Protest and the Body in Melville, Dos Passos, and Hurston (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

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L ITERARY C RITICISM AND C ULTURAL T HEORY

Edited by

William E. Cain Professor of English Wellesley College

A ROUTLEDGE SERIES

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Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory WILLIAM E. CAIN, General Editor Balancing the Books Faulkner, Morrison, and the Economies of Slavery Erik Dussere

Feminist Utopian Novels of the 1970s Joanna Russ and Dorothy Bryant Tatiana Teslenko

Beyond the Sound Barrier The Jazz Controversy in TwentiethCentury American Fiction Kristin K. Henson

Dead Letters to the New World Melville, Emerson, and American Transcendentalism Michael McLoughlin

Segregated Miscegenation On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the U.S. and Latin America Literary Traditions Carlos Hiraldo

The Other Orpheus A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality Merrill Cole

Death, Men, and Modernism Trauma and Narrative in British Fiction from Hardy to Woolf Ariela Freedman

The Other Empire British Romantic Writings about the Ottoman Empire Filiz Turhan

The Self in the Cell Narrating the Victorian Prisoner Sean Grass

The “Dangerous” Potential of Reading Readers and the Negotiation of Power in Nineteenth-Century Narratives Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau

Regenerating the Novel Gender and Genre in Woolf, Forster, Sinclair, and Lawrence James J. Miracky

Intimate and Authentic Economies The American Self-Made Man from Douglass to Chaplin Thomas Nissley

Satire and the Postcolonial Novel V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie John Clement Ball

Revised Lives Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Authorship William Pannapacker

Through the Negative The Photographic Image and the Written Word in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Megan Williams

Labor Pains Emerson, Hawthorne, and Alcott on Work and the Woman Question Carolyn Maibor

Love American Style Divorce and the American Novel, 1881–1976 Kimberly Freeman

Narrative in the Professional Age Transatlantic Readings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Jennifer Cognard-Black

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Protest and the Body in Melville, Dos Passos, and Hurston

Tom McGlamery

Routledge New York & London

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Published in 2004 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abington Oxon OX14 4RN www. routledge.co.uk Copyright © 2004 by Taylor & Francis Group, a Division of T&F Informa. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. 10

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McGlamery, Tom. Protest and the body in Melville, Dos Passos, and Hurston / Tom McGlamery. p. cm.—(Literary criticism and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-97063-6 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. American fiction—History and criticism. 2. Body, Human, in literature. 3. Melville, Herman, 1819–1891—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Dos Passos, John, 1896–1970—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Older people’s writings, American— History and criticism. 6. Hurston, Zora Neale—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Old age in literature. 8. Aging in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PS374.B64M38 2004 813.009'3561—dc22

2004014243

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This book is dedicated to R. Dean McGlamery

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Chapter One Introduction

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Chapter Two Reading a Man Like a Book: Bodies and Texts in Billy Budd

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Chapter Three Producing Remembrance: John Dos Passos’s Body in the Text

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Chapter Four How it Feels to be Not-So-Young, Gifted, and Black: Passing and “de change uh life” in Their Eyes Were Watching God

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Afterword

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments

I would like to think professors Warwick Wadlington and Evan Carton for their instruction and encouragement in the development of this study. I further wish to thank my mother, Sue McGlamery, and my sisters, Dana and Gayla, for their continuous love and support. Finally, I am deeply grateful to my wife, Laura Grossenbacher, my daughter, Aylise, and my son, Ian, for their patient love and understanding while I worked on this manuscript.

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Chapter One

Introduction

This book about three authors and the way their bodies manifest in their texts was conceived within a welter of academic discourses on the body. Feminist scholarship has a long tradition of explicit engagement with the body as a contested site, and the wider field of gender studies that has developed out of this scholarship has continued to make the body a focal point in cultural analysis. Foucault’s work on disciplined bodies and on sexuality has continued to generate, in gender studies and queer studies principally, detailed analysis of the implication of the body in the discursive shaping of gender and sexuality. Class-invested scholarship has been built upon Pierre Bourdieu’s investigations into habitus and the category of taste and upon Elaine Scarry’s work on the body in pain. Increasingly, we read the body as cross-hatched by a multitude of cultural vectors, and a sophisticated and often recondite apparatus of theory has grown out of these efforts. While attempting to take advantage of insights offered by portions of this theoretical discourse, I have chosen to write in what I hope is a different though supplementary direction, focusing on the practical body problems of three authors, problems assigned to them, as it were, by their cultures and their circumstances. I have attempted to meld biographical approaches, discursive analysis, and close reading to achieve a textured, lively understanding of these works as personal and political statements. Perhaps I can best locate the critical practice I seek in this dissertation by using two examples of types of criticism to which I see my own being in part opposed, in part complementary. In 1992, Frederick Crews published what he called “a report to nonacademic readers” regarding the kind of criticism practiced and taught in university English departments. Crews’s book, The Critics Bear It Away, collects a number of spirited, highly readable essays he had published over the past few years in The New York Review of Books. In it he calls for an “empirical” literary criticism steeped in biography, one that understands American fiction “with 1

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as few illusions as possible” (xv). Distancing himself from cultural conservatives like Bloom and Bennet and acknowledging the revitalizing influence of New Americanists, Crews nevertheless would chasten the latter for what he sees as certain critical excesses, registering the following objections to New Historicist practice: a proclivity for “apriorist,” theory-driven readings that fail to take appropriate advantage of biographical scholarship and screen biographical and textual data to suit theoretical premises, a propensity to reduce the range of critical inquiry to considerations of the rhetorics of race, class, and gender operating within a text, a tendency to dismiss aesthetics as a mystification of politics, and, if I read him correctly, a commitment to dissolving the (canonical) author into “a helpless vector of forces that typically cannot even be located, much less stemmed” (xix). (Crews’s corollary claim is that authors inhabiting subaltern subject positions are often read as having an intention and agency that these others are not granted.) In registering these objections, Crews neglects to substantially argue the very arguable premises on which many of them rest, namely, that there can be such a thing as a non-theory driven, non-selective reading of texts, that aesthetics is not a mystification of politics, that “authors” are not a nexus of discursive forces that express themselves through persons. His “report” to nonacademics holds such nettlesome questions in abeyance, instead issuing a flattering appeal to an audience that has not been “academically retrained to distrust their pleasures” and can thereby “sense the difference between calculatedly progressive pap and art that flows from vision, albeit a feverish one” (xxi). Crews rather grants this intuition, this “pleasure,” its own a priori status, thereby indicating that something like “common sense” will arbitrate the validity of critical practice, an impression re-enforced by other approving references to such notions as “the empirical center” (xvi). When he adds that he prefers to honor this commonsensical distinction between “pap” and “art,” “even while exploring the challenge to criticism posed by a major writer’s blatant prejudices” (xxi), Crews does little to qualify his embrace of nonacademic commonsense, since what is “blatant” is, by definition, well within the purview of such sense (and, one might add, perhaps only marginally worth interrogating). Launching his readings of various “New” and “Old” Americanist efforts to define the field of American literature from such a foundation, Crews nevertheless produces some valuable insights into the practice of Americanist literary criticism and into the work of traditionally canonical authors and texts who serve as its subject. His review of surveys of the American Renaissance illuminates weaknesses in the strong readings that have come out of efforts to define that period and its canon, and his biographically informed readings of

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canonical texts often yield surprising insights that suggest the need to revise established readings. The latter readings demonstrate both the strengths and weaknesses of a commonsensical, “empirical,” traditional biographical criticism that I have sought to, respectively, exploit and avoid in my own work. I turn, then, to Crews’s chapter on Hemingway for an example of such criticism and a reference point for locating my own critical practice. Entitled “Pressure Under Grace,” Crews’s discussion of Hemingway and such well-known works as “Big Two-Hearted River,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and The Sun Also Rises relies heavily on Kenneth Lynn’s 1987 biography of Hemingway. Lynn’s biography is praised for its “admirable combination of justice and compassion,” for offering “our first cogent and sustained explanation of the psychological, familial, and environmental pressures that helped to make the willful yet deeply cautious [Hemingway] what he was” (91). The result, writes Crews, is certainly a “diminished figure” compared with the Hemingway of traditional myth, but he is also “not the exposed fraud we have grown accustomed to meeting in ideological diatribes of recent decades,” a man who “secretly entertained broader sympathies that his manly code implied” (91). According to Crews, the Hemingway Lynn allows us to see speaks most revealingly in this passage of a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald: “We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it don’t cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist” (91). Crews, using Lynn, will shortly tell us that, as Hemingway saw it, the bitch that bitched him so bad that he could write like a serious scientist was his mother, his damning Grace. Lynn, says Crews, shows “how pervasively the writer’s mind was ruled by his sense of what Grace had done to him” (105). Crews will go on to argue that what Grace Hemingway did to Ernest begins with what she did to Ernest’s father, Clarence Hemingway, whom in Ernest’s eyes was castrated by Grace, whose lavish spending created financial difficulties, whose willfulness made her the primary decision-maker in the family, and whose relationship with her voice student and housekeeper, Ruth Arnold, prompted rumors of lesbianism that shamed both father and son. Though Crews speculates that Hemingway was genetically predisposed to depression, he claims, standing on firm ground, that Hemingway himself blamed his mother for both his father’s depression (and therefore, one must infer, his suicide) and his own. The other source of Hemingway’s resentment is his own treatment at Grace’s domineering hand. Crews does not believe that Ernest was both dressed and coiffed in the manner of a girl for the first two-and-a-half years of his life merely because such was the convention of the time; rather, he assails

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Grace’s programmatic attempt to “twin” Ernest with his older sister, Marcelline, a passage from whose memoir he cites. It seems that Grace Hemingway arranged it so that Ernest and his sister slept in the same bedroom in twin white cribs; they had dolls that were just alike; they played with small china tea sets that had the same pattern. Later, the children were encouraged to fish together, hike together and visit friends together, and after Grace deliberately held Marcelline back, they entered grade school together. (106)

Crews adds that Grace once disgusted her son by insisting that he and Marcelline be in the same class. Adducing this evidence, and noting that even well past infancy Hemingway’s mother gave both sister and brother identical haircuts, Crews concludes, In all likelihood, what Grace wanted, beyond an enactment of some private cross-gender scheme, was a boy whose sexual identity would remain forever dependent upon her dictates and whims. If so, she gruesomely got her wish. The apparent effect of all that dolling and doting was not so much to lend Ernest a female identity as to implant in his mind a permanently debilitating confusion, anxiety, and anger. (106)

The upshot of this, in Crews’s words, is “a man possessed,” a mind “deeply strange,” and fiction that “abound[s] not only in castrating shrews and shattered men but also in sibling-like lovers whose deepest fantasy is to trade sex roles or merge into androgynous oneness” (107), writing that is “saturated in a mood of indefinite resentment, pessimism, and urgency about maintaining control” (97). In providing this biographically informed reading of Hemingway’s psyche and work, Crews seeks not to put to final rest the myth of Hemingway the hard-drinking, hard-writing, hard-loving, hunting-and-fishing hard-on— that he sees as a myth already thoroughly debunked—but rather to complicate and, to some extent, moderate the debunking of that myth: to see Hemingway as a man with strong cross-gender identifications who also saw himself as wounded (perhaps mortally) by his mother, thus enabling us to “return to the fiction with fresh appreciation” (91). Crews’s reading, whose debt to Lynn’s he readily acknowledges, validates his claims for the uses of biography by enabling such a return, revealing, for instance, that “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” “undercut[s its] own impulse to distinguish between the he-man and the weakling, the compliant kitten and the castrating bitch” (109), (though it is not clear to what

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degree the terms of distinction are challenged) and that in The Sun Also Rises Hemingway can be found to “identify with a woman’s point of view,” which should “thus mitigate some of the tendentiousness of his schematizing” (110). Yet Crew’s readings also demonstrate the limitations, even dangers, of criticism that founds itself too comfortably on biography and common sense. What the essay lacks most of all is an adequate etiology/sociology of Hemingway’s illness, greater reference to the discursive forces shaping gender—as well as class—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.1 Such a discussion could not only cast more light on the conflicts that may have eventually put a gun to both Hemingways’ heads, but, at least as importantly, if not more so, also begin to explain the politics and psychology of Grace Hemingway’s own obviously beset self-negotiation, played out in respectable, upper middle-class, heterosexual Oak Park, Illinois. The importance of such an addition could be overstated, but that would be hard to do. Even if one grants Crews’s privileging of Ernest Hemingway and his fiction over the “life-writing” of Grace Hemingway, too much of Crews’s chapter on Hemingway is about his mother for it to leave unexamined the motives for her own behavior. Even if one accepts Crew’s hastily arrived at conclusion that Grace Hemingway sought to create an Ernest whose sexuality she would always control, there remains to ask why she would do so. Without a greater appreciation of the discursive shaping of both Ernest’s and Grace’s work, readers are left with something that looks suspiciously retrograde: a psychologism that, though occasionally qualified, traces the origins of Ernest Hemingway’s misogyny, sexual dysfunction, and grotesque masculinist posturing back to his monstrous mother, then looks no further. This is to risk rewriting misogyny in a different, less blatant, register. To look further into the potential sources of Crew’s own critical practice, the “common sense” that permeates his Hemingway chapter is something that could quite arguably be traced back to a kind of thought prevalent during the nineteen fifties, when Crews’s academic career began. The “momism,” that appears to operate in this chapter was a post-World War II psychology that sought to return women from the factory to the home and placed enormous burdens on housewives by emphasizing the absolutely crucial importance of mothering in the development of children.2 (And to track Crews’s critical practice one step further, I would add that it seems that, with the “return” of appreciation of Hemingway in this chapter, we also get the return of a lately repressed figure in Crews’s own work, for the apostles of momism claimed for their authority Freud.) Crews’s useful analysis of what ailed Ernest Hemingway provides an example of what is valuable about biographical criticism, but also of what can

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go wrong when such criticism fails to assess the discursive conditions of the texts it analyzes and its own critical practice.3 In 1992, the same year Crews published The Critics Bear It Away, there appeared a collection of essays entitled Kate Chopin Reconsidered. Published by Louisiana State University Press, in its subtitle, Beyond the Bayou, the collection of New Americanist readings of Chopin’s work promises to be anything but backwater in perspective. One essay by John Carlos Rowe provides an example of the kind of critical practice that Crews may have in mind when he weighs in against “theory-saturated” criticism that pays little attention to biography: “The Economics of the Body in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening” (1172–4). Rowe’s essay seeks to reveal a political unconscious at work in Chopin’s novel, reading it as an expression of the alienating workings of capital and patriarchy in late-nineteenth-century America. Drawing foremost on Marx, Engels, Lucacs, and Elaine Scarry’s discussion of Marx— and using biographical materials sparingly— Rowe succeeds in arguing that Edna Pontellier “successively experiences the inadequacy of the modes of production available to her to express her body, to offer her any substantial and self-sufficient being.” He provokes reconsideration of Sandra Gilbert’s influential reading of the novel (complicating her interpretations of Edna’s last supper and last swim). Finally, Rowe discusses the novel as Edna’s (and Kate Chopin’s) working out of a problematic related to that which I am using to read the authors and texts in this dissertation: “how to make the body other—an object, an artifact, a child, a novel—without losing that body” (139). Illuminating Rowe’s essay is Elaine Scarry’s reading of Marx in The Body in Pain. Rowe’s interest in Scarry stems from what she has to say about the body’s capacity for self-transformation, and most crucially for its socialization in labor. Rowe, who begins by noting the numerous critics who have remarked the novel’s many private moments in which Edna examines and cares for her body in a relieved manner, concludes that Chopin’s protagonist wants “to experience her body in the world around her, not simply in the private moments when she touches herself as if to confirm an existence so tenuous in public but in the labor of socialization itself ” (139). He then quotes Scarry on the transformations of the body in this self-socializing activity: The socialization of sentience—which is itself as profound a change as if one were to open the body physically and redirect the path of neuronal flow, rearrange the small bones into a new pattern, remodel the ear drum—is one of Marx’s major emphases. Sense organs, skin, and body tissue have themselves been recreated to experience themselves in terms of their own objectification. It is this now essentially altered biological being that, in going on to remake himself or herself in other ways, enters

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into that act of remaking as one whose sentience is socialized, fundamentally restructured to be relieved of its privacy. (139)

Rowe then extends Scarry’s argument: Because these modes of objectification can be shared by others, they enable us to extend our “bodies,” amplify our “privacy” (and thus our mortality) to encompass society (and thus an enduring history). In Scarry’s reading of Marx’s philosophy of the social commodity as an extension and amplification of the individual body, that commodity is not fetishized but endlessly productive: ‘For Marx, the more extended and sublimated sites of making should extend this attribute of sharability; the interaction made possible by a freestanding object is amplified as that object now becomes a ‘commodity’ interacting with other objects and so increasing the number of persons who are in contact with one another; the socialization of sentience should continue to be amplified as one moves to more extended economic (money, capital) and political artifacts.’ Under capitalism such a socialist economy is detoured into the peculiar economy by which the amplification of a fabricated body (the capitalist’s capital) depends upon the diminution of the natural body (the worker’s physical body). (139)

To take seriously Scarry’s reading of Marx is to perceive texts as the extension of bodies that are, under the right dispensation, “endlessly productive.” If I read Crews correctly, his argument is that, rather than allow this endless productivity to take place, something analogous to the kind of amplifying and diminishing process Rowe describes above is occurring now in American literary studies, with critics occupying the position of the capitalist working in the “peculiar economy” of academic scholarship, the author in the position of industrial worker, now alienated from his or her labor (and often conveniently dead and therefore unlikely to resist). Indeed, the title of Crews’s book evokes the element of force, of piracy, that Rowe, in the course of enfolding details of the life of the pirate Jean Lafitte into his discussion of Chopin’s narrative, claims is not only “capitalism’s secret law” but also “one of its origins” (132). Rowe’s critical practice at times invites such a comparison. Those passages that can be construed to refer to Chopin’s artistic intentions consistently transvalue them into Marxian or Marx-compatible terms: “Chopin uses this knowledge [precise referent unclear] to explore woman’s problematic relation to the new economics of speculative capitalism (119). . . . Even so, a woman’s rebellion will involve much more for Chopin than merely the assertion of her naked self; that rebellion will require a thorough trans-

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valuation of the modes of production that govern both the psyche and the economy of late-nineteenth century capitalism (121). . . . Chopin wants . . . to entangle Edna’s erotic sense of her body with more general economic questions of human production (129). . . . the legends of Lafitte seem to suggest for Chopin how easily rebellion may be co-opted (132). . . . as Edna only dimly recognizes at the very end of the narrative but Chopin knows all too well, there can be no nature for a woman that is not always already shaped and determined, inscribed and charted, by the laws of the social order (135). . . . there can be no myth, after all, without culture, and it is just this mythopoetic role that both Chopin and Marx imagine every worker ought to assume in his or her everyday labors” (137). Rowe reductively glosses scenes of great complexity and psychological depth, such as those in which Edna Pontillier experiences her oppressive torpor in the wake of encounters with her husband: “In these two scenes Edna’s frustration and rebellion are analogous to the industrial worker’s recognition of the alienation of her labor power, an alienation by means of which the capitalist affirms his power to rule” (129). Throughout the essay, Chopin’s text is painstakingly subsumed to a Marxian meta-text, as Rowe, nearing the end of his essay, belatedly and perhaps somewhat ruefully acknowledges, “I have made Kate Chopin sound like a committed Marxist, which she was decidedly not . . . .” Rowe then continues, but she nevertheless understood her activity as a writer to involve a problematic sort of labor. As she writes in “In the Confidence of the StoryWriter,” ‘The story completed, I was very, very weary; but I had the satisfaction of feeling that for once in my life I had worked hard, I had achieved something great, I had taken pains.’ (139)

Ultimately, Rowe, seemingly activated into opposition by his own admission that Chopin was not a “committed Marxist,” will severely qualify Chopin’s success (success that he elsewhere appears to grant Chopin) by circumscribing the novel’s diagnostic and liberatory power. No sooner does he allow Chopin to begin to narrate her own literary and self-production than he again subsumes that narrative to the grand historical one. Following Sandra Gilbert’s reading of the novel’s ending only so far, he warns that though The Awakening “is potentially a narrative of emancipation,” “we must not forget literature’s conditions of production, its history.” Because the novel undervalues the labor of working class and racial others and offers an emancipatory symbolism that only plays to a sophisticated audience of “profoundly private” readers, it merely “remains an interesting contribution to the restricted economy of literary modernism” (140).

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One can say “true enough” in response to these judgments and still feel that Rowe’s critical practice leaves much to be desired: mainly, the particulars of Chopin’s history of literary production, and of the pains and pleasures she, a widow at thirty-two with six children to raise and her deceased husband’s business to conduct, took in it. Such a consideration should in no way compromise a principled critique of Chopin’s or The Awakening’s politics; instead, it would ground such a critique, provide it with a finer working of supporting detail, perhaps prompt revision that would make a worthy meta-narrative even better—and rescue it from claims that it runs roughshod over laboring individual sensibilities as it makes relentlessly and without detour for its conclusion. To return to Scarry on Marx, and Hemingway on Hemingway (and the rest of us), if a literary production is the working out of the body into the larger social sphere, and in many instances the working out of the body’s pain, a careful anatomization of that pain, using everything we have, including biography, will allow us to see, however darkly, its social, psychological, and physical conditions and to preserve a finer sense of the struggle for life that is at the base of that work. In the process, we will preserve something like an “author” who can even still be “relieved of its privacy,” and—born into a world not of its own making and enselved in cooperation and conflict with others—receive what is desired by all: acknowledgement. I am not arguing that texts or authors be allowed to be “endlessly productive” on their own terms, but that an effort to understand those terms from the ground (or body) up should be a part of our own productive reconfiguration of authors and texts, even as we bring them into relation with bodies like that of the body who once wrote, “If nothing else, the bourgeoisie will have cause to remember my carbuncles.” My own efforts here aspire to this kind of criticism. Individually, the three chapters that follow favor particular features of critical practice. Of the three, my reading of Melville’s Billy Budd as an attempt to read and write a body that insists on its own inscrutability—yet also as an epitome of Melville’s lifelong effort to relieve himself of both his inheritance and his privacy—provides the best, most substantial use of discursive analysis as it delves into nineteenth century phrenology. I have read Billy Budd, his last, unfinished work, as the “inside narrative” (to take a phrase from its subtitle) of Melville’s life and literary career. My argument is that in Billy Budd, we see Melville working out the effects of what I call a military-literary complex on his body and his writing. This demanding, disciplining complex gives structure to his life, the trajectory of his literary career, and his last novella. It is a legacy of ancestral participation in the revolutionary war that has been celebrated by his family and the culture at large, which has richly rewarded that participation both

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symbolically and materially. Writing at the end of a life in which he has appeared to singularly fail to live up to this legacy, Melville provides us with a meditation on the forces contributing to that failure using the figures of Captain Vere, Billy Budd, and John Claggart, whose interactions are understood within the workings of this complex. In the course of this reading of a novella filled with bodies, we find Herman Melville’s discursively shaped body. As Melville’s personal literary history, Billy Budd comes to terms—or blows—with the figure of the sailoradventurer, whose embodiment of a life of out-of-culture experience, of martial and sexual adventure, launched Melville’s literary career. This character, in fact, Melville was, after a fashion, in Typee, which was sold as an autobiographical account of time he had spent on the island of Nukuheva in the South Seas. Melville’s readers thrilled to this body. They were titillated by the barely veiled intimations of its experience of taboo pleasure and excited by its close escape from being eaten. Melville’s name-conscious family called him “Typee”; the press sometimes made it his middle name. Thus it was that Melville’s body—laden with cultural significance—was very much a vehicle of his initial success. The character of the Handsome Sailor, however, proves original boon but final bane, as Melville, determined to write another way, foresakes him, trading the physical for the metaphysical and the marketable for the mysterious. Billy Budd begins in a manner evocative of Melville’s early work, yet gradually leads readers into the darkest tragedy. We watch as Billy Budd, the young handsome sailor, is finally hanged at the command of martial law and its front man, the older, “wiser,” hyper-literate and hypo-embodied model of military discipline, Captain Vere, whose secret sin is ambition. In the encounter between Vere and Budd we find an allegory of Melville’s changing thematics over the course of his career, an indicator of the forces that drive that change, and a repudiation of that former self that it involves. We also find something like a representation of Melville’s composing process. It is here that I have made use of two ideas generated by Carolyn Marvin in her work on speech and public performance. The first is that body and text historically have been conceived as opposites, as opposing forces associated with different classes, one literate and possessed of both political control and immense textual resources, the other illiterate, disenfranchised, and “stuck with their bodies” in a way those who could manipulate texts were not (“Theorizing” 1193–8) . The second involves the struggles writers have with their bodies as they compose. Marvin describes the sense that writers have of the body as a distraction, obstacle, or tormentor, as something that keeps them from writing (“Body” 1294–9). Attempting in some fashion to transcend the self through writing, the writer is brutally recuperated by the most

