortunately, the focus on the proletarian collective novel elides
crucial concerns about mass culture, the breakdown of community, and even skepticism of
communism and proletarian culture that emerge clearly in the metropolitan collective
novel.
The political and aesthetic efficacy of collective novels lay in their ability to generate
cognitive maps, making both connection and, just as important, disconnection
visible. Illuminating this capacity, my argument joins two ongoing discussions. The first
discussion concerns the status of the collective novel vis-à-vis proletarian
literature and modernism. The second discussion focuses on the question of what issues
network narratives make visible. Critics studying proletarian literature today, like their
1930s predecessors, have placed the collective novel at the heart of their case for the
inventiveness of proletarian literary culture, linking it by turns to a rejection of
modernist aestheticization and an embrace of aesthetic innovation. The attempt to link the
collective novel with proletarian culture is compromised on one hand by the emergence of the
collective novel from attempts to grapple with metropolitan incoherence, and on the other,
by the critiques of communism voiced in key metropolitan collective novels. This analysis
focuses on several novels — Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer,
Fuchs’s Summer in Williamsburg, Halper’s Union Square, Herbst’s Rope of Gold, Rollins’s
The Shadow Before, Seaver’s The
Company — to illustrate how the urban collective novel generates an account of
disconnection that charts the deleterious effects of metropolitan mass culture on social and
cultural politics.
The accounts of frustrated political community in these novels problematize discussions of
connectivity theory and network narrative by moving away from functionalism and description
to emphasize manufactured disconnection. Connectivity theory traces the increasing global
connections of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, seeking emergent
identities, cultural forms, and possibilities of agency. Anticipated in the 1970s by
Immanuel Wallerstein’s economic World Systems Theory, but seeking to broaden this work
beyond the economic and political spheres, theorists in several disciplines — including
Bruno Latour,
Manuel Castells, and
Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri — have conceptualized
networks of information, technology, people, culture, and governance. These theories offer
accounts of personal, political, and institutional relationships across multiple scales:
local, regional, national, and transnational. Actor-Network Theory, associated with Bruno
Latour, describes the construction and maintenance of networks of people and technology,
allowing theorists to examine both the practices and the rationales holding them together.
Connectivity theory also explores how agents of both dominance and resistance make use of
new technologies and institutions that transcend national boundaries. For instance while
Hardt and Negri trace the emergence of a new global mode of dominion they call Empire, they
also examine resistance in the form of transnational activist and cultural movements.
Crucial to most of these theories is their functionalist bent, their tendency to focus on
how connections are created or maintained. In contrast, the dysfunctional and distorting capabilities of networks were crucial concerns of modernist writers.
Corresponding with the rise of connectivity theory, critics have gained an increasing
interest in cultural forms that replicate its complex focus on networks. In the visual arts,
several artists have pioneered new forms for imagining transnational relationships. Mark
Lombardi’s
Narrative Structures, for example, diagram relationships
among power brokers in a globalized network, allowing the audience to visualize connections
and influence normally hidden from view. Focusing on construction and interpretation more
than description, Thomas Hirschhorn’s installations create congeries of images, texts, and
material, provoking questions about both the items’ relationships and how we develop
knowledge in an information-saturated, global context. Recent cinematic forms termed
“network narratives” by David Bordwell explore globalized relationships
across the sociogeographical incoherencies of class, race, and nation, often by tracking the
production, distribution, and consumption of specific commodities. One need only think of
recent films like
Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic and
Alejandro
González Iñárritu’s Babel to realize how such an expansive form
can challenge aesthetic conventions.
[2]
As a precursor to these network narratives, the collective novel offered writers an opportunity to trace out forms of causality that confounded the plotting which characterized most nineteenth century prose. Indeed, the collective
novel seemingly provided writers with the narrative tools to tackle the tension between the
“tangible export of goods and men” and the more ephemeral
“cultural instrumentality” in the opening FWP statement, namely the
difficulty of assessing causality and efficacy in an overdetermined, image-saturated
environment. The collective novel, then, represents an important step towards forms of
narrative that seem increasingly relevant today, and in consequence the problems its
practitioners faced, and often metanarratively explored, remain important.
Despite their diagnostic focus neither interwar collective novels nor modern network
narratives fulfill Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson’s call for, a “positive hermeneutic, or a decipherment of the Utopian impulses of these
same still ideological cultural texts”
[
Jameson 1981, 296]. Rather than indicating hopeful directions, most of the artworks we might group
under network narrative approach globalized relationships as problematic and they portray
them at a critical remove. This distance is anticipated in the urban collective novel of the
interwar period. In these novels, the charting of social and narrative disruption, often via
mass culture, and a self-aware approach to narrative construction undermined more hopeful
renderings of networks. Indeed, writers using the collective form frequently went so far as
to question the possibility of political community, and even narrative coherence, in an
environment shaped and maintained by mass culture.
The Collective Novel: Recovery and Repression
The collective novel has long been an important genre for proponents of the United
States’ radical literary heritage because of its potential for creating expansive
politicized narrative. Both early and more recent discussions of the genre’s boundaries,
often coalescing around Dos Passos, illuminate the stakes of the link between the
collective novel and proletarian literature. In “Revolution and the
Novel”
New Masses editor Granville Hicks offered Soviet authors
Valentin Kataev and Aleksandr Fadeyev as exemplars of this new literary tendency.
[3]
The crucial issue dividing the emerging collective novel from the older “complex
novel”, was whether the group “emerge[d] as a
character”
[
Hicks 1974, 29] or whether individual
characters continued to dominate the plot. In other
words, the represented group had to achieve some sort of unified identity, in essence a
form of narrative class consciousness. While Dos Passos served as a promising model for an
American collective novel — in 1935, Hicks enthroned him as the heir apparent of a
“great tradition” of American letters that chronicled social forces —
the critic felt that his novels fell short of realizing a unified group, a shortcoming he
believed was based on muddled ideology. Hicks sought to distinguish the politically —
charged collective novel from the apparent disengagement of high modernism, maintaining a
critical emphasis on the link between content and form. To read his writing on Dos Passos
is to sense growing frustration, recognition of undeniable literary talent that flirts
with, but refuses to yield to, a communist worldview. For Hicks, Dos Passos’s hesitation,
his “camp follower” mentality, was a tragedy; the writer’s lukewarm and
negative portrayals of communists derailed his narrative accomplishments [
Hicks 1974, 78].
In its marriage of modernist narrative structure and realist social focus, the collective
novel offered a potential resolution to a conflict between two of the most influential interwar
Marxist aestheticians: Georg Lukács and Bertholt Brecht. In History
and Class Consciousness, written in 1923, Lukács detailed an epistemological
role for the novel as a means of countering reification:
By relating consciousness to the whole of society it becomes possible
to infer the thoughts and feelings which men would have in a particular situation if
they were able to assess both it and the interests arising from it in their
impact on immediate action and on the whole structure of society. That is to say it
would be possible to infer the thoughts and feelings appropriate to their objective
situation.
