How is experience, both the biographically ‘real’ and the fictive, mediated by modernist narration? How is a reader thereby granted access to the experience of an author and/or protagonist? This position paper seeks to link two key terms of the semester, “experience” and “access,” as I retrace our path through select primary texts that we read together. While maintaining my own generalizing narrative distance, I intend to touch down on key moments—the train metaphor in The Ambassadors, the porch scenes in Their Eyes, the meta-confessional prefacing in Le Sueur’s “Marching”—to examine how modernist narrative practices (namely, a push-pull dynamic between distance and proximity) figure the concepts of experience and access. This paper will attempt to enact a collective position for the class, making liberal use of my peers’ blog posts over the course of the semester in an attempt to integrate my theme into my practice.

Langston Hughes’ work is canonized as representative of Black experience, or at least Black writing, in mid-twentieth century America. Like other stories in The Ways of White Folks his short story, “Berry,” is overtly about racial injustice—in it a Black employee is treated unfairly by a white employer—but in structure and content Hughes generates an argument that shakes the epistemological core of white supremacy, a thought system that relies on classificatory orderings. Using shifting perspectives, readerly complicity, and thematic elements (including disability), Hughes’ concerns are revealed to be not just identitarian, but a complex and networked strategy of sabotage aimed at compromising received notions of classification. “Berry” is not (simply) a sociological or anthropological documentation of Black life, but a defiant and subversive resistance to the rendering of Harlem Renaissance writing as projects of representation of difference.

Although the Harlem Renaissance directly connotes an association with a specific geographical location, it allows opportunity for exploring the relationship of race to territorially linked citizenship. What are the ways to write Black American experience? Are broad divisions such as the rural and the urban or the North and the South adequate? A selection of texts by W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alain Locke offer a range of spatially situated experiences of racial national identity that are often overlapping, intersecting, and contradictory. This paper explores the multiple vocabularies of African American writing that reveal strands of transnational universalism, regionally situated local experience, and other-worldly or alternative geographical imaginations. The paper therefore explores the significance of spatiality to race writing: it asks whether such an approach leads us towards a provincialization of African American writing and how it complicates recovery efforts.

This paper will examine how Eric Walrond’s “The Palm Porch” breaks the frame of The New Negro anthology and implicates its reader in the potential violence of reading literature as documentation of the marginalized masses. With the relentless onslaught of modernity—specifically, the scar of the Panama canal—social divisions along racial and regional lines dig into communities so deeply as to prohibit almost all communication both across and within group identities. In “The Palm Porch,” violence is the end of the individual in Walrond’s corporeal masses, either as victim or agent, and it is only in the deadly moment that real communal clarity arises. Furthermore, Walrond’s complex, shifting prose demands an interpretive mode that incorporates the reader into the communal clarity of murder, suggesting that reading for representation, interpreting texts to match them to a nonfictional analogue, is a move of violence, although not without its deadly efficacy.

This paper examines the paradoxical relationship established between modernist text and reader when the narrative withholds information at the same time as it expects the reader to know what it is that has been suppressed. Just as social games/silences are modelled within the text—as in Faulker’s The Sound in the Fury when characters are unable or refuse to communicate—they are also imposed upon the reader. In this way, Barnes’ Nightwood employs rich language that reveals almost no information and Moore’s “Shambleau” explicitly and repeatedly omits Smith’s profession. In demonstrating how characters account for narrative elision, these texts interpolate an active reader to likewise respond to and fill in gaps accordingly. In building an exchange between cagey text and assuming reader, the modernist narrative creates a collective experience of meaning-making that deprivileges the hegemony of the author just as it elevates the role of the reader.

My paper will explore anxieties over interpersonal possession in modernist texts by tracing the complicated metaphor of intimate distance in James’ The Ambassadors, Loos’ Gentleman Prefer Blondes, and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. James defines interpersonal relations as a social game, the point of which is to prolong play. Loos takes James’ flirtation and turns it into seduction, arguing that the point of the social game is to win. Whereas in James distance/deferral is a way to engage in relation while avoiding complete possession, in Loos it becomes a form of manipulation through which to possess another. Finally, Hurston’s more ambivalent approach to possession simultaneously argues that total possession is impossible and inevitable, while also suggesting that some forms of submission/possession may be pleasurable. Through these texts, I aim to grapple with the central modernist tension of autonomy versus commitment as it is grafted upon intimate bodies.