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elemental fact of selfhood: our embodiment. This way of thinking about and experiencing writing, like our historical associations, makes antagonists of bodies and texts. When one considers both these ways of thinking about bodies and texts, it casts in a new light the ambition of would-be authors whose intention is to transcend their present station through this “disembodied” act. How must such people think about their bodies that threaten to silence them and resonate so strongly of stuckness? So I came to think, as I reflected on the encounter between Melville’s foretopman and Captain Vere, of the Jacob-like wrestling match that was Melville’s composing process—and his propensity to dramatize writing as struggle in works such as “Bartleby the Scrivener” and Pierre. Eventually, I read Billy Budd as, in part, an allegory of Melville’s struggles with his body in the composing process: the hyper-literate Captain Vere demanding the stilling of the young, overly embodied, hardly articulate sailor Budd so that his own ambitions could be realized. This consideration of Melville’s conception of the role of his or her body in writing leads us out into much broader avenues of inquiry, areas to which Melville purposefully takes us. Billy Budd is not merely about Melville’s allegory of private struggle. Melville’s struggle to write is a class struggle (and a race struggle, and a gender struggle, and a sexuality struggle) played out in his body, his family, and his text. The struggle of John Dos Passos to overcome the “stays” of class privilege and become most fully and democratically American through writing U.S.A. is read primarily by recourse to biographical materials rather than those of his discursive surroundings (which in many ways are already the explicit subject of the trilogy). Dos Passos writes U.S.A. in the wake of the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, whom he had strenuously defended through letters, articles, and monographs. Faced with this significant testimony to the powerlessness of the writer, Dos Passos resolves that the deaths of the two anarchists have redeemed the very words that have failed to save them. U.S.A. is his furious attempt to make the novel—a form challenged by the new media of the early twentieth century—productive. In it we find a politically motivated writer wondering at the ultimate utility of words against “Power/Superpower,” yet employing them—lots of them—nonetheless. The trilogy as a whole testifies to Dos Passos’s conflicted attempt to “declass” his body and refashion both it and his writing according to a conventional paradigms of American masculinity that operated during these periods, to acquire something like what he calls “the body of an American” so that he could write a more democratic America into being. Though he detested this masculinist paradigm and despaired of embodying it, and though he saw its destructive potentials work themselves out in bodies strewn all over battlefields of

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Europe, it is stylistically refashioned in the writing of the trilogy that he hoped would redeem both himself and the bodies of countless suffering Americans, from anarchists to soldiers obedient unto death. Dos Passos, like Melville, will attempt to speak on behalf of a dead body separated from his own body by class and circumstance and try to work out the machinations by which it was doomed. In the process he struggles self-consciously with the sensitive, cultured, observant body that his “hotel childhood” bequeaths him. This body alienates him from the men he would defend, yet he is determined to speak for them. U.S.A. evidences Dos Passos’s struggle with what he called the “stays” of his privilege as the son of a wealthy and influential father. In it, we see him both defending the working man (and it is, primarily, men that he is interested in) and expressing the worm at the heart of his project: an intransigent class bias that is part of what prevents a full-throated song of ourselves. (To be sure, there are other biases at work as well.) Further complicating this struggle are two important factors. One is Dos Passos’s scarring personal history of overmatched physical endeavor, particularly in childhood and adolescence. The other is the writer’s movement into mid-life. With this movement comes a growing awareness of the vulnerability of his own position within Depression-era America and a species of early second childhood, as Dos Passos struggles to revise an old script of personal inadequacy. These factors combine to produce a Big Money that is bigger than it ought to be. Though assisted by biography and an awareness of general discursive conditions, my analysis of Their Eyes Were Watching God is—more than these others—an extended close reading, in this case of Zora Hurston’s attempt to write out of the discursive box of blackness, femininity, and aging. While both Melville and Dos Passos work in a tragic mode and write the embodied conflicts of (chiefly) gender and class from circumstances pressured but also comparatively privileged, Zora Neale Hurston attempts to bootstrap her way to a better life in Their Eyes Were Watching God. In the first paragraphs of the novel, Hurston purposefully distances herself from a masculinist tradition of tragic consolation, announcing that hers is a different, hortatory writing that aims to realize dreams rather than mourn their demise. Hurston’s comedy is haunted, however, by discourses of race, gender, and aging that devour characters in the novel and threaten its author as well. Hurston begins her best novel at age forty-five, after breaking ties with both a long term lover and an important, wealthy patron. Having long lied about her age by years that most persons would only dream of dissembling, and having gained substantial emotional and economic support thereby, Hurston produces a novel about a forty-year-old who looks like a twenty-year-old. The central antagonist of the

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story is destroyed by being told he “looks like de change uh life.” While the novel by the self-described “born first-nighter” begins by depicting triumphant public performance of a confident woman who commands spectatorship, it ends with an image of a someone suffering from performance fatigue, a woman tired of men and prying eyes. She is a woman happy to have a house, a secure income, and a friend to talk to. Hurston writes her best book at a point in life at which she is in danger of being discursively defined as notso-young, not-so-gifted, and not-so-black (at least, not the kind of black that her audience might desire). The dead male body at the middle of Hurston’s text, however, is substantially representative of the forces that would so define the writer, so rather than speak for him, his narrator is happy to shut him up after a lifetime of listening. This dissertation is arranged so that, in a progressively insistent manner, it is about aging. In Billy Budd is presented a generational conflict that can also be transmuted into a tale of growing to a compromised “maturity” by brutalizing the younger self. I have not provided an extended reading explicitly along these lines, but it is in the tale for the taking, especially when it is read beside the narrative of a young man who is supposed to do something with his life after returning from almost four years at sea. In my reading of U.S.A., the category of age moves closer to the foreground of the analysis, especially as I look at the bodies to be found in The Big Money, where one can clearly see the effects of John Dos Passos’s stint in Hollywood, which in 1934 was already unparalleled for its ability to make one conscious of age and appearance. Finally, in Their Eyes Were Watching God age moves to the center of my reading. Such a progression mirrors my own developing thinking about what links these authors and texts, each of which, in their various ways and to various degrees, has something to say about growing “old.” Discourses on age are, of course, pervasive. It is a commonplace that our marketized culture ceaselessly circulates iconic images of young bodies, images of embodied status, wealth, excitement, fun, and success that serve as the engine of our economic life. This market converges with scientific and medical interest in the body that generates a copious discourse on health, fitness, and beauty; on sex and sexuality; on “looking and feeling younger.” Our sporting events celebrate youth. The greater part of the music industry caters to it. These things we know. It is in this discursive stream, however, that academic discussion of the body takes place, and we should ask to what extent this discourse conditions our own talk in ways good and bad. The academic community in the humanities and social sciences has increasingly over the last two decades conceived

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itself as, in one fashion or another, “talking back” to power in its multiple forms, or at the very least in anatomizing power’s operations. While seeking a critical practice that has a political impact, it has also, however, developed an increasing awareness of the unexpected workings of power, of the accidents of agency, of the susceptibility of “progressive” critical practice to misappropriation, misunderstanding, and mistake, not only in its reception, but in its selfconception, since “talking back” to power is not a simple enterprise when that power so deeply informs the terms of discussion. One can justly wonder then, at the comparative lack of analysis (at least within cultural studies and literary studies), especially given present interest on the body, of the powerful and important discourses that calculate, track, and define age—discourses that age us. Identity politics and the categories of gender, race, class, and sexuality are staples of most contemporary academic efforts to read cultural artifacts and the body, but age rarely figures as a prominent concern in our effort to read and change our culture. This is a curious state of affairs for a critical community in a nation such as ours, which is youth-obsessed, which is to say, agedobsessed as well (but prefers not to talk about it). Why, in a professional community that, if nothing else, rarely shies from taking an intensely interested look at a first rate obsession, is there not more work in this area? What would cultural studies look like if it had as one of its founding texts a study of bodies not in penal agony and in prisons and asylums, but in nursing homes? And why doesn’t it? To ask these questions is not to imply a criticism of Foucault or his projects, which have been taken up and extended in very productive ways, but to extend it still further by asking a question he might have eventually asked, and to suggest that there are substantial blind spots in academic surveillance of the cultural field. When discourses as powerful and pervasive as those on age go so little analyzed by a profession that makes it its business to analyze powerful, pervasive discourses, a massive repression is operating, or a phobia, or a powerful discursive police force. Some clues the reasons for the exclusion might come from one of the few critical ideas that does have something to do with age—the anxiety of influence. Bloom’s investigations into the efforts of Romantic poets to supercede the practices of their poetic forebears brings to the forefront issues of generational conflict that certainly must resonate with literary studies in the academy, where junior faculty have so often vied with senior faculty over curriculum and course content, where scholarship has been self-consciously transforming itself over the past twenty to thirty years into something different from what it once was, where pressure to publish generates an economy of the new that demands obsolescence. In such a context,

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what—and who—is new and old are questions of such importance and sensitivity that inquiries into their cultural ground might be discouraged. They can also appear inevitable and even natural, operating as many, if not all of us, do, within a meta-narrative of progress that is perhaps easier to deconstruct than to destroy. We can also wonder about the force the idea of the “generation” has exerted on the field of literary studies. Many attribute recent changes within this field to the work of scholars who “came of age” during the sixties and early seventies, scholars who, trained primarily in formalist criticism yet intent on social change, have used the close reading skills such work demands to study and develop extrinsic approaches to literature that foreground the rhetorical, political nature of literature, and who have queried the category of the literary itself for its political force and legitimacy. These scholars have made the profession more diverse along the lines of race, gender, class, and sexuality. (Certainly, one must add sexuality if one counts public representation of one’s sexuality as its defining feature). They have brought with them and developed a sensitivity to these categories and a determination to query their history of use and their potentials in the present. These scholars—and important forebears and progeny—have largely succeeded in redefining the discipline’s work along these lines. These scholars also were part of a generation that more than perhaps any that has gone before—or come along since—has thought of itself as a “generation,” both a discrete national sub-group clearly differentiated by virtue of the historical moment of its birth and maturity, and one that has continued to conceive of itself as exceptionally generative. The reasons for this exceptionalism are various. First, there is the matter of sheer magnitude of the demographic shift that occurred in the wake of World War II that, amplified by American post-war prosperity and hegemony, called attention to itself because it was so unprecedented. The baby boom demanded the further development and attention of a class of researchers and policy experts who studied society en masse and whose findings would be refracted through the classrooms through which this generation passed, as well as through the culture at large. Second, there is the creation of galvanizing events and movements in civil rights, women’s rights, the sexual revolution, and—most significant because of its violence and that it so deeply involved many of these issues—the Vietnam war. These conflicts have motivated much of the scholarly shift in the past decades. They also, as is well known, created divisions between parents and children, between “young people” and those “middle-aged” and older of an order that perhaps have not before or since been experienced in American life.

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Third, television mediated these conflicts in an unprecedented fashion, providing college undergraduates and graduate students with an extraordinary forum for protest (briefly) and an opportunity to watch and think itself as a generation, a collective constituted across the country, united in age and (re)generative power. Fourth and finally, marketers and corporations seized the moment—and discourses that trace back at least to the romantic period— to sell that “generation” on its generationness, and generally on the power and goodness of youth. It is therefore possible that the very conflicts that have motivated the development of so many productive insights in literary and cultural studies have also contributed to its relative blindness to the problematic of age, which is to say, the problems of assigning age, of representing age, of determining the privileges and limitations of age, of living life’s ages. (There are other determinants as well, of course, above all the market forces I allude to above.) As baby boomers “grow older,” perhaps their scholarship will take up this issue, or perhaps a “new generation” of scholars, seeking a frontier (or lands held by their elders?) will do it instead. My own criticism, itself inevitably shaped by the same forces I’ve just outlined and by the particulars of my experience, only begins to examine this largely uncharted territory, which requires much more extensive mapping.4 In America, there are two groups in particular who are menaced by the discourses on age—the non-adult “young” and the “old”—those who exist at the margins of the conventionally figured life spectrum. The litany is familiar to many. Recent welfare reforms have blasted poor children. Support for public schooling is at a low. In the wake of school shootings, one can expect a brace of punitive laws against minors, who now are far more likely to be prosecuted as adults than they once were. (Already, in Louisiana the legislature has passed a law requiring students to address teachers as “ma’am” and “sir,” and it even took under consideration the proposal, mercifully dropped, that students must stand any time a teacher enters or leaves the classroom.) As for the “elderly,” in America five million of them either have no food in their house or testify to worrying about having enough to eat (Lieberman 11). Many of the nation’s nursing homes are a scandal: poorly administrated, under-staffed, and regulated in the most perfunctory manner. Underwriting the malign neglect of these groups is that those living at the two ends of the age spectrum also exist at the margins of employability in our economy.5 (One of these groups is “protected” by child labor laws, some of which, in the absence of a viable public education system, may be doing them more harm than good.) Our globalizing economy has generated a lifeboat mentality in which the aged (a preponderance of whom are women) and children go last. Those doing cultural and literary studies should examine at greater length the writing of their fate and our fate.

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Chapter Two

Reading a Man Like a Book: Bodies and Texts in Billy Budd

In 1886, at age sixty-six, forty years after the publication of his first novel and greatest commercial success, Typee, thirty-four years after the publication of his fifth novel and greatest artistic success, Moby Dick, thirty-three years after the publication of his sixth novel and greatest commercial and personal catastrophe, Pierre, and twenty-nine years after the publication of his last novel, The Confidence Man, which effectively ended his career as a marketable writer, Herman Melville, who daily walked unrecognized by passersby on the streets of New York, indeed, whom many American readers believed to be dead, began work on Billy Budd. Melville started this novella as an aging man who, though continuing to produce poetry that he published privately, had effectively lost his writing career, had nearly lost his marriage, was losing his health, had outlived numerous friends and relatives, and had lost his only two sons—one apparently by suicide, the other by tuberculosis. When Melville plots his final, unfinished tale entangling the Handsome Sailor, the Marplot, and the Master Plotter, he has most recently been writing poetry for friends, family, and himself, producing Weeds and Wildings Chiefly: With a Rose or Two, which has been described as “a bouquet of poetry” for his long-suffering and sacrificing wife, Elizabeth Shaw Melville (Robertson-Lorant 608); and John Marr and other Sailors with Some Sea-Pieces, collections whose titles suggest the modesty of Melville’s poetic ambition and the comparative intimacy of his relationship with his readers.1 In the latter years of his life, freed from the duties at the customs house that had occupied him for twenty years, and financially secure because of various late inheritances on his wife’s side, Melville, having seemingly set his sights decidedly lower than they once had been, returns to the sea that gave birth to his career, often waxing elegiac and reflective, as 17

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one might expect from a person of advanced years who has experienced repeated failure and substantial tragedy. The work he produces expresses this multitude of experience, and then some. Its origins can be traced to events that significantly predate Herman Melville. Sixty-six years before commencing Billy Budd, Melville was born into a proud, substantial family that boasted revolutionary war heroes on both sides. His paternal grandfather, Thomas Melvill, was a close friend of Samuel Adams and a participant in the Boston Tea Party. As an artillery officer in the navy, he fought at Bunker Hill and distinguished himself at Nantucket by firing the first battery at the retreating British fleet. After the war he found his service to the new country’s cause richly rewarded, successfully running for state representative and, in 1796, receiving from President Washington an appointment as Naval Officer for the Port of Boston. After serving once again in the War of 1812, Thomas Melvill received a sinecure with the Boston Custom House that allowed him time and energy enough to serve as local fire warden and as president of the Massachusett’s Charitable Society. He was a pillar of Boston society, eulogized in death by the likes of Daniel Webster and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Heroic service to the country could also be found on the mother’s side of Melville’s family. His mother’s father, Peter Gansevoort, was a scion of a firmly established Hudson Valley family who distinguished himself as an Indian fighter during the revolutionary conflict, becoming famous for his determined defense of the strategically placed Fort Schuyler, which was under his command. For his service he received a substantial amount of land near Lake George. When he died in 1812, he was buried with full military honors. Regalia from his time in the service were treasured family heirlooms. Both father Allan and mother Marie were proud of their family’s history and saw in it a tradition of heroic endeavor that they attempted to communicate to their eldest sons, Gansevoort and Herman. Dinner conversation in the Melvill household was laced with stories of the revolution and the exploits of the patriarchs. Allan frequently urged his sons to boldly follow the example of their grandfather and his “daring chivalric deed” in Boston Harbor (Robertson-Lorant 3). Melville’s father, Allan Melville, however, sought no martial achievement of his own in early nineteenth-century America, preferring rather to seek his fortune in the import of luxury dry goods. He was an egotistical and elegant man of accomplished manners that served him well in the wooing of Maria Gansevoort. He cultivated the gentlemanly arts of good penmanship and poetry. He avidly traced his lineage back to the thirteenth century and the Scots nobility. He overextended himself financially and borrowed heavily, first

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from his father, then, when Thomas Melvill refused to lend more, from his father-in-law. He desperately believed that Providence smiled upon him and would reward his fervent prayers for financial success. It did not. Ultimately, lack of business acumen and a bad economy did him in. When his second son, Herman, was twelve years old, Allan Melvill, age fifty, took a steamer to New York in a last gasp effort to save his flagging business. It was the dead of winter, but to economize Melville booked a deck passage. Afterward, Melvill fell sick, but continued to work feverishly to save his finances. Eventually he developed an intense fever, and with it, fell into a delirium that did not cease until he died weeks later. Allan Melvill’s death left Maria Gansevoort Melville to struggle with her grief, the multiplied burden of raising their eight children, and a humiliating bankruptcy. She survived on her abilities, the kindness of relatives, and a reconfirmed Calvinist faith. In picking up the pieces, she changed the family name, adding an “e” that both compensated for and concealed the bankruptcy by highlighting the family’s aristocratic lineage (the “e” was the old Scottish spelling) and distancing son Gansevoort from his father’s name-besmirching failures. Both of the eldest Melville sons went to work— Gansevoort in an attempt to salvage the family business, Herman, taken out of school, as a bank teller. Though aided by relatives on both sides, Maria and her children would not recover from Allan Melvill’s death. Herman Melville would eventually get additional formal schooling and become a teacher for a time, but his father’s death would consign him to a whale-ship education. Herman Melville’s semesters at sea begin when he is twenty-one, following years of office work and odd jobs, including a few weeks in the Atlantic as a ship’s cabin boy. Melville’s voyage lasts the nearly four years that a more fortunate son would have spent at Harvard. During that period, he serves aboard four different ships, beginning his voyage aboard the Acushnet, a whale ship on its maiden voyage as well. He eventually jumps ship, spending four weeks among natives on a South Sea island. Melville then signs on aboard an Australian whaler, the Lucy Ann, but he is eventually charged with mutiny and imprisoned on Tahiti. Escaping his imprisonment, he and a friend work on a potato farm until Melville jumps aboard a Nantucket whaler, the Charles and Henry. It takes Melville to Hawaii, where he works odd jobs and makes enemies in the American missionary community that he sharply criticizes. Finally, he enlists to serve aboard the United States, becoming acquainted with the martial discipline of the navy, never knowing the sting of the lash, but observing frequently and closely the flogging of shipmates. When he returns to his home in Lansingburgh, New York, he is different from what he was and

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from anyone else around, arriving “sunburned, bearded, and rugged as a bear” (Robertson-Lorant 133). Friends and relatives pump him for details of his voyage, and he becomes a local celebrity, telling and embellishing the tale of his hairbreadth escape from the cannibals(?) of the South Sea island of Nukuheva. His young brother Tom hangs on his words; the young ladies of Lansingburgh flock to the mountain man from the sea. It is a welcome, heady change from being hounded, shackled, and ordered about by shipsailing martinets. He is urged to write a book, and he does, producing the novel Typee. Named for the inhabitants of the South Sea Island that Melville rested on after jumping ship, Typee tells the story of Tommo, a sailor who jumps a ship in the South Seas and spends four weeks resting on a tropical paradise that may be a tropical hell. When Tommo is not enjoying the ministrations of a young Nukuhevan boy to his “swollen leg,” swimming and sailing with nubile Nukuhevan girls, or making general observations on their free sexuality and mores, he wonders if he is being fattened up to be eaten. After the friend with whom he had jumped ship disappears, Tommo’s anxieties mount. Finally, one day the suspense grows too great for him, and he breaks for a ship that has stopped in the island harbor. There is a fight among the Nukuhevans over him. Tommo barely escapes after burying a grappling hook into the throat of one of his pursuers and falling back into the arms of a friendly Nukuhevan who ensures that he boards the Australian vessel waiting in the harbor. The tale mostly delivers upon the “come aboard” promise to readers delivered in its early pages, which are redolent with promises of forbidden fruit: ‘Hurra, my lads! It’s a settled thing; next week we shape our course to the Marquesas!’ The Marquesas! What strange visions of outlandish things does the very name spirit up! Naked houris—cannibal banquets—groves of cocoa-nut—coral reefs—atooed chefs—and bamboo temples; sunny valleys planted with bread-fruit trees—carved canoes dancing on the flashing blue waters—savage woodlands guarded by horrible idols—heathenish rites and human sacrifices. (5)

Thus it was that Melville began his writing career by trading on his body. Its chief value to his readers was that it provided a vehicle by which to imagine the unimaginable erotic pleasures of the tropics and that it had almost been eaten: Melville had enjoyed heavenly fleshly delights that he had nearly paid for with hellish fleshly terror. Melville marketed himself as a subject of bodily adventure and transgression that had barely lived to tell the tale. It was what his comfortable middle class readers wanted, giving them a vicarious experience of release from buttoned up England and eastern seaboard America. For a time, this response served Melville so well that he became

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“nothing less than the first American literary sex symbol” (Parker xii).2 But readers’ keen interest in Tommo’s body soon began to stalk both Melville’s financial and artistic ambitions. Some readers turned out to be distressingly literal-minded. They insisted upon the importance of Melville’s body having actually gone through all that is related in Typee; they demanded to know if the appearance given by his first novel corresponded with reality. For them, the tale of Typee had to be backed by the body of Melville or it was not worth the trouble. The dispute surrounding the verisimilitude of Melville’s account became of some concern because it hurt not only Melville’s reputation but also book sales. Controversy regarding whether or not Typee was an actual account raged for some time. Melville responded to his critics, defending both his honor and the book sales that depended on the account being read as factual.3 Apart from this controversy, and more importantly to the trajectory of Melville’s career, readers also thrilled so strongly to the pleasure and plight of the protagonist in Melville’s first book that they never quite got over the author’s abandonment of the travel narrative/adventure tale. In the aftermath of the success of his first novel, Melville’s family began to call him “Typee,” a nickname that, as time and success passed, was doubtless mercifully dropped, but not, one would imagine, before Melville sounded out the ironic, punning applications of the title of the book to himself. Melville, a man of enormous ambition searching desperately for both monetary and critical success that could restore his family’s name, would come to rue the prospect of being known simply as “the man who lived among the cannibals,” and his letters would one day contain chagrined instructions that publishers stop putting “by the author of Typee, Pidledee’ &tc” on the jackets of his later works (Robertson-Lorant 416). Early in his career, Melville traded heavily on the thrill experienced by American and British readers contemplating both his erotic adventure among exotic maidens and his narrow escape from being ingested by them. Later in life, he wished readers would drop it. Their refusal to let go reveals their puerility (and perhaps their perversity),4 mocks his commercial failure, typecasts him and his books, and consigns him to the drudgery and shame of the Custom House and the marginalia of literary history (or so it seemed). From the promise of Typee and his second novel, Omoo, Melville fell hard. Turning to fiction that insisted on exploring further the regions of metaphysics, politics, and the psyche, he left the conventional sailor adventure behind. Financial hardship dogged him, as did many critics. Melville, driven by ambition, financial necessity, and a desire to exercise his growing power over words, pushed himself hard, producing six novels—Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, White Jacket, and Moby Dick—in five years. Each

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was less readerly, more dense, dark, and “metaphysical” than the last. The harder Melville wrote, the smaller became his readership and the more wary became his publishers. By the time he was writing Pierre, numerous family members feared for his health and sanity. For many, the publication of Pierre, a deeply troubling novel that Melville originally intended as a money-making conventional romance but quickly transformed into a money-losing anti-romance, confirmed their fears. For the next quarter century or so, Melville’s domestic and professional life was marked by difficulty. Relatives on his wife’s side continually worried about his sanity and Maria Melville’s safety, once giving serious consideration to a scheme to spirit her away from him. Money was tight, and more than once Maria’s family came to their aid. Melville eventually went to work at the New York Customs House, where he would labor from 1866 to 1885, surrounded by corruption that he politely resisted, never taking a bribe—or receiving a raise in salary. Billy Budd bears the marks of much of Herman Melville’s personal history. It is the final textual manifestation of a military-literary complex that fuels his enormous ambition and constitutes his primary inheritance from his family and his culture, an inheritance he can neither wholly repudiate nor wholly embrace. The novella expresses his complex views and allegiances, developed over a lifetime of experience and reading, on issues of class, race, sexuality, child-rearing, politics, and writing, revealing their radical entanglement with each other and with the complex just named. Billy Budd recapitulates in a phylogenic fashion the trajectory of Melville’s life and his writing career, offering insight into the participation of the forces named above in the shaping of that arc. And most of all, it offers us bodies, seafaring bodies that mediate much of the content to which I’ve just referred. These bodies promise adventure but deliver tragedy. Beginning Melville’s tale, readers are invited to gaze upon iconic male forms, “Handsome Sailors” freighted with the values of adventure-seeking and heroic martial accomplishment. Melville’s jocund narrator commences in the manner of a verbose story teller as merry in his tale as Billy Budd in his mess. Before long, however, the story takes on more somber tones and plunges readers into a world of confusion, tragedy, and metaphysical imponderables. They find themselves tacking in nineteenth century discourses of phrenology and physiognomy that taught Americans to police themselves and others, reading bodies and reading other readers reading bodies, led into a search for clues into the truth of bodies that is, like the manuscript, never quite finished. The one truth that is made mostly clear, however, is that one particular body has been sacrificed to the greater glory of the Text.