[Lukacs 1971, 51]
A novel that could trace the connections among structural relationships, perception of
those relationships, and resulting behaviors would offer a powerful corrective to
reification. Appropriating the term realism for such a literature, Lukács argued that to
achieve the necessary effect, the literary work needed to replicate totality in its own
unified aesthetic system, to immerse the reader in a credible world that was recognizably
their own. This led Lukács to attack both naturalist and modernist texts, which he viewed
as flawed in execution by fragmentary narratives that in emphasizing and replicating
flawed perception only skimmed the surface of totality. In a response written in 1938 and
published posthumously, Brecht decried the formal constraints of Lukács’s edicts while
offering an alternate aesthetic theory designed to counter the effects of mass media
rhetoric.
[4] Brecht critiqued the dominance of mimesis in
literary construction and critical evaluation as a sop that encouraged readers to lose
themselves in the narrative drama while subverting their critical capacity. The
pedagogical function, and thus political utility, of literature, could be heightened
through non-Aristotelian effects, bucking mimesis, which would both heighten the reader’s
awareness of the construction of narrative.
If the collective novel could unite these epistemological and pedagogical functions,
providing by turns a complex account of social totality and a defamiliarizing jolt to the
reader, it would marry modernism’s metaperceptual and textual foci with realism’s
penetrating social lens. Hicks’s vision of proletarian literature, captured in this
wishful passage, evoked this possibility:
Proletarian literature, however, does not end with John Dos
Passos...if we can imagine an author with Michael Gold’s power of evoking scenes, with
William Rollins’[sic] structural skill, with Jack Conroy’s wide acquaintance with the
proletariat, with Louis Colman’s firsthand knowledge of the labor movement, with all the
passion of these and a dozen other revolutionary novelists, with something of Dreiser’s
massive patience, we can see what shape a proletarian masterpiece might take. It would
do justice to all the many-sided richness of its characters, exploring with Proustian
persistence the deepest recesses of individuality as essentially a social phenomenon.
And it would carry its readers toward life, not, as The Remembrance
of Things Past does, toward death.
[Hicks 1974, 65]
The literature Hicks hopes for would render gripping images within a complex narrative,
producing a social and psychological understanding of the working class’s role
revolutionary politics. For Hicks, “toward life”, meant cognizance of
the economic underpinnings of social totality, which would impel recognition of
capitalism’s structural injustices and the reader’s connections with other proletarianized
subjects. The invocation of Rollins for the formal ideal was crucial because of the
similarities between Rollins’s and Dos Passos’s style: compounded adjectives, multiple
plotlines, imagism, and incorporation of documentary material. While Dos Passos served as
the example of repeated failure he remained the clear benchmark for formally innovative
and expansive narrative.
Now that modernism connotes lasting literary value rather than decadent experimentation,
the collective novel ironically serves to buffer proletarian literature against critics
who have pilloried the latter’s banality and didacticism. When Barbara Foley revived the
collective novel category in her seminal study of the proletarian novel,
Radical Representations, she placed it at the juncture of
proletarian literature and modernist aesthetic innovation. Foley begins her discussion of
the collective novel with a taxonomy indebted to Hicks.
[5] She asserts that the form’s defining
features are the focus on the group rather than individuals, the use of “direct documentary links with the world of the reader,”
[
Foley 1993, 400–402] and the heightened deployment of “experimental devices that break up the narrative and rupture the
illusion of seamless transparency”
[
Foley 1993, 400–402]. This definition allows her to expand the category beyond Hicks’s
politically-charged division, a move that establishes the form not as a longing, but as
the manifestation and fulfillment of proletarian literature’s promise. The move to expand
and formalize the collective novel genre, quickly leads to its repoliticization. Citing
the collective novel’s experimental form, the praise it garnered from critics of various
political inclinations, and its popularity among writers, Foley contests the monolithic
conception of the proletarian literary movement typical among postwar anti-communists (of
both the left and the right). While many radical novels had predictable, sentimental
plots, as postwar critics charged, Foley hails a more flexible and experimental
understanding of proletarian literature. In her view, other typical proletarian novel
forms — the proletarian autobiography, proletarian
bildungsroman and proletarian social novel — had bourgeois origins, but the
collective novel: “is primarily the product of 1930s radicalism. The
term
proletarian collective novel would therefore be tautological
”
[
Foley 1993, 398]. Insofar as the collective novel form was a
distinctive proletarian literary contribution promoted by communist critics, often
practiced by proletarian writers, and developed during a period of heightened awareness of
class struggle, it bolsters a reconsideration of proletarian literature’s legacy.
However, this recovery has also created its own peculiar form of repression. While Hicks
overemphasized authorial politics in his imagination of the collective novel, Dos Passos
remains as troubling for Foley as he had been for Hicks. Foley rightly recognizes that the
overwhelming influence of Dos Passos, a rather ornery fellow traveler in both life and
letters, generates tension between the collective form and communist political doctrine.
But her move to bring Dos Passos into the fold generically, if not doctrinally, sidesteps
Hicks’s reservations. One symptom is her heavy focus on the national trilogy
U.S.A., the most formally ambitious of Dos Passos’s interwar
works. In contrast, in Hicks’s analysis
Manhattan Transfer
forms a crucial prior link in the evolution of the collective form, which was tied to the
growth of the metropolis. Like the FWP, Hicks stressed the city’s effect on narrative,
positing William Dean Howells’s
A Hazard of New Fortunes and
Frank Norris’s
The Octopus — the former utilizing the
metropolis as an organizing rubric, and the latter as a governing node in a global market
— as antecedents of Dos Passos’s novels. Hicks was not alone in recognizing the earlier
novel’s innovations. A glowing 1925 review by Sinclair Lewis, comparing Dos Passos
favorably to modernist icons Proust and Joyce, presciently suggested that “
Manhattan Transfer might be the founding of
a new school of writing”
[
Maine 1988, 68]. Dos Passos
himself believed the form was distinctive enough to be the first of his novels to merit
the name “chronicle”, the designation he applied to the
U.S.A. trilogy, marking these novels’ shared focus on historical
and spatial context.
[6] By asserting the
proletarian nature of the collective novel, Foley misses a secondary link between content
and form in many collective novels: the struggle to narrate the incoherent modern
metropolis and, in turn, use it as a microcosmic exploration of modernity. Written by a
member of the cultural elite, focusing primarily on bourgeois characters, and yielding no
coherent class-based social agenda,
Manhattan Transfer was by
no means a proletarian novel, but it was a collective novel. Its inclusion in this
category troubles the equation between proletarian literature and the collective novel
while opening communist cultural politics to a mass-cultural critique.