My essay explores the significance of “selling out” across three categories of recognition for printed texts: commercial popularity, institutional prestige, and academic survival. Working comparatively across secondary material on contexts for the production and reception for specific printed texts in the early twentieth century, I suggest that selling out is a useful framework for classifying the changes in status that a writer undergoes as their work circulates. My point in singling out the act of selling out is to highlight the changes in writerly status necessary to achieve a level of sustainable financial success within what Carl Kaestle and Janice Radway characterize as an explosion of printed material from 1880-1940 that established a determinate “culture of print” in the United States. In sum, I call for further attention to the issues of exemplarity that adhere to writers and intersect with the communities that make writers and that writers break. 

Why are we not to know what Smith is up to? “His business there does not concern us,” the narrator of “Shambleau” assures the reader (14). Later, the narrator reminds us once more that, though “he passed the day quite profitably,” what those profits are “do not concern us now” (18). What we do know, from the narrative preceding this moment, is that whatever Smith is doing involves some sort of knowledge of “the latest” (18). While we too learn the details of the latest joke, the latest report, the latest song, it is meaningless knowledge to us, as it applies to unfamiliar subjects, rather than the immediately familiar Smith, whose personhood and purpose remain abstruse.

Dovetailing the privacy of Smith is the privacy of the “Shambleau,” whose mystery elicits an almost-colonial impetus within Smith to know. Before inviting her to accompany him, he judges her fit (and submissive enough) for his fascination: “Behind the animal shallows of her gaze was a shudder—a closed barrier that might at any moment open to reveal the very deeps of that dark knowledge he sensed there” (12). Whatever this “dark” knowledge is, Smith eventually accesses it at a great cost and ultimately strains to remember any of it (31-2). “You ought to thank your God you can’t [remember],” Yarol answers, arguing toward the necessary unknowability of the “Shambleau” (32). Nonetheless, the story ends with a noncommittal promise by Smith: he probably will not seek out this knowledge again.

What is “dark” knowledge? It reads as something marked by an otherness, held by someone unknowable and for the explorer to uncover. Yet it simultaneously eludes all possible definition: it exists pre-historically and escapes the comprehension of any historical subject. I pair Smith’s obsession with the knowledge that evades him with that which that evades us: why are we, the readers, not to know certain things? There is a deliberate withholding here by the narrator that moves beyond the hidden, yet revealed/read manuscript of “Cthulhu.” Is there a larger argument here towards what knowledge should be inaccessible to its readers? Are we to persist anyway?

I was intrigued by the references to reading and publication in H.P. Lovecraft’s stories that we read this week. Both narratives are framed as intimate accounts, bound by a code of confidentiality between the author and the reader. This is partly due to the sensitive nature of the information as well as the fundamental ways in which the horrific ‘secret’ infiltrates the familiar codes of shared life: revealing it would disrupt the consensus on what is permissible to be talked about and the knowledge that is held in common. Not only does Professor Angell’s grand-nephew hope that his discoveries will not be known after his death, even as he would ‘never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain’ (167) during his lifetime, he too had unfortunately chanced upon the professor’s notes after his sudden death.

The reader is thus drawn into a sequential and intimate network of confidences and layers of knowing. Moreover, this intricate web is made more complex by the references to the contemporary publishing culture. Malone, for instance, cannot publish his notorious tale in the Dublin Review and none of the writers of New York he is in contact with believe that anything remotely curious can be written about the city. It is a crafted narrative, certainly, but one that is remarkably unique because it cannot (and should not) be found anywhere in the known contemporary sites.

This seems to suggest that Lovecraft and his presumed readers were engaging with the culturally valuable category of ‘literature’, even if tangentially, as John Rieder approaches the term. He writes that the relations between commercial publishing and academia in the early twentieth century resulted in a master genre of literature that was distinguished by tasteful discernment, with different kinds of literary production being defined according to their distance or relationship to this category (39) and forms the basis of his historical reading of genre. A major theme of Lovecraft’s stories seem to be their mediations between different modes of knowing—based on Rieder’s insights, do they qualify to be literature? What qualifies some genre fiction readers as possessing literary sophistication?