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PROBLEMS OF THE BODY So is everyone influenced—the robust, the weak—all constitutions—by the very fiber of the flesh and chalk of the bone. We are what we were made. Melville, in the margins of Arnold’s Essays in Criticism5

Much of Billy Budd is about making sense of male bodies. The story begins with a kind of tease of bronzed and blackened male forms: lower class and preindustrial, implicitly or explicitly muscular, they, not steam engines, provide the energy that launches Melville’s final voyage to sea as a writer. Readers spend a good portion of the tale reading bodies, reading characters reading bodies, and attempting to anticipate and understand the action of a story about a sailor whose beautiful body inspires peace and mayhem, a story that then “ends” with a poem about a talking body that both is and isn’t dead. Billy Budd is rich in description of faces and forms that seemingly testify to the moral and intellectual character of their owners. To find one’s way through the tale, to get one’s bearings, one must constantly resort to a description of a face or figure. In the murder mystery that is Billy Budd, the question is not “whodunit”; the question is “what does this body mean?” (Rivers 6)6 This question is so general as to demand subdivision or a consideration of more particular functions of the bodies within the text. Through its consideration of the meaning of male bodies in its first few pages, Billy Budd raises political questions regarding right to rule and collective responses to political authority. The male body becomes one of the most potent potentials for arousing both obedience and rebellion towards a particular order. In Billy Budd the body of the handsome sailor becomes a force of social cohesion; the text represents his form as having the power to spontaneously generate social collectives, some, like the convoy of sailors with which the story opens, are ridden with aggression, others, like the “happy family” aboard the Rights of Man, apparently are not. At the same time, however, that same body often threatens the order it establishes, either because of its own incomplete socialization or because it inspires transgressive erotic response. As the tale reveals these potentials and meanings of male bodies, it also, through its rich descriptions of bodies, involves both its characters and its readers in self-conscious readings of the body. In this text the body would seem to be the signifier by which many attempt to ground interpretation. Yet the tale makes a hash of its descriptions, and in the end, attempts to find meaning are frustrated as an ostensibly stable and transparent signifier becomes itself uncertain and enigmatic. At the end of this text, the body, ostensibly a bearer of a reliable “natural language,” decomposes.

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Finally, the meaning of the body is played out in the main action of the tale, which involves a dramatic encounter between the very bodily Billy Budd and the radically disembodied Captain Vere. One of the most striking absences in this story replete with descriptions of faces and forms is the lack of information provided to readers regarding the appearance of its most compelling—one hesitates to say—figure. The reader is never encouraged to form a clear visual image of Captain Vere, the center of virtually every storm of controversy over Billy Budd. Not one concrete detail as to facial features, hair color, stature, or gait is ever provided; much less is there any attempt to overtly link physical appearance with moral or intellectual traits, a hermeneutic applied to every other character in the story. Instead, we learn a textual anatomy. While their bodies make the other men in the text, Vere’s library makes him. This hypertextual character is brought into relation with a hypotextual Billy Bodd, and their interaction involves the transfer from the captain to his foretopman of a portion of his symbolic resources, which are represented as extraordinarily powerful, if not exactly empowering: for Vere the transfer is fate; for Billy it is fatal. Melville’s last story suggests that “in the time before steamships” there is already a technology at work undoing the poetry of the body: it’s that machine called text. BODY POLITICS The first lines of Billy Budd present the reader with a small collective of sailors at liberty and at war, projecting good times and threat. The mood is nostalgic, and the focus is on the form, color, adornment, and movement of male bodies. In the time before steamships, or then more frequently than now, a stroller along the docks of any considerable seaport would occasionally have his attention arrested by a group of bronzed mariners, man-of-war’s men or merchant sailors in holiday attire, ashore on liberty. In certain instances they would flank, or like a bodyguard quite surround, some superior figure in their own class, moving along with them like Aldebaran among the lesser lights of his constellation. That signal object was the “Handsome Sailor” of the less prosaic time alike of the military and merchant navies. With no perceptible trace of the vainglorious about him, rather with the offhand unaffectedness of natural regality, he seemed to accept the spontaneous homage of his shipmates. (1353)

Melville will continue with a description of a particular version of the handsome sailor, carrying on in a manner suggesting that the narrator, and perhaps the author himself, is carried away by this dashing figure (however much his

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capitals and quotation marks indicate his awareness that he is talking about a cliché). Homage to the black handsome sailor in the lines that follow is forthcoming from several communities, and it is wholly unreflective, suggestive of the workings of either a “natural language,” to use a largely discredited concept that still had cachet during Melville’s lifetime, or a comprehensive and profound discourse operating at a mostly unconscious level. The sailors’ “spontaneous homage” to their fellow is seconded by the “spontaneous tribute” of the stroller on the wharf, whose response is both filtered through and mirrored by the still-more-respectable narrator’s own unstoppable digression on the matter. And one might finally add to this community of admirers Melville’s readers. The sailors, so long effectively incarcerated on ship, are “at liberty,” heading toward a good time, and seemingly so are those readers, as the pagod’s body talk communicates across boundaries of race, class, and literacy. David Leverenz has said that Melville terrorizes his white middle-class male readers with the slaves in Benito Cereno (96). Here the black sailor and his cohorts provide only a gratifying frisson of mingled fear and expectancy. They are invited to marvel at the sailor like the rest of those on the wharf and forge a certain identity with those in the group surrounding the black sailor “like a bodyguard,” if not with the sailor himself (1353). This identification is politically charged. Billy Budd begins with a representation of a vanishing, informally democratic sailor sub-culture that was paradoxically ordered as an aristocracy/meritocracy of the body. Within this society the king, or perhaps what one should more appropriately call the head of the clan, commands by virtue of superior physical attributes. The group is multi-racial and multi-cultural, and it has as its leader a “black pagod.” It is also a bit of a mob. The sailors exist as a group through a highly tensioned dialectic of aggression and affection. Their African leader “rollicks” along, gleaming with sweat, exhibiting “barbaric” good humor, issuing “jovial sallies” right and left. Conspicuous are his white teeth, “flashing into view” (1353). This man pack is part wolf pack, engaging in a kind of play that has the potential at some point to turn nasty, threatening to turn on the port community and, at the same time, threatening to turn back upon itself. Furthermore, Melville, through his references to Anacharsis Cloots, evokes the context of the French Revolution. At an early juncture, therefore, the issue of social order and the means and price of its attainment is put into play, an issue at least as important during the later part of the nineteenth century as it was during the middle decades.7 The interesting thing about this group, given this context, is that it appears to be granted its license, if only temporarily. Contests of wit will be succeeded by contests of physical prowess. The spirit of Anacharsis and the revolution he embraced will have its way.8

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Melville focuses on the body early in the tale not only for its thematic importance, but also as part of a rhetorical strategy for snaring his readers. Billy Budd steps lightly at its outset, beginning with humor and something like high spirits. It seems to promise a long awaited return to the author’s old stomping ground—the adventure tale/travel narrative. The phrase “in the time before steamships” and the allusion to “the less prosaic time alike of the military and merchant navies” refer to the story’s setting, but they could just as well say something like, “in the time before my unfortunate absorption in metaphysics,” or “preceding the period of my darkest self-unfoldings, and my expression of them, which ruined my chances of commercial success.” The writer who feared being remembered only as the man who lived among the cannibals knows that his audience is interested in bodies—powerful, handsome, semi-clad male bodies that will place themselves at risk.9 Just as the sailors of the first paragraphs organize themselves around “some superior figure of their own class” who proves master of every situation—ashore the champion, at sea “the spokesman”—so do a substantial portion of Melville’s potential readers gather ‘round to hear “tales of his prowess.” Melville’s literary career has been a constant reminder of how the “spontaneous tribute” paid by “wayfarers” to the handsome sailor of his second paragraph is matched by the monetary tribute of Melville’s male readers (1353). It was strength and beauty that drew them, along with elements of pagan exotica and the promise of an “uncivilized,” unChristian kick that comes from imaginative involvement in the sailor’s world.10 Strength and beauty, and the ways of pagan “barbarians,” however, at least of the relatively unadulterated variety, have failed to sustain Melville’s literary interest, which partially explains why Cloots’s name surfaces here, hinting that larger issues are in play. For quite some time Melville has not been able to resign himself to writing as his readers would like, and his impatience with the figure of the Handsome Sailor finds expression at a rather early juncture in Billy Budd. One might even go quite so far as to argue that by the end of the story an older, wiser, literary, metaphysically-inclined Vere/Melville takes pleasure in finally throttling a lifelong nemesis, the figure of the handsome sailor (or at least the sailor/adventurer), which if not his own creation was nevertheless one that he traded heavily upon. At the least the “Handsome Sailor” of Billy Budd’s first paragraphs can’t be considered a figure invested with high seriousness. At his first mention, both capitals and quotation marks announce his flatness and unreality, his existence as a literary type. Melville’s hyperbolic terms of comparison—“Aldebaran among the lesser lights of his constellation,” “their grand sculptured Bull,” “young Alexander curbing the fiery Bucephalus”—virtually spell out that such a

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character is really so much bull (1353–54). The recitation of his virtues is perfunctory: “Invariably a proficient in his perilous calling, he was also more or less of a mighty boxer or wrestler. It was strength and beauty. Tales of his prowess were recited. Ashore he was the champion; afloat the spokesman; on every suitable occasion always foremost” (1354). “Invariably,” “more or less”—these terms communicate a certain lack of interest on Melville’s part; the other terse pronouncements amount to a tired listing of clichés ticked off like the items on a dime novelist’s checklist that they are. Paragraphs four and five continue in a vein suggesting that the sailor is more literary stereotype than he is anything that ever lived and breathed. His “moral nature” turns out to be as ideal as his physical being, but its exact content goes tellingly unspecified, since it is of little interest to readers. What is of interest are the possible ‘scapes this “welkin-eyed” counterpart to the “black pagod of a fellow” of the second paragraph might involve himself in, impressed as he is upon the portentously named Bellipotent.11 One might even be tempted to say that Melville dismisses the character of Billy even as he introduces him. Billy’s “moral nature” soon proves to be constituted primarily of ignorance, naiveté, and juvenile charm. As the narrator will later indicate, Budd is as witless, if also as faithful and loyal, as a Saint Bernard. Such is the impression that Billy Budd’s first pages can give. Melville’s style, however, is perhaps not so univocally characterized by impatience, boredom, and disdain. The first paragraphs cultivate a deliberate garrulousness that delights in the quality and range of its own classical allusions and boardwalk observations. In their own manner, Melville’s sentences rollick along at least as much as the “black pagod” and his retinue, and the banalities quoted above strike the ear as much for rhythm as for content. Melville feels the music, and the sound of his prose connects him with both strolling pagod and songbird Budd. Here and elsewhere in the tale, Melville’s style seems to bear witness to the complex, tensioned class identifications constantly in evidence in Billy Budd. The energies of the body let loose at the outset of Billy Budd will eventually be contained. Nevertheless, Melville has introduced at the outset of Billy Budd what Josiah Strong two years later was to call “the problem of THE BODY” (qtd. in Seltzer 41) and its place in the social order. If impatience and a degree of condescension toward the “Handsome Sailor” as a generic type (and Billy Budd in particular) are registered in the text’s first paragraphs, present too is an interest in the politics of that type. Billy Budd is about the male form as both an anarchic potential and organizing force. It is about the “measured forms” useful in controlling that force, the men who will measure them, and the ultimate purpose of their measurement. The text will vigorously pursue

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these questions to a pessimistic conclusion, first through its digression regarding Lord Nelson, then through its account of Budd’s brief life and early death under the management of Captain Vere. The novella’s development will ultimately follow that of Melville’s career and life. Having begun by writing in a manner suited to the desires and tastes of a popular audience, Melville will eventually, predictably, turn somber, veer once again into metaphysics. The aggressive, anarchic energies that, in his early career, first attracted readers hoping to encounter “hairbreadth ‘scapes” will be countered by, or perhaps transmuted into, a formidable combination of martial discipline, political and literary ambition, and metaphysical obsession. ANXIOUS READINGS I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look. Pip, Moby Dick

In pursuing questions on the political potentials of the body, Melville spends much time describing bodies and the characters who intently watch them. Susan Mizruchi discusses the key function of surveillance in Billy Budd, arguing that “all the concerns about watching and being watched in the story derive from a prevailing fear of social disorder” (275). Making note of the revolutionary context invoked by the text, she calls Billy Budd “a test case for the problem of authority and agency,” a story that displaces late-nineteenthcentury concerns about social unrest onto eighteenth-century revolutionary events (275). In her historicization of the tale, Mizruchi argues that this period of extreme demographic change, which was marked by a rise in internal and external immigrants due to end of slavery and the displacements of the unemployed and homeless brought on by the perpetual revolution called capitalism, gave urgency to the question of what exactly that tie is that binds a modern society rapidly losing its grip on traditional sources of social cohesion. What keeps diverse human populations in line? Mizruchi puts Billy Budd in dialogue with an emerging sociological discourse that formed part of what she calls the “culture of vigilance” and involved itself in “the obsessive production of methodologies and visibility” (274). In its staging of characters, in particular that of Captain Vere, who constantly attempt to manipulate and command visual perspectives, the story exposes seeing as a deeply political act. In Mizruchi’s account, Vere, relying on models of social types similar to those developed by early sociologists like F.H. Giddings and E.A. Ross, attempts to comprehend and regulate his ship in the manner of the master social blacksmith envisioned by Herbert Spencer, who posited the need for an expert class possessed of a deep understanding of the

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social totality, lest attempts to intervene in its social and economic workings do more harm than good (287). Vere’s foretopman, furthermore, would appear to be the jewel of his accomplishments as such a smith. The man who so ably orchestrates the movements of his ship’s crew through sounds and gestures achieves in Billy the perfect and literal realization of Ross’s “binding from within,” whereby clumsy methods of social control are superseded by more subtle means, and the individual operates under “the illusion of self-direction even at the very moment he martyrizes himself for the ideal we have sedulously impressed upon him” (280). The concerns shared by my argument and Mizruchi’s should become apparent as this essay unfolds; however, I want to bring other, earlier discourses of observation and social control to bear on Billy Budd, namely phrenology and physiognomy, and examine how the text uses and interrogates these earlier typologizing movements. Insofar as it involves itself in the issue of typing, and it richly does, Billy Budd makes use not so much of the broad categories of sociologists like Giddings, who elaborates four major American character types (the forceful, the convivial, the austere, and the rationally conscientious) as of the materialistic, naturalistic, particularistic categories of phrenology and physiognomy. Furthermore, the notion that all the surveillance that goes on in Billy Budd is about fear of social disorder is a partial truth that ignores the spectral pleasures described by the text. Acknowledgment of these pleasures is crucial to coming to a better understanding of the way this story problematizes the body as potential source of social disorder and order, and of the complex identifications this text encourages readers to make. It is fun to watch in Billy Budd. If for some, within and without the story, the pleasures of looking threaten personal order and identity, and if collective orders are similarly menaced, these dangers are nonetheless occasionally secondary. The shared pleasurable experience of beholding the beautiful male form, as has been previously noted, unites communities of readers and sailors alike. Ultimately, however, it must be admitted that watching is chiefly a hermeneutic activity in Billy Budd. To watch is to read and interpret, to hunt for meaning and behavioral cues. The materials for guiding such interpretation would appear to come from the nineteenth century pseudoscience of phrenology. Phrenology, the study of the human skull as an indicator of character and intelligence, begins to take shape as a more or less coherent and codified field of study in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a result of the work of Franz Joseph Gall, a German-born anatomist who developed his theories while studying the heads of inmates of prisons and insane asylums.12 His

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work is then taken up, changed, and elaborated by a host of followers, but especially by Johann Gasper Spurzheim, whose arrival in the United States in 1832 initiates a wave of interest in the new “science.” Unlike Gall, who appears to have been much more the “pure” scientist (in his ambitions if not his scientific thinking), Spurzheim is an early social engineer, a reformer active in penology, the care of the insane, and education. When Spurzheim comes to the U.S. both to proselytize and to study the heads of Native Americans and African-Americans, he is well received by the nation’s scholarly elite. Perhaps too well received. A whirlwind tour of speeches, public demonstrations, and honorary dinners may have contributed to his contracting cholera in Boston. Spurzheim dies only nine weeks after coming to America, but having left his mark, perhaps doing more for phrenology by dying than by carrying on. Fittingly, it is a matter of matter over mind; nothing about Spurzheim is as impressive as his noggin. His remains are publicly autopsied by Harvard physician Joseph Warren, and his brain, weighing in at fifty-seven ounces, is placed in the Boston Athenaeum. Three thousand Bostonians attend his funeral, including Harvard President Josiah Quincey and the eminent legal scholar Joseph Story. He is eulogized by a choir singing an “Ode to Spurzheim.” Spurzheim’s mission is then taken up by a young Harvard divinity student named Orsen Fowler, who, along with classmate Henry Ward Beecher, begins lecturing to local groups about the new science. It is not long before Fowler and his brother, Lorenzo, have a small empire based first in Philadelphia and later in New York. They publish several books and tracts, along with the American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany. Their monthly journal enjoys a seventy-three years run, from 1838 to 1911, its circulation rising to over 50,000 readers before the Civil War. After the war the Fowlers build the American Institute of Phrenology and begin enrolling students in a six-week course of study. In 1894 it numbers between 600 and 700 alumni. Phrenology under the Fowlers has often been talked about under the rubric of self-help. They made it accessible to self-improving laypeople and plasticized some of the more deterministic aspects of Gall’s phrenology, arguing that individuals could programmatically enlarge or shrink specific faculties of the mind if they would commit themselves to various regimens of self-alteration. (The goal generally was a golden mean. On a scale of one to seven for a given faculty, threes and fours were considered desirable scores.) Less often has phrenology been talked about as the ever-present shadow to self-help: self-policing. Yet, clearly, several elements lend themselves readily to a Foucauldian reading of the movement. First, phrenology finds its moment of birth in the period of growing populations and rapid industrialization that is the focus of Discipline and

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Punish. Its place of birth, too, is in the institutions that are the particular interest of Foucault: the prison, the asylum, the school, and the hospital. Much of the phrenological discourse also organizes itself around issues of normality and the norming process, of productivity and reproductivity. Despite the fact that many of its earliest practitioners and champions are doctors, however, phrenology never gains full institutional validity, and it sells itself as a kind of people’s science with a reformist and utopian agenda. It is in some respects an anti-institutional or perhaps alternative institutional practice that tacitly realizes the power/knowledge relationship expressed by Foucault and resists the formation of an ambitious scientific elite. It appeals to a middle-class audience in part because of widespread suspicions of doctors and their practices, illustrating at once the satisfactions and the discontents of the middle class with the prospect of a society in which individuals would be known and ordered by an expert, scientific class. Phrenology’s leading exponents, while occasionally thinking in terms of the social collective and how to best order it, marketed phrenology as a pragmatically minded science oriented toward the everyday concerns of individuals. From the standpoint of many of its consumers, phrenology promised not only a system for self-change but a means of negotiating urban life and the necessity of dealing with strangers on a daily basis. Phrenologists promised to help employers hire workers and salesmen size up customers (and vice versa), to help persons perform quicker and more accurate readings of the various more or less anonymous persons whom they increasingly met and depended upon. Perhaps, however, because such reading were complicated by the interference of hats, hair, and wigs, the ability to read skulls—the aspect of phrenology for which it is best remembered—constituted only a part of the discourse of many phrenological texts. Much of this discourse is also about physiognomy; it concentrates on characterizing bodies, providing clues for reading facial features and expressions, and interpreting bodily gestures. It often insists upon the reliability of such markers. The following passage from Fowler is typical in its assertion of exact correlation of face with mental faculties: “Every physical and mental organ has its pole stationed in a given part of the face, so that, when such organ acts, it influences such poles, and contracts those facial muscles which express this action” (Phrenology 21). It is in this promise to make the private public, to render persons transparent to each other in both casual and formal encounters, that phrenology begins to resemble the discursive analogue to Bentham’s architectural “machine” for diagnostic and therapeutic observation, the panopticon. By virtue of the mobility of persons, it does Bentham’s invention one better, extending the lines of sight virtually into every portion of public space, and making each

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person a potential inspector of character and morals. To put it in terms of another of Foucault’s topics, it makes confession not only obligatory but inevitable, a necessary concomitant of existence itself. And time, place, and confessor are not of one’s choosing: one confesses always, everywhere, to everyone. A phrenological America is the ultimate self-policing state. This is how Fowler expressed it: “We can not help, whether we will or no . . . expressing all of our mental operations, down even to the very innermost recesses of our souls, in and by our countenance” (24). But of course there was no run on black veils. The statement above expresses an ideal or nightmare limit of phrenology. Phrenology represented itself, during a time when science began to become specialized and professionalized, primarily as a common man’s science, and if it was considered by some a tool for general reform, others simply saw it as an accessible, easily acquired body of knowledge that gave one a competitive advantage and provided protection against being made the dupe of others. Nevertheless, it could not help but suggest that one might always be more on view than one wanted to be, and the personal probity, or lack thereof, was always written somewhere on the body, to one’s honor or shame. Thus to the usual spurs to self-improvement was added the anxiety that one always wore one’s character on one’s sleeve. It should come as no surprise, then, that phrenology also participates in the considerable pseudo-scientific effort to know and define sexuality during the nineteenth century. Fowler devoted at least three volumes to this topic: the ambiguously titled Amativeness: Embracing the Evils and Remedies of Excessive and Perverted Sexuality, including Warning and Advice to the Married and Single; a second book called Sexuality Restored, and Warning and Advice to Youth Against Perverted Amativeness: Including Its Prevention and Remedies As Taught by Phrenology and Physiology; and the omnibus Sexual Science: Including Manhood, Womanhood, and Their Mutual Interrelations: Love, Its Laws, Power, Etc., Selection, or Mutual Adaption; Married Life Made Happy; Reproduction, and Progenal Endowment, or Paternity, Maternity, Bearing, Nursing, and Rearing Children; Puberty, Girlhood, Etc.; Sexual Ailments Restored, Female Beauty Perpetuated. In these volumes the faculties of most concern prove to be Amativeness (sexual attraction), whose home in the body lay at the back and base of the skull, and which is strikingly id-like in some of Fowler’s descriptions of it; Adhesiveness (the tendency to associate and bond with others); Inhabitiveness (love of home, region, and country); and Philoprogenitiveness (love of offspring). An understanding of these mind-body organs becomes crucial to seeing through the fog of courtship and to determining marital compatibility and the capacity to bear and raise children (McHugh 73).

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In addition to helping one choose a mate, phrenology also purported to provide a line of vision into sexual practices—particularly those held deviant during the period. Fowler believed that Amativeness was larger in males and that this made them more susceptible than women to perversion. (In accordance with common wisdom, men were advised to avoid rich and spicy foods, abstain from alcohol, dress modestly, and, if all else failed, cover their genitalia with wet bandages in order to extinguish sexual desire [McHugh 72].) It was not so much the shape of the skull, however, as other physiognomic, behavioral, and gestural keys that revealed the exact habits and attitudes of sexual deviants and undesirables. Much of discourse regarding these signs was hardly of the order of “special knowledge” but partook instead of commonsense. For instance, the licentious man, according to Fowler, has “a lascivious expression of the eyes and lips, and always manifests curiosity when he observes females; and often turns to look at them” (qtd. in McHugh 72). Other observations are less obvious and less tautological in character, if not exactly esoteric. Fowler’s “private sensualist” is known not by his conversation but by the face of dissipation. He goes about with a “halfwild, half-vacant stare,” “hollow, sunken and ghastly eyes,” and a “pallid, bloodless countenance” (qtd. in McHugh 72).13 The preceding sketches a wide discursive context within which Melville writes and his readers read. One can further isolate within this discourse texts more directly engaged by Melville, books that we know to have been in his possession and that, in fact, he was reading during his period of concentration on Billy Budd. We know, for instance, that Melville’s library contained a copy of the Essays on Physiognomy by the famous Swiss physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavater, whose work was widely disseminated throughout Europe and whose influence was strong in the United States (Sealts 193, and Hillway 420). A theologian of sorts, Lavater sought proofs for Christianity through studying natural and supernatural phenomenon and believed that “natural” signs were provided because Providence had foreseen the debasement and consequent deceptiveness of man-made language. Lavater emphasizes complete correspondence between the physical and the spiritual, the material and the immaterial, and posits the master physiognomist as a man of genius and extraordinary innate abilities. Parts of Lavater’s work appear to describe the same sort of tight, hermetically sealed universe—presided over by providential necessity—that the narrator of Billy Budd comes very close to endorsing. As Christopher Rivers has put it, As the signs of Lavater’s system (made up of natural corporeal signifiers and essential metaphysical signifiers in a natural relation) are predetermined by nature (God), so is the reader of these signs (the

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Melville not only owned one of Lavater’s books, he also read considerably in Balzac, who himself owned a volume of Lavater and quoted both this Swiss and Gall frequently within his work (Rivers 105). Melville began to collect books by the French novelist in 1870 and by his death owned no fewer than fourteen volumes of Balzac’s work, as well as books about Balzac by other authors (Sealts 131). It might be noted, however, that Balzac’s reading of the body differs in several regards from those of Lavater and Gall. Though he shares with them a theory of correspondence between bodily attributes and characterological traits, his analysis encompasses a larger field of signs, employing close observation of gait, gesture, facial expression, and clothing, and he seems interested in adopting not the particulars of their observations but their foundational premise, preferring to create his own system, if one can call it that, of correspondences between body and mind (Rivers 105). Tapping into these anxiety ridden discourses of body reading, Melville heralds Billy Budd as an “inside narrative,” but, as already noted, spends much time dwelling on the appearance of all characters except Captain Vere. Melville’s narrator deploys physiological types that often appear to correspond closely with characterological types; that is, a great deal of physiognomic and physiological stereotyping takes place. Readers’ interactions with the text are to a significant degree influenced by his coding of bodies to the present day. It would seem that the text invites them to read these surfaces as signs of the inner man, or perhaps not so much to read these surfaces as to make conventional, reflexive correspondences between appearance and character. Such is the case, at least, when one considers the minor characters. Once can see Balzac’s quasi-zoological discourse at work in the descriptions of Dansker and of Vere’s seconds, who are described using analogies to various animal species and generally typed through descriptions of their physical characteristics and behavioral patterns. The same seems true of Billy Budd, whose beauty is an ostensibly reliable manifestation of his innocence. In the cases of the other two principals of the narrative, however, such typing may confuse or prove impossible. Though Melville’s narration invites physiognomical readings, it also suggests the limitations of that practice, if not its outright uselessness as a window into character when it matters most. The “natural” language of the body may be hopelessly admixed with culture, as would be the perceptions of readers of that language.

