6
Excluded Middles: Social Inequality in American Literature
“She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity?” These are the thoughts of Oedipa Maas, the protagonist in Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49 (150). Oedipa has spent most of the novel attempting to solve the riddle of the Tristero: does a huge conspiracy lie behind Western history, a battle between the empowered and the disempowered waged through competing systems of postal service? Is the nation’s underclass communicating through a secret mail system known as WASTE? Oedipa never knows for sure, but the question she confronts is profoundly significant to our understanding of the nation’s narrative encounter with the problem of social class. Have the horizontal equalizations of democracy, the constant shifts between diverse cultural groups and lifestyles, been ousted by a vertical and binary division of society into the powerful and the disinherited, with an excluded and uncertain middle class in between? This chapter offers a brief history of American narrative that not only confirms Oedipa’s fears but also suggests that the chances for diversity were perhaps never very good to begin with.
The influence of Marxist thought on critical analysis has helped to establish the importance of the novel to the emergence of bourgeois subjectivity in the United States. The historical romance and sentimental domestic fiction of the antebellum era, the realism and naturalism of the later nineteenth century, and the modernist tradition that emerges in the works of Henry James have all been convincingly positioned within developing middle-class attitudes and ideologies. Yet, as Leslie Fiedler famously observed, many of American literature’s central characters actively flee this “civilized” life. The horror of feminized domesticity or the attractions of interracial male intimacy may be motivations, as Fiedler suggests, though this urge to run also speaks to the curious instability of a bourgeois center that fails to hold. I uncover in the analysis that follows a persistent narrative interest in the extremes of social inequality, whereby the middle-class space is anything but coherent and secure. Awareness of this literature of the excluded middle tells a significant story about the formation of the United States as a nation of profound disequilibrium where those in the social middle are gripped by status anxiety and the fear of falling. My chapter also offers a history of literary development because this confrontation with the irony of social inequality amid political ideologies of equality disrupts the bourgeois realm in which the novel should be most at home, hence creating moments of ethical and formal shock that set narrative on surprising paths. From this excluded middle emerge formal experiments with first-person narrative in the antebellum romance, with plot in Gilded Age realism, with character in modernism, and with mediation in the literature of postmodernism. By the time we return to Pynchon, the problem is eerily the same – the problem of inequality – but the way of understanding it has shifted. Subjective responses to class difference and the threat it poses to the promise of democracy eventually give way to a more fundamental difficulty: accessing a condition of disadvantage that seems both permanent and structured into the primary modes of viewing the social world.
Working against exceptionalistic denials of class conflict in an American context and against powerful traditions of individualism, historians have charted the emergence of a socioeconomic idea of class relations in the United States. If we return to the origins of this class discourse, then we discover not only an inherent instability in definitions of class but also a predominant sense of binary opposition not between capitalists and workers but, more basically, between rich and poor. In Orestes Brownson’s essay “The Laboring Classes” (1840), for example, we glimpse a nation essentially bisected along lines of wealth and property, as Michael Burke has argued. One of the most powerful forces in US class discourse, as I have suggested elsewhere, was the growing awareness of the problem of poverty and what seemed like a permanently poor class. The idea of poverty meshed easily with the national tendency to moralize questions of social position and worth. Against the familiar history of the rise of middle-class forms of identity and consciousness, we discover a class discourse that is curiously obsessed with radical forms of inequality dividing the nation into “Its Upper Ten and Lower Million,” as George Lippard phrased it in the subtitle of his sensationalistic novel New York (1854). By the 1840s, this awareness of inequality and the association of lower-class status with severe social suffering primed the ground for the utopian socialist movements that swept the land in a ferment of reform. A political language of class polarity had emerged, and literature was ready to represent the encounter with a socialist solution on American soil.
During the 1840s, Nathaniel Hawthorne participated briefly in the utopian socialist commune of Brook Farm in Massachusetts, and used his experience as the basis for his novel The Blithedale Romance (1852). In his preface, Hawthorne seeks to distance the primary importance of the socialist context, arguing instead that “his present concern with the Socialist Community is merely to establish a theatre, a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel, where the creatures of his brain may play their phantasmagorical antics, without exposing them to too close a comparison with the actual events of real lives” (3). Yet Blithedale differs radically from Hawthorne’s other romances in its refusal to mix the real with the kind of alternate romantic space that the Puritan past offers in The Scarlet Letter (1850), or that the supernatural offers in The House of the Seven Gables (1851). The “phantasmagorical antics” of Blithedale emerge from a dialectic internal to the mind of Miles Coverdale, our first-person narrator. I turn to this dialectic as the first stage in an American literature of inequality notable for the vacuum it creates at the social center. This vanishing middle is most discernible, I argue, in writers who are less marked by the minority cultural identities and the excluded social locations that have inspired such a radical revision of the canon in recent decades. Hawthorne is a writer very much in and of the middle – a white, male, middle-class writer who became quickly institutionalized as an important representative of the American literary tradition. Ironically, Hawthorne’s centrist position enables a counterintuitive view of the bourgeois ideology then becoming dominant in the era’s more popular kinds of domestic, sentimental, and melodramatic writing. Foreshadowing the other writers who occupy us here, Hawthorne’s literary effort to represent rather than to subvert or sanction the social center brings him face-to-face with a crucial contradiction in American history: the nation’s early investment in fundamental structures of social inequality.