Manhattan Transfer, Mass Culture, and
Disconnection
By portraying both the dissolution of social connectivity in the city and the conflation
of mass-market images with political desire, Dos Passos identified crucial problems for
writers and activists associated with the radical left. Manhattan
Transfer mapped the interpenetration of media in urban lives, highlighting the
way the media shaped conceptions of the self and community. In the novel, the confusing
urban milieu and technologies of desire perpetuate an unjust social order to the detriment
of the individuals within it. Critics discussing the novel’s critique of mass culture
often concentrate on Jimmy Herf and Elaine Thatcher, the novel’s most developed
characters, but Dos Passos’s links among the urban environment, mass culture, and politics
emerge most clearly in the clutter of subplots and resonant images that gave the novel its
collective force and which constitute the object of this analysis. Through them Dos Passos
identified the epistemological problem engendered by the metropolis that gave rise to both
the possibility and need for collective narrative.
Jameson argues this epistemological problem emerges during the late nineteenth century
when awareness of global markets triggers an important split between the experience of a
phenomenon and its truth:
At this point the phenomenological
experience of the individual subject — traditionally, the supreme raw materials of the
work of art — becomes limited to a tiny corner of the social world, a fixed-camera
view of a certain section of London or whatever. But the truth of that experience no
longer coincides with the place in which it takes place. The truth of that limited
daily experience of London lies, rather, in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong; it is bound
up with the whole colonial system of the British Empire that determines the very
quality of the individual’s subjective life. Yet those structural coordinates are no
longer accessible to immediate lived experience and are often not even
conceptualizable for most people.
[Jameson 1988, 349]
While Jameson aligns this experience with the inward flows of empire, the flow of goods
out of the metropoles was equally important in generating the split.
[7] As the metropolis grew, its culture industries transformed the
modes of social interaction well beyond the hinterlands. This situation was compounded
within the city, where expansiveness, social diversity, and media saturation all
compromised the authority of experience.
[8] This
development cast doubt on the capacity of a unified plot to depict either the experiential
reality or the complex mediated totality of the city.
The quest of Bud Korpenning — the book’s first character — to “git more into the center of things”
[
Dos Passos 1953, 24] is a metanarrative reference to the difficulty of making sense of a complex
environment beyond the reach of the individual consciousness. An anachronism in the
metropolis, Bud walks about asking questions, activities emblematic of an earlier age of
personal transportation and empirical knowledge, which highlight his inability to deal
with modern urban characteristics such as job scarcity, workplace organization, and social
services. Rather than flânerie, the contemplative approach to the city lauded by Walter
Benjamin and Michel de Certeau, Bud’s experience is bewilderment.
[9] His futile search ends in his fatal plunge into the East
River from the Brooklyn Bridge, an important symbol of modernity which had joined the
cities of New York and Brooklyn in 1883 [
Dos Passos 1953, 125].
Manhattan Transfer addresses this problem directly,
mimicking the social complexity and fragmentation of the city to expose the confusion and
failure of individual consciousness. Like Bud, readers wander through Dos Passos’s
metropolis, struggling to keep track of events, particularly in the first section of the
novel where the narrative follows eight named characters from different social registers,
as well as several minor characters. Reinforcing this effect, the narrative jumps from
third person exterior description to stream-of-consciousness impressions. Moreover, the
character narratives are interrupted by both imagistic passages at the beginnings of
chapters and cultural artifacts like headlines and bits of popular song. When, in a review
for the New York Times, a frustrated Henry Longan Stewart complained that the novel was
simply a recording device with “vestige of plot”, he missed the point in assuming that the city was simply
available to traditional plotting methods, a strategy that reduced its social and
textual complexity [
Maine 1988, 65].
The formal innovations of Dos Passos’s text enabled the rendering of the city’s
complexity and energy, fracturing conventional expectations to generate a heightened
awareness of the problems involved in making sense of the city. Yet they also held forth
the promise of a critical epistemology, a means of understanding relationships among urban
phenomena. Though the novel’s form replicated metropolitan confusion, William Brevda
contends that Dos Passos insisted on art’s “critical
transcendence,”
[
Brevda 1996, 100] which Brevda defines
as the artwork’s “capacity to be the center at once both inside
and outside of structure”
[
Brevda 1996, 100]. In other words, as Mikhail Bakhtin
suggested, the novel has the structural capacity to stage multiple discourses and
subjective perceptions against one another as one of its defining structural elements,
allowing it to both mimic and expose [
Bakhtin 1981, 6–7].
[10] While the metropolitan “center of
things” seemingly lay outside the grasp of either subjective or unified
narrative, the possibility remained that a narrative structure deploying many
consciousnesses and discourses simultaneously could establish hierarchies among them. This
quality would in turn allow the reader to distinguish among subjective discourses, to move
from parataxis to hypotaxis, from observation to understanding. Ideally, the collective
novel could bridge the gap between experience and truth, fulfilling Jameson’s call for
“cognitive mapping”
[
Jameson 1988]
by rendering complex interactions visible across unbridgeable social divides and
epistemological uncertainties.
Manhattan Transfer’s structure
indeed helps to make the metropolis intelligible to readers by narratively connecting a
wide range of urban elements and interactions, but it repeatedly stresses social
disconnection and alienation.
Bud’s death provides the blueprint of a key motif, the spectacular catastrophe, which
highlights further disjunctions between experience and actuality, linking them to
metropolitan mass culture. Before his plunge, Bud finds himself first entranced by the
East River into a reverie and then blinded and disoriented by the sunrise off the
skyscrapers. As Bud falls, he is incorporated into the urban spectacle; the viewpoint
shift to a tugboat captain who watches the fall literally makes Bud’s catastrophe one the
sights of the city. The spectacular catastrophe links two dominant modes of understanding
the modern metropolis while highlighting disjunctions among actual responsibility,
perceived responsibility, and outcome. Guy Debord’s influential formulation of the
spectacle echoes the epistemological problem identified by Lukács and Jameson. A
manifestation of the material and textual plenitude of advanced capitalism, the spectacle
arises when the commodity fetish becomes generalized throughout social life, when
“all that was once directly lived has become mere
representation”
[
Debord 1994, 12]. Identifying the
spectacle as a product of mass culture, Debord argues:
Understood on its own terms, the spectacle proclaims the predominance
of appearances and asserts that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere
appearance. But any critique capable of apprehending the spectacle’s essential character
must expose it as a visible negation of life — and as a negation of life that has
invented a visual form for itself.
[Debord 1994, 14]
The shifting visual dynamic of the spectacle engenders desires and offers a framework of
interaction for urbanites. Yet it also disrupts the ability to form stable understandings
of causality and responsibility, including political responsibility.
A glance through late nineteenth and early twentieth century newspapers, which chronicled
the frequently disastrous meeting of the metropolis’s dense concentration of bodies and
the modern machinery of industry and transportation, shows catastrophe to be an equally
prominent topos.
[11] While, on one hand, the
catastrophe ended subjective involvement in the spectacle for its victims, on the other,
it incorporated their bodies into the spectacle, providing material for the media and
reinforcing the sense of change and unpredictability that Debord argues is essential to
life under the spectacle. One of the dominant motifs of the novel is fire with its often
indeterminate origins, its swift destructive power, and its spectacular coverage by the
media. Symbolically, a pyromaniac sets the novel’s first fire on the day after the 1898
unification of New York’s five boroughs in the section appropriately entitled “Metropolis.” Each of the four fires in
Manhattan Transfer occurs suddenly and with indeterminate or irrational
origins, reinforcing the indictment of the metropolis as an unjust environment.