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Certainly, though, the myriad efforts to describe the appearance of the tale’s villain would appear at first glance to support the reliability of body policing discourses. For instance, there is the strong suggestion that Claggart’s marred good looks, his “no ill figure,” and his features that are “except the chin cleanly cut as those on a Greek Medallion” signal his kinship with another flawed beauty, the same “marplot” of Eden who has stunted Billy’s speech (1372–73). Further damning to the Master-at-Arms case is that his chin resembles to the narrator that which belonged to notorious seventeenthcentury perjurer, hypocrite, and general exemplar of human evil, Titus Oates. Oates, in addition to being the skilled spiritual progeny of the Father of Lies, was himself once a chaplain on a naval vessel before being dismissed on a charge of “infamous conduct” (Douglass 230). Claggart’s Oates-like chin, then, may mark him as homosexual, if one takes Fowler as one text for reading him by: “Nature . . . always does up similar characteristics in like diversity in their mentality. . . . In short, the correspondence between form and character is absolute and universal” (Phrenology 27). Add to Claggart’s resemblance to Oates the description of his own chin in phallic terms—“beardless as Tecumsah’s,” having “something of a strange protuberant broadness in its make” (1373)—and it becomes clearer that this jawline encodes a dual threat of rape and cannibalism to Billy.14 It is hard to ignore the parallels between the two most notable instances in which Budd’s otherwise perfect and harmonious body escapes his control, and the way in which anthropophagy and homosexual rape appear to be at issue. In the first instance, Red Whiskers, a former butcher and a present ship’s bully, in the course of showing Billy how a steak is cut (already an exercise in intimidation one can well assume, given the tales of cannibalism at sea circulating during the century), “insultingly gave him a dig under the ribs.” He earns for his gesture “a terrible drubbing” in which, according to the captain of the Rights of Man, Billy “never meant to do as much as he did” (1357). The second instance is that which is fatal to Claggart, whose threatening, outsized mandible is now complemented by his aggressive, protruding, violeting eyes, which first look with “serpent fascination,” then attack with “the paralyzing lurch of the torpedo fish.” Billy first stands as one “impaled and gagged,” then begins “gesturing and gurgling,” before finally firing his fatal blow to Claggart’s head (1403–04).15 It would appear, then, that form follows character in the case of the Master-at-Arms. For a time during the story, however, significant mystery surrounds the figure of Claggart. The initial description of him, for all the intimations that it provides a window upon his soul, partakes of the indescribable or unnamable. The narrator avers that he “shall never hit” Claggart’s portrait and indicates that he does not quite want to (1372). (Here it must be admitted that

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there is some hint that to “hit” at Claggart’s portrait too well is to reveal a kind of worldly knowledge only available to those bearing an uncomfortable affinity to the Master-at-Arms. The idea that it takes one to know one—a notion elevated to interpretive principle in some of Lavater’s writing—seems active in the narrator’s mind.16 It is with seeming reluctance that he begins to describe Claggart at all, and relents only because he has a central part in the story. According to this kind of reading, Claggart’s indescribability then becomes a further mark of his evil.) Nevertheless, the narrator does his best to describe the story’s villain, invoking phrenology, then proceeding to draw a word portrait that reminds one of Poe, himself a believer in the science, and one who, like Claggart, possessed the sort of high forehead that was “phrenologically associated with more than average intellect,” and—again like Claggart—set off this expanse with jet black curls. Complexion reveals Claggart’s separation from the other sailors, his “official exclusion from the sunlight,” his unhealthiness, and his status as a creature of the deep. It implies that he is an exile of sorts. In other ways, too, Claggart’s hide is revealing. It is “not exactly displeasing” but “seems to hint at something defective in the constitution and blood” (1373). Claggart’s skin, though bearing the evidence of “official exclusion” and as much the result of occupation as of inheritance, nevertheless somehow also hints at his “Natural Depravity” that will be so elliptically discussed later (1383). Here, as is so often the case with Melville, the categories of the inborn and the acquired are in question. The mystery regarding Claggart’s appearance and character deepens the further one reads into his description. There remains an equivocalness to Claggart’s description not unlike that of his title, master-at-arms, which the narrator acknowledges may throw off landlubbers. “Aspect and manner” belie Claggart’s present station and contradict the testimony of his very skin and bones. They cause him to appear as a man “of high quality, social and moral,” who for whatever reason is “keeping incog” as he goes about doing the dirty spywork on a man-of-war (1373). Here the movement and expression of high social and moral character is inscribed upon a flesh and bones testifying to moral turpitude. The body in motion lies. The flesh does not. (Or is it the other way around? This quandary, it just so happens, plays a large role in many physiognomical discussions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Lavater, for instance, held closely to the view that only the features at rest or in repose told the truth about a person. He favored readings of the resting, the sleeping, and the dead; and he regarded the forehead as the most reliable indicator of character. One discerns a kind of crypto-phrenology in his texts. Others, however, thought that it was precisely this kind of accurate reading of a fixed character that physiognomy could not accomplish. Buffon, for instance, in his Histoire naturelle de l’homme

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argued that facial expression could be used as an accurate indicator of an immediate emotional state but that bodily and facial form of themselves told one virtually nothing of a characterological essence.)17 The upshot of all this confusion is that the reader trying to police the text, the master-at-text, as it were,18 has a suspect and yet finally does not know which man it is that is “incog”: is it Claggart the man of high moral and social standing (who bears unfortunate resemblance to the perjuring and profane Oates), a man whose occupation results in suspiciously tainted skin; or is it Claggart the Evil, who is so loathsome one recoils from describing him too accurately, yet who manages to put on the manner and air of his better?19 Finally, only the testimony of Claggart’s behavior can, in a retrospective manner, confer validity on certain parts of the narrator’s description. In themselves, the descriptions of Claggart have no predictive power and reading the body becomes an exercise in—excuse the pun—hindsight. The narrator’s efforts to “hit at” Claggart’s description suggest that this business of “natural” reading is a rummy’s game shot through with received ideas. If the narrator’s descriptions finally prove inadequate to readers attempting to police policeman Claggart and suggest that body reading is a culturally inflected act through and through, elsewhere the various descriptive treatments given characters reflect a narrator operating largely from all-too-conventional ideas regarding race and class. As fellow members of the Handsome Sailor club, Billy and the black sailor might expect similar descriptive treatments, but none is forthcoming. The black sailor is noted for his sartorial flair (the gold hooped ears, a silk handkerchief, a highland bonnet), “the displayed ebony of his chest,” “his white teeth flashing into view,” and, finally, his rollicking gate (1353). Billy’s description contains nothing of such animated physicality; if a “barbarian he surely was,” his teeth don’t flash. In fact, his description is one of statuary repose: Cast in a mold peculiar to the finest physical examples of those Englishmen in whom the Saxon strain would seem not at all to partake of any Norman or other admixture, he showed in face that humane look of reposeful good nature which the Greek sculptor in some instances gave to his heroic strong man, Hercules. But this again was subtly modified by another and pervasive quality. The ear, small and shapely, the arch of the foot, the curve in the mouth and nostril, even the indurated hand dyed to the orange-tawny of the toucan’s bill, a hand telling alike of the halyards and tar bucket; but, above all, something in the mobile expression, and every chance attitude and movement, something suggestive of a mother eminently favored by Love and the Graces; all this strangely indicated a lineage in direct contradiction to his lot. (1360)

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Later it will be said that Budd’s noble descent “was as evident in him as in a blood horse” (1361). This is in keeping with the other terms of the description, which emphasize racial and ethnic purity, as well as class markings. This nobleman is decidedly not incog. Yet, as in the case of Claggart, it is beauty more than strength that is the focus. The description of this strong man doesn’t dwell on muscularity. Instead it describes the beauty of this face, the shape of his hand, the arch of his foot, and the graceful, rather than forceful, qualities of his gestures and attitudes. (In this, too, it differs from the description of the black sailor, who, beyond having it mentioned that his head is “wellshaped” and his teeth are flashing, is virtually featureless.) The choice of descriptive points is striking. They correspond to those that receive great attention in sculpture, those parts of the body which present the greatest challenge to the artist. The reader is invited to consider Billy as an objet d’art.20 For Claggart, medallions and prints provide readers with points of reference that “civilize” him, too, in a way that the black sailor’s description does not. (Yet whereas Claggart’s occupation appears to bring out a certain “unhealthiness in the constitution and the blood,” Billy’s skin, though hardened, sunburned, and “telling alike of the halyards and the tar bucket,” cannot hide his noble lineage. In Billy, the testimony of the flesh is at one with the testimony of his movement. Neither belies the other, as happens in the case of Claggart.) These descriptions of Billy, Claggart, and the black handsome sailor are not the only ones re-enforcing racial boundaries. The narrator is keenly interested in racial and ethnic purity; he attributes Budd’s beauty to it, and perhaps some of his moral qualities as well. He refers to the black sailor as being “of the unadulterate blood of Ham,” jocosely invoking an apologetics for racism that seems neither fully denied nor fully embraced, but rather casually alluded to in a rambling, logorrheic fashion. Claggart possesses a foreign accent that arouses the narrator’s suspicions, and the policeman, of course, has suspect blood. All in all, the narrator possesses a rather conventional set of anglophilic racial and ethnic prejudices, and the descriptions that fuel the anxious readings of character are similarly tainted. Only one character in Billy Budd completely defies description: Captain Vere. It is here that Melville seems most influenced by Balzac and his privileging of the figure of the expert observer who need not have much close contact with a person or even to observe him for very long in order to render an accurate account of his character, and who communicates, if one can call it that, with others through an opaque, idiosyncratic discourse that bears witness to his intuitive powers (Rivers 112–119). Vere would seem to be the observateur par excellence, both in the distance he maintains from his crew and his mode of communication. In both Balzacian and Melvillian schemes, the observer

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figure, as one might expect, manages to escape the typological discourse that works upon other characters. Vere remains a cipher to readers and the key figure of critical disputes regarding the story in part because he is physically nondescript. It seems plausible that Melville himself never arrived at a clear picture of the moral nature of his captain and therefore left a void where one would otherwise expect a body.21 As with the narrator/lawyer in “Bartleby” (another interpreter of the law), no clear image of Vere’s appearance emerges. We know his age, his station, his lineage, his habits, and his books, but nothing of his looks. EMBODIED TEXTS AND TEXTUALIZED BODIES: THE BODY OF THE LEADER The underclass male collectives in Billy Budd serve two masters, one Lord Nelson, the other Captain Vere. Commentators have often remarked upon the contrast between the two and have frequently inferred that Melville intends a comparison that casts Vere in Nelson’s shadow. According to these arguments, Nelson’s love of glory and charismatic presence outshine Vere’s prudential, utilitarian style of command.22 It is not my purpose here to rehearse these arguments, which seem to ignore the narrators’ admiration for the captain, borne witness in such remarks as that which calls him one of nature’s noblest types. What interests me is the very different uses of the body that each commander employs and the striking presence of a body/text dialectic that structures and is structured by class relations. In the instance of both Nelson and Vere, the workings of this dialectic suggest the culpability of Literature in the maintenance of class structures and jingoistic nationalism. Studies of western societies from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the present day have suggested that in the West an increasing tendency toward gesture is generally a characteristic of the lower classes (Thomas 1–14). The case can and has been made that body and text are often construed as ancient opponents emblematic of class divisions. As Carolyn Marvin has put it, the body has been for centuries “the emblem and resource of those without textual credentials”; it is “the ancient antagonist of text,” which is perceived as aligned with “those whose cultural power and entitlement to participation in social life derive from educational and other textualizing credentials” (“Flagbody” 120). In other words, the upper classes read words from papers and pages and books; the lower classes read, speak, and understand the language of the body. Those who wish to rule, one might surmise from this account, must be versed in bodily display. Admiral Nelson is such a man. Section four of the

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tale begins with the narrator leading us into a “diversion,” the second in a very young story. Like the first digression involving the black sailor, this one is about the organizing, commanding capacity of a male body, in this case, Nelson’s. (The narrator, it seems, can’t stop talking about bodies.) As in the first few paragraphs of Billy Budd, this section hearkens to a less technologized time when bodies played a greater role in the scheme of things, especially in war. The narrator seems to lament that “nowadays in encounters there [at sea] a certain kind of displayed gallantry be fallen out of date as hardly applicable under changed circumstances.” Lines later, echoing the critique of modernity contained in his earlier reference to “less prosaic times,” he will speak of the “poetic reproach” offered by Nelson’s ancient ship to the European ironclads” (1366). Finally he arrives at his destined theme: Nelson himself and his physical courage in combat at Trafalgar. The narrator opposes Nelson’s “excessive love of glory” and personal recklessness in combat with more prudential styles of command, three times alluding to the commander’s decision to put himself deliberately in harm’s way by conspicuously showing himself during battle in full regalia (1367). A crucial element of Nelson’s ability to command is his fashioning of his body as a text for his men. Nelson’s dress is elaborate and deliberately chosen for the “ornate publication of his person”; he is a “reckless declarer of his person in combat” (1366). The narration continues: If under the presentiment of the most magnificent of all victories to be crowned by his own glorious death, a sort of priestly motive led him to dress his person in the jewelled vouchers of his own shining deeds; if thus to have adorned himself for the alter and the sacrifice were indeed vainglory, then affectation and fustian is each more heroic line in the great epics and dramas, since in such lines the poet embodies in verse those exaltations of sentiment that a nature like Nelson, the opportunity being given, vitalizes into acts. (1367)

Here the narrator makes war a religious rite of the culture, suggesting that it is its fundamental meaning-making act. Nelson is a sacrificing priestly participant. Supporting both rite and Nelson in his priestly role are “the great epics and dramas” that give expression to the same “exaltations of sentiment” that move Nelson, and in fact, Nelson and these sacred texts are placed in a mutually dependent relationship: if his adornment and sacrifice are vain, then so are these “great” texts; if the texts are vain, so is Nelson. Nelson’s textually informed participation in this economy of destruction and fulfillment is signaled by his willingness to turn himself into text, to involve himself in the “publication” of his person, to become a “reckless declarer” of himself, to wear

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“the vouchers of his great deeds.” He is quite willing to underwrite “the great epics and dramas” so long as he will be written into them (and, one might surmise, “the gazettes”) in return. The prime mover in this entire process seems to be nothing more than an “exaltation of sentiment,” a bodily production with no clear content or referent, political or moral. It just is. The narrator’s sympathy with this religion appears clear; though his if-then argument stops just short of certainty, it seems to assume assent. This impression only increases when one looks again at the narrator’s earlier digression. Rather than read Nelson only against Vere, critics need to look more closely at the manner in which this text encourages a comparison between Nelson and the black “pagod,” whose body glistens with sweat rather than medals and whose retinue shows in him the same pride “Assyrian priests doubtless showed for their grand sculptured bull” (1353). Against this black idol of the bronzed mariners is set the white, privileged, pressured defender of the true faith, backed by a tradition of epic poetry and the loyalty of his men, who thrill to his text. The digression involving Nelson will later prove useful in casting Captain Vere’s more prosaic style of leadership in stark relief. Vere, whenever possible, seeks the position of a reader with a text before him. If there is a body to be displayed on his ship, it is someone else’s, and it is consumed as a lesson rather than an inspiration. To repeat, about no other character’s physical appearance, even that of someone as incidental as the “old Dansker,” do we learn as little as we do about Vere’s. In fact, Vere is characterized mostly by his ability to go unnoticed: among strangers he easily passes for a civilian; he is “not conspicuous by his stature”; his demeanor is “unobtrusive” (1369).23 Vere is a behind-the-scenes operator who usually arranges to keep himself from being read, Balzac’s “observateur” who controls access to his person while arranging for the private and public showings of others. When forced into the position of text himself, he often does his best to render himself obscure—for example, hiding his face in front of Billy while trying to decide what to do with him in the wake of Claggart’s death, or freezing ramrod straight before the entire ship after receiving Billy’s blessing. Vere’s attitude toward the publication of his person is to prefer not to. When he must be the object of all eyes, however, his primary concern is to appear in control. In both the instances just described, what is required of Vere is that he present the mask of command. In the first instance, Vere stands quietly with his hand over his face while transforming himself from the figure of a paternal care-giver to that of a military disciplinarian; in the second instance, after being blessed by Budd, he “either through stoic self-control or a sort of momentary paralysis induced by emotional shock, stood erectly rigid as a musket in the ship armorer’s rack” (1426–27).

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In this latter case, Vere’s leadership and agency are in doubt; it is the second time in a short space that Billy Budd has managed to surprise a man unaccustomed to surprises. However, whether Vere is in control or not, whether he is terrified or confident, military posture and martial aspect prevail, as is clear from the terms of the simile (a comparison that also suggests, I think, that Vere is not quite so one-of-a kind as other parts of the text would have it—he is one musket among a rack of them). The effect of the body-at-attention is to hide, manage, and control the internal life of the commander, who arguably here is as much commanded as commanding. Vere’s “emotional shock” likely is brought on by both terror at the possibility that Billy will touch off a revolt, and strong internal moral and emotional conflict over the morality of Vere’s own course of action. Yet why go rigid—as a opposed to making some gesture—unless responding as reflexively to Budd’s statement of devotion as the sailors respond when they later automatically react to the drums and whistles with which Vere forestalls any mutinous actions? Vere, like the sailors beneath him, proves the perfect product of martial discipline of the body, which takes over when symbolic or linguistic self-management becomes difficult, when his internal text becomes confused or contradictory. This discipline—as opposed to Nelson’s “exaltation of sentiment”—enables Vere to do his duty, rendering his inner life, like Billy Budd’s intentions, “nothing to the purpose” and allowing him to serve War, which “looks but to the frontage” (1416). These moments of surprise and loss of control, however, are rare for Vere. His introduction in section six describes a remarkably secure man possessing “a certain unaffected modesty of manhood sometimes accompanying a resolute nature” (1369). Vere’s security, bearing, and discipline appear to issue from three sources: one is his status as a man “allied to the higher nobility,” a second is his naval experience and related expertise in “the science of his profession,” and a third is his collection of books (1369). Vere never goes to sea unaccompanied by “a newly replenished library, compact but of the best” (1371). The contents of this library link him to a more prosaic vein of the Western tradition than that to which Nelson is tied. Rather than possessing an appetite for the great epics and dramas, Vere has “nothing of that literary taste which less heeds the thing conveyed than the vehicle” (1371). He goes in for history, biography, and “writers like Montaigne, who, free from cant and convention, honestly and in the spirit of common sense philosophize upon realities.” In these books he finds “confirmation of his own more reserved thoughts,” convictions which “serve as a dike against those novel opinions, social, political, and otherwise, which carried away as in a torrent no few minds in those days, minds in nature not inferior to his own.”(1371).24

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Books also, according to the narrative, allow Vere to transcend mere class bias, providing an Olympian perspective on human affairs from which he could oppose these new currents of thought. With respect to the French Revolution, while other members of the aristocracy to which by birth he belonged were incensed at the innovators mainly because their theories were inimical to the privileged classes, Captain Vere disinterestedly opposed them not alone because they seemed to him insusceptible of embodiment in lasting institutions, but at war with the true welfare of mankind. (1371)

This passage describes Vere not only as a social conservative but also as a bit of an isolato. It is an interesting position, indicating that he is not entirely at home in the social order he so ably defends both with body and conscious mind. He finds few around him to confirm the inner man. The next paragraph further establishes his estrangement from his peers, “with whom he would necessarily [emphasis mine] consort” and who “found him lacking in the companionable quality, a dry and bookish gentleman” (1371). (It seems especially significant, given these qualities in Vere, that Montaigne is the only author in his library mentioned by name. The somewhat aloof French aristocrat wrote quotations from the Roman stoics on the walls of his bedroom, and his essays are densely and explicitly intertextual, rife with quotations from classical sources that indicate a continuous dialogue with these texts. Reading him, one gains the strong sense that Montaigne’s closest human relationships were textually mediated through time. Likewise Vere.) It is not long before the narrator transforms Vere’s absorption into the world of texts into something like moral virtue. In the next paragraph we learn that the captain does not converse with those around him so much as with his familiar texts. His talk is never “jocosely familiar,” and he is as apt to cite ancient sources to illustrate his points as he is to cite moderns. Furthermore, he seemed unmindful of the circumstances that to his bluff company such remote allusions, however pertinent they might be, were altogether alien to men whose reading was mainly confined to the journals. But considerateness in such matters is not easy to natures constituted like Captain Vere’s. Their honesty prescribes to them directness, sometimes far reaching like that of a migratory fowl that in its flight never heeds when it crosses a frontier. (1372)

Here again Vere appears to bear close resemblance to Balzac’s highly privileged “observateur,” who speaks a discourse inaccessible to others. Lack of audience

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awareness, the result of Vere’s preoccupation with a text-based scheme of understanding unknown to his auditors, here becomes a sign not of ignorance and limited perspective but of “honesty” and “directness” that supposedly know hardly any limits, especially arbitrary political ones like frontiers. The captain’s limitations are transformed into virtues by a narrator who largely shares these same limitations. In addition to confirming his isolation from his contemporaries, Vere’s texts clearly and explicitly guide him. He brings to bear historical, political, philosophical, and theological schemes of understanding into his thinking about his own activities, those of his ship, and especially those of the illiterate and sometimes dumbfounded Budd, who utterly lacks such symbolic resources. The doom of Billy Budd, which begins with the legal right of impressment and with the strict application of the Mutiny Act, is helped along by Vere’s application of wider, non-legal frames of reference. Immediately upon killing Claggart, Budd is read into tragedy, becoming a “fated boy” (1405). Soon afterward with the surgeon, Vere participates in a little latterday typologizing, pronouncing Claggart’s death to be like that of “the divine judgment on Ananias!” (1405) Lines later he translates Billy into an angel of God who must hang. Amidst his agitation Vere has reached for the New Testament, and Billy’s time is now quite limited: the one must die so that the many might live. Using his books, Vere constructs a dilemma that reduces the field of possible actions to two. He can either hang Billy or open the door to anarchy and violence. Other, differently positioned, lesser officers who don’t possess Vere’s bookishness or his ties to the aristocracy search for alternative positions, but in Vere’s mind he can either impose this one “ordered” form or unleash chaos. That he (and the narrator) frames the problem in this manner serves as testimony to the working of an aristocratic and conservative discourse of political control that would reduce all viable possibilities of social and political organization to one, the one extant. That the operations of this discourse and the brutality that it warrants have themselves brought about the crisis in question is all too clear, bringing to mind Foucault’s observation that discourses always generate resistance out of themselves. Furthermore, through military “usage,” the sailors themselves, at least by Vere’s reckoning (with which the narrator voices little disagreement), also operate under a certain framework of expectation and interpretation that will guide them to a reading of any deviation from form as “pusillanimous,” its consequences “deadly to discipline” (1416–17). The discourse at this moment has ceased to serve the purposes of its chief sponsors. The momentum of the “law and rigor” operating through the captain and crew of the Bellipotent carries it beyond the bounds of pragmatism:

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the very excess of its zeal is the chink in its armour—not only because it signifies the brash authoritarianism of the insecure, but because it involves the law in a ceaseless self-undoing, arousing the yearnings it interdicts, spreading havoc in the name of creating order. (Eagleton 274)25

Vere doesn’t just throw the book at Billy Budd, he throws every book he has ever read, all of them “of the very best.” He and Nelson show how a canon participates in the economy of war (be it between the classes or between the states)—what one might call the workings of a military-literary complex. FATHERS, SONS AND TENSIONS If Vere is text, Budd is body, and Budd is often lack of intention. Billy does not intend satire in his final salute to the Rights of Man; he does not intend to thrash Red Whiskers quite so badly as he does; he does not intend to kill—or perhaps even strike—Claggart. Billy is both the best and the worst kind of mutineer: he is a loose cannon, an unintentioned body whose next direction cannot be predicted. He means no harm; he hardly means anything at all; but his very innocence and lack of meanness, in combination with his beauty (and it is beauty, much more than manifested prowess), make him a lighting rod of attention and draw people to him. The problem with Billy is that he is an unintentional leader. (And for readers he has acquired a certain revolutionary potentiality through his linkage with the black sailor of the story’s beginning.) If he is not yet “a bit of the nautical Murat” and presently appears wholly incapable of assuming the role of “spokesman” and representative for his mates’ interests, he may one day be just that, particularly as he has now arrived at so rigorous a finishing school as the Bellipotent, which has already fashioned through “continuous martial discipline” several men “of no common natural stamp” (1360). Such intention, or “will power,” to use the pursy sailor’s related term, and William James’s term, and the term used by any number of mid-to-late nineteenth-century humanists seeking to preserve a space for human agency among threateningly mechanistic models of human being, arguably only comes to Billy in becoming a “prodigy of repose” as he is hoisted above the ship (1430). But the argument here is fierce. Does the divine intervene to give Billy an “easy death” like that of the Gnostic Christ on the cross—a reading that certain celestial occurrences described in the text seem to encourage? Does a wholly other kind of opiate account for the stillness of this body, hung in a process “scientifically conducted—under special orders” of the Captain to the surgeon (1427)? Is the stillness of Budd’s body indeed a prodigious expression of intention by a physically gifted young sailor who