It is no coincidence that Hawthorne’s foray into the implications of socialism should take the form of a first-person narrative – indeed, Blithedale is Hawthorne’s only novel in this particular mode. Recognition of the problems that social stratification presented to the nation’s ideologies of freedom and equality worked to upset the personal perspectives of a number of Hawthorne’s peers. At the heart of his essay “Self-Reliance” (1841), Ralph Waldo Emerson responds in a self-centered outburst to a friend’s suggestion that he has a responsibility to the poor: “Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong” (22). The logic of self-reliance breaks down into enraged, first-person revulsion from any recognition that needs make rights. In Walden (1854), Henry David Thoreau meets an impoverished Irishman residing in his idealized landscape, and subsequently disturbs the woods with his nativist tirade against imported “shiftlessness” (166). The genteel narrator of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) sees his entire system of values come crashing down when he confronts an indigent individual who refuses to work, just as the narrator of Melville’s “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” (1853) can only crow madly like a cockerel after confronting the destructive poverty of a rural family. The narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) runs in fright and confusion from a scene of social and structural collapse in a gothic tale of downward mobility following the destructive Panic of 1837. Blithedale is less dramatic in the story it tells of our narrator’s residence in a utopian commune, though even here the genteel Coverdale’s confrontation with another form of social organization unravels rapidly as Coverdale contracts a fever that throws him into mental delirium. Hawthorne’s novel spreads this initial collapse into a more subtle and pervasive tonal irregularity – at heart a narrative unreliability – that comes to mediate an imbalanced social structure.
Around halfway through the novel, after escaping from the social reformer Hollingsworth’s monomaniacal efforts to convert him to his philanthropic mission of prison reform, Coverdale leaves the commune and returns to conventional society, taking a hotel room that overlooks a row of fashionable buildings inhabited by families of office workers – a prototypical middle class:
One long, united roof, with its thousands of slates glittering in the rain, extended over the whole. After the distinctness of separate characters to which I had recently been accustomed, it perplexed and annoyed me not to be able to resolve this combination of human interests into well-defined elements. It seemed hardly worth while for more than one of those families to be in existence, since they all had the same glimpse of the sky, all looked into the same area, all received just their equal share of sunshine through the front windows, and all listened to precisely the same noises of the street on which they boarded. Men are so much alike in their nature, that they grow intolerable unless varied by their circumstances. (123–4)
Ironically, the equality Coverdale sought in the socialist community is more present in the middle-class Americans he confronts from afar. If upper-class Coverdale cannot fit into the socialist community, then neither is he part of the bourgeois life that opposes it. Recent critics have described Blithedale as Hawthorne’s attempt to work out literature’s new middle-class situation: as part of a public entertainment system that addressed private class needs through represented life, according to Richard Brodhead, or as a fantasy of masculine power that uses the feminine to construct possessive individualism, according to Lori Merish. Yet this middle class is exactly the problem in Hawthorne’s novel. There is no coherent middle-class space from which to narrate. Indeed, such is the crisis of representation when confronted by an incoherent middle class that Coverdale recoils in frustration, and is left with a desire for varied circumstances – for inequality, in effect.
The unstable narrative structure of Hawthorne’s novel as a whole emerges from this failure to occupy a middle space of equanimity. Throughout, Coverdale feels that he is either facing a conspiracy, as Robert Levine has argued, or projecting the monster of his own fears. Coverdale’s paranoia, that is, mirrors instabilities of scale. Either he is too small in comparison to a large system that he does not understand, or else he is so large that he has created intrigue through his voyeuristic interest in the romantic lives of his Blithedale companions Hollingsworth, the wealthy Zenobia, and the impoverished young Priscilla, who joins the commune in mysterious circumstances. Coverdale’s social movement, from his conservative upper-class location to his communitarian contact with the low and with radical forms of social thought, sets into play this inherent instability, this movement between error and exaggeration. Hence Coverdale suffers at various times from depression, from an inability to analyze his own mind, and from a proneness to the influence of the bogus. Yet at other moments he falls into the delusion that God has impelled him to use his “delicate intuitions” to learn the hidden secrets of others and to judge as he sees fit (132). Coverdale’s unreliability, his vacillation between reality and fantasy, mediates a dynamic of inequality. His failure to command a central and stable ideological location compels him to move between grandeur and abjection.