In
Manhattan Transfer, spectacles, often connected to mass
culture, undermine the ability of subjects to perceive their environment accurately,
leaving them susceptible to catastrophic reversals. The clutter of subplots reinforce the
threat of sudden reversal, as illustrated in Phil Sandbourne’s brief narrative, which
draws a clear connection between desire, spectacular incorporation, and catastrophe.
Walking with a colleague, Phil falls into a discussion of the latest fashions and the
attractive women who wear them. Here, mass culture is juxtaposed with the body of a woman
— a common modernist linkage, and one that the novel utilizes often.
[12] As they cross the street at Fifth
Avenue, Phil notices a woman in a taxi and wanders into a fantasy in which he joins the
woman in the taxi on her unspoken invitation, only to find the material world reasserted
in the form of a truck that strikes him. Likely unaware of Phil’s gaze or even the
accident, the woman leaves. Phil’s thoughts, however, indicate that he is still caught in
the spell:
As they lift hi minto[sic] the ambulance Fifth Avenue
shrieks to throttling agony and bursts. He cranes his neck to see her, weakly, like a
terrapin on its back; didn’t my eyes snap steel traps on her? He finds himself
whimpering. She might have stayed to see if I was killed.
[Dos Passos 1953, 171]
Unable to distinguish fantasy from reality,
Phil mistakenly believes that the woman has an obligation to remain. Their relationship
is, like many other relationships in the book, a projection of one person’s misguided
desire rather than a shared experience. The pattern of sudden reversals continues in
several plotlines.
In Manhattan Transfer, spectacular culture is equally
detrimental to the possibility of stable political communities. Anna Cohen’s story
highlights one mode of social participation — self-definition through mass culture — that
conflicts with other ethnic and radical forms of community. As several commentators have
argued, Elaine Thatcher’s plot provides an example of limited agency and security gained at
the cost of participating fully in mass cultural self-objectification. Anna’s work in the
garment trades could easily highlight mass cultural production, offering an instructive
contrast in class and ethnic opportunity with Elaine. However, Dos Passos chose to focus
on the effects of mass culture rather than its production, a move that emphasized
manufactured disconnection.
Indeed, mass culture appears particularly destructive to class-based organizing. This is
a curious and telling portrayal since Dos Passos would soon be entering his most intense
engagement with communism.
[13]
Anna transposes the radical vision of justice that her labor organizer boyfriend Elmer
offers onto romantic understandings of the future defined in mass cultural images. Anna
daydreams of a future with the young radical, but waffles in her fantasies between a
future after the revolution in which Elmer is chosen as New York’s mayor and one in which
Elmer opens a store on the Lower East Side. Her vision of the post-revolutionary world is
particularly revealing as it mixes revolution with glamorous images from the movies.
Elmer in a telephone central in a dinnercoat, with eartabs,
tall as Valentino, strong as Doug [Anna’s favorite dancing partner]. The Revolution is
declared. The Red Guard is marching up Fifth Avenue. Anna in golden curls with a
little kitten under her arms leans with him out of the tallest window.
[Dos Passos 1953, 398]
Anna conflates one vision of community with
another, drawing together elements of Jewish urban life with an Anglo-oriented cinematic
fantasy in which Anna is blond and Elmer tall and dashing
Conflagration returns in this narrative, yielding yet another catastrophic and
misinterpreted spectacular incorporation. While Anna daydreams of seizing the means
of production, those material means, the scraps of cloth around her, catch fire and
severely disfigure her. While the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, which Anna’s predicament would
likely call to mind for most 1920s readers, tragically united the fate of a group of
working women and eventually helped forge sympathies that helped to build a stronger
social justice community, Anna’s tragedy is individualized and contained. Elaine, who has
witnessed the aftermath, limits the damage to the upscale boutique’s image by telling
other customers, “it was nothing, absolutely nothing”
[
Dos Passos 1953, 398].
Ultimately,
Manhattan Transfer depicts an environment where
the capacity for self-realization and community has been sapped, an indictment that Dos
Passos eventually transferred to the nation. The Manhattanites, stupefied by the spectacle
all around them, cannot seem to formulate clear thoughts or lasting relationships. The
only characters who profit from the urban environment are those who, like Elaine Thatcher,
exchange their independence for security, or those, like the bootlegger Congo Jake and Gus
McNiel, who gain power through corruption. Success and failure are both predicated on
incorporation into the spectacle. This leaves the possibility of social justice with
little chance in the metropolis. Walking out of the city jobless and homeless at the end
of the novel, the disillusioned journalist Jimmy Herf becomes the prototype for Vag, the
character whose incessant wandering would frame the narrative of the
U.S.A. trilogy and transfer the indictment of mass culture and political
failure to the nation [
Wagner 1979, 62].
[14]
It is tempting to read Jimmy’s self-exile as productive abandonment of a career and
environment in which his choices are constrained for one in which he will have more
autonomy. Yet Jimmy’s uncertain response to a query about his destination, “I dunno…pretty far,”
[
Dos Passos 1960] recalls the
threat figured in Bud’s narrative; Jimmy’s quest may lead to a ruinous pursuit of an
impossible aim [
Dos Passos 1960, 404]. The spectacular catastrophe returns
again and again in
U.S.A. as the metropolitan allegory
becomes
a national one, its questions of justice famously unresolved in the trilogy’s final image
of the separation between Vag’s perambulations and the airborne intercontinental traveler.
While Dos Passos was adapting the collective novel for more expansive territory, other
collective writers continued to explore the metropolis, finding similar elements of
disconnection.
Marx and Metropolis: The Urban Collective Novel in the Red Decade
The history of the collective novel following
Manhattan
Transfer shows both divergence from its urban focus and remarkable continuities
in the concerns with metropolitan culture and disconnection. Despite the urban origins,
few collective novels were written about the metropolis, writers preferring instead to
locate problems within classically Marxist narratives of struggle in primarily industrial
or agricultural milieus. To a certain extent, this may also reflect a general cultural
turn away from the metropolis in the 1930s toward the national problems presented by the
Depression, as well as the international rise of fascism. However, social historians have
argued that the city remained a vital entity, both politically and culturally during the
1930s.
[15] Besides Dos Passos’s
U.S.A. trilogy, a few novels — notably Herbst’s
Rope of
Gold (1939) and Rollins’s
The Shadow Before (1934)
both written by committed radicals — contained significant sections set in the metropolis.
Moreover Seaver’s
The Company (1930) and Halper’s
Union Square (1931) engaged with the metropolis at length. In all
of these novels, the metropolis exerts a negative force on characters’ lives and their
understanding of political community.