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is jealous of his reputation as the “Handsome Sailor” and desperate to preserve his body’s dignity? Or finally is Billy responding to an eleventh hour interview with the Captain, stilling himself so as not to trigger a mutiny? Has Vere indeed “concealed nothing” from the condemned man and acquainted him with the context for understanding why he shall die and a motivation to do so quietly (1418)? The narrator speculates at length on the possibilities of such an interview and what effect it might have had on captain and sailor alike. If one trusts him, it follows that Vere in a sense finally manages to textualize the young Budd and provide him with a scheme for understanding his predicament, and it is at this moment, arguably, that Billy finally obtains the intentionality that he has never possessed in other situations, when, linguistic resources failing, he has violently lashed out. The stutter-prone Billy’s “God bless Captain Vere” rings out as an utterance “wholly unobstructed,” and his consequent stillness upon ascending to the yard-arm end is his gift to Vere (1426). Billy becomes a “prodigy of repose” because he senses that his struggling, spasming body might trigger the very mutiny his captain/father hopes to avoid. Such is the implication of a text that invokes Isaac and Jesus, other sons obedient unto death. But of what avail, finally, is the text that Billy is provided? Billy’s intention, finally, here as elsewhere, is “nothing to the purpose.” He acts upon the sailor audience in an unintentioned way, fomenting mutiny in his very attempt not to. The sailors themselves become “without volition,” the mere “vehicles of some vocal electric current” (1426). They replicate the crypto-rebellious, spontaneous grouping of the bronzed mariners of the story’s first paragraphs around the black sailor. Shortly thereafter, their collective “inarticulate” murmuring, “dubious in significance further than it seemed to indicate some capricious revulsion of thought or feeling such as mobs ashore are liable to” will be compared to an approaching torrent of rain (1428–29). Such mechanicals are best handled mechanically. The Boatswain pipes down the starboard watch, and away they go. If Budd’s effects always escape his intention, however, Vere’s own agency is again equally dubious, at least if one takes him at his word. What Vere elaborates for both drumhead court and readers to see is a pressuring context that makes Budd’s execution seem inevitable, an opinion with which the narrator, given his reference to Calvinist believers, appears to concur. (It also appears from the manuscript that Melville had intended to work in an allusion to Jonathan Edwards [Hayford and Sealts 264].) Indeed, Vere claims that action is not possible in any meaningful sense for him and his crew, in effect arguing that a prior text animates him and his court in a manner much like the “vocal

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electric current” will inhabit the sailors. Vere asks rhetorically, “Would it be so much we ourselves that would condemn as it would be martial law operating through us? For the law and the rigor of it, we are not responsible.” (Watching Vere, one is reminded of Franklin’s sly aside on the usefulness of Reason, here altered slightly: “So convenient a thing it is to be a textual Creature, since it enables one to find or make a text for everything one has a mind to do.”) Vere continues by arguing that not merely the law constrains them and speaks through them but also a longstanding tradition of naval practice and tradition, which “the people” (a phrase that resonates of a much larger political context) being familiar with, cannot be contravened without being interpreted as weakness inviting mutiny. The captain would have it that he has no choice. The law has spoken and he is its captive. In acting as an instrument of the law, Vere exercises his paternal powers to persuade Billy not only to stand still for his punishment but to embrace it. Melville’s Redburn states, “Some sea-captains are fathers to their crew. . . . severe and chastising fathers, fathers whose sense of duty overcomes the sense of love, and who every day, in some sort, play the part of Brutus, who ordered his son away to execution” (Redburn 67). Given this close connection in Melville’s mind regarding the duties of captains and fathers, one might say that in Billy Budd an allegorically minded Melville gives us a temporally telescoped vision of the socialization of the infant and that Billy Budd is about more than martial law: it is about The Law. Vere draws upon more than his library in making his decision regarding Budd. “Martial law” is the form of socialization writ large. Child-rearing is the other major form of impressment represented in the story, with Vere merely passing down the “stern discipline” learned from Fairfax and Starry Vere.26 The babying of Budd occurs long before the Dansker ever supplies Billy’s nickname. It starts, of course, with his surname, and it continues in sections one and two of the story, where readers encounter a description of Billy that will largely govern their image of him throughout the tale. Billy is spoken of with a casual familiarity absent in any description of Vere, Nelson, or Claggart. The narrator invites readers to share his paternalistic sense of possession and conception, as Billy is referred to as “our merchant sailor,” “our foretopman,” and “our new-made foretopman” (1359). Already there is the sense that Billy is something to be shared, passed around, dandled upon the knee, and observed with fondness, though not necessarily with seriousness. As baby, Billy is the purest kind of body. Naive, innocent, without verbal proficiency and lacking perception of social complexity, he is repeatedly described in terms that emphasize his potential and the degree to which he is socially unfinished. At the moment of his impressment aboard the Bellipotent

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and in the references to the men of “no common natural stamp” aboard the ship, the ship itself is represented as a technology for formation and reformation of men. Billy’s lack of clear antecedents further denominate him as a person largely uninscribed. He is an uninformed potentiality possessed of little more than an eagerness to please whatever figures of authority he encounters. Finally, and most crucially for Billy, he paradoxically lacks control over his own marvelously gifted body. Twice in the tale he does “more than he intended,” reacting spontaneously and violently to assaults against his person. Aboard the Rights of Man Billy enjoys the status of favored child. Freud’s passage on the special privileges of the infant in “Of Narcissism” suggests that the idealizations or “overvaluations” of Billy to which crewmen, Vere, narrator, and readers can succumb are motivated by their own histories of socialization: If we look at the attitude of affectionate parents towards their children, we have to recognize that it is a revival and reproduction of their own narcissism, which they have long since abandoned. The trustworthy pointer constituted by overvaluation . . . dominates, as we all know, their emotional attitude. Thus they are under compulsion to ascribe every perfection to the child—which sober observation would find no occasion to do—and to conceal and forget his shortcomings. (Incidentally, the denial of sexuality in children is connected with this.) Moreover, they are inclined to suspend in the child’s favor the operation of all the cultural acquisitions which their own narcissism was forced to respect, and to renew on his behalf the claims to privileges which were long ago given up by themselves. The child shall have a better time than his parents; he shall not be subject to the necessities which they have recognized as paramount to life. Illness, death, renunciation of enjoyment, restrictions of his own will, shall not touch him; the laws of nature and society shall be abrogated in his favor; he shall once more really be the centre and core of creation—’His Majesty the Baby,’ as we once fancied ourselves. (90–91)

It is just such privilege that Billy enjoys aboard the Rights, where “some of ‘em do his washing, darn his old trousers for him, and the carpenter “is at odd times making a pretty little chest of drawers for him.” On the Rights “anybody will do anything for Billy Budd; and its the happy family.” Suggested here is a situation that would permanently infantilize, if not suffocate, Billy.27 But the baby must grow up. He passes from the maternal bosom of the Rights into the care, the stern discipline, of Vere and his man-making ship, without whom and without which Budd will never receive, or become, “the full rose of the dawn” (1427). Vere appears to provide Billy with a kind of self that he has lacked, and which Billy and the narrative, suffused as it is in redemptive imagery, seem to embrace.28 Vere communicates his texts to Billy, who willingly takes the fall.

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The meaning of Billy’s self, however, at the level of the “inside” narrative, does not hold. The story of the foretopman refuses to end. The official history that the narrator’s own “inside” history is intended to supplant is inhabited by still another inside history. “Billy in the Darbies” provides a different account of Billy Budd’s execution, and it could hardly constitute a more direct challenge to the narrator’s religiously inflected story. The pietistic dramatization of Billy’s hanging is supplanted, finally, by the sailor’s doggerel of “Billy in the Darbies.” The reader, using as scales the passage that elsewhere describes the difficulty of making truth formally pleasing, can weigh the truth value of this rough-edged verse against the sonorous sentences that describe Billy’s ascension. In “Billy in the Darbies” a fellow sailor of “an artless poetic [emphasis his] temperament” writes Billy’s death as descent into unalloyed tragedy (1434). His account circulates hand to hand and ship to ship before being “rudely printed” as a ballad: Good of the Chaplain to enter Lone Bay And down on his marrowbones here and pray For the likes just o’ me, Billy Budd—But, look: Through the port comes the moonshine astray! It tips the guard’s cutlass and silvers this nook; But ‘twill die in the dawning of Billy’s last day. A jewel-block they’ll make of me tomorrow, Pendant pearl from the yardarm-end Like the eardrop I gave to Bristol Molly— O, ’tis me, not the sentence they’ll suspend. Ay, ay, all is up; and I must up too, Early in the morning, aloft from alow. On an empty stomach now never it would do. They’ll give me a nibble—bit o’biscuit ere I go. Sure, a messmate will reach me the last parting cup; But, turning heads away from the hoist and the belay, Heaven knows who will have the running of me up! No pipe to those halyards.—But aren’t it all sham? A blur’s in my eyes; it is dreaming that I am. A hatchet to my hawser? All adrift to go? The drum roll to grog, and Billy never know? But Donald he has promised to stand by the plank; So I’ll shake a friendly hand ere I sink. But—no! It is dead then I’ll be, come to think. I remember Taff the Welshman when he sank. And his cheek it was like the budding pink. But me they’ll lash in a hammock, drop me deep.

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We are now a far cry from the affected and the fustian, terms that can be applied to the logorrheaic narrator and that have not infrequently been applied to much of Melville’s textual production. (One can often see in Melville’s prose the strange division of loyalties and identifications that I spoke of earlier, and it is these divided loyalties that give his prose its so very rhetorical, ungrounded feel, and which make it seem on numerous occasions to parody itself and come completely undone.) That Billy Budd ends with a bit of unsmoothed verse by a “artless” sailor of poetic temperament, and that the verse is circulated as a ballad at the level of the narrative, would appear significant in this regard. Perhaps Melville sides with the sailors. Yet here again, the particular form that the “artless” takes complicates the picture considerably: In “Billy in the Darbies” Melville does a relatively unlettered sailor doing another illiterate sailor by himself doing Shakespeare doing a groundling— witness the heavy alliteration, the extensive associational word play, and the archaisms, as well as the doggerel. Even when appearing to renounce the military-literary complex and its class ties, Melville’s literary allegiances cannot be disavowed because they are his very resources for representation.29 Still, the voice that emerges in the interior monologue of “Billy in the Darbies” throws into relief the rest of the narrative, and by doing so reminds the reader of just how outside the rest of the history is. It refuses to let the reader rest with an easy comparison of one “inside narrative” with a clearly specious “official history,” and rather draws still more attention to the construction of point of view and highlights the business of narrativizing as a whole, thereby forestalling any certain claims one might make for the poem itself as an “objective” or, in keeping with the insider motif, more accurate representation of Billy’s subjectivity.30 That said, it must be admitted that “Billy in the Darbies” makes its own strong bid for narrative ascendancy, because it gives to Billy a subjectivity markedly different from that which he is assigned anywhere else in the text. For once Billy is a bit more than Saint Bernard or eager-to-please child, and for once readers are presented with an interior history—a representation of Billy’s representations. The interior monologue that the sailor imagines for the foretopman grants Billy a significant interior life, so Billy becomes more fully

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impersonated at just the point at which he will be depersonated. It is the sailor’s effort to imaginatively recuperate Billy’s consciousness, to save him from somehow having been, in the memorable phrase of a Vietnam veteran describing his own near-death experience, “a book that nobody was reading.” And of course that it is a sailor who is able to make this move is immediately relevant. Melville, from often bitter personal experience, and as evidenced by his other fiction, well knows the power of occupation for defining the person and the strength of the identifications that are formed around the sharing of work and station. In addition to providing a representation of Billy’s interiority, however, the sailor gives us one last chance to imagine and read Billy’s exteriority, and by the lights he provides us, it is not going to rise again. In the “oozy weeds” that twist about the foretopman’s figure, the “corruption” of clothing, of first sin and the shame of nakedness, of the advent of “unnatural” culture, and of self-hiding and self-misrepresentation, are in strong evidence. Billy was in the darbies long before he ever knew it. Nature’s child has been entrapped by his inheritance on his father’s side.31 And the amniotic space to which he returns seems not so much womblike and safe—umbilical images notwithstanding—as the repository of a primordial muck into which he will soon de-compose. In the end, besides imaginatively throttling a longtime nemesis of the literary in Billy Budd, Melville shows us how he came to do in himself, or a certain version of himself both cherished and disowned. Writing scenes in both Pierre and “Bartleby” quite explicitly pit the body’s inclinations against the demands of textual production. Scholars have suggested that the description of Pierre’s torturous efforts to become an author is Melville’s self-portrait, and the clearly autobiographical elements of much of that novel, combined with the common knowledge of the demands of textual production on the body, support this contention. What I am finally suggesting here is that Melville’s subjectivity splits along text/body lines. He is Budd and he is Vere, who requires the binding of Budd so that he can realize “that most secret [and most social] of passions, ambition,” though, alas, he “never attains to the fullness of fame” (1432). Melville himself is a victim of the military-literary complex. Charged with ambition from his youth by stories of his ancestors and reminders of a noble lineage, he felt, from quite an early age, the pressure to live up to a legacy of heroic accomplishment.32 Melville had some sense of the way in which his own father had been ground up by circumstances and the pressure to make good on his name and business. And he himself felt family pressures: both as son and as father he knew in quite a different way from Billy what it meant to have his entire family “practically invested within himself ” (1359). He knew the pressure to resurrect the family fortunes and enjoyed the

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promise of actually being able to do so as a writer, in effect discovering the shame and humiliation of the fallen aristocrat twice, the second time in the failed effort to transform himself from merely a commercially successful author to a known literary genius. To this cause was sacrificed, to one degree or another, sanity, health, and family all. Billy Budd, a story about history written at the end of his life by a man weaned on history and envying a better place in it, provides—for any literary historian who might notice—the inside narrative of a someone who, in the time before steamships, owned a spectacularly subversive body.

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Chapter Three

Producing Remembrance: John Dos Passos’s Body in the Text

V. S. Pritchett once described The 42nd Parallel as its author’s effort to “run twelve different directions at once” (Carr 272). Pritchett’s comment connects the novel’s sprawling, consciously polygeneric form and ambitious content, which he figures as peripateticism, to one of the singular characteristics of John Dos Passos himself: his vigorous mobility. Born in a Chicago hotel room, Dos Passos’s nativity was followed by a self-described “hotel childhood” (qtd. in Ludington 14), which in turn was followed by an adulthood filled with travel. Dos Passos was a walker to rival Dickens. As an undergraduate at Harvard he often ventured out late at night to investigate the streets of Boston, and later, in Europe, he sometimes hiked thirty and forty kilometers a day to survey the countryside. To Dos Passos, bed-ridden from time to time by vicious bouts with the rheumatic fever that first struck him as a child, movement was life itself, so it is no wonder that a restless kinesis should characterize his work. Pritchett’s recognition of that quality leads readily enough to a consideration of the way Dos Passos’s body gets into U.S.A. If the trilogy offers, as its author suggests in its first pages, the “voice of the people,” in that voicing we also find traces of the body of John Dos Passos. My aim here is to articulate that body with this “voicing” given the people, to examine the struggle for and against various embodied forms of “Americanness” that in many ways shaped both Dos Passos and his most signal work. The U.S.A. that Dos Passos assembles in his trilogy is a by-product of his own effort at cultural assimilation, at a self-assembly which is very bodily. In the course of this articulation, I will attempt to lay out in schematic fashion some of the experiences and discursive streams that shaped Dos Passos’s apprehension and experience of his own flesh. One such influence, a legacy of his education at the Friends School in Philadelphia, then at Choate, 53

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is his early, acute, sustained experience of his body as a liability, as something that marks him as foreign and inferior to other children and young adults, as feminine, as a target of labels and jibes, as an embarrassment that should in some wise or another be concealed. In childhood and adolescence, Dos Passos’s body was a source of shame and loneliness. In his adolescence, he apprehended his flesh as something to be worked upon, disciplined, and toughened through physical exercise and competition. I will show that Dos Passos’s efforts along these lines should be construed not only as part of a program of masculinization, but of Americanization, of acquiring, as it were, something like the body of an American. This project of self-legitimation, in turn, is also construed as an effort at establishing affinity with his father, who himself, as a “swarthy” second generation American moving in influential circles, was heavily invested in his own project of self-nationalization. Both John Dos Passos and his father were physical culturists of a sort, participants in a movement that was shaped in part by the well-documented anxieties regarding potentially debilitating effects of prosperity upon middle and upper class bodies, about the possibilities for “race suicide” and class suicide. Narratives that flowed from that anxiety, which I have indicated is also at play in Billy Budd, held that more vigorous, less sedentary immigrants and former slaves—members of the “lower classes”—would first reproductively, then violently, overwhelm the nation’s elites.1 This movement to physical culture is also fostered by anxieties of economic productivity brought on in no small part by the ever-increasing presence of the machine in industrial and economic life, for machines bring with them yet another crisis for a masculinity that is always perilously maintained in the first place. Hard, tireless, inured to harsh conditions, fantastically productive, the machine calls for a re-appraisal of masculinity because men can’t compete with its productive capabilities. Within this context, the turn to physical culture is in part nostalgic, involving the preservation and creation of a body type that no longer matters as it once did. Physical culture attempts to address a man’s deracinated relationship to his body, which is no longer exercised in cultivation and production, but now cultivated and produced in exercise. Another way of putting this is that the physical culturist enacts a nostalgia for a time when the body produced rather than merely ran (machines, factories, farms, itself), when its “fitness”—and one can read here masculine strength, toughness, and endurance—was important to producing the means of existence and the attendant social matrix. This question of productivity and the body will become important to my reading of U.S.A., for productivity is a keen issue for Dos Passos, who, born into the privilege of wealth, in his youth divided the world into “producers and non-producers” and constantly worried that he might be nothing more than “a sponge.”2

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Of equal importance to my reading, though, is the sense in Dos Passos that much of the business about being strong and tough and American is claptrap. Dos Passos the physical culturist endlessly vies with Dos Passos the aesthete, whose body exercises not its muscles but its senses. This Dos Passos is acutely aware of the sensuous world around him and cultivates not his abilities of transformation but of observation. Though he felt acutely a need for “improvements” according to the dictates of conventional American masculinity, Dos Passos also apprehended his body as a sensitive, important instrument for receiving and recording impressions, something to be cultivated and preserved for what it could mediate into text. It is in this capacity that Dos Passos regarded his sponginess not as a weakness, but as a capacity, as a special asset to his defining ambition to become a great novelist, to write, in fact, the Great American Novel. This sense of the body can be at odds with the more conventionally masculine modes of embodiment that encourage toughening and callousing of the body, that foster an attitude not of careful preservation and recording of sensation but of reckless use and intentional ignoring of sensation, most notably pain. They suit one for particular forms of work that call on these qualities—farm work, factory work, ship work—the (mass) productive work of the lower class male. Drawn to these forms of work, or perhaps to a certain idealization of them, Dos Passos was also repelled by them. He abhorred the discomfort of farm work and the dangerous conditions and mind-numbing repetition of work in the factory. He also had opportunity to see the shattering effects of this masculinist ideology in war. ANATOMY AND A MID-LIFE CRISIS According to Dos Passos’s testimony, U.S.A. precipitates from a failure to save the lives of two lower class immigrants, the Italian-born anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti (Foley 435). To their cause Dos Passos devoted a goodly amount of time and energy, but neither his letter to Lawrence Lowell, President of Harvard and chairman of a specially appointed governor’s factfinding committee, nor his monograph on the case, nor any of his reportage on the issue, made a crucial difference. Nothing Dos Passos wrote could extricate the anarchists from “the sticky filaments of law words” (“Pit and the Pendulum” 118) that bound them over for execution just as surely as they did Billy Budd. Dos Passos responds to this galling lesson on the limitations of language by attempting to write the Great American Novel (and a trilogy at that). U.S.A. can be read as both an insistent shout that novel writing still matters and as a sustained admission that it means less and less.3 On the one hand, it bears marks of an enormous narrative ambition to write the story of America; on the other, much of the story is registered in a mind-numb-

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ing “machine prose for a machine world” (and machined people) that suggests despair at the heart of that ambition. Protest fiction that prompted Sartre to proclaim Dos Passos the greatest living writer, U.S.A. is in many ways Dos Passos’s “no,” his own refusal, as he put it in the sodamic formulation with which he memorializes Thorstein Veblen, to “get his mouth round the essential ‘yes’” (Big Money, 849).4 At the heart of the novel, however, like a worm, is a sense of its own nothingness. In the adult Dos Passos, this anxiety is perhaps most clearly voiced in his introduction to the Modern Library Edition of Three Soldiers, a novel originally published in 1919 and re-issued in 1932 to take advantage of the popularity of Dos Passos’s 1919. The essay, written as Dos Passos is working on the last novel of his U.S.A. trilogy, expresses his acute awareness of his growing older and his desire to have something to show for it. Announcing itself as “An apologia at thirty-six,” [italics his], the introduction is about regret, loss, impotence and a sense of personal ossification. Beginning by evoking the sense of possibility of personal, political, and artistic revolution that characterized the year 1919 for him, Dos Passos then soberly reflects, You wake up one morning and find that what was to have been a springboard into reality is a profession, the organization of your life that was to be an instrument to make you see more and clearer turns out to be blinders made according to a predestined pattern, the boy who thought he was going to be a tramp turns out to be a nearsighted middleclass intellectual (or a tramp, it’s as bad either way). Professional deformations set in; the freeswimming young oyster fastens to the rock and grows a shell. What it amounts to is this: our beds have made us and the acutest action we can take is sit up on the edge of them and look around and think. They are our beds till we die. (v-vi)

In this passage, Dos Passos, whose rheumatic fever could be counted upon to return every few years to rack him with pain and force him to bed, appears to align his professional commitment with this incapacitating disease. The reference to his nearsightedness is clear enough in its meaning, but it resonates the more strongly when one considers this condition’s stigmatizing effect on Dos Passos during a childhood filled with social trauma related to bodily “shortcomings.” (There is the internalized mockery of other children in the remark.) And Dos Passos’s reference to the “middle class intellectual” must be construed both in the context of his involvement with the Left and his downwardly mobile movement as the son of a wealthy and powerful corporate lawyer. From a Left perspective the label marks him as potentially compromised and ineffectual, one unable to make difficult commitments. From the perspective of his class of origin, he is simply middling, mediocre.

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In addition to this dramatic lament on his “professional deformation,” on the warping, limiting effects (cast here as reductions in sight, mobility and sensitivity) of his own activity as a writer, which produce a kind of bedriddenness which makes the observations of this blindered being the “acutest action” he can manage, Dos Passos meditates on the power of writing in shaping the world. He begins by diffidently describing the novel as “a commodity that fills a certain need,” “daydreams,” “intellectual catnip” that is bought just as people buy “ice cream or aspirin or gin”: “All you need to do to feel good about your work is to turn out the best commodity you can, play the luxury market and to hell with doubt” (vi). Leaving behind his dyspeptic meditation on the commodification of the word, Dos Passos then pursues a related tangent that similarly relies heavily on market analogies. Quickly summarizing the history of writing from the Middle Ages (when “the mere setting down of the written word was a marvel” and “something of that marvel got into the words set down”) to the Renaissance (when “the printing press opened up a continent more tremendous than America” and “sixteenth and seventeenth century writers [were] all on fire with it” (vi)). Dos Passos concludes by describing the very modern, very personal problem of over-production as it applies to print. Citing modern inventions for printing that “plaster the world from end to end with print,” Dos Passos complains that “eighty percent of the inhabitants of the United States must read a column of print a day, if it’s only in the tabloids and the Sears and Roebuck catalogue” (vi). This mass production of words is correlated with other mass produced forms: “Somehow, just as machinemade shoes aren’t as good as handmade shoes, the enormous quantity produced has resulted in diminished power in books. We’re not men enough to run the machines we’ve made” (vi). Dos Passos’s analogy here runs slightly off its tracks. On the one hand, it begins as an argument for the individual craftsman and the superiority of his handmade products to those of the machine. The subordinate clause with which the analogy begins would suggest that there are corresponding forms of “handmade” text and “machinemade” text, as if the former were the superior product of a painstaking, individual craftsman, and the latter the product of a process of mass production, inferior because of its development through that process, and indistinguishable from other texts derived from the same process. This part of the analogy suggests that machines—not craftsmen—write books. The second part of the analogy, however, casts the problem of “the diminished power of books” (and therefore of writers) somewhat differently, not as problem of craftsmanship and of diminished quality, and not as a difference between texts produced by human beings and those

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produced by machines, but as a problem of overproduction that “somehow” diminishes the value of the well-crafted book. There is a clear sense that, in addition to feeling, as did so many of his modernist contemporaries, that language had become debased, Dos Passos also feels overwhelmed, shouted down by the sheer volume of print that fills modern existence, much of it produced in service to the marketplace. This fantastic, market-driven proliferation of text has had the effect of diminishing the power of the most venerable and even charismatic form of text, the book. Re-enforcing the suggestion that machines do in some way write the books, and echoing contemporaneous diagnoses of the nation’s economic ills, his final line, “we are not men enough to run the machines we have made,” expresses this crisis of the power of books as a crisis in masculinity, both in effect castrated by the machines intended to enhance their power. If Dos Passos was anxious concerning the status of books in modern life, however, he hoped for future redemption for his work and the works of others. There is an alternative to playing the luxury market, or becoming a “daydream artist” who is “merely feeding the machine, like a girl in a sausage factory shoving hunks of meat into the hopper” (viii). Instead, one may refuse writing for mere profit and produce “straight writing.” First employing homely images of the cabinet maker, Dos Passos then uses the even homelier one of the backwoods craftsman, claiming that the straight writer “whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes for them forms to set the mind of tomorrow’s generation” (vii-viii). Such writing “[dominates] the machine of production,” according to Dos Passos. “Whoever can run the machine runs it for all of us. Working with speech straight is vigorous, absorbing, devastating hopeless work, work that no man need be ashamed of ” (viii). Not long after in effect marking the death of the author, Dos Passos now announces the reality of his redemption and surpassing agency.5 And as if to ward off his own skepticism regarding this claim, Dos Passos produces a hedge: if the power of such writing that will renovate our interior spaces is not readily apparent, then that is because it “is more likely to be exercised vertically through a century than horizontally over a year’s sales.” The straight writer, Dos Passos concludes, echoing Shelley, “is the architect of history” (viii). All of this from an ossified, blindered, deformed creature looking about from the edge of its bed. Dos Passos’s bi-polar ruminations on history and the writer’s place in it are themselves dominated by the market and its valuations, and by the power of machines, providing as they do so much of the figurative and literal material for his text. Close to his essay’s heart are anxieties regarding the changing meaning of productivity and masculinity in the machine age. When he claims for the writer

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“vigorous absorbing devastating hopeless work, work that no man need be ashamed of,” Dos Passos articulates personal and cultural anxieties, attitudes, and emotions that permeated the thirties—fear (of weakness and unemployment), lassitude, hopelessness, devastation and, above all, shame. In their stead he would fashion a stoic pride of craftsmanship. In effort to ward off these threats, he continued to write his trilogy, itself a kind of “machine of production.” USA is in no small part about other “machines of production,” beginning with “machines to write with.” The first chapters of The 42nd Parallel concern themselves with the technology, economics, and politics of printing. The first of Dos Passos’s protagonists, Mac, is apprenticed to his Uncle Tim, a small printer. Uncle Tim, a member of the working class who reads Bellamy and Marx, is forced to either purchase a new linotype printer or eventually go out of business. He chooses the former. After extensively renovating his building to support the machine, Tim finally obtains his new colossus: For a whole day there was no work done. Everybody stood looking at the tall black intricate machine that stood there like an organ in a church. When the machine was working , and the printshop filled with the hot smell of molten metal, everybody’s eyes followed the quivering inquisitive arm that darted and flexed above the keyboard. When they handed round the warm shiny slugs of type the old German typesetter who for some reason they called Mike pushed back his glasses on his forehead and cried, ‘Fifty-five years a printer, and now when I’m old I’ll have to carry hods to make a living.’ (24)

Unsatisfied with the already leaden irony of the radical printer rebuilding his business around this dark satanic mill, Dos Passos must pile on more. The first print Uncle Tim sets up on the machine is, “Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains” (24). For a time, Mac works for Tim, experiencing his first lessons in censorship at the heavy hands of policemen who would prevent him from distributing pro-union handbills. Eventually the debt Tim incurs to revamp his business brings him to ruin at the hands of bankers and businessmen outraged by his pro-union publications (done at cost). Uncle Tim’s protest is doomed from the outset. To get the word out on behalf of workers, he must install at the heart of his production an alienating technology that reduces an experienced, life-long skilled laborer, a printer, to a hod carrier; and to acquire this technology he must indebt—and thereby expose—himself to persons inimical to his message. A casualty of this failed protest, Mac subsequently hooks up with “Doc” Bingham, a nineteenth century con man on the cusp of the twentieth.