At the end of the novel, the utopian experiment fails after the haughty and wealthy Zenobia drowns herself, apparently dying of a broken heart when Hollingsworth rejects her for the destitute and delicate Priscilla. Blithedale gets occupied by the town paupers – a class of the permanently poor – and our narrator retreats to his wealthy life of ease. Polar inequality has reestablished itself against the attempt at fruitful class contact and socialist reform. Yet Coverdale, who finally abandons his only labor as a poet, still seems inherently anxious about his situation, fearing that his life is all emptiness, having established no separate interest in his own narrative. Hence we have the novel’s infamous ending, Coverdale’s confession of something “essential to the full understanding of my story,” that “I – I myself – was in love – with – PRISCILLA!” (203). He attempts to justify his inactive years, his unsatisfied past and listless future, by instantly generating mystery and depth. Far from establishing a middle-class location or consciousness, this ending resorts to the kind of shiftiness and unreliability we have experienced throughout. Coverdale’s desire to occupy a high location as the holder of special knowledge confronts the debasement of his narrative art, a degeneration into melodrama – a failure in the quality of the narrative itself. Social insecurity brings narrative instability that responds to the novel’s radical inequality: its inability to picture a coherent ideological location between the high and the low. What Blithedale registers at the level of tone and voice is a social incoherence whose psychological focus would become even more confused in the shift from romance to realism’s encounter with the ever-widening structures of the world of business.
“It is usually indigent literature which presents itself with these imaginative demands, and I think usually fictionists of the romantic school. I do not know but it would be well for me as a man of principle to confine my benefactions to destitute realists: I am sure it would be cheaper.” These lines, from William Dean Howells’s 1895 essay “Tribulations of a Cheerful Giver” (125), suggest the degree to which changes in literary form and genre were entwined with the problems of social inequality then becoming increasingly visible on the streets of New York and other large cities. Howells is describing his practice of offering street beggars only half of what they request, hence giving himself the illusion of making money, though he moves seamlessly from the social to the literary as he describes the demands placed on the imagination by this kind of transaction. According to Howells’s theories of realism at least, the realist text should exhibit fidelity to experience and probability of motive, hence bringing into play a series of epistemological questions that naturally found their correlative in this contact between strangers from opposite ends of the social spectrum. In a genre that purported to replace the coincidences of plot with the commonalities of character, and hence to read and make intelligible the world of social appearances, the confessed needs of strangers placed primary demands on the imagination to step into the profound uncertainty opened by the chasm of social inequality. Yet when Howells discovers a destitute “realist” on the streets of New York – an educated man with the potential to do a “perfectly fresh thing in literature” by describing experiences that “mostly happened to the inarticulate classes” (125) – his ability to read the details of character collapses. Despite paying the man to write his story, no narrative appears. The desire to believe a character and hence to access a new and authentic kind of experience is defeated by the epistemological problems of uncertainty within the structure of experience. In effect, Howells wants to trust character, but in the process he becomes victim of a plot. Something is going on that he does not understand and cannot access – a kind of conspiracy that lies beyond the bounds of realistic knowledge. “I am quite sure he was at heart a romanticist” (126), Howells concludes of the beggar, moving like Coverdale uneasily between a desire for reality and a realization of delusion.
Howells theorized realism as a middling formation that rejected the inherited intellectual property of the elite classes while also rejecting the “low” world of popular dime novels and sentimental romances, which Howells described as symptoms of bankrupt taste. Yet if we turn to Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), often described as the nation’s first novel to describe the rise of a culture of business that cuts across the traditional lines of class affiliation, then we confront again the strange absence of the very middle-class culture that the realist text should naturally embrace. The novel makes the clear distinction between an elite, cosmopolitan class (the Coreys) and a rustic, folksy class (the Laphams). The former are insecure financially (the Corey son, Tom, goes to work in Lapham’s paint business), while the latter are insecure culturally, as their financial rise places them in a world “above” their lowly values. As with Blithedale, anything like a middle-class sphere lies beyond the realms of representation, as becomes clear when Tom Corey and Silas Lapham take the ferry to Nantasket and confront a crowd of “people who were going down to the beach for the fun or the relief of it, and they were able to afford it” (80). Rather than a moment of common experience that embodies the egalitarian ideals of the realist form, the scene throws narrative into crisis. The stress on the commonplace erases the kind of “distinction” (80) that enables these characters to be seen individually. Far from transcending class division with the uniqueness of character, the novel presents instead the opacity of class, and a relationship between Tom and Lapham that is dominated by the tension between class as a cultural and an economic force. The financial rise of Lapham places him in the same social sphere as characters with very different – and seemingly absolute – ideas of cultivation, which creates the novel’s predominant tension that explodes in the famous dinner scene at the Corey home, where the Laphams’ social inexperience ends in Lapham getting drunk and making a fool of himself by haranguing the dinner guests about his Civil War experiences.