In The Shadow Before, New York is where the bosses live,
extending control over mill towns in the hinterlands where the novel is set. The primary
urban figure in the text is Harry Baumann, the son of one of the bosses, who grows up
among the city’s social elite, but feels alienated among them. This disjunction turns him
into a sociopathic figure, obsessed with criminality and sadism as a means of enacting his
rebellion. Only when he sides with the strikers at his father’s textile mill does he seem
to be able to turn his energy to useful purpose. However, even there, his background seems
to corrupt his understanding. Baumann steals the keys to his father’s mill, potentially
enabling a sit-down strike, but instead he nihilistically sets out to burn the mill and
kills himself when he is about to be caught.
The city has similarly deleterious effects on both community and creativity in Rope of Gold. Herbst’s communist journalist Victoria Chance is
separated from her husband by her need to find work in New York. This separation proves
disastrous to their relationship, but the city seems to emanate a more insidious influence
over politics. In the following scene Victoria describes the bohemian atmosphere of the
city:
Time went very fast. Before you could turn around, the week was over,
then the fortnight. She would never thrive in a city; she was a woman for the country as
her people before her. Esther had a great deal of company and the arguments and
discussions were endless. People who had never before thought of communism argued
incessantly. Many of Esther’s friends talked of the revolution as if it were, like
prosperity in the Hoover era, just around the corner. Victoria sniffed at them often
enough and at what she called “Marx, fifth-hand,” and she
said a revolution was never fought by “paper revolutionaries”
with a feeling of pride that, though she herself might be working at a job in the city,
Jonathan was actually putting his hand to the plow, for better or for worse.
[Herbst 1939, 165]
This passage repeats Malcolm Cowley’s 1934 indictment in Exile’s
Return of Greenwich Village bohemianism as the unconscious promotion of a
market-oriented individualism, but shifts the target to fashionable urban radicalism. The book reinforces Victoria’s dismissal of bohemians when
it shows how Lester Tolman, the leftist journalist with whom she works, is distracted from
his writing by alcoholism and an affair with an actress. Ultimately, Victoria, like Jimmy
Herf, must leave the city in order to find a radicalism untainted by bohemianism.
As its title suggests, Seaver’s
The Company offers an
alternative organizing principle, while still yoking mass culture and the metropolis.
Resembling a 1930s literary prequel to the TV series
Mad Men,
the novel focuses on the copywriters of the Universal Illuminating Company. The city is
everywhere present in the novel, in commutes and lunchtime walks, as well as in the
attitudes of the main characters. Like
Manhattan Transfer,
The Company linked mass culture to the decline of
authority. At one point, an unnamed first-person narrator celebrates the departure of a
Jewish copywriter named Aarons from the firm, whose cynical self-deprecation — “When you’re a harlot, you have to know how, eh boys?”
[
Seaver 1930] — leads to demoralization among the other writers, who want to
believe in their commercial work, “to write inspirationally the
way the boss wanted us to”
[
Seaver 1930, 149]. The final realization of one of the
copywriters is that his life has been essentially unproductive: “Advertising didn’t make electricity any more than the smoke drooling all day from the
mouths of the chimneys. Fifteen years of scribbling meaningless words, an epitaph of
smoke.”
[
Seaver 1930, 206].
The novel goes beyond personal alienation to show the disorganizing effect mass media can
have on politics. In one scene, another copywriter, Mr. Nash, passes a demonstration of
“Reds”
[
Seaver 1930, 112]. Written in a way that exposes the limits of Mr. Nash's understanding, the novel shows how newspapers backing a company sponsored union have prejudiced him against the communists' message. The text seems to sympathize with the communists, as it does
with Aarons, who is marked out as one of them later. However, the crowd shares Mr. Nash’s
limits, and the demonstration quickly devolves into a melee. Far less subtly than Dos
Passos, Seaver suggested that metropolitan mass culture capably set consciousness in
patterns that frustrated attempts to organize.
“Manhattanized Communism”: Albert Halper’s Union Square
Despite the persistently negative image of the city and mass culture in 1930s collective
novels, few writers grappled with manufactured desire and co-optation to the extent that
Dos Passos had done in
Manhattan Transfer. However, the
concerns with social divisions, image proliferation, and market imperatives all return
clearly in Halper’s
Union Square, written in 1931 when the
proletarian literary movement was gaining momentum. This novel bears careful attention
both because of its literary merit and its direct, metropolitan critique of proletarian
literature. Despite the complexity of his form and his steady literary output throughout
the 1930s, Halper has received too little attention from critics interested in the textual
archaeology of that decade.
[16] In
criticism, Halper emerges as either an urban proletarian novelist or an individualistic
objector, but a survey of his politics and literary output suggests a complicated
engagement with proletarian culture. Halper’s associations and stories in the 1930s do
indicate a left-leaning radicalism. However, like Dos Passos, he prized detached
criticism, and his political views were tempered by commitment to his writing. In the
collective novel, he found a way to voice his concerns.
Union
Square offers a critique aimed at the intersection of radical cultural politics,
commitment, and advanced capitalism.
Union Square draws the
early concerns of the collective form — mass culture, social division, and alienation —
into dialogue with proletarian literature, showing how radical cultural and political aims
are undercut by a metropolitan consumer culture.
Halper’s account of
Union Square’s origins suggests the
productive confluence of his lifelong urban experience and a fresh engagement with New
York’s radical scene and spectacular street life. Publishers had rebuffed Halper’s first
two novel attempts, manuscripts that focused on the lives of immigrants in his native
Chicago. While he was able to support himself by selling essays and stories to the
left-leaning
Menorah Journal, he could not generate the idea
for a new novel. Halper moved to a room near Union Square in 1930 after spending several
months in a loft in the Bronx. His new neighborhood was in fact a meeting place of a
number of neighborhoods. Located at the northern edges of bohemian Greenwich Village and
the Lower East Side,
Union Square also abutted affluent
neighborhoods around Gramercy Park, Stuyvesant Square, and Astor Place. By the 1930s, the
square had earned its reputation as the center of left-wing radicalism in the city because
of its proximity to the headquarters of the Communist Party and several labor unions.
Rallies for socialists and communists were held in the park frequently, speakers shouting
their messages from atop crates. As a symbol of social conflict, it was ideal. On one of
Halper’s frequent strolls, he noticed a man walking backwards using mirrored glasses as
his guide. The perilous navigation of the walker via fragmented reflections, a sort of
ambulatory version of Plato’s cave allegory, crystallized Halper’s observations about
urban life. Immediately, he began plotting and drafting the manuscript to
Union Square
[
Hart 1980, 48]. The manuscript was accepted and published quickly,
delayed only by its acceptance as the Literary Guild Book of the Month, which guaranteed
it a wider audience and critical response than many other radical novels
received.