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Bingham is not a printer, but he peddles books and is himself a kind of walking, talking volume of instruction on oratory and elocutionary rhetoric. Versed in a repertoire of soliloquies from Shakespeare and quick to maximize at every opportunity, Bingham is the cynical embodiment of any number of books that graced middle- class bookshelves from the middle nineteenth century to the early twentieth, all of which represented themselves as vehicles to culture and respectability. Dos Passos’s readers, however, see Bingham employ his rap to sell Boccaccio to bored businessmen, anti-papist tracts to protestant Midwesterners, and pornography to teenage boys. Yet, debased figure that he is, Bingham testifies to the power of the book during the period, especially in the countryside. When eventually Mac and Bingham part ways in a hail of buckshot from a farmer Bingham has cuckolded, Mac kicks around from place to place, job to job, until he finally ends up in revolutionary Mexico, sympathetic to revolutionary causes but wary of the violence of revolution because it endangers his . . . bookstore. The first part of U.S.A. is pre-occupied with print, with its power and limitations, with its ethical use, with the compromises made in order to disseminate it, with people’s hunger for it, with its revolutionary and anti-revolutionary valences, with the implications of the technologies and economics of its production, with the systems by which it is distributed, with its censorship, with its power in working class lives, with its comforts for lonely people, with its relationship to “respectability.” Print is the obsessive subject of the beginning of U.S.A. Dos Passos’s struggle, in the aftermath of Sacco and Vanzetti, is to make his writing productive,6 and in the early going of U.S.A. we see his mostly pessimistic, if ultimately inconclusive, fictional ruminations on the productive power of the word—his own at-hand tool for social transformation. One senses Dos Passos’s effort to locate himself within a web or system of economic and social relations, to gauge the relationships writers are implicated in and, ultimately, to determine what power the writer has. In the end, Dos Passos, feeling that “we have only words against . . . Power, Superpower” (Big Money, 1210), looking for a point of leverage for lifting the “system” of America, writes a prescient novel about the role of print and other media in the production of this superpower. U.S.A. is a collectivist novel about the function of media in the formation of collectives, how these media organize and manage bodies, how they member (animate and enervate) them, how they remember them. If there is a central “character” in this trilogy, in fact, it is these media, whose presence pervades the narrative and biographical segments of the novel, whose conspicuous absence is in part the subject of the Camera Eye segments, and whose products are taken apart and remembered in the newsreels. Of the twelve major protagonists in the

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trilogy, Mac is a printer/bookseller, Mary French is a reporter, Ben Compton is a union organizer and skilled orator, Margo Dowling is a movie star, Richard Ellsworth Savage writes for a public relations mogul, and blue-eyed, born-onthe-fourth-of-July J. Ward Moorehouse, around whose life that of so many of the other characters revolves, is that public relations mogul. Of the twenty-eight biographies offered in U.S.A., two are of reporters, two of writers, two of stars of screen or stage, five of prominent orator-politicians, and one is of William Randolph Hearst. Last, there are two more biographies of quintessential American bodies—unnamed, abject bodies—subjects that have been, as we now like to say, “bombarded” by the media. VAGABARDAGE In its prologue, U.S.A. offers itself as an alternative medium channeling “the voice of the people” through the ears of its tramp protagonist, “Vag.” Vag is heard through the narrator’s free indirect discourse, but not seen. No hint of his physical demeanor or appearance—save its ceaseless movement—is provided. But if Vag escapes the reader’s eye, little escapes his own, for he is a careful observer of faces and bodies. He walks the streets “greedy” for the “warm curve of faces, answering flicker of eyes, the set of a head, the lift of a shoulder, the way hands spread and clench.” With “greedy eyes, greedy ears taut to hear,” he goes “searching through the crowd” (1). This greed of the senses extends to his muscles, which “ache” not from laborious exertion but for that exertion—or more exactly, for the embodied knowledge held by a range of working class laborers, for the roadmender’s pick and shovel work, the fisherman’s knack with a hook when he hauls on the slithery net . . . the swing of the bridgeman’s arm as he slings down the whitehot rivet, the engineer’s slow grip wise on the throttle, the dirtfarmer’s use of his wholebody when, whoaing the mules, he yanks the plow from the furrow. (1)

Vag’s sensory voraciousness is matched by, and in part driven by, a desire for human bonds. His “greedy” looking, however, goes unreciprocated; his own mobile, intensely alive body—with blood that “tingles” with wants— attracts no notice. Lacking “knack,” “wise[ness],” of the body at work, Vag also lacks the human community that can often be found in common employment, though when he looks about, he also sees little to suggest that the city or its work promises such bonds. The U.S.A. trilogy begins with a theatrical tableau of urban anti-community; the city the young man walks cannot begin to answer to his desire for fellowship. Its denizens—those who ostensibly are not still working—seem intent on getting away from one another.

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Having “packed into subways, climbed into streetcars and buses . . . scampered for suburban trains . . . filtered into lodgings and tenements, gone up in elevators into apartmenthouses”(1), they continue to labor under the timework discipline of the workplace long after they have left it, “packing” and “filtering” themselves even as they enter their homes—now factoryized. If the rest of the inhabitants of the city seem perpetual victims of the Taylorized speed-up, Vag himself appears as hurried as the next person, yet he is an image of inefficiency and unproductive pain. The kinesis of the city has its analogue in the young man’s mind, which is potentially productive but presently tortured. In addition to his aching muscles, Vag’s brain is “a beehive of hopes, buzzing and stinging.” He is set in frustrated motion by the motion of the city; he walks “fast but not fast enough, far but not far enough,” as “faces slide out of sight, talk trails into tattered scraps, footsteps tap fainter in alleys”(1). He wants to “catch the last subway, the streetcar, the bus, run up the gangplanks of all the steamboats, register at all the hotels,” and to “work in the cities, answer the wantads, learn the trades, take up the jobs, live in all the boardinghouses, sleep in all the beds. One bed is not enough, one job is not enough, one life is not enough” (1). The city produces a surpassing desire that cannot begin to be satisfied. Driven by an impulse that would take him a hundred directions at once, the young man, though surrounded by jobs, women, houses, and a city, finds himself with “no job, no woman, no house, no city” (2). What he does have, however, what are connected and full of knowledge, are his ears. These ears are tied to a speech community figured as a continental vinework, which at first seems to cover the ground the young man cannot, and provide a sense of human contact that he has in nothing else: Only the ears busy to catch the speech are not alone; the ears are caught tight, linked tight by the tendrils of phrased words, the turn of a joke, the singsong fade of a story, the gruff fall of a sentence; linking tendrils of speech twine through the city blocks, spread over pavements, grow out along broad parked avenues, speed with the trucks leaving on their long night runs over roaring highways, whisper down sandy byroads past wornout farms, joining up cities and filllingstations, roundhouses, steamboats, planes groping along airways; words call out on mountain pastures, drift slow down rivers widening to the sea and the hushed beaches. (2)

Yet no sooner have readers been presented with an image of organic unity for the country than they are frustrated to find that these tendrils are not necessarily nurturing. Our young itinerant has been across the nation, and he has found himself “no less alone” all over the country,

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in the training camp at Allentown,” or in the day on the docks at Seattle, or in the empty reek of Washington City hot boyhood summer nights . . . or in the bed full of fleas in New Orleans . . . or in the gray faces trembling in the grind of gears in the street under Michigan Avenue . . . or the night without a sleepingbag among frozen beartracks in the Yellowstone, or canoeing Sundays on the Quinnipiac.” (2)

Instead, the young man lives off remembered words, finding comfort “in his mother’s words telling about longago, in his father’s telling about when I was a boy, in the kidding stories of uncles, in the lies the kids told at school, the hired man’s yarns, the tall tales the doughboys told after taps” (2). It is this latter kind of speech—narrative, nostalgic, comic—found circulating in and around families, among schoolboys, between fellow soldiers, the language exchanged in small, intimate groups that provides solace. Finally, Dos Passos winds up his lengthy exposition of the national vine: “it was speech that clung to the ears, the link that tingled in the blood; U.S.A.” No sooner, however, has he offered us this epitomization of the nation, than we find Dos Passos unravels it: U.S.A. is the slice of a continent. U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stock quotations rubbed out and written by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public-library full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U.S.A. is the world’s greatest river valley fringed with mountains and hills, U.S.A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bank accounts. U.S.A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U.S.A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. (2–3)

This last paragraph, as much as anything else, seems to summarize the unsummarizability of the nation. Its pell mell listing of heterogeneous, constitutive elements of the nation suggests the infinitude of these elements and the incommensurability of them, at the same time that it highlights its own activity of choosing among these elements of those which are most “representative.” And it is no accident that organs of representation and collections of texts account for a large portion of the elements listed in this paragraph— “set[s]” of laws, a radio “network,” a “chain” of theaters, a “column” of stock quotations, a “public library full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil.” The final, punning line of the prologue marks the inseparability of the nation from its representations (including its representative bodies), among them the novel before us.

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It invites us to consider how these forms of media and representations reproduce the nation. The prologue that, like its protagonist, like its author, seems to want to run in several different directions at once, finds a way to end itself through its own qualified, exasperated, reductive representation: “But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people” (3). In doing so, the prologue announces a stubborn democratic idealism that, against the aggregated, integrated forces of government, business, labor, academia, and media, would propose “the speech of the people” as the defining element of the nation. It marks the urge, encouraged but frustrated in the previous paragraphs, to constitute an atomized humanity as a national community that speaks with a more or less unified political voice. It promises a cornucopia of American idioms, a wide-ranging sampler of distinctive yet representatively American voices that manage to find community in small groups. Yet since it refers to a voice rather than voices, there is also the clear sense that U.S.A. will attempt to speak univocally for the people. And finally, if it has previously gestured toward the importance of a muscular, experiential knowledge of labor, what emerges as the most powerful and potentially unifying force in this prologue—over and against the massed forces of modernity—are the unemployed, unmated, unsettled, well-traveled ears to which this speech clings. In this prologue, Dos Passos provides a melodramatic, thinly veiled image of himself as a young man who preserves the nation’s idioms and speaks for the people. As is the case in “The Writer and His Tools,” however, shadowing this exalted self-conception is something more akin to a portrait of the middle class intellectual as a young tramp: there is the same pervasive sense of lack, of insufficiency of knowledge (especially muscular knowledge) and experience that finds expression in “The Writer and His Tools.” Dos Passos’s long-standing anxiety about not being sufficiently embodied and connected to write a politically transformative novel pervades the opening. Present as well is the same pre-occupation with print and other media, with the nation as a media production that we will find in evidence in other parts of the novel. And nearly throughout, there is a consideration of the artist’s body, of its would-be capacity to perceive and to produce the nation, to ably represent—both artistically and politically—bodies whose experience in labor it does not share. THE (UN-)AMERICAN BODY The man who would be mediator of the Voice of America began as the “illegitimate” offspring of a second-generation American, John Roderigo Dos Passos, and his lover, Lucy Addison Spriggs Madison, whose family tree, as her name suggests, had roots that ran substantially deeper than did her lover’s into

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the national soil.7 John Dos Passos’s father was the son of a Portuguese immigrant who cobbled shoes. By the time John Dos Passos was born, however, his father had risen to the higher reaches of American society. John Roderigo had learned law as an apprentice and at night school at the University of Pennsylvania and received his big break when he successfully defended Edward Stokes from charges of having murdered the financier Jim Fisk (“not guilty” by virtue of insanity). He had become one of the most sought after corporate attorneys in America, a representative of large sugar and railroad trusts and the author of the definitive text on trust law. His lover was the product of a well-established Virginia family, a widow who recalled having been as a child swung to sit atop Robert E. Lee’s horse. Wealthy and respected, neither mother nor father, who was married to another woman at the time of his son’s birth, could afford a scandal. Thus, their son was born in a Chicago hotel, far from his mother’s home in Washington, D.C. and his father’s business in New York. Dos Passos’s hotel nativity was followed by a nomadic childhood, he and his mother perpetually on the lam from social policing. Most of their time was spent in Europe, where they lived as comfortable tourists. Accounts of this time, including the camera eye segments in The 42nd Parallel, suggest a childhood filled with an unusually large range of sights, sounds, odors, and tastes that Dos Passos would later write about in striking detail.8 Dos Passos’s range of social contacts, however, was not equally various. Most frequently he found himself in the company of adults—his mother, his nurse, or two maiden friends of his mother he came to know has his “aunts.” His accounts of his encounters with other children emphasize their infrequency and their brevity, as well as the high degree of adult supervision, if not interdiction. He was an intelligent, sensitive, extremely observant child who lived a highly restricted existence, a child passed among adults who could be both smothering and indifferent, if not abusive. (Dos Passos’s nurse on at least one occasion seems to have sexually molested him). Furthermore, though he sought contact with other children, Dos Passos often experienced them as threatening and “other,” especially in their rough, aggressive physicality.9 It was an upbringing that Dos Passos would begin to pay for in the fall of 1901, when he started at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington during a nine-month return to the states. Dos Passos found it hard mixing with the other children. He discovered himself to be singularly inept at gymnasium, which received special emphasis at an institution that sported one of the largest arrays of fitness apparatus in the city. He was mocked for his awkwardness at gym, his inability at team sports, his French accent, and his thicklensed glasses, which he was forced to wear after his teachers observed him

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fiercely squinting while reading (Carr 19–20). In short, more than most children, Dos Passos experienced his body as burden that marked him as foreign, faulty, and inept. When his mother returned to London in 1902, Dos Passos, after suffering from his first bout with rheumatic fever and undergoing a hernia operation, entered a boarding school in the London suburb of Hampstead. Here, he appears to have excelled, and there are few indications that Dos Passos suffered the humiliations that had befallen him at Sidwell. When he returned more or less permanently to the States and was placed in Choate, however, Dos Passos again was made to feel his body was foreign and inadequate. The circumstances of his entry could hardly have been more inauspicious. In January of 1907 he arrived at Choate at midterm. At eleven the youngest and smallest student at the school, he initially lodged away from the other boys in the home of the headmaster and his wife. Almost immediately he began to accumulate nicknames. Students quickly dubbed him “Frenchy” and “Four-Eyes” when the masters weren’t about; when the masters were, they themselves called him “Maddie,” a moniker that stuck with Dos Passos throughout his time at Choate.10 Dos Passos’s lack of sporting prowess continued, now compounded by his comparative youth: he shied from the competitive sports through which the school’s pecking order was established, and when others took to the playing fields, he took refuge in his room or escaped to the woods surrounding the school. In The Best Times, the mature Dos Passos describes the acute loneliness he felt, and his efforts as a young man to analyze his predicament conflate matters of legitimacy of paternity with social and sporting ineptitude: he wondered if it was “the bar sinister or the nearsighted eyes that made him always fumble the ball—what a terrible tennis player, no good at football or even at soccer—or the foreign speech or the lack of a home that made him so awkward, tonguetied, never saying the right word, never managing to do the accepted thing at the accepted time” (16). In such a universe of callow American masculinity, lack of athletic grace and lack of social grace went hand in hand, and both were important markers of legitimacy. Dos Passos felt his lack with the keenness that only an adolescent can feel, enduring the casual stigma that formed as he was teased by classmates for playing female roles in school plays or because he distinguished himself in the classroom but nowhere else. Voted class grind, in yearbooks he was labeled “little Maddie, the class co-ed,” described as “a hit in girls’ parts for the last three years,” and summarized as “meek” in his senior yearbook, where his favorite expression was listed as “how thrilling.” In his last semester at Choate, the fifteen-year-old Dos Passos would melodramatically record his pain—and his ambition:

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How happy I could be if I could only have one true friend who did not treat me like a damned little fool. Is it because I am younger than most of the fellows I am with that they neither respect me, like me, dislike me, hate me? I should rather be hated by every one in the school than looked upon as a nonentity. . . . Perhaps I am a “hated little stuck up fool”—I certainly try not to be—but it does hurt me to feel that if I should die tonight it would not make any lasting impression on any one. . . . But I do not care what misery I go through now if I can only in the future be great—Be the greatest man that ever lived—Be such a man that they will all treasure the remembrance of me and say with pride: ‘I went to school with John R. Dos Passos” (if I ever assume that name). But I suppose it is morbid foolishness to write all this—and does no good to anyone. . . . But if I can make myself great—oh—if I can—(Carr 40–41)

Later in life, attempting to write The Great American Novel, in which he would attempt to speak on behalf of various American “nonentit[ies],” Dos Passos would revisit his Choate experience in various Camera Eye segments in U.S.A. The intervening years enabled him to gain a certain perspective on the discursive forces at work in his experience there. In the following passage, Dos Passos suggests that his physical ineptitude provided an unwanted occasion for identification with the lower classes: “skating on the pond next the silver company’s mills where there was a funny fuzzy smell from the dump whaleoil soap somebody said it was that they used in cleaning silver knives and spoons and forks putting shine on them for sale there was shine on the ice early black ice that rang like a sawblade just scratched white by the first skaters I couldn’t learn to skate and kept falling down look out for the muckers everybody said bohunk and polack kids put stones in their snowballs write dirty words up on walls do dirty things up alleys their folks work in the mills we clean young American Rover Boys handy with tools Deerslayers played hockey Boy Scouts and cut figure eights on the ice Achilles Ajax Agamemnon I couldn’t learn to skate and kept falling down. (42nd Parallel, 77)

The consciousness at work here initially has something of the character of a transparent eyeball. It comprises an ego-liberated taking in of the odors, sights, and sounds of the mill pond, until brought up short by the, literally, jarring experience of its own failure to skate, a failure which elicits the general call to “look out for the muckers.”11 This jeering warning then triggers a culturally sponsored rumor regarding the vicious deceptiveness of “bohunk” and “polack” kids who won’t play fair, stirring hazy notions of their salacious, unsanctioned public writing and furtive sexual activity in public places. Their

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parentage provides an explanation for their shameful and dangerous behavior. The “I”-ball in this passage, a “mucker” by virtue of his clumsiness, becomes dangerously mixed with these “dirty” elements. He, too, can be come a rumor or byword to the “we” who are “clean,” “American,” literate woodsmen; who are sporting, martial, heroic; who are “handy with tools”; who know how to skate. The “I” can’t skate and, in mucking about, finds himself uncomfortably allied with a netherworld of muckers who would likely be equally unreceptive toward him. As Dos Passos’s later reconstruction has it, his boyhood stream of consciousness runs into a pond of class consciousness. This consciousness is in part brought on by and mediated through both physical inability and a discourse of proper ruling class boyhood and masculinity that defines that inability. For Dos Passos the boy, his failure to skate epitomizes a much more general failing to rise above the muck(ers) and attain the standards imparted and upheld by the Choate canon. The elliptical structures devised by the adult Dos Passos nicely convey the emotional storm of a boy’s shame and the way a physical fall not only shocks the senses, but also precipitates a hail of associations that would tie failure to skate with failure at the use of tools (for cutting figure eights), at sport, at woodcraft, and at warcraft. This is a fall indeed. The texts that formed the mucker-defining discourse depicted in this passage were provided by Choate; the skates were gifts from dad. They had remained long unused until persistent, exasperated inquiries from the father apparently goaded his son into a humiliating public attempt at doing something he knew he, in fact, could not do. This link to his father is also part of the delegitimating force of Dos Passos’s fall, in which he fails to live up to a standard of able and invigorated manhood rigorously upheld by his distant father, who would not publicly acknowledge paternity, and whose approval Dos Passos therefore desired perhaps more keenly than did most sons. A stout, broad-shouldered man with a long moustache, Dos Passos’s father, John Roderigo Dos Passos, was a devoted physical culturist who greeted every day with a thirty-minute battery of sitting up exercises before dunking his head in icy saltwater. Daily exercises usually involved a great deal of brisk walking and almost always included a swim, even in the winter among ice flows. Dos Passos senior was an outgoing, theatrical man who spent money nearly as fast as he made it and loved to be the center of attention. Politically, he was of his class and the kind of patriot that only a second-generation American and highly successful advocate for big sugar and big railroads could be. J.R. believed in the white man’s burden, authored an imperialist tract entitled The Anglo-Saxon Century, and “remained a Social Darwinist to the end” (Ludington 60). As a father, he was acutely concerned that his son not be like Lucy Madison’s son from her previous marriage, whom he viewed

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as a physical and moral weakling, lacking in ambition and self-control (Carr 30–1). Though often absent because of his business dealings and marriage to another woman, J.R. seems to have made a significant effort to be a part of his son’s upbringing, and he did not need much time to make an impression. His son remembers being in awe of the man whom he describes at one point as “a bull” (Best Times 2). His earliest memories are of being unable to imitate his father’s vigorous walk and of being overmatched when trying to join him in swimming in rough ocean surfs or icy rivers, efforts for which he had his father’s strong encouragement.12 Dos Passos’s skating failure is therefore defined not only through the practices of the Choate schoolboy community and the literature coursing through it, but also by the words and example of his forceful but often absent father, an ambitious, second-generation American intent on securing for himself all the material advantages of America’s elite class, in part through a quick study of its codes and values. At age sixteen, Dos Passos entered Harvard, where he encountered some of the same attitudes that had confronted him at Choate. One upperclassman advised him that if he “did not make something” he would become “a runt,” which in turn meant not making “the Institute” a gateway organization from which more selective clubs drew their members (Carr 53). Again Dos Passos, who by his father’s account stood “straight as a bean pole and as stiff ” and “might well be picked as the best pole for a shad” (Carr 53), found his body a social liability. He seems to have made a desultory attempt to make the freshman rowing crew, but failed. Malcolm Cowley describes him as “shy, selfconscious, awkward at sports, and a brilliant student,” “a lonely figure, standing outside the terribly snobbish social system of those days.” (Carr 54). During this time Dos Passos writes to his closest friend, Rumsey Martin, who was some years his younger, “Don’t get too husky, please—husky people invariably have a brain the size of a pea and are awful bores. At least I find them so at college here” (Fourteenth Chronicle 31). He goes on to offer that he has considered doing something to develop his body but has balked because of his dislike for organized sports. In truth, however, Dos Passos’s efforts at physical culture merely became more private and surreptitious. If he did not make the freshman crew, he did rise mornings to row on the Charles river or wait until late at night to run three or four miles through the streets of Cambridge. For a time he and a friend boxed with each other, an experience he described to an old prep school acquaintance in self-deprecating and parodic fashion: Imagine . . . I box nowadays! I have a friend who knows nothing about boxing—and I know nothing about it—so we have a charming time

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The hyperbolic, oxymoronic, terms employed here vent the anxiety and earnestness of the boxing, as well as express Dos Passos’s desire to dismiss the activity as of no account. In evidence is Dos Passos’s desire to toughen himself, to make himself a man through an agonistic, rule-bound encounter, but at the same time to escape that encounter and subvert its project. This same contradiction characterizes some of the responses to the exigencies of conventional masculinity that reappear in Dos Passos letters later in life. Elsewhere, in accounts of Dos Passos’s post-graduate existence, one encounters a son who carries on a regimen of exercise that, if much more understated, rivals his father’s. Dos Passos was known among his friends for the prodigious walks and hikes he embarked upon.13 He loved to swim and to ride, for a time took up a painstaking eye exercise program to improve his sight, and engaged in early morning runs. A summer program for self-improvement—whether adhered to or not—is suggestive of his ambitions to succeed as a writer, as well as cultivate a certain kind of body. While spending the summer following his graduation at Harvard at his father’s Virginia farm, Dos Passos set down a program that called for him to rise at six, run on the beach for fifteen minutes, breakfast, garden for two hours, then write from ten to noon. This regimen would be followed by swimming, lunch, a short nap, then more writing and some reading from two to five. Finally, he would ride horses, then go for another swim (Ludington 87). But Dos Passos, as one would expect, had more choices at Harvard than he had a Choate. If the classic form of the Harvard man was closed to him, there were alternatives, among them that fashioned by those who came to be known as the “Harvard aesthetes,” the intellectual and spiritual progeny of Oscar Wilde, who had made a lasting impression during a visit to Cambridge in the later part of the nineteenth century. Self-conscious disciples of Wilde and Pater who kept the flame alive well into the 20th century, these students opposed the vulgarities of modernity, countered the cult of the strenuous life with a studied lassitude, ridiculed conventional morality, and generally refused the modes of hegemonic masculinity. “Taste” was a central category for the aesthetes; its refinement and expression important definers of a selfhood distinct from and above that of both the masses and their rulers. In Cowley’s satiric description, they “drank, instead of weak punch, seidels of straight gin topped with a maraschino of cherry; they discussed the harmonies of Pater, the rhythms of Aubrey Beardsley and, growing louder, the voluptuousness of the Church, the