If decidedly un-modernist in style, Lovecraft’s stories are nevertheless anxiously preoccupied with modernity itself. [A note on style: I’m just going to go ahead and say it’s also pretty lousy. No one needs that many adjectives!!] Modernity and progress are in these two stories under threat by primitive, racially other, and chthonic forces. The precarity of modernity here seems deeply indebted to Freudian thinking about primitive unconscious urges (see, in “Call of Cthulhu”: the ocean/oceanic feeling as the hiding place of dark forces, and, more prosaically, the use of dream-analysis as plot device). It is also clearly indebted to racism, eugenics, and anti-miscegenation.

Perhaps it’s because of these debts that there’s a baffling disjuncture between the mind-altering fear experienced by the characters of these stories, and the complete lack of affect they had on me. Or perhaps it’s because it is no longer true for readers today that any threat to modernity is inherently terrifying. In “Call of Cthulhu,” the narrator first introduces us to the sculptor’s bas-relief by saying that it was “obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern.” (169) The style of these two sentences is that of the frightening reveal: in this story being “far from modern” alone is meant to strike the fear of death in us.

So is having to retreat from scientific thinking. Midway through the story, the narrator recounts in retrospect: “My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were.” (186) Here too the style of the sentence is telling the reader: this is scary! What’s meant to be frightening here is that “materialism” is being rendered in the past tense. It suggests that the narrative present is one of regression from modern thought. Both these stories are in fact deeply anti-progressive. Their narratives contradict the modern conception of history as forward-moving, a principle of history that is also Christian, if not more generally Abrahamic—we are all, fingers crossed, moving toward an ultimate ascent. By contrast, as the narrator of “Call of Cthulhu” marks his own ending: “Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.” (196)

Between “a mouth and a chin that seemed shaped for gossiping” (Collinson 34) and “little sharp predatory teeth” (Chandler 5), the texts for this week are full of “readable” exteriors. The readable “type” was a preoccupation of ours when discussing Crane. These texts are also interested in “readability,” as a new version of the distanced narrator (the hard-boiled detective) engages in acts of distancing (the voice-over/reporter POV, the “I versus them” mentality, etc.) to better read, analyze, and “solve” a mystery. And, indeed, there are moments when exteriors and the detective’s ability to “read” through distance prove the best ways to solve a mystery. The knife-like women in The Big Sleep are (of course) villainous, and it is the physical description of Thornburgh that gives him away.

Nevertheless, there is also a persistent fear in these texts that things are not what they seem. This may be connected to the detective’s knowledge that he, too, is performing. Daly’s biographical background and Race Williams’ invocation of “the curtain goes up” remind us of the mystery’s theatricality (428, 431). Williams ultimately avoids detection by easily performing an external Klan identity. In The Big Sleep, Marlowe seems obsessed by the possibility that all of this is just a game. As Erin Smith points out, Chandler’s own essay on the genre revealed how identities were “increasingly constructed through performance” (42). The resulting concern: if detectives can construct their identities and fake distance, is the readability of the suspects also just performance.

To what extent are exteriors readable and/or performed in these texts, particularly considering the gendered/racial/national/class coding of the texts’ exterior “types”? This is, of course, related to Plotinus’s post, as the question of distance is a vital one. Does analytical distance allow one to read better? Or is even the distanced narrator always already implicated in the deception itself, and this very implication is what allows him to read it? To what extent can the questions of readability explored within the text be translated outside the text, to the ways in which writers construct identities and we read, analyze, and identify with them?

I was struck by the insistence on individual heroism in our readings this week. Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams succinctly sums up the attitude with his response to why he hasn’t joined the Klan: “Of course I’m like all Americans—a born joiner. It just comes to us like children playing; we want to be in on everything that’s secret and full of fancy names and trick grips. But it wouldn’t work with me; it would be mighty bad in my line…No, I like to play the game alone. And that’s why I ain’t never fallen for the lure of being a joiner” (430). Peter Collinson’s/Dashiell Hammett’s disaffected detective is more subtle in his isolation, as he seems happy to work for and with others, but his own understanding of evolving and mysterious circumstances remains inaccessible to everyone else. He alone has a grasp on the complex lies that have been spun by the suspects, and his refusal to share his revelations–for lack of time? to not hazard a guess that might be wrong? to preserve his tight-lipped image?–results in McClump killing a man for reasons beyond his ken, reasons only our hero knows (42). The detective is happy to explain eventually, but not until the action’s ended; when he runs out on the sheriff because “the pieces were beginning to fit together under my skull” (42), it seems that to admit anyone else into his cranial secrecy would shatter his grasp on the situation. Even with a partner at his side, the hero saves alone.