[17]
While Halper nowhere nods to the influence of Manhattan
Transfer in his memoir, Union Square’s formal
similarities to the earlier novel include diverse and disconnected character plotlines and
resonating images. Though political radicals figure centrally, recognizable characters and
plots from popular urban novels and movies abound in the text. These serve as allusions to
other narratives of urban alienation, highlighting the broad failure of the urban
environment to provide meaningful lives and communities. Serving as a “sugar daddy” for a
younger woman, the wealthy Mr. Boardman is unhappy with both the volatility of his affair
and the tensions created by hiding it from his daughter. The immigrant Andre Franconi sees
his relationships with people back home dissolve. Gangsters compel a Hungarian restaurant
owner to sell alcohol, which leaves him subject to extortion by the police. The negative
trajectory of these plotlines is reinforced by repeated allusions to the fall of the Roman
empire and an emphasis on seasonal instability.
Union Square’s thematic concern with mass culture and
social alienation also echoes
Manhattan Transfer. The novel’s
engagement with a spectacular mass culture emerges most clearly in the plotline of Celia,
a young woman infatuated with the communist artist Leon Fisher. The novel links Celia’s
failure to win over Leon to the urban consumer culture and its standards of beauty,
suggesting a source of frustrated aims. A cracked tooth prevents Celia from smiling, and
she believes this blemish keeps Leon from noticing her. Ironically, Leon’s attraction to
Celia is based in the artistic qualities that her imperfections generate. During a quarrel
Leon’s bitterness with Celia is mollified by the interesting quality of her “sweet, frozen
smile” that hides the gap where her tooth was removed [
Halper 1933, 309]. Earlier, when Leon paints Celia, she attempts to smile, but he specifically asks her
to refrain. “Then, hurt, she gave up and stared hopelessly before
her, the joy of posing gone, the loneliness of her young life flowing from her eyes.
In a flash Leon began squeezing paint from tubes and started painting
furiously”
[
Halper 1933, 59]. Because she avoided
smiling to hide her tooth, her face evokes a sense of loneliness — simultaneously personal
and, in the Depression, historical — which Leon tries to capture.
In her attempt to correct the tooth, Celia is faced with the particularly urban dilemma
of a proliferation of choices, abetted by mass media technology, with a dearth of reliable
guidance. “Every evening she read the dental advertisements,
leaning over the sheets, wondering what dental parlor did the best work at the lowest
price”
[
Halper 1933, 120]. Overwhelmed by these choices, she finally
decides to go to a dentist whose quality and value are promised on a flashy sign,
“a big, gilt sign with two strong electric bulbs glaring
toward the print: ‘Painless Dentist, First-Class Work, Lowest Rates, Plates and
Crowns, also Gas Administered”
[
Halper 1933, 255].
Celia’s choice and its result show how the advertising spectacle obscures the actuality of
the promised good. The doctor will not give Celia a “first-class
job” for less than twenty-five dollars, but comes up with an inferior solution
that is just barely within her ability to pay [
Halper 1933, 255]. This
bait and switch undercuts the promise of the sign. At the end of the novel, Celia is
pleased by the results of the dental work, the “flashing smile”
that echoes the dentist’s beckoning sign [
Halper 1933, 376]. However,
the novel has already deterred this reading of mass cultural fulfillment by denying the
object of her transformation.
As Halper’s novel revisits these concerns in the Depression metropolis, it offers more
direct commentary on communism than
Manhattan Transfer, or
even
USA. It even parodies other proletarian novels,
undercutting their claims and enabling a critique of the proletarian cultural scene. In
Union Square the question of commitment — the degree to
which individuals subordinate their individual and class interests to those of the
proletariat (as defined by the Communist Party) — emerges in several plotlines.
[18] In each, the novel suggests that commitment is either thinly held or
motivated by desires that render social justice a secondary concern. Positioned to attract
the sympathies of readers, Leon could offer healthy model of political participation, his
commitment and passion reinforcing the justness of communist aims. His willingness to help
other characters like Celia, Jason Wheeler, and Comrade Helen displays generosity and
devotion. In the middle of the Depression he abandons a secure job to work as a
propagandist making posters for the Communist Party. His commitment makes him an ideal
fellow traveler whose art directly serves revolutionary aims. In a conventional
proletarian novel, Leon might well be rewarded for his political virtue or martyred
heroically. The novel undermines these expectations showing how Leon’s gentle nature and
selflessness become liabilities in the city.
Leon’s desire for Helen channels his virtues into a mechanism of denial and servility,
invisible to Leon, but openly displayed to the reader in its associations with mass
culture. Helen is a dual figure identified with mass culture, much like Brigitte Helm in
Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis, who appeared as both the saintly
reformer Maria and her lascivious robotic doppelganger. Leon imagines Helen as the pure
heroine of a political melodrama. By contrast, Jason, who often points out Leon’s naiveté,
sees her as a very different cinematic character: highly sexualized, “a big, hot baby” who takes advantage of Leon’s idealizing vision to gratify
herself [
Halper 1933, 203]. Leon’s innocence throughout the affair
suggests his incompatibility with urban moral codes, a dangerous susceptibility that was a
popular theme of 1930s cinema.
[19] When he helps out
with the cleaning at Helen’s apartment, a seemingly selfless activity that echoes his
devotion to the communists, the text emphasizes the servility of his actions. Leon’s
blindness is shown as an inability to face an unwanted reality that has negative effects
on his behavior and casts doubt on his political commitment.
In Union Square, market demands subvert proletarian culture
and complicate the question of commitment by influencing artistic production and
valuation. Jason’s plot explores this problem by linking propaganda and pornography. A
highly cynical writer whose work at one time was seen as promising in proletarian literary
circles, Jason, like Manhattan Transfer’s Jimmy Herf, faces a
choice between making a living and making art. Jason, however, chooses the former, and he
ends up freelancing pornographic stories, which ironically often fail to sell. Jason
taunts Leon through sardonic monologues about the formal qualities and craftsmanship of
these stories. His jibes are meant to force Leon to confront the question of the
relationship between his art and propaganda, insinuating that Leon has undercut his
artistic potential by subordinating his art to political aims.
This pairing of propaganda and pornography suggests a common ground in market forces, a
link made explicit in a scene in which Jason’s cynicism suddenly erupts into pointed
literary critique. In a crucial scene at a party at “the Kremlin”, a
tenement which houses many proletarian artists and writers, Jason voices criticism of
another poet’s work, triggering condemnation and calls for clarification by the other
writers. Turning the proletarian writing’s prophetic didacticism against itself, Jason
monologues on the failures of proletarian literature. Voicing Leon Trotsky’s criticism of
proletarian culture, Jason suggests that no such culture will emerge without a proletarian
revolution, and contends that no first-rate writers have yet emerged from the workers’
ranks.
[20] He
contends that most writers have little experience with working-class life, and therefore
cannot illuminate those conditions in any useful way. Moreover, Jason charges, they have
aggrandized their role within class struggle by suggesting that their work creates
class-consciousness even when they do nothing further to aid workers. To this point
Jason’s concerns about proletarian literature echo critiques from within communist
critical circles.