Class conflict lies at the heart of the novel’s narrative tensions, and it becomes the force that generates interiority, as seen in Tom’s long interior monologue following the dinner, in which he quivers in resentment at Lapham’s “vulgar, braggart, uncouth nature,” and recognizes “his own allegiance to the exclusiveness to which he was born and bred” (211). What rises at this point in the novel is the possibility of a humorous, ironic point of view – embodied in the voice of Penelope Lapham, whom Tom will eventually marry – to offer a way out of the absoluteness of class difference by promising a middling set of cultural values that can sympathize with both forms of class consciousness: the high and the low. The marriage of Tom and Penelope is the one place of harmony between the two families, yet even this hope is finally dashed by a narrator, who is explicitly and disturbingly sympathetic to the Coreys’ belief that the marriage of Tom to the lower-class Penelope meant “the end of their son and brother to them” (361). So severe are the differences in “manners and customs” (361) between classes that the young couple must travel to Mexico, where Penelope believes she will not feel as strange as she does among her Brahmin in-laws. In a realist genre that allegedly valued common experience and the nonintervening narrator, here we have a moment of narrative intervention that confirms and condones the absoluteness of class inequality.
Like Blithedale, Silas Lapham is thus structured by the failure of middling values to hold sway. The novel returns characters to their original situations, and indeed denies anything like growth or development to the extent that “character” itself gets partly emptied of moral content, being influenced instead by environmental location and by the determination of unseen forces. This becomes clear in the chapter that culminates with Lapham’s business failure, right after the Laphams lose the house they are building on the Back Bay, which burns to the ground coincidentally just one week after the insurance policy expires. By this point, Lapham is dominated by a paranoid suspicion that he is becoming victim to a conspiracy. He discovers that a West Virginia company now has superior paint that will force him out of business, yet a final opportunity offers itself: Lapham could invest in the West Virginia company, which would require him to sell a milling property he bought from his former business partner, Milton Rogers – a property whose value becomes doubtful when its adjacent railroad is purchased by a new railroad company, which effectively gains control over the property by controlling its transportation link. Rogers introduces Lapham to some Englishmen who – in a gesture back to the concerns of Blithedale – claim to be agents for a group of English utopian reformers looking to establish a community on American soil. This potential transaction is dominated by uncertainty about the motivations of the parties involved, and uncertainty about who knows what:
Something in the eyes of these men, something that lurked at an infinite depth below their speech, and was not really in their eyes when Lapham looked again, had flashed through him a sense of treachery in them. He had thought them the dupes of Rogers; but in that brief instant he had seen them – or thought he had seen them – his accomplices, ready to betray the interests of which they went on to speak with a certain comfortable jocosity, and a certain incredulous slight of his show of integrity. It was a deeper game than Lapham was used to. (324)
In a novel where the narrator jumps to judgment throughout, this is a rare moment of undecidability. It seems that the choice here is between the modern values of business, “which regards common property as common prey” (325), and the traditional moral codes that would prevent Lapham from selling property he knows could become valueless owing to the intervention of the railroad. The links between causes and effects are extremely difficult to comprehend, and indeed become more so when Rogers offers to intervene and to buy the mills himself, arguing that the intentions of the railroad are as yet unknown, hence absolving Lapham of responsibility. The complication of the plot suggests how these individuals are wired into structures they do not understand – a confusion mirrored for readers in a hermeneutic dilemma. Is there a “plot,” a conspiracy, or not? Lapham cannot simply unmask Rogers; he cannot just walk away from this situation as he would “from the plays at the theater” (325). There are no recourses to melodrama – the solution of Coverdale in Hawthorne’s novel. Something different is happening here. Traditional moral codes are not just confused: they fail to operate altogether. Insecurity is introduced as a narrative dynamic, one that confuses the moral grounds on which choice can be made. “It was for him alone to commit this rascality – if it was a rascality – or not” (326; emphasis added). The confusion in the decision becomes a structure of doubt whereby judgment is moot because the relations of cause and effect are so uncertain.