As the ironic ending of “Knights of the Open Palm” demonstrates, however, there is something to be said about joining up, even if it’s only a wisecrack. Erin Smith’s chapter highlights similar tensions between manly lone rangers and collective power in the pulp industry. Despite their writers eschewing the modernist type of the “lone artist/creator” (21), these authors still lionized the might (intellectual and physical) of the single American male. Smith also identifies a “good symbolic fit” between the “homologous” lives of pulp readers and writers (26), and notes the care that pulp magazines took to display their “union labels”—declaring belonging to a collective power (22). Simultaneously, pulp editorials decried the London Detection Club’s feminizing rules and regulations, and writers opted instead to “[break] these rules with adolescent abandon” (40), much like the hero who operates outside the law (Race Williams). This seems a serious tension between an aesthetic commitment to a male hero who depends on no one, and the need for the pulp publications to appeal to and make use of a distinct group, often quite consciously calling for solidarity. Is this lone ranger an impossible dream in the increasingly heterosocial modern culture? If so, does this literature acknowledge in any way that its survival in the public sphere depends on a recognized collective power, a community of “He-men”?

Continuing to think about this distinction between “accessible” and “easy,” I’ve added in the theme “slickness.” McGurl describes GPB as a “fairly rigorous narratological experiment in perspectival limitation” (107), a novel in which the kind of access that the reader is given is heavily mediated and constricted, including through what McGurl points out is Loo’s own (self and outward directed) misogyny. It’s left me considering the ways this novel, its author, and its characters are implicated in a discussion of access, how access might be misread as ease, and what the veneer of slickness does to it all. Is this an “easy read”? Does Lorelei have an “easy life”? How much modernist aesthetic practice is about limiting access, and does “slick fiction” achieve, subvert, or fail to produce those limitations?

On the page, this novel engages with questions of access, as David points to: access to financial security. Rather than characterizing Lorelei’s pursuit of valuable jewelry as “innocent avarice and guileless guile,” as McGurl does, I read a careful strategy for accumulating capital and security (in a system that wouldn’t allow women to take out credit cards in their own name for another 50 years). Lorelei, channeling Loos (or Loos channeling Lorelei) might have access to work in Hollywood and the social and financial stability that provides, but small, value-dense jewelry represents one of the only kinds of capital accumulation that (for centuries and across patriarchal cultures) women were able to claim. Cultural capital is another means of self-sustenance to which women have had some historical access, but a much less “easy” stream of wealth accumulation—McGurl characterizes Loos as borrowing Menken’s “cultural authority” (106). For Lorelei, education is a lower priority than securing material wealth (evidenced by her occasional neglect of her diary). This plays out too in Loos’ life—royalties lasted longer than readership.

I think GPB plays as slick a trick on readers as Lorelie plays on Broussard. We are persuaded by our narrator that we have full access to her (simple, easy) mental state, when she’s offered us paste diamonds and hidden the tiara in a safe.

The ending of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes takes on the issues of aestheticism and professionalization that we have been thinking about since the start of term. Lorelei leaves us at the close of the novel, spinning her diary toward closure: she says “good-bye” to the project of putting “down all [her] thoughts” in order to “make a book,” secure in the “feeling that, after all, everything always turns out for the best” (123). What exactly does this “best” look like for Lorelei, and why does her achievement of it necessitate her bringing the diary to a close? In her view, she is “so busy bringing sunshine into the life of Henry that . . . with everything else I seem to accomplish, it is all a girl had ought to try to do.” Obviously Lorelei elides much here, including her access to Henry’s finances, an access which allows her to work with Mr. Montrose “in the motion pictures” while participating in “society life with Henry” (117). As Mark McGurl notes, the novel is structured by “the series of predatory males who patronize [Lorelei]” for the sake of her education—this story is about the “about the acquisition of culture, an aesthetic education [. . .] the pursuit of intellectual improvement” (106-108). Put another way, Lorelei becomes a professional; I think it is crucial (beyond a necessity for the novel), that Lorelei caps her education by (1) writing a book and (2) achieving financial stability as she moves into the film industry. 