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essential virtue of prostitution. They had crucifixes in their bedrooms, and ticket stubs from last Saturday’s burlesque show at the Old Howard” (Exiles 35). In short, the aesthetes defined themselves primarily through acts of consumption (and in this respect harbingered a major cultural shift of the twentieth century) and artistic production. For a time Dos Passos moved among the aesthetes, but he never, it seems, felt comfortable with them. By his junior year he satirized the group in a story published in the Harvard Monthly entitled “An Aesthete’s Nightmare,” featuring a frail young man whose greatest pleasure in life is donning a crepe dressing gown and Turkish slippers and sipping an exotic liqueur while luxuriating in his painstakingly appointed apartment and inhaling its incensed air. Dreaming one night that he is a statue-smashing philistine, he awakens to find that he has inadvertently broken his statuette of Venus. Aroused by the dream and the pleasure he had taken in his revel, he now destroys his apartment in a frenzy (Ludington 57). If Dos Passos’s own psychic conflict lacked the comically dramatic outlines of his protagonist’s, his satire of it nevertheless represented a similar, though more self-conscious and literary, attempt at resolving contradictory impulses. Dos Passos, too, was a frail young man with a passion for literature and a sense that much that was fine in life was being lost in the rush of modern living and in the frantic pursuit of money. He was committed to a refinement of his senses and an assiduous recording of his perceptions. And if decidedly more physically active in his experience seeking, his perspective, like that of the aesthetes, was often that of the connoisseur and tourist. In another letter to Martin he recounts one of his many late night walks through Boston, commenting excitedly on the wonderful atmosphere of gaiety & sort of paganism . . . in the cheaper parts of the city—those are the only parts that are ever alive . . . all the old women, young women, boys, old grizzled men, flashing eyed Italians bringing vegetables and meats—and the reds and greens and yellows were so fresh in the rainy atmosphere. It is wonderful what beautiful faces you sometimes see, ugly gargoyle-grotesques too, to be sure—still it is all very alive and exciting—when not done up in stays like the life of us cotton-wool plutocrats—because we are plutocrats compared to these people. But enough romantic sociology!” (Fourteenth Chronicle 40)14

Dos Passos, however, worried that his “stays” would stifle his ability to produce politically or artistically meaningful writing. His great opportunity to break out of what he called the “bell glass” and “the ethercone” came with the advent of World War I. While at Harvard he, though espousing pacifism, had

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come to see democratizing and masculinizing possibilities in army service. It would provide an opportunity for the cotton-wool plutocrats to rub elbows with the commoners, a place where they might get “a little snobbery knocked out of them . . . [and] a smattering of slang to spice their conversation” (Landsbert 41).15 At the same time, he dreaded the regimentation, submission to officers, and forced association that the army entailed.16 So after leaving Harvard, Dos Passos, still ambivalent about American involvement but unwilling to miss history, chose what to him, as for few others outside his class, was a viable middle path, signing on as a “gentleman volunteer” with the NortonHarjes Ambulance Service.17 The service was filled with other young men of Dos Passos’s class, many of whom shared his literary ambitions: its roster— along with that of the American Field Service—reads like a Who’s Who of early Twentieth Century American letters. None wanted to miss out on what was viewed as the single most momentous event of their generation. Nearly all joined as the result of a similar impulse: “Everybody’s idea was to get into the war without getting into the army” (Fourteenth Chronicle 612).18 Eventually, Dos Passos would become trained as an ambulance driver, enter battle zones, experience shelling and extreme privation, witness gruesome injuries and mutilated, lifeless bodies. The first glimpse of shattering violence of battle came while he was still in Paris, with the sight of a boyish French soldier with a triangular black patch for a nose and “a mechanical contrivance with shiny little black rods” for a jaw. The man’s eyes were “full of meek dismay,” wrote Dos Passos; they reminded him of an injured animal (Carr 128). In the wake of one of the several French offensives at Verdun, he would write to Rumsey Martin that nothing had quite affected him like viewing the camions taking soldiers to the front: “the men were drunk & desperate, shouting, screaming jokes, spilling wine over each other—or else asleep with ghoulish dust-powdered faces.” “Later,” he would add, “after the ‘victory,’ we brought them back in our ambulances, or else saw them piled on little two wheeled carts, tangles of bodies with grey crooked fingers and dirty protruding feet, to be trundled to the cemeteries, where they are always busy making their orderly little grey wooden crosses” (Fourteenth Chronicle 97). If Dos Passos was horrified at the sights he witnessed, and caustic regarding French efforts to impose a pious order on the carnage, he himself looked toward a time when he would impose his own order on the holocaust he witnessed. In the diary entry that formed the basis of the letter cited above, he exclaims, But gosh, I want to be able to express later all of this, all the tragedy and hideous excitement. I must experience more of it—and more—the grey

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crooked fingers of the dead, the dark look of dirty mangled bodies, their groans and joltings in the ambulance, the vast tomtom of the guns, the ripping tear shells make when they explode, the song of shells outgoing like vast woodcocks—their contented whir as they near their mark—the twang of fragments like a harp broken in the air, the rattle of stones and mud on your helmet. (Fourteenth Chronicle 95)

Most people who do work that confronts them with trauma day after day find themselves with some sort of mechanism for self-distancing; Dos Passos’s coping mechanism was pre-writing, gathering “experiences”19 (in a manner that he self-consciously casts here as greedy, if not ghoulish) and experimenting with their description. Over time, he also purports to have found himself reassuringly battle hardened: In some ways the high point for me at the Avocourt offensive was the day I caught myself quietly opening a can of sardines for my lunch in the rear of a dressing -station while some poor devil of a poilu was having his leg sawed off on the operating table up front. God knows I was still morbidly sensitive to other people’s pain, but I had learned to live in the world and stand it. (Fourteenth Chronicle 134)

Through such experience, Dos Passos felt he was getting the toughening he needed. By the end of his time in the ambulance service he would write that he felt himself “much stodgier and sturdier . . . a much heartier [sic?] son of a bitch than I used to be, much readier to slap my cock against the rocks of fact” (134). Perhaps nothing better parodies—and indicates his ambivalence toward—Dos Passos’s self-man-making project than this last phrase. Uncertain of his masculinity and desiring a new “realist” rather than “idealist” self, in best Johnsonian fashion he slaps his cock against the “rocks of fact,” thereby proving his manhood according to the ancient, nutty formula, “I abuse myself; therefore, I am a man.” A masochistic erotics of toughness takes the place of an erotics of sensitivity, with the implication that Dos Passos will beat himself senseless in the effort to make himself hard. This attempt to harden himself is part of Dos Passos’s effort to, as he puts it at one point, “declass” himself, which for Dos Passos meant coming closer to realizing a certain paradigm of manhood that has been associated with the working classes in particular. This model encourages stoicism, an instrumentalist perspective on one’s own body, a willingness to take risks, and the ability to block out disruptive sensory input.20 It is a perspective encouraged and developed in certain sports and conducive to dangerous work

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in factories, in mines, and on farms. But as both this description and an ironic reading of Dos Passos assertions indicate, it is a perspective that is not declassed. Embracing this perspective would not declass but re-class Dos Passos—and compromise him, because it plays a substantial role in maintaining abusive class and gender structures, an abuse particularly evident in wartime, where these toughened bodies achieve Pyrrhic victories for themselves, as the men around Dos Passos so ably demonstrated. The Norton-Harjes ambulance service was officially disbanded on August 30, 1917. Dos Passos’s time in the ambulance service had had a schizophrenic quality. Interspersed with the terror, horror, privation, suffering, and tedium of his work had come opportunities for brief walking tours, for enjoyment of food, drink, and repose. He writes in a letter to Dudley Poore, “Curiously enough I adore la vie militaire, apart from my convictions. It’s been a long orgy of food & drink with intermittent excitements of shells & assorted horrors” (qtd. in Ludington 138). Dos Passos’s modulated tone of the bemused sampler of both the pleasures and horrors of war again measures the distance between the average soldier and himself, whom he recognizes as a conscious collector of experiences always on the lookout for material for novelizing.21 Upon the dissolution of the service, Dos Passos served relatively easy time with the American Red Cross. With light work duty, he spent days in Italy mostly “sitting under a haystack reading and contemplating and eating [Camembert cheese] through Elysian September days.” By night, he and a friend drank “infinities of cafe-au-lait or white wine with sirop de groseille” (qtd in Ludington 139).22 Eventually Dos Passos’s service in the Red Cross grew to bore him, so little did it include any ambulance work. Finally, letters critical of the war and the governments waging it passed before the eyes of Italian censors. Dos Passos found himself drummed out of the American Red Cross and back stateside. Determined not to miss any more of the war than he had to, he immediately, through the influence of a family friend, managed to get both the circumstances of his recent discharge from the ARC and the failure of his eye exam overlooked, successfully entering the United States Army. His ship sailing on the day the Armistice was signed, Dos Passos and his new ambulance unit saw no battle.23 His unit was transferred to France, and Dos Passos’s Harvard education rescued him from the grind of the rank and file, as he managed to enroll in a program of the Army Overseas Educational Commission that allowed him to study anthropology at the Sorbonne.24 Despite his stint at the Sorbonne, Dos Passos’s army experience, if it did not provide him with further opportunity to experience life in the trenches,

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still in some respects lived up to his expectations that it would further his project to overcome the confines of his privilege. Unlike the ambulance service, which had been filled with moneyed, educated, and idealistic adventurers much like himself, the army introduced him to a collection of men of varying but mostly lower class backgrounds, many of whom had little interest in literature or politics and no desire for the kind of travel and adventure the military might offer. And though Dos Passos, unlike many of his compatriots, had sought out a place in the army, once he was in, there was nothing “voluntary” about his service. He performed menial labor that lacked any redeeming aspect of adventure, washing thousands of windows to the inward chant, “Organization is death” (Carr 156). He suffered the indignity of low rank, complaining that his “blood boiled” when he was ordered to sweep out the quarters of noncoms. Dos Passos thought the medical corps was filled with “misfits and oddballs of various kinds.” He found himself in an institution in which “everyone wears a phallus on his sleeve” (Fourteenth Chronicle 221), but writes, too, of the “simple and sublime amiability of the average American soldier,” which made him “fit clay” for the right potter (Carr 157). He writes to John Howard Lawson, “You can’t imagine the good nature and blundering willingness of the American privates. It gives an idyllic low comedy quality to things” (Fourteenth Chronicle 214). Rubbing shoulders with these men, Dos Passos also, however, observed them being molded by the relentless American propaganda efforts that Adolph Hitler would later so admire. During one “particularly inept” movie that showed American soldiers rescuing women and children from “the Germans,” he felt a wave of hatred sweep the audience as the men shouted “goddamned bastards” and “cocksuckers.” The man next to Dos Passos believed he would be “snatching halfraped Belgian women from the bloody claws of Huns.” Another exploded that he did not “fuck” women but would “give anything to rape some of those German women. I hate them—men women children and unborn children—They’re either jackasses or full of the lust for power just like their rulers are—to let themselves be ruled by a bunch of warlords like that” (Fourteenth Chronicle 219–20). Fit clay indeed. Dos Passos allows the enlisted men to condemn themselves out of their own mouths, and to indicate that sublime amiability, properly mediated, is rapidly convertible to a combustible hatred.25 DOING THE PEOPLE IN INDIFFERENT VOICE The multi-fronted battle the aspiring architect of history fought during the war was in part one of self-transformation, but it also resembled the kind of political transformation that he believed had to take place in America. As Dos Passos saw it, both he and his country required declassing and democratizing

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if either was to speak with a unified voice. For Dos Passos, the army provided his greatest opportunity to “rub shoulders” with the working class and transform himself into someone capable of speaking with a national voice, someone who might potentially speak a new classfree U.S.A. into being. But as his army experience also graphically revealed to him, there were other powerful, molding voices at work that sought to speak through the people. To counter the productive power of these voices Dos Passos the erstwhile whittler of words built his own “machine of production,” U.S.A., which he once described as containing a “four belt conveyor system” for delivering the nation to his readers. At three volumes and, in its current Library of America edition, 1240 pages, the trilogy could, if not “plaster the world from end to end with print,” at least paper a very large room. Reading it, and wading through substantial prosy segments, one suspects Dos Passos of responding to a crisis in masculinity/productivity by attempting the authorial equivalent of drinking everyone else under the table. There is the sense that one is clearly engaged with a project of mass production in several senses, and it happens that Dos Passos was not alone in recurring to factory images for describing his novel. Alfred Kazin described U.S.A. as a “vast Ford plant of the human spirit” (113), its narrative sections filled with “machine prose for a machine world” (104), adding that The Big Money is one of “the coldest and most mechanical of novels” (119). Jean Paul Sartre, as well, flirts with such analogies in talking about the (anti)narrative sections of the novel: “There is no narrative, but rather the jerky unreeling of a rough and uneven memory, which sums up a period of several years in a few words only to dwell languidly over a minute fact”(63). He also connects Dos Passos’s prose with forms of mass media, referring to his use of “American journalistic technique” (68), citing passages which sound like a “local newspaper’s account”(67). He further comments on the “slack air of [Dos Passos’s] style: ‘And . . . and . . . and’”(63). More recently, Thomas Strychacz has written of the “spectacularly unspectacular prose of the narrative sections” (141). In short, there is a consciously antiliterary style on display in the narrative sections of U.S.A., so much so that Dos Passos comes perilously close to putting his readers to a kind of factory work. They handle one set of words and phrases after another that are hooked on a steady stream of coordinating conjunctions, alienated from any sort of telos or narrative or totalizing vision that would enable them to make sense of their own labor.26 The effect of such a style on the fictional consciousness of both lower class and middle class characters it mediates is dramatically reductive. The prologue of U.S.A. says that it will contain “the voice of the people.” That phrase, so pregnant with progressive, democratic aspirations, seems to prom-

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ise not only a call for equality and justice, but also a rich sampler of the American vernarcular. But in fact, the delivery on the latter promise is decidedly ironic. There is little celebration of the folk in U.S.A., nothing, to take an at-hand comparison, remotely approaching the bravura comic performances of Zora Neale Hurston’s Eatonites. Everyday talk, either in the form of dialogue or in the form of the voicing of a character’s mind, is more often flattened and converted to “machine prose,” depicted as banal and casually brutal.27 It is impossible to separate the characters from this prose; hence, for some readers, like Sartre, you see “just enough” of Dos Passos’s characters “to see that they are living animals”(68); or, like Strychacz, using Sartrean terms decades later, you see that “the characters exist in a striking presentness; they experience the nausea of life without recollection and without reflection” (146), which might be summarized as a life without narrative or history— mere chronology. As Malcolm Cowley notes, Dos Passos “always seems to be approaching his characters from the outside” (84). This is where we as readers reside as well. Dos Passos’s employment of what Sartre and others called a “behaviorist” style might be construed as a “respectful objectivity” (Hook, 66), as a manifestation of novelistic humility, as the expression of his own otherness that would not pretend to psychological insight that it doesn’t possess. Yet, another alternative beckons, and that is to see the narratives as a frank expression of class bias, as suggesting that, in fact, there is very little “inside” to these characters, whose lives are made up of one damn thing after another and always will be. Kazin’s description of the characters in 1919 can largely be extended to the others in the trilogy: “Every life in it, even J. Ward Moorehouse’s, has become a corrosion, a slow descent. . . . . The war for almost all of them has become a endless round of drink and travel; they have brought nothing to it and learned nothing from it save a growing consciousness of their futility”(117)28 He concludes, “Dos Passos is the first of the new naturalists, and U.S.A. is the dominant social novel of the thirties; but it is not merely a vanished social period that it commemorates: it is an individualism, a protestantism, a power of personal disassociation, that seems almost to speak from another world” (119). This disassociation is stylistically manifested through the journalistic technique referred to earlier, about which Sartre had more to say: Dos Passos reports all his character’s utterances to us in the style of a statement to the Press. Their words are thereby cut off from thought, and become pure utterances, simple reactions that must be registered as such, in the behaviourist style upon which Dos Passos draws when it suits him

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Proceeding to quote a passage from 1919 at length, Sartre continues in a manner that suggests this “Platonic heaven” is, in fact, quite earthly: “Doesn’t it sound like a local newspapers account of an ex-serviceman’s banquet?” Sartre expatiates, Then, they begin to unwind their endless tissue of ritual statements and sacred gestures. For [Dos Passos characters] there is no break between inside and outside, between body and consciousness, but only between the stammerings of an individual’s timid, intermittent, fumbling thinking and the messy world of collective representations. What a simple process this is, and how effective! All one need do is use American journalistic technique in telling the story of a life, and like the Salzburg reed, a life crystallizes into the Social, and the problem of the transition to the typical—stumbling block of the social novel—is thereby resolved. (68)

Sartre then goes on to suggest that readers try accounting for the events of their own life narrating in this manner, assuring, “you will start to hate yourself immediately” (69). Dos Passos mediates his hateful characters using the conventions of the newspapers that he called “sheepdogs” to the American people, rendering them in the voice of the newsreels with which he brackets or fences the accounts of their lives. This, apparently, is “the voice of the people.” This disassociative media prose, this anti-stylistic writing, is to be found in the main narratives of the trilogy. Elsewhere, in the Camera Eye segments in particular, readers have something quite different. Here we are decidedly inside looking out from the vantage of John Dos Passos. These brief biographical segments provide an account of John Dos Passos over the first third of the twentieth century that chronologically parallels that of the other characters in the novel. Through these segments, we gain a sense of the camera eye/I that provides us the outside view of the rest of the novel. The fifty-one such segments in the trilogy contain highly impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness prose that aspires to a Joycean lyricism. Reading them, we are as far “inside” as the narrative segments are “outside,” and the consciousness we are inside is qualitatively different—intensely observant of people and objects,

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sensitive to its surroundings, given to literary reference. This is a “living animal” of a different breed, its body alive to the sights, sounds, and smells around it, its mind educated, its self capable of agency and development. That is why critics read the Camera Eye as an episodic bildungsroman.29 The important differences between these segments of the novel have been variously explained and justified. Barbara Foley argues that in the Camera Eye segments, Dos Passos offers readers access to “the highly personal sources of the author’s alienation” (433). In doing so, he “exposes all the forces that have shaped him—not just those generating his public anger but also those establishing his private zones of indecision and ambivalence” (433). This self-exposure allows Dos Passos to avoid didacticism and preaching by allowing readers “to follow the formation of his own interpretive paradigm.” It presents Dos Passos’s collectivist awareness not as a given, but as “the product of a long and anguished battle with ideological conditioning” (433). Readers will then be invited to compare the respective career paths and perspectives of Dos Passos and the character of Richard Ellsworth Savage, who is his degenerate double in the narrative, and be edified through their own conclusions. Malcolm Cowley, on the other hand, regards the Camera Eye as providing a supplemental function: The collective novelist is tempted to overemphasize the blindness and impotence of individuals caught in the rip tides of history. He is obliged to devote less space to each of his characters, to relate their adventures more hastily, with the result that he always seems to be approaching them from the outside. I can see now that the Camera Eye is a device adopted by Dos Passos in order to supply the “inwardness” that is lacking in his general narrative. (84)

Barbara Foley argues that the Camera Eye allows a critique of the debased consciousness of one of the characters in the realist narrative; Cowley grants—unsurprisingly—the Camera Eye superior sight and power. Neither account puts to rest suspicions that troubling hierarchies are at work. All the “insidedness” and vision and extraordinary sensitivity to the world around him belongs to the author. Dos Passos still struggles with the “stays” of privilege throughout U.S.A., and this struggle is evident in the style and structure of the trilogy. There is yet more to be said regarding Dos Passos’s attempt to work out a politically productive, democratic literary form that perhaps complicates what I have just said.30 I have already mentioned that Dos Passos has figured the Camera Eye as one of the belts in his textual factory; now I want to discuss two other figurations of this segment. The first hearkens to the earlier discussion of “The Writer and His Tools,” where Dos Passos refers to “straight

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writing” that has the possibility to be politically transformative. When Dos Passos cites contemporary producers of such writing, it is not to the spare, masculinist prose of Hemingway or the gritty examinations of city squalor supplied by Dreiser that he refers; rather, he finds his example of such writing in James Joyce, whose own stylistic innovations are put to work in the Camera Eye segments.31 That such Joycean prose is employed in only, at best, five percent of the trilogy suggests that the category of “straight” writing comprehends more than merely that kind done by Joyce, and that Joycean “straight” prose might be, after, all, somewhat inadequate to the task of representing, reforming, or reproducing the nation. Still, what we have in both the essay and the novel is the insistence that such writing is crucial. Elsewhere, however, there is figuration to the contrary, for Dos Passos also asserts that these intensely biographical, lyrical segments allow him to “[drain] off the subjective” (qtd. in Gado 52), a description that suggests not that the Camera Eye section forms a crucial belt in his factory, but that it, in fact, amounts to a sump for removing water from the site so the factory can be built. In other words, the Joycean biography these segments contain—with all the cultural capital it describes and instantiates—is represented as something that threatens Dos Passos’s project, something watery—perhaps feminine—something that might swamp the factory. In this light, one sees that would-be whittler Dos Passos is still worried about the “straightness” of his product and wonders if it can be comfortably distinguished from the “girlish gush of romance” he deplores. This fear, finally, may in fact explain the many points in his general narrative at which Dos Passos appears intent on proving himself the most hard-boiled of hard-boiled realists, flaying his characters as he flays himself and his prose to an ever-hardening condition. REMEMBERING THE BODY OF AN AMERICAN As an ambulance driver, Dos Passos found himself the bearer of mangled bodies, “remembering the grey crooked fingers the thick drip of blood off the canvas the bubbling when the lungcases try to breathe the muddy scraps of flesh you put in the ambulance alive and haul out dead” (1919 446). Part biography, part newsreel, part camera eye, “The Body of an American,” which concludes 1919, is an attempt to fashion the remembrance of those bodies. It is Dos Passos’s deconstruction of an enormously important production of national theater: the burial ceremony that inducted the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery. Dos Passos recognized that it was through this kind of national theater—and dissemination of reviews—that the nation was maintained. He saw it as the attempt of American elites to stamp the war and its dead with a meaning that would reinforce their

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hegemony, as an effort to write history and shape memory to insure that the remains of one soldier will be recycled in perpetuity for the maintenance of the nation and the production of more soldiers to defend it. If, as Randolph Bourne claimed, war was the “health of the state” (1919 448), then images of the Unknown Soldier were what the state produced and consumed to keep in fighting trim. Dos Passos attempts to speak on behalf of the soldier in his imposed silence and to confound the elaborate ceremonial gloss on his body written by the nation. Because the “Unknown Soldier” also serves as a kind of Everysoldier, Dos Passos speaks, too, on behalf of others who went to war.32 One should read the final line of the newsreel that precedes this section—taken from a popular patriotic song—as an apt, if hyperbolic, prelude: “And there’s a hundred million others like me.” Dos Passos answers the images produced by the mediacracy with his own production of competing images that induce nausea, not only in response to the soldier’s blown apart, decomposed body, but at the use the architects of the nation make of it. Dos Passos’s basic rhetorical strategy is one of antithesis. The spiritualizing, nationalizing representations of the nation are placed hard by his own representations of the physical body and remains of the Unknown Soldier. The “official” conception, execution, and narration of the ceremony is at each juncture contrasted with Dos Passos’s account that rigorously keeps its eye on “what happens to the body,” as if following a shell game or magic trick. The segment begins with the text of the congressional resolution to establish a national memorial for unknown soldiers, the wording enjambed and thereby mumbo-jumbofied. Removing the space and punctuation from the lengthy, clause-filled resolution, Dos Passos takes the air out of a legispeak that aspires to be sonorous and lofty, to conjoin moral and political authority; and converts it to gibberish, a kind of abracadabra through which the nation is conjured.33 He then jarringly shifts to the action that this resolution mandates, the choosing of the remains of this soldier from a makeshift morgue at Chalons-sur-Marne, the site of some of the war’s most brutal carnage.34 An abrupt shift in register marks a scene change, as Dos Passos employs the patois of the noncom who once again is in the shit, caught up in yet another attempt to execute impossible orders come down from some fool on high. His own gibberish (“eenie meenie minie moe”) as he sorts through dead bodies and scraps of bodies in effort to find “John Doe” (so close to John Dos Passos)35 is both an exasperated response to that in the official proclamation and a sign of how the ludicrous trickles down through official channels. Likewise, his nativism reflects the unofficial nativism of many American officials (Woodrow Wilson, first and foremost): he attempts to insure that “he ain’t a dinge . . . guinea or . . . kike,”

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but artillery and decomposition have obliterated any supposed racial or ethnic markers: “how can you tell a guy’s a hunredpercent when all you’ve got’s a gunnysack full of bones, bronze buttons stamped with a screaming eagle and a pair of roll puttees”/ . . . and the gagging chloride and the puky dirtstench of the yearold dead . . .” (756). Having lifted the lid of the sarcophagus to show us what lies beneath the official rhetoric, Dos Passos now turns to a less visceral prose, incorporating a newspaper account of the tomb’s dedication ceremony: “The day withal was too meaningful and tragic for applause. Silence, tears, songs and prayer, muffled drums and soft music were the instrumentalities today of national approbation” (756). The genteel diction, modulated tone, and relaxed pacing of this commentary measure several degrees of separation from the retching behind-the-scenes work of choosing a body that the private farthest down must perform. It won’t be long before it becomes even clearer that “the day of national approbation” is in no small part a self-congratulatory exercise through which elites persuade themselves of the rightness of the sacrifices they have required of others. But first Dos Passos will begin the “biography” of John Doe: John Doe was born “(thudding din of blood in love into the shuddering soar of a man and a woman alone indeed lurching into and ninemonths sick drowse waking into scared agony and the pain and blood and mess of birth). John Doe was born.” (756–57)