Jason’s most developed critique, however, reveals the intertwined logic of the cultural
marketplace and urban arts communities. Foreshadowed in the novel by the misreadings of
films from the Soviet Union that idealize its culture and political system — the
characters who gain their understanding of the Soviet way of life from the movies are not
workers, but the police and the Drollingers, a bohemian couple who nostalgically yearn for
Russia’s imperial past — Jason asserts that the proletarian cultural movement is a vogue,
subject to the demands of the urban literary marketplace more than the needs of the
communists or the proletariat. Many of the writers he attacks are amateurs who have
attached themselves to a popular movement because of its publicity instead of developing
their own work. Jason equates them with the bohemians of the previous generation:
You’re all bohemians! Fifteen or twenty years ago you would,
if you had been born earlier, been[sic] living in Greenwich Village, fighting for the
‘new freedom,’ free love, and all that sort of stuff. But what’s happened, comrades?
Why the bourgeoisie has stolen your ancient thunder; every shopgirl, every
fifteen-dollars-a-week clerk believes in free love and freedom now.
[Halper 1933, 287]
While Cowley suggested that radicalized writers rejected bohemian affectations, Jason
reveals a common bond between these groups: the marketability of rebellion. In his view,
these writers work to establish marketable identities rather than concentrating on
artistic development. In consequence, the proletarian cultural scene supports and even
encourages second-rate work. Only by developing their specialized skills as artists rather
than acclaiming themselves “proletarians,” Jason argues, can
they be of any use to workers. Arguing that true proletarian writers will need to emerge
from a “background other than Manhattanized
communism,”
[
Halper 1933, 293] Jason suggests that
urban social demands have co-opted the already narrow possibility of building a more
equitable society [
Halper 1933, 293].
The novel advances the account of market dynamics in a scene which references the 1931
writers’ committee to investigate and publicize conditions among striking Harlan County,
West Virginia coal miners, which was led by Theodor Dreiser and featured Dos Passos. In
the novel, the writers on the committee believe they will provide the essential compelling
testimony, which is, after all, why they were sent. But it is the entertainment provided
by the Appalachian folk band and the speech of a young organizer from Kentucky that excite
the audience. Here, authentic experience appears to drive the audience’s response, yet the
narrative questions whether the audience is motivated by recognition of the value of
working class experience and culture, or the
effect of authenticity, the
cultural capital that the “genuine stuff, workers beaten down
into the ground, silent, plucking their instruments — men starved and gaunt with
toil”
[
Halper 1933, 274] lends the event and by
extension its audience [
Halper 1933, 274].
In summary,
Union Square effectively questions the
sophistication of communist cultural politics. It exposes the complexity of market
dynamics that undercut the potential usefulness of proletarian literature, both as
propaganda and as art. The novel casts doubt on the commitment of writers to radical
politics by identifying the marketability of radical identity. The novel’s depiction of
the climactic march draws on negative understandings of urban crowds to create a
disturbing figurative dissolution of identity in the political mass. Halper portrays the
march as “a dark, advancing shadow against the flat grey of the
street below”
[
Halper 1933, 327]. Halper notes the presence of women and
African-Americans among the marchers, and through the growing collective voices suggests
the solidification of a community. Silent initially, as the marchers near
Union Square they become more assertive, “the roar of their united voices struck the waiting crowds like the sound of pounding
seas.”
[
Halper 1933]. This image, which could be read as
either hopeful or tragic, is temporary, replaced by a far more ambivalent mob scene in
which identities dissolve. The march decays into a melee as the police deploy
agents
provocateurs, who succeed in duping the communists into a disorganized and
dangerous mass. In this mass the distinction between intentional and apparent
participation dissolves. Struggling to escape the panic-stricken mob, while screaming
“I ain’t a Red, I’m an Amerikin!,”
[
Halper 1933, 354] Hank Austin, a worker with nativist views,
suffers a spine-crushing beating when the police mistake him for a violent protester [
Halper 1933, 354]. This erasure of his identity as an able-bodied worker
is followed by another: his life is rewritten “as a victim of the
bosses…of the whole capitalistic system”
[
Halper 1933, 365] by communists anxious to benefit their own cause [
Halper 1933, 365]. The narrative irony in this rewriting in no way eases the erasure. Halper
drew on understandings of the crowd as the dissolution of individual identity in order to
cast doubt on radicals’ promises of community.
[21]
In the final paragraphs of the novel, a skeptical rhetoric disorders the notion of
progress essential to communist teleology. The final scenes, in which the communists’
march is juxtaposed with a suicide and the fire that destroys Twenty Door City and kills
Mr. Boardman, are punctuated by the repeated phrase, “In this
world things move on apace.”
[
Halper 1933]
[22] Coupled with the march, this would initially seem to suggest the
inevitability of progress and reaffirm the communists’ vision of change. However, the
novel’s final verses undercut both the hopefulness of such a vision and its teleology:
In this world things move on apace. Life must go on. There
are children to be born, and some will cry out when their tender skin is cut. But
progress overleaps all barriers. Time does not stop, it moves. The tide comes in and
great waves roll toward the shore, and if there’re pebbles waiting, why the pebbles
are no more. For the future must be faced, no getting away from that, and if you
cannot keep apace, you’ll be sitting on your hat. Tramp, tramp, tramp, past Union
Square they’re clopping. A wooden beat on an iron street, and no telling when they’re
stopping.
[Halper 1933, 378]
The marching ends in an ominous tone, one that resonated in later decades as demagogic
politics derailed the effects of democratic movements. The facile rhyme and violent
imagery in this passage affirm the inevitability of progress, but strip it of positive
connotation, stressing destructive and unforeseeable consequences. Union Square casts doubt on the ability of the communists, or anyone else, to
direct progress, leaving little hope in the possibility of justice. At the end of the
novel, the square is returned to the scene of economic competition between pushcart
vendors that began the novel.
The Narrative Perils of Collection in Daniel
Fuchs’s Summer in Williamsburg
If the collective novel’s expansive focus could challenge the viability of political
community, why end the critique of coherence at that point? One final urban collective
novel of the 1930s deserves separate consideration, if only briefly, because its
self-aware critique of narrative form raises crucial problems for both the collective
novel and modern network narrative. Daniel Fuchs’s 1934 novel
Summer
in Williamsburg, which re-appropriated Halper’s hybridization of the Jewish
neighborhood novel and the collective form to focus on a Brooklyn ghetto, illustrates the
conflict between an increased capacity for collection and narrative coherence. Marcelline
Krafchick has accurately described its radical approach to complex narrative, showing how
the novel attempts and then deflates a collective approach to its object.
[23] In one crucial scene a suicide of
indeterminate cause prompts Philip Heyman to meditate on narrating urban complexity.
Countering the tendency to read his working-class neighborhood as a uniform “slum,” he recognizes its immense diversity, and, hoping to capture
it, recites the advice given by Old Miller, one of the elders of the ghetto: “If you would really discover the reason, you must pick Williamsburg to
pieces until you have them all spread out on your table before you, a dictionary of
Williamsburg.”
[
Fuchs 1961, 12]. In this vision, the
collective narrative becomes the collecting narrative, drawing as many elements as
possible into its frame.