Rather than stressing the significance of individual character over the power of social class or the movements and coincidences of plot, as Howells theorized realism, Silas Lapham suggests – like Blithedale – a radically unequal social world divided between the low and the high. Many of the novel’s tensions depend on this disjunction between economic and social questions of class, and on the failure of a middle space that might hold them together. But Howells does not leave it there. The book takes essentialized ideas of character, based on class and cultivation, and subjects them to a structure of events (the plot) that belies the moral categories of responsibility on which these ideas of character would seem to depend. We do not know in the end which way Lapham intends to act concerning the mills, though in all likelihood he looks set to do the “right” thing and to hold out against Rogers and the (potential) conspiracy. But the final point of this key chapter is that Lapham does not really act at all. He is acted on, by outside forces, when he receives a letter from the railroad, a letter that presumably (we never know for sure) contains their offer for the mills, which they now effectively control. The problem here is not – as it was for Hawthorne – with narrative voice because radical inequality is no longer a moral problem that creates shock. The problem is one of plot, which effectively destroys the value and agency of character, as individuals get situated within a determining social structure that lies beyond coherence or comprehension.
In this respect, Howells’s novel reflects formally a historical shift in the economic conditions of American modernity. The situation of panic, with its stress on isolated commercial crises and their destabilizing influence on the individual subject, gave way to a deeper situation of depression marked by the economic instability and financial turmoil that came to seem endemic during the final three decades of the nineteenth century. Numerous critics have noted realism’s fascination with this fluctuating world of finance; according to New Historicists at least, the very possibility of subjectivity came during this period to seem inevitably constituted by the money economy. Howells’s interest in the complexities of plot thus marks a wider concern with the subject’s determination by economic forces that often seemed distant and dimly understood. Take, for instance, Kate Chopin’s “Elizabeth Stock’s One Story” (1898), a tale about a village postmistress and failed writer who “never could think of a plot” (274) but who stumbles into a plot of a different kind when she pries into mail intended for a local businessman. Like Howells’s novel, Chopin’s story again pivots on a potential conspiracy, this time between government and business – a conspiracy that remains fundamentally offstage and uncertain, yet nevertheless loses Stock her job and eventually leads to her death. Naturalism’s “plot of decline” is another example of this combined interest in the power of plot over human agency and in the inevitable fall from a tenuous and insecure middle class. Howells’s interest in a polarized social world gets reflected again in the character of Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), a character who from the outset is paradoxically both “horribly poor – and very expensive” (31). Lily crashes down from high to low, unable to exist in a middle class that seems like failure. What makes Howells’s novel stand out from these broader concerns is the absolute degree of its structured world of inequality. There is no movement from high to low, merely a return to a seemingly natural and static state of social bifurcation. There is no theoretical “republic of the spirit” in Silas Lapham, no realm between the anxiety of poverty and the ease of wealth that Lawrence Selden describes in The House of Mirth – an exclusively male realm on which Wharton grounds her feminist critique. Lacking this gendered perspective, Silas Lapham turns its gaze solely to an absent center that undermines the middling values on which realism was founded. Realism’s promises of character collapse beneath the complexities of plot. Once more, the excluded middle creates a contradiction with important formal consequences – a contradiction to which the literature of modernism would return and react.
On May Day 1919, a party at the New York socialist newspaper, The Call, was stormed by a mob of soldiers and sailors who smashed the newspaper’s offices and sent seven of its staff to hospital. The culmination of rising tensions between troops returning from the Great War and an increasingly vociferous socialist movement, this episode is central to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novella, May Day (1920). In its theme and tone, the novella looks back to realist and naturalist novels such as Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). Both works end with the suicide of a weak male character who gets involved in a love affair that destroys him. Yet gone in Fitzgerald are the moments of obvious plotting or the antiplotting of coincidence that we saw in Silas Lapham and that mark, say, the moment when the safe door inexplicably swings shut in Sister Carrie, leaving George Hurstwood with $10,000 in his hand. Instead, we have what we would perhaps expect from a modernist work: a decentered narrative that seems at the outset radically uncertain over whether it depicts “several – or perhaps one” of many adventures (26). What emerges from this episodic structure is a problem not of narrative reliability or of plot but a problem of characterization – both a difficulty representing a protagonist that we can identify or sympathize with, and a deep essentialization of character based on a profound inequality of social power.
May Day introduces us initially to two characters: Philip Dean, a figure of success, wealth, health, physical strength, and fitness, and Gordon Sterrett, a figure of poverty, failure, and sickness. The identity of these characters is dominated not by their relation to a social position or to a class habitus but entirely by personal, embodied power. The turn of the twentieth century saw the rise of the scientific philanthropy movement, which sought to analyze the causes of poverty and to reform the poor through well-aimed charity and institutional care. This was a time when dominant power groups came to control cultural images of the poor. Environmental explanations battled with hereditary explanations of apparent differences in social power, but by the 1910s the pseudoscience of eugenics held sway. Differences in identity and social power were reduced more consistently to heredity alone. If Dreiser’s Sister Carrie reveals a conflict between environment and heredity, as Hurstwood gradually weakens in a dynamic process, then by the time we get to May Day anything like environmental development has curiously ceased. For Fitzgerald’s characters, there is no progression or movement of plot. Dean and Sterrett are trapped at their social levels, whose determining conditions have become naturalized, internal, and melodramatically extreme, with no middle ground between wealth and poverty. Character has effectively come to practice a social logic, sanctioning a eugenic ideology that divides the world into the weak and the strong.