Lorelei isn’t publishing for money, but her status as recipient of patronage at least generates, and is at times even tied, to the fact of her writing. In my view, Lorelei has achieved aesthetic mastery by way of what is marked as a really bad diary-book: she has written a book and gotten paid to do it. Or perhaps just economic mastery—Lorelei skips the aesthetic part and goes straight to professionalization. A clunky final connection:  but what does this have to do with Loos’s positioning toward modernism? I’m thinking mostly here of money, education, and time. 

Michael Denning tells us that rather than searching for representative authors and titles in order to delineate proletarian writing, it would be more useful to focus on the energies of the proletarian movement more broadly. This helps him to present Meridel Le Sueur’s work as an example of proletarian literature, or more particularly, Le Sueur as a literary practitioner of ‘left-wing regionalism’ (220). Denning underscores the importance of regional American politics for Le Sueur in fashioning a literary aesthetic, including in continuing a tradition of Midwestern women’s writing.

The sub-category of the ‘regional’ was especially interesting as we have been approaching the question via different writers and texts through the semester. There has been a great amount of attention on the metropolitan centers of canonical modernism in influential scholarship on the field but, as we have discussed, a significant amount of literary production that we are engaging with in the seminar does away with the need to concentrate conversations of modernism on these specific urban centers.

However, it might be worthwhile to complicate the expansion of the geographical imagination of modernism. Some questions I am thinking of are: would it be productive to think of the Midwestern setting of Le Sueur’s stories as comparable to the view of southern American life that Zora Neale Hurston provides us? What is at stake, for instance, by collapsing the car journey through the rural Midwest in “O Prairie Girl, Be Lonely” with the journey through the ‘muck’ in Their Eyes Were Watching God or will identitarian concerns continue to mark the contours of the field and modify its definitions? Might it be possible to refocus the expatriate framing of modernist writing to work towards a means for understanding exilic or cosmopolitan sensibilities from within a national framework? Is the national merely a sum total of regional expressions? Denning writes that the matter of the legacy of proletarian writing is a vexed one as many of these texts were ‘recovered’ by later generations: does a widening of the geographical scope make modernism a cohesive category that only makes sense as seen through its sub-categories?

“Does one define proletarian literature by author, audience, subject matter, or political perspective? Is it literature by workers, for workers, or about workers?” (Denning, 201, emphases mine). These questions struck me as familiar to the identitarian concerns that dominate contemporary literature and scholarship; questions about how an author’s identity legitimizes or deligitimizes, provides an entrée or a barrier to objects of writing.

Le Sueur’s “I Was Marching” makes these questions explicit by performing its own status as a personal, non-fiction account of class mobilization. The piece opens with strong markers of truth-telling. Putting  “I” first–both in the title and the first sentence–shows that the narrator’s identity will be the source for the story’s narrative claims. By the third sentence, the narrator has confessed to her middle class origins–a confession that functions as a twofold authorization. First, the confession works as a traditional claim to the objectivity afforded to the outsider. Second, the confession works by laying bare the narrator’s culpability, and therefore counteracting the taboo which should operate against her account. Indeed the structure of the sentence enacts the reversal of this taboo. In the sentence starting with “If you come from the middle class,” the “as I do” is silent. The contortion of the seemingly confessional “I” comes again in “That is why it is hard for a person like myself and others to be in a strike”(158).

These formal moves are designed to draw attention to the epistemological battles at work in class warfare, in striking, and most of all in writing about class warfare and striking. “If you come from the middle class, words are likely to mean more than an event” opens the piece in order to set up an expectation that the story will provide a reversal. By the story’s end, the sentence “I was marching” seems to tell us that the reversal has happened (168). But of course, from the reader’s perspective–and the narrator’s confession of middle class origins seems intended to interpolate a middle class reader–words have been our only event.