Highlighting the stakes of this activity, Fuchs’s story showcases the effects of mass
culture, most often in the form of cinematic images that rewire desire, shaping the
attitudes and behavior of the characters. If Philip, and by extension Fuchs, cannot find a
way to represent Williamsburg, mass culture will provide the definitive narrative. Fuchs’s
depiction of the cinema as a force that has deeply and perniciously influenced the
thoughts, language, and behavior of the second generation makes this threat clear.
Although he makes fun of his friend’s infatuation with actresses, the young boy constantly renders his
own understanding of his relationship with a girl in images from romantic films. Throughout
the course of Philip’s relationship with Tessie, he sardonically notes her tendency to
construct an understanding of love out of the movies. The narrator reinforces Philip’s
observations, suggesting Tessie’s attempt to discover the “truth”
[
Fuchs 1961, 56] of her feelings is “clouded by the shadowy influence of the movies”
[
Fuchs 1961, 56] . Philip himself, however, is influenced by the movies, which inform
his gestures and thoughts. He notes this tendency, saying, “I’m a
dope, I fall in love with movie stars and there isn’t even a great emotion for Tessie
to turn down”
[
Fuchs 1961, 87]. When Tessie leaves him
for Schlausser, he has a brief reverie that recasts his pain in the imagery of cinema:
In his brown warm mental mist a machine gun began pumping bullets into
his heart, his face full of surprise at the unexpected attack. Ta ta ta, rra, traa, ta
ta ta. The belt of lead sluiced through the gun. Boomp, boomp, boomp. The bullets sank
into his flesh, each impact individually shaking his body. The movies.
[Fuchs 1961, 93]
While the behavior of the second generation approximates movie romances, the reality of
the relationships seldom measures up to their expectations. Nonetheless, the movies
provide solace for this dissatisfaction as well; after he walks from Williamsburg to
Clinton Hill and back while mulling his narrow existence, Philip feels “compelled to lose [his sadness] and his loneliness in the darkness of a
movie theater”
[
Fuchs 1961, 47].
While the idea of collection might provide an alternative to the scripted visions of the
cinema, the narrative begins to dissolve when Philip tests the ramifications of Old
Miller’s directive:
That means Mrs. Linck and her guinea pigs…my uncle Papravel, and my
father, Mahler, and even Old Miller himself. It means my lovely friend Cohen and his
pimples. A million things. That means the raw metallic tunes of a player-piano that come
out of a window and paint the buildings with drabness; it means the horse rippling the
skin of his rump; that couple, fat and perspiring, in holiday clothes with bathing-suit
bags at their sides, drinking vanilla soda water at the candy stand.
[Fuchs 1961, 13]
As the list approaches absurdity in its grotesque detail the reader begins to see the
pitfalls of the strategy: the more information is available, the more difficult it becomes
to parse it for meaningful connections. Though Summer in
Williamsburg’s form upholds Philip’s vision, the collective novel essentially
becoming the collecting novel, the skeptical metanarrative returns at several points to
reaffirm this paradox. As the narrative expands, it increasingly comes to look like a
congeries, a disconnected collection held together only by the conceptual framework of the
neighborhood. Ultimately, the novel fails to resolve this tension. Philip eventually
recognizes selection as crucial to narrative, but still hopes to incorporate the full
range of impressions he has gathered. Critics often recognize the apparent futility of
Philip’s endeavor, but the novel leaves the reader with the dilemma of condemning all such
expansive narrative efforts or recognizing discordant excess as an essential part of complex
narrative.
Fuchs answered this dilemma personally by abandoning metanarrative fiction for
screenwriting. In a short reminiscence in Commentary,
provocatively entitled “Strictly Movie,” he resolved the mass
culture/critical culture antipathies of Summer in Williamsburg, He recalled the influence
of the vaudeville and cinema shows of his youth at the Republic Theater on Grand Street
while suggesting that the art of storytelling for film required an understanding of
fragmented, episodic narrative like his novels. Fuchs largely abandoned long form fiction
after the 1930s, turning to work in the industry which had served as the narrative
competition for his first novel. While this resolution seemed to eliminate the
self-critical possibilities embodied in his fiction, Fuchs’s most famous screenplay, for
the 1949 film noir thriller Criss Cross,
foregrounded problems of individual and epistemological disconnection.
Conclusion: Narratives of Disconnection
The urban collective novel provides an important modernist precedent for both the
existence and the interpretation of present day network narratives. Rather than viewing
these novels as an attempt to forge or identify points of connection, they may be better
viewed as attempts to map disconnection. Emerging alongside the proletarian collective
novel, and often overlapping with it, the urban collective novel was an excellent
instrument for representing both urban alienation and the failure of political community.
Their authors’ attempts to use the metropolis as a platform for exploring social
disconnection illustrated the spatial power of the narrative, its ability to explore
multilayered social environments and the proliferation of images in those environments.
The writers skillfully pointed out the contradictions of an environment that promised
opportunity yet simultaneously militated against it, suggesting that these conflicting
drives undermined both individuals and the bonds of community between individuals. This,
ultimately, is the legacy of the urban collective novel: its power to trace the production
and circulation of disconnection, the focus on the preemptive and co-optive adaptations
that maintain the investment of individuals in damaging economic and social practices.
Ironically, even while they condemned its effects, they often identified in mass culture a
social order that citizens often found more appealing than the visions of a communist
future advanced in proletarian literature. As Halper’s and Fuchs’s novels showed, the
market itself seemed to provide a narrative logic, one that worked through multiplicity
while generating desire.
In arguing that these fellow travelers wallowed about in despair of answers, Hicks and
other communist critics who praised the formal character of Dos Passos’s and Halper’s
collective novels while hoping the writers would find their way to a more sanguine view of
communism accurately described the novels’ pessimistic stances but neglected both the full
thrust of their critiques and the tensions shaping the novels’ form. The novels’ final
images —
Manhattan Transfer’s self-exile,
USA’s final split,
Union Square’s
brutal march,
The Company’s vision of smoke — offered little
hope of any sort of politics of connection. Even the politically committed Rollins left
his reader with a young mother-to-be, radicalized but unemployed, deserted by her lovers
and hunting a husband as an instrumental father to her baby.
[24] As the title of Iñárritu’s
Babel suggests, cinematic network narratives today emerge out of a
similar crisis of experience as the one that first defined naturalism and then the
collective novel, and these films have been just as notable for their negative stance,
their eschewal of hopeful resolutions, as their modernist predecessors. Though critics
today, with the absence of a robust communist politics and the rise of modernist
aesthetics, are unlikely to judge this a failure of ideology, they will have to reckon
with the intensely critical and negative elements of these narratives, their refusal of
the network as emancipatory community. It may well be significant that these critical
forms have developed in media with anachronistic, even declining, relationships to
emerging mass media networks. The novel is, of course, not a radio play or a newsreel, nor
is the network film a Twitter feed.
[25] While digital narrative projects today largely seem to
embrace the connective possibilities of the network, it is likely that ambitious narrative
forms will develop that resurrect the epistemological critique levied by the
collective novel.
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