There is much in May Day that seems reflective of its surrounding ideologies. The urban crowd, for example, seems very different from the crowd on the ferry boat in Silas Lapham. There is no crisis of representation or poverty of exteriority here. The crowd glitters with signifiers: it is all too readable. The crowd has become “the masses,” defined not by their relation to the means of production but by their lifestyle choices and their power to consume (32). This is part of the modernism of May Day. Yet the fluid model Fitzgerald adopts, his decentralized narrative, is confronted repeatedly by a problematic intractability of characterization, which becomes pronounced when we confront two members of the crowd, Carrol Key and Gus Rose, returning troops from the war. “They were ugly, ill-nourished, devoid of all except the very lowest form of intelligence, and without even that animal exuberance that in itself brings color into life; they were lately vermin-ridden, cold, and hungry in a dirty town of a strange land; they were poor, friendless; tossed as driftwood from their births, they would be tossed as driftwood to their deaths” (35). Clearly we are at the heart of eugenic ideology here. These characters are poor because they lack intelligence, and they lack intelligence because they are physically inferior. A signifying chain of causal forces makes them victims not of the social order but of their own inherent weakness. Indeed, these characters are only kept alive by the institution, which allows this devolution to occur. The remarkable point is less the eugenic logic than the absolute nature of their inferiority. Not only are these characters stupid and animalistic to the extreme, but also the construction of character itself suggests a lack of subtlety, as the narrator cannot help blurting out the characters’ impending demise.
The different worlds of Fitzgerald’s story collide when a mob of soldiers storms the offices of The Call, as seen from the perspective of Edith Bradin, whose brother is one of the socialists:
Then the room was a riot. She realized that the soldiers were surging forward, glimpsed the fat man swinging a chair over his head – instantly the lights went out and she felt the push of warm bodies under rough cloth, and her ears were full of shouting and trampling and hard breathing.
A figure flashed by her out of nowhere, tottered, was edged sideways, and of a sudden disappeared helplessly out through the open window with a frightened, fragmentary cry that died staccato on the bosom of the clamor. By the faint light streaming from the building backing on the area Edith had a quick impression that it had been the tall soldier with the weak chin. (62)
The figure (presumably Carrol Key) emerges “out of nowhere” and is urged to his death in a strangely passive way. Rather than pushed by an assignable cause, he “was edged sideways” – but edged sideways by what exactly? It is tempting to read this passage in light of the socially Darwinian logic that underscores naturalist fiction, or in light of the eugenic logic then blossoming in the era’s influential “rural family studies”: pseudosociological accounts of allegedly degenerate and dangerous families who have seemingly rejected the moral norms of capitalist society. Nicole Rafter has argued that these narratives would use literary devices such as melodramatic plots and dense symbolism to construct negative images of the poor, which in turn became a means for the newly professionalized, lower-middle-class “sociologist” to construct his or her own sense of status entitlement. A similar argument could be made for Fitzgerald’s narrative. Perhaps Fitzgerald is throwing his own weak side (one of his middle names was Key) out of the story in the ultimate attempt to assuage ongoing anxieties about his own personal weakness. Yet this is too neat an argument about a narrative that lacks a center structurally. We are not presented with any focal moment of conspiracy or coincidence, no moment of unseen plotting, as in Silas Lapham; there is no moment of confrontation with a shady set of connections that determines action by forestalling decision. Here, in Fitzgerald’s decentered narrative, there is no social force that drives action and event. We are left with a much more abstract, unrooted dynamic of power. Either some almighty force shunts a character out of the story in an ultimate moment of intervention, or else this character is so colossally weak that he virtually implodes, taking himself dramatically out of the narrative (he “killed hisself,” says a policeman later [63]). Like Gordon Sterrett, who also takes his own life at the end of the story, Carrol Key is so empty and undynamic as a character, constructed to preclude development, that he simply ceases to exist.
Either way, May Day presents again an extreme inequality of power that divides the world into the weak and the strong, the poor and the rich, with nothing in between. Distributing its energy among several characters, the story establishes no solid hero for us to identify with. There is no coherent middle class, nor any moral center to the narrative. The upper class is not marked by higher intelligence or greater cultural capital. Dean is successful but not intelligent or attractive, nor even really self-made (his wealth is hereditary). There is an upper- and a lower-class variety of speech, yet each is insincere, clichéd, and bankrupt in its own way. Even the socialists share the eugenic beliefs of the capitalist class. There is thus no opportunity for the moral conflict we saw in Silas Lapham, where the vernacular values of character are upset by the indeterminacies of plot. We are left instead with a radically unequal world with nothing to explain differences in power but power itself. Hence the novella features in its penultimate episode the absurd, drunken exploits of Mr. In and Mr. Out, described not as characters but as “vivid personalities” (68). As Warren Susman has argued, the shift in the twentieth century from a culture of character to a culture of personality brought new emphasis not on inherent moral values but on the affective power to gain status by moving others. May Day enacts this power binary as a structural problem of characterization in which a failure of depth and development, across the social scale, turns individuals into items of luxury or waste in a social system that seems increasingly arbitrary in its power to determine the stark alternatives of wealth or poverty. In this turn from class to power, May Day gestures toward a postmodernist politics in which the forms of mediation come to supplant social substance altogether.
In 1965, Thomas Pynchon published “A Journey into the Mind of Watts” in the New York Times Magazine – a look at the smoldering unrest in the largely black Los Angeles neighborhood, following the full-scale riots of the previous year. The essay is a barometer of changing conceptions of class in the 1950s and 1960s, marking a growing recognition of a racialized, largely black “underclass” that suffers in special ways from what the sociologist William Julius Wilson would call “social isolation”: structural forces segregating and impoverishing a black lower class. Pynchon’s essay points to the growing racialization of class dynamics, while marking the new importance of mass media to the understanding of social inequality. Of course, the question of mediation was nothing new: the language used to describe lower social classes, and the methods used to access them, have always had a profound impact on how the poor are judged. But for Pynchon, this question of mediation is now of primary importance because the reality of whites, particularly in Los Angeles, has become a wholly mediated phenomenon. Reality has become a fantasy, existing merely on a TV screen. Questions of class thus become defined by access – access not to resources but to information and to knowledge – while communication becomes a primary motivating force in the perpetuation of inequality. Pynchon’s essay ends with an image of a Watts sculpture made in the Simon Rodia tradition: “In one corner was this old, busted, hollow TV set with a rabbit-ears antenna on top; inside where its picture tube should have been, gazing out with scorched wiring threaded like electronic ivy among its crevices and sockets, was a human skull. The name of the piece was ‘The Late, Late, Late Show’ ” (84). At once an image of the violence of poverty and an image of the centrality of media to this problem, Pynchon leaves us with a ray of hope in a world whose middle class has become a delusional void: an image of the vernacular recycling of waste into a kind of social critique.
Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49 grows from this mid-1960s moment, though it expands the consideration of inequality away from the neighborhood of Watts toward what may be a global network of disinherited individuals, communicating through an underground postal service run by the Tristero, an organization whose “constant theme” was “disinheritance” (132). Like Blithedale, Crying treats the theme of class tangentially. Indeed, Oedipa never knows for sure whether there is a vast conspiracy, a power structure in place that keeps the wealthy rich and the poor dispossessed – a system that seeks to maintain hegemony by neutralizing any threat of dissent through media opiates and illusions of consumer choice. Echoing the position of Miles Coverdale, Oedipa may be facing a conspiracy or she may be simply projecting a paranoid fantasy by misinterpreting a series of coincidences. Oedipa is in an excluded middle logically – either conspiracy or paranoia – and also socially, occupying a space between the extremely wealthy and the disinherited she encounters on the edges of her world. If Oedipa can never track down the full legacy and business dealings of the wealthy Pierce Inverarity (Oedipa’s erstwhile lover, who dies leaving Oedipa to execute his will), then neither can she easily discover the poor or fix them as an object of study. The dispossessed are defined not by a lack of participation and integration in larger institutions, nor by their silence or inherent resistance to description. On the contrary, they may well be fully integrated into their own organized institution, though one to which Oedipa lacks access. The social problems of inequality in Pynchon’s novel look back to the disoriented social middles we have already encountered, though here the problems are not psychological, moral, or material as they were for Hawthorne, Howells, and Fitzgerald. Oedipa’s social position, in the excluded middle, gets defined not by her access to the means of production or consumption, and not even by her access to literacy, education, or cultural capital. Rather, she lacks access to the means of communication, to the particular media through which rich and poor may be relating to their own social strata. Oedipa becomes trapped not between different social classes, traditionally understood, but between different systems of communication in a world of pure mediation.
If May Day resonates with the eugenic view of the poor as a form of social waste, then Crying ties this theme directly to the question of communication. The Tristero’s mail system is known as WASTE, of course, and it suggests the possibility that the system of liberal democracy has essentially failed in its promises of inclusion, and has hence necessitated the creation of an antibureaucratic communication system among the disinherited. This link between the structure of society and the system of information is centralized in the novel’s repeated references to the thought experiment known as Maxwell’s Demon – an experiment created by the Scots physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–79) in an effort to disprove theoretically the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In the words of Stanley Koteks, the engineer whom Oedipa encounters around the middle of the novel:
The Demon could sit in a box among air molecules that were moving at all different random speeds, and sort out the fast molecules from the slow ones. Fast molecules have more energy than slow ones. Concentrate enough of them in one place and you have a region of high temperature. You can then use the difference in temperature between this hot region of the box and any cooler region, to drive a heat engine. Since the Demon only sat and sorted, you wouldn’t have put any real work into the system. So you would be violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics, getting something for nothing, causing perpetual motion. (68)
The thought experiment combines two ideas of entropy. The first is thermodynamic: the tendency of systems to produce waste, which cannot be recycled to improve efficiency. The second idea of entropy is informational: the measure of uncertainty in a system. The thought experiment cannot work, Oedipa discovers later, because of all of the sorting that needs to happen – sorting that involves informational work and hence increases the total entropy of the system. Maxwell’s Demon thus poses a key question that gets to the heart of the novel’s tenuous grip on the social: what is the link between the structure of a system, which through its tendency to natural disorder produces waste, and the world of information, with its tendency toward incoherence or “noise,” that surrounds it? Is the link simply metaphorical? Is it just a coincidence that these two ideas of entropy happen to look alike? Or is there a more radical connection in which structural and systemic differences depend entirely on the communication of information?
From a reading of “A Journey into the Mind of Watts,” Pynchon’s answer to this last question would appear to be a resounding “yes.” Yet Pynchon’s novel resists reductive conclusions by suggesting but finally refusing to resolve this problem of connection. In so doing, Crying exposes greater problems of connection and a bigger disequilibrium, not least in the relationship between the novel’s discourse – its ironic, postmodernist technique – and the subject matter of its story. To a large extent, what remains convincing about this novel is the excluded middle with all its paranoia and anxiety. What comes to life is the media-saturated world of popular culture, the alienation amid fabricated images, and the discursive world of hypermediation. Less clear, however, is the world of the story: the events, or possible structure of events, which of course may not be a story at all but simply a paranoid fantasy. In this way, Pynchon’s novel shifts questions of representation away from the epistemological grounds exposed in Blithedale and Silas Lapham, which both return to the problem that a middle-class space cannot be known and depicted, unlike the opposed worlds of the wealthy and the poor. Like May Day, Crying is concerned with power, not knowledge, as society recedes altogether as a force determining the unequal positions of the novel’s characters.
With postmodernist irony, Crying questions its own seriousness as an effort to represent the real. Hence it raises not epistemological but ontological questions about what literature is as a system of representation, and whether there is any “real” that is not constructed, or ultimately assimilable into an image. Crying raises this classic postmodernist question. Yet it is also curiously in sync with American literature of the excluded middle, effectively combining the concerns of the media age with a critique of late capitalism. For Pynchon, inequality becomes essentially informational, and gets structured into the narrative not as a destabilized narrative voice, a plot explosion, or a character implosion but as part of the discursive system itself – part of the nature of its relation to the real and to us as readers. Rather than a retreat from social politics, Pynchon finally fills the gap implied by the works of Hawthorne, Howells, and Fitzgerald. He gives us a narrative that mediates the incoherence of a middle class reeling in paranoid doubt from the shocking recognition that the United States has structured extreme social inequality into the primary ways that the world is seen, understood, and communicated.
References and Further Reading
Brodhead, Richard H. Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Burke, Martin J. The Conundrum of Class: Public Discourse on the Social Order in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Chopin, Kate. “Elizabeth Stock’s One Story.” In The Awakening and Selected Stories (pp. 274–80). New York: Penguin, 2003.
Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. New York: Doubleday, 1900.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Self-Reliance.” In Self-Reliance and Other Essays. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1993.
Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. 1960. Rev. ed. New York: Stein and Day, 1966.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. May Day. In Babylon Revisited and Other Stories. New York: Scribner, 1996.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. London: J.M. Dent, 1993.
Howells, William Dean. The Rise of Silas Lapham. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986.
Howells, William Dean. “Tribulations of a Cheerful Giver.” In Impressions and Experiences. New York: Harper, 1909.
Jones, Gavin. American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
Levine, Robert S. Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Merish, Lori. Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.
Pynchon, Thomas. “A Journey into the Mind of Watts.” New York Times Magazine, June 12, 1966, 34–35, 78, 80–82, 84.
Rafter, Nicole Hahn. White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877–1919. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988.
Susman, Warren I. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. London: J.M. Dent, 1995.
Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1994.
Wilson, William Julius. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.