The parentheses here contain everything. They suggest the “between the lines” that necessarily exists in any biographical account of a life, the partiality of history writing, the enormity of what is left unsaid by such meager declaratives as “John Doe was born.” Such parentheses comment on not only the gloss being offered by President Harding and others at the ceremony, but also, less directly, on the mediacratic prose in which Dos Passos himself has been delivering his characters in U.S.A. Within these curved lines is admiration and tribute; John Doe acquires dignity and becomes both “living animal” and something more, something mythic. His conception and gestation are described in terms of an undeniable biological imperative, yet they resonate of transcendence. Conception and birth here are agon—there is something of the battlefield in this description of human passion, giving John Doe’s violent death a fatal circularity, yet also suggesting that procreation, or “making love,” is an alternative heroic activity. It is more man-making—and inseparably, woman-making—than any other. Without this parenthetical comment that “knows” him in this

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way, John Doe is in danger of becoming somebody wholly characterized by the deliberately reductive, prosaic litany of birthplaces, childhood homes, and mundane adolescent accomplishments that follow, a litany off of which this parenthesis is purposefully played. Having given birth to John Doe, John Dos Passos then returns to the newspaper account, which now, in carefully measured parallel phrases, further engages in a(n)esthetic appreciation of the proceedings, dwelling on the “touch of color” from uniformed attendants and dignitaries, the “varicolored furs and outdoor wrapping garments of mothers and sisters come to mourn”—in short, on anything but the possible particulars of John Doe, whose unknownness, it is becoming apparent, is his greatest virtue, according to the needs of the nation. Picking up the soldier’s story again, Dos Passos runs down a list of typical occupations, most of them modest, ending with the peddler’s effort to get his foot in the door by expressing his hardworking ambition: “Madam would you be willing to help a young man work his way through college?” The text then again returns to the account provided by the newspaper of record, now focused on President Harding’s speech, which begins with a tribute to “a typical soldier of this representative democracy” who “died believing in the indisputable justice of his country’s cause” and ends with the Lord’s Prayer. Having provided Harding’s pious gloss of the unknown soldier’s life as a soldier, with its willing sacrifice upon the altar of the nation and intimations of redemption for the soldier’s “imperishable soul,” Dos Passos now produces a different, ironic second birth: “Naked he went into the army.” What follows is a quick, de-sacralizing rundown of the procedures of the army physical, the first invasive, inductive, de-individualizing, (de)privatizing ritual in which new arrivals are first exposed. The catalogue of standard exams and issues extends for several lines before finally being interrupted by a drill sergeant’s abusive, homophobic command for bodily discipline: “Atten’SHUN suck in your gut you c——-r wipe that smile off your face eyes right wattja tink dis is a choirch-social?” (758) Continuing to tear the sacred veil cast over the experience of military service by the memorial proceedings, Dos Passos describes the “typical soldier[‘s]” experience, which involves not a hint of patriotic valor, but instead a lot of boredom, lice, disease, danger, getting by, and slogging about in the mud. This list is interrupted then by a plaintive voice that will reappear two more times—each time with greater urgency. It is that of the unknown soldier, and has nothing patriotic or noble to say; it is merely lost and wants to get back to its army home-away-from-home: “Say feller tell me how I can get back to my outfit” (758). As soon as the Unknown Soldier acquires a voice, we also learn that

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Beginning with the body and its sensations before taking us into the realm of the symbolic and the social, Dos Passos telescopes the body’s progressive involvement with language and its education by institutions of socialization—the church, the school, the press. With a sequences of readily recognized fragments of maxims, aphorism, cliches, commandments, propaganda, and “common sense,” he charts a serpentine pathway of nationalization and normalization that begins with the one of the ten commandments (the sixth?) yet ends with a racist, jingoistic viciousness—skin “charged” to charge and brain “coiled” to strike. Counterpoised with this account is again his plea—”Say buddy cant you tell me how I can get back to my outfit?” (759)— followed by more narrative that is represented as the soldier’s stream of consciousness. This narrative suggests that the soldier became “unknown” through knowing a French girl named Jeanne, getting lice, “roughhousin” with another soldier while swimming in the Marne waiting to be deloused, and losing his tags in the process—just a typical soldier of this representative democracy. This is succeeded by his final, most frustrated plea, which re-inforces our sense of a soul forlorn who cares not a whit for “the indisputable justice of his country’s cause”: “Say soldier for chrissake cant you tell me how I can get back to my outfit?” (759) The soldier will soon be hit by a shell, but not before he stops to rest— and be transformed: John Doe’s heart pumped blood: alive thudding silence of blood in your ears

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down in the clearing in the Oregon forest where the punkins were punkincolor pouring into the blood through the eyes and the fall colored trees and the bronze hoppers were hopping through the dry grass, where tiny striped snails hung on the underside of the blades and the flies hummed, wasps droned, bumblebees buzzed, and the woods smelt of wine and mushrooms and apples, homey smell of fall pouring into the blood, and I dropped the tin hat and the sweaty pack and lay flat with the dogday sun licking my throat and adamsapple and the tight skin over the breastbone. (759–60)

Readers are returned to the lyric mode most recently employed in describing John Doe’s birth, the “thudding silence of blood,” linking us stylistically, imagistically, and thematically to that previous passage—and to dozens of Camera Eyes in which we’ve encountered John Dos Passos. Having already reinforced the pun on John Doe and John Dos Passos by adding an apostrophe s to Doe, Dos Passos, after using the vernacular punkincolor, offers, in standard diction, a delicately realized, detailed description of the forest and its fauna. Dos Passos’s makes the soldier the repository of nature’s bounty, his blood full of the Oregon forest teeming with life and “homey” smells. And the next pronoun usage is in the first person. Senses alive to the minutiae of the natural world, Dos Passos’s now sensitive soldier is attuned to nature’s beauty and can be made love to, “licked” by the dogday sun that is described in an order suggesting descent down his torso. (There is also something of a baptism in this adams-applelicking sun.) In all, the passage attempts, in somewhat Whitmanesque language, a Whitmanian erasure of the boundaries of selfhood. (Yet the consciousness represented in this passage jibes poorly with that of the socialized assassin and of the lost soul. One wonders if Dos Passos’s own “Unknown Soldier” must be Dos Passified and Whitmanized, represented in the language of a nineteenth century poet before he can be mourned.) Finally, Dos Passos then emphasizes that this mortal body will not be received and recuperated by the nature that has held it. There will be no looking for this soldier in the dust of one’s footprints. Instead, what the trench rats and maggots have not eaten is scooped up by the modern nation-state, which “remembers” it by sanitizing it and packaging it into its paean to itself. The final, epitomizing irony of “The Body of An American” is that at the ceremony there is no soldier’s body; it has been virtu(e)alized. In its place is a legion of nationalist icons, of medals metonymically glittering of “trade greed and glory greed” “where his chest ought to have been” (760). That’s an American body. The state appears at the moment of the soldier’s disappearance.

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A TRAMP OR A MIDDLE-CLASS INTELLECTUAL— IT’S AS BAD EITHER WAY The Big Money concludes Dos Passos’s trilogy, the title—and much of the content of the volume—inspired by Dos Passos’s experience in Hollywood as a putative writer of screenplays. Dos Passos had severe reservations about signing his studio contract, which he saw to some extent as an act of prostitution. While in Los Angeles, Dos Passos understood that he was writing a screenplay—an adaptation of the novel La Femme et le Pantin (The Woman and the Puppet) for a Josef von Sternberg movie starring Marlene Dietrich that was brought to the screen as The Devil is a Woman. Plagued by bouts of illness as he began writing the screenplay, he eventually came to discover that the script was actually being ghostwritten, and that he was providing his name only.36 “The Big Money” becomes a catch phrase for Dos Passos while he is in Hollywood, gracing nearly all of his letters during the period. It mocks him; he mocks it (Carr 331). For despite the great privilege he had been born into, Dos Passos had to date inherited little wealth. His father had been a lover of high living and a poor investor, and Dos Passos had benefited almost not at all from his part of the estate. Financial problems were a constant for Dos Passos, who had borrowed money from Hemingway, among others, and who now found himself in the middle of the Depression, moving into married life and middle age without a secure income. Health problems—recurring bouts with rheumatic fever—are also pinching him financially. During this period, he is pushing his publishers hard to promote his books more aggressively. Meanwhile, Dos Passos continued to wonder about the political worth of his overall enterprise. His correspondence from the late twenties through the mid-thirties is filled with expressions of diffidence regarding his writing’s importance. He often paints himself as someone who is “on the sidelines” (Carr 289). In 1930, writing a letter to the editor of the The New Republic, he casts himself in the familiar role of noncombatant, arguing that “middle class liberals,” among whose number he counts himself, cannot affect the outcome of the coming class war, but that “if they are genuinely neutral, they can at least demand that the war be fought under the most humane conditions possible”(Carr 277). Carr summarizes his attitude toward his craft during this time by quoting something Dos Passos had written in Bookman in 1928, where he refers to the novelist as “a sort of second-hand historian of the age,” a “truffle dog digging up raw material which a scientist, an anthropologist, or an historian can later use to permanent advantage” (327–28). Already on the fringes of influence as a writer of experimental novels and plays, Dos Passos is being pushed to the margins of the margins by radio and film. Fresh off his

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stint in Hollywood as he concludes his novel, he is extraordinarily sensitive to the popularity of these media. His massive trilogy—filled with “machine prose”—seems a kind of single-handed attempt to roll back this tide of media, to assert an industrial force of the individual writer as his influence is being steadily eroded by the growing wave in radio, film, and newsprint—media whose influence Dos Passos both documents and seeks to harness. Toward the end of his U.S.A., Dos Passos revives E.R. “Doc” Bingham, the book-peddling con man of The 42nd Parallel’s first chapters, now the purveyor of Bingo, a patent medicine. The Bingham of the end of the novel is every bit as bombastic, hypocritical, and lascivious as the Bingham of thirty years previous. But the book peddler has made it big in a small way and now presides over a business empire that, though founded on his “laxative,” has extended its product line to include a list of remedies and proprietary medicines, all marketed via a house-organ magazine, Rugged Health, as well as through Bingham’s nationally broadcast radio health talk and his opportunistic use of newsreels. And not only is Bingham aggressive in his use of new media, he is now connected in other ways as well. He hires Moorehouse’s firm to do publicity work for him and to fight pure food legislation in Washington that would threaten his business. Moorehouse’s firm provides Bingham with political access via the figures of Colonel Judson and the always-available-at-theright-price Senator Planet. They also present him with an advertising strategy that is essentially a political rhetoric, packaging the fight against the legislation as “more than a publicity campaign . . . a campaign for Americanism,” “one of the biggest educational drives the country has ever seen,” the goal of which is to foster “selfservice, independence, individualism,” to “make the layman free and self-sufficient, able to treat many minor ills without consulting a physician.” The campaign will serve up large helpings of durable individualism and take advantage of mistrust of an increasingly powerful and consolidated medical profession. It will also exploit broader class rivalries. The name of Bingham’s flagship product will be changed to something more respectable (“A man would be ashamed to lunch at the Metropolitan Club with a bottle of Bingo at his table”), and customers will be made to “feel they’re smarter that the bigbugs who go to Battle Creek” (1170–1199). Bingham’s career path from book peddler to purveyor of “health” foods captures the transition from a still very Victorian culture that is both concerned with “respectability” and drawn to the illicitly erotic to a consumer culture increasingly saturated with mediated images and, while still caught in a dialectic of disciplining and indulging the flesh, more concerned with the fate of its mortal body than its everlasting soul. This transition, in turn, coincides with America’s transition from a print culture to a multi-media culture

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in which the book’s role in cultural formation is substantially reduced. Bingham helps to demonstrate the displacement of the author by the ad man, and of the book by the increasingly pictorial print media, radio, and film. Finally, and most importantly, however, his metamorphosis affords an opportunity to present readers with a picture of the integration of media, business power, and political power, and the carefully worked rhetorics that effect such an integration. Dos Passos’s satire of the physical culture movement highlights the increased body consciousness of a culture infused with more and more images of iconic bodies. These bodies he carefully works into his final volume, where biographies of both Isadora Duncan and Valentino are located and the character of Margo Dowling, movie starlet, is chronicled in the larger narratives. So, too, do his character descriptions over the last fifty pages of The Big Money highlight bodies in ways that suggest the cultural anxieties that the circulation of such iconic bodies encourages. While Bingham aggressively peddles all manner of body fixes to a culture bent on consumption, the end of the trilogy is filled with descriptions that focus on the ill-health and aging of characters. J.W. Moorehouse is repeatedly described in terms that focus on his declining health and appearance; he constantly complains about not feeling well and is given symptoms of angina. Eveline Johnson’s aging face is described in detail on three occasions before she commits suicide. Moorehouse’s receptionist, Miss Williams, now has “a sour lined oldmaidish face” (1184). Mary French, herself getting older and showing the effects of her hard life, hardly recognizes Ben Compton because he looks so much older. An extra at Eveline Johnson’s cocktail party is described as “an older woman covered with silver lame . . . her scrawny neck, wattled under the powder, thrust out, and hooknose quivering and eyes bulging over illconcealed pouches” (1234). At one point, Mary French, studying Johnson’s face, concludes that “their silly life tells on them” (1231).37 The final section of U.S.A. might at first seem to give credence to Richard Pells’s claim that in U.S.A. Dos Passos is “primarily concerned not with the ill effects of a particular economic system but with the loss of youth and the ravages of time” (233). Pells notes that characters of every class and political affiliation experience “the devastating effects of age” and are subject to “the accommodations which inevitably accompany maturity” (234). He argues that Dos Passos’s characters are betrayed “not so much by their own greed, by the fraudulence of the American Dream, or by the crimes of American capitalism, as by the very process of growing old.” But the problem with Pells’s account, which is admittedly brief and provided in the context of a much larger narrative, is that it tends to universalize the aging experience. It

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fails to adequately query the notion of “maturity” or the “inevitability” of one’s “accommodations” to it, and it fails to recognize that Dos Passos’s novel depicts the role of capital in forcing and shaping these accommodations. It is the case, however, that in U.S.A. Dos Passos seems to have a hard time imagining life without these inevitable accommodations, a failure that might contribute to Pells’s reading. Through three novels and twelve hundred pages, not one of the twelve characters in his narrative sustains anything approaching successful protest or keeps alive for himself or herself a viable, attractive life. One must wonder at the relation of this failure to Dos Passos’s own threatened position within The Big Money, a force which, in the final instance, is represented as bigger than it ought to be represented. Reading a trilogy that begins with such energy and hope for voicing the people, one must finally observe its failure to provide those people with hope. In part, this failure is due to the recuperative power of a childhood spent among adults and an adolescence spent among older boys, at the experience of trying to please a distant father who embodied (in a larger-than-life manner) rugged, bootstrapping masculinity and whose exploits one could hardly hope to duplicate, at the frequency with which Dos Passos experienced himself as too small and too weak to participate in the fields of masculine endeavor. This history contributes to the bigness of the money in this trilogy. Pells calls U.S.A. “an elegiac commemoration of [Dos Passos’s] own and America’s childhood” (235). If only he knew. Among the bodies buried in USA is that of a very young John Dos Passos. It, too, contours the trilogy with its anger and its sense of its own incapacity. The last word in the U.S.A. trilogy goes not to the bodies at the cocktail party, but to the body of Vag, which tells on U.S.A. In the prologue to the trilogy we have a body in what would be called “Brownian motion.”38 Vag is set in motion by his sense of the range of experience available over the vastness of the American landscape and the variety of the American city. His “greed” is for that experience, for productive labor and for breadth of sights and sounds and speech of U.S.A. In search of these things he rapidly walks, wanting to “catch the last subway, the streetcar, the bus, run up the gangplanks,” to avail himself of all the newly developed modes of transportation in search of something to satisfy his inexperienced, innocent “greed.” The epilogue, however, shows us a very different Vag, dispirited and immobilized. If his hand—“almost making a fist”—is at first suggestive of defiance, we then learn that he is a beggar of rides with his “thumb up.” A brief history, a transient’s tale of bodily aches and pains, of physical abuses at the hands of police, deputies, and henchmen, follows. Now this Vag, like that in the prologue, seeks the eyes of passersby, but these speed along in cars and trucks.

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Vag’s eyes seek out, too, the latest form of transportation, a plane high overhead, a “silver Douglass” that is the very futurist image of the promise of modernity: it “flashes once in the sun and bores its smooth way out of sight into the blue” (1239). The well-set “transcontinental passengers” on this plane are quickly summarized in language contrasting their own comfortable positions with that of Vag.39 Dos Passos’s tramp stands curbside with his hand out and his belly “twisted” by hunger, while high in the sky above a “transcontinental passenger” heaves steak and mushrooms into a carton, his vomit rather magically becoming “no matter” by virtue of “silver in the pocket, greenbacks in the wallet, drafts, certified checks, plenty restaurants in Los Angeles”(1240).40 By the end of the epilogue, Vag is the enervated subject— “idle hands numb, beside the speeding traffic”—of the integrated forces of government, business, and media that readers have seen brought together through Bingham’s activities. The potentially productive “beehive of hopes” of the prologue has been supplanted by “wants” that crawl over his skin like ants: went to school, books said opportunity, ads promised speed, own your own home, shine bigger than your neighbor, the radiocrooner whispered girls, ghosts of platinum girls coaxed from the screen, millions in winnings were chalked up on the boards in the offices, paychecks were for hands willing to work, the cleared desk of an executive with three telephones on it. (1240)

The product of a media bombardment not unlike that which “charged” the unknown soldier, Vag’s desire has been transformed by the “forms to set the mind of tomorrow’s generation.” The Vag of the prologue has a desire for work and a hunger for companionship, experience, and community. In the epilogue his “desire” is for the things the Big Money can buy, and it takes the form of an infestation. The figure of the ants communicates the externality of Vag’s desire, its multiplicity, and its unceasingness. The final image is one of deferment: “The young man waits . . . with swimming head, needs knot the belly; idle hands numb, beside the speeding traffic./ A hundred miles down the road.” (1240). It’s a bit like waiting for the impact of one’s writing to be felt, “vertically, over the course of a century,” or waiting for “a scientist, an anthropologist or an historian” to later pick up one’s corpus and “use [it] to permanent advantage.”

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Chapter Four

How it Feels to be Not-So-Young, Gifted, and Black: Passing and “De Change uh Life” in Their Eyes Were Watching God

In her self-introductory essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” published in World Tomorrow in 1928, Zora Neale Hurston relates what seems to have been a common occurrence for her as a small child growing up in Eatonville, Florida at the turn of the century. As Northern whites vacationing in South Florida passed through town, the child Zora, standing on the front porch of her family’s home, would call to them: “Howdy-do-well-Ithank-you-where-you-goin?” (I Love Myself 152) According to Hurston, none could refuse the beguiling combination of trust and self-confidence she exuded, and a short, transgressive ride to the outskirts of Eatonville often ensued: “My self-assurance must have carried the point, for I was always invited to come along” (Dust Tracks 34). Hurston’s story, retold a decade later in her book length autobiography, where we learn that speaking pieces and singing songs were also part of her one-child show, seems intended to suggest that certain qualities of her personality—her curiosity, her self-confident brashness, her love of travel and adventure—were in place from the beginning. Her account, however, provides a rather one-sided causal explanation of events, perhaps because so much has been taken for granted. As related in “Colored Me” and in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, all of the curiosity in this encounter is on the side of the young Zora, none on that of the white tourists who stopped or slowed down to engage this young black child in conversation. For these people, part of the attraction here lies in the blackness of the child before them and her readiness to perform for them. That 91

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Zora always obtained the desired outcome suggests that she never met a disapproving audience. Thus, more than a ride is being hailed here, so is the child Zora Neale Hurston, though she could hardly have known it. This dialectical hailing process would continue. From early childhood, Zora Neale Hurston’s mobility depended upon her ability to charm an audience, and in being charmed, that audience exerted its own influence upon the charmer. Through such a process this self-proclaimed “born first-nighter” became a performer. Her first efforts put her in the automobiles of Northern whites’ vacationing in South Florida, allowing her to venture past the margins of the town that she constantly revisited in her writing. Later in life, Hurston’s performances of blackness inevitably became self-conscious, but they remained closely linked with the issue of geographic mobility, as they engaged first a group of Gilbert and Sullivan actors who, in exchange for the pleasure of Zora’s company, provided her with further informal schooling in the dramatic arts; and later patrons who could provide money for education, research, and the travel that that research required. At first a vehicle of pleasure—and for obtaining vehicles—performing before an audience became for Hurston an increasing professional and personal burden. And the character of these performances changed, of necessity, in accordance with a variety of conditions, influenced by the cultural milieu as well as Hurston’s immediate existential circumstances. In these performances Hurston negotiated through and with not only categories of race, gender, class, regionality, and sexuality, but also—to bring in a category often strangely overlooked in discussions of this woman who throughout her life lied about her birth date— her age. These categories, which are about nothing if not our ways of apprehending bodies, help put the body near the center of understanding Hurston’s textual production. It is my purpose here to talk about the role Hurston’s body played in these negotiations and to make sense of her texts, in particular Their Eyes Were Watching God, in light of what we can reasonably infer about Hurston’s own attitudes toward bodies—especially her own. “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” enacts a performance about performance. It is an advertisement as much as it is an attempt to say something to a white audience about what it is like to be “colored” in America. Though the child Zora gazes as much as she is gazed upon and makes it clear that the Northern tourists were to her and her fellow Eatonites “something else again,” the autobiographical nature of the essay and the calculated cuteness of representations of the young, naive child—taking risks in utter confidence, speaking “pieces,” singing, and dancing the “parse-me-la” (I Love Myself 152)—mark it as the latest in a series of very public performances that have mobility among their ends. Hurston’s effort to color herself, as Barbara

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Johnson has noted, does much to deconstruct the notion of a “true” identity and demonstrates that the call for self-definition necessarily prompts considerations of who is asking, why they are asking, and what one wants to be (“Thresholds” 130–40). In this instance, among the several identities that Hurston has constructed for herself is that of an aboriginal, irrepressible child performer, exuberant in her energy, “everybody’s Zora,” even for the grumpy locals who didn’t toss dimes. When she calls herself a “born first-nighter,” readers are to understand that she is on stage, not in the audience. At other important stages in life, Hurston again could be found performing a similar version of the racial and regional “other” to people who could make her mobile. Effectively orphaned at thirteen, she through the help of a friend takes a job with a Gilbert and Sullivan repertory from the North and quickly charms the troupe. Her Southern idioms, childlike naiveté, brash plain speaking, and sharp observations again make her “everybody’s Zora”: “It seemed I was necessary to everyone. I was continually stuffed with sweets, nut meats, and soft drinks. I was welcome in everybody’s coach seat and the girls used to pinch [sic] pennies to see who carried me off to their hotel rooms” (Dust Tracks 100). Later, while in her adulthood in New York, Hurston continued to mount the stage. In Harlem she became famous for taking over parties with her stories and folk tales. On Park Avenue, in the home of Mrs. Rufus Osgood Mason, Hurston was “simply paid to . . . sit around and represent the Negro race” (Hughes 238). At the apex of her career, Hurston staged musicals and dances and generally distinguished herself from her peers by becoming “a perfect book of entertainment in herself ” (Hughes 239). For much of her professional life, Hurston actively solicited spectatorship, welcoming a gaze that would have discomforted or even undone others. Her attitudes toward the body—as they are manifested in her writing—are inseparable from her experience of herself as one whose trade is this management of spectatorship, and they are informed by her complex negotiations with that audience and their fears, desires, and expectations. Thus spectatorship and performance are important activities throughout Hurston’s fiction and non-fiction. Self-conscious, highly public performances are constantly offered, and viewers of these performances are often well versed in their conventions. They feed on them and provide immediate feedback that makes or breaks the (in most cases) man. The protagonist of Hurston’s first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, is modeled closely after her father, John Hurston. A preacher who performs every Sunday before his congregation, his fate turns on important moments when the whole town is watching. Joe Starks of Their Eyes Were Watching God (even the Deity doesn’t escape scrutiny—indeed, being the object of visionary effort is often a sign of one’s

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power) cements his leadership of the town by his inspired burlesque at the dragging out of Matt Bonner’s mule, which “made him more solid than building the school house had done,” and he dies a humiliating social and physical death when Janie insults him before other men. In Seraph on the Sewanee, Jim Meserve is characterized by his poised escorting of Arvay before the gathered eyes of the community; she, on the other hand, by her acute embarrassment. In much of Hurston’s work, as in her life, the drama of the self is played out in very public spaces. (This is in keeping with her statements regarding African-American culture in general, which she describes as a village culture that does not recognize the separation of public and private spheres, and to a lesser degree with the character of Southern culture as a whole, which even during Hurston’s lifetime had not the same well-developed notions and practices of privacy that were common in the North.1 In such societies, often rural, how well one copes with the scrutiny of the community is a key measure of strength, and appearance, if not everything, is almost; being able to sustain appearance is a sign of essential strength, because the social construction of the self in part proceeds by a continuous process of mutual reflections as members perform for a community that interprets these performances and mirrors back a self that is introjected as real and indeed is real, if unstable.) The sensibility expressed in these texts befits a woman whose father rose to preach before a community every Sunday, a community that, because small and intimate, could doubtless be counted upon to measure the distance between the man and the message with some assiduity. A bearer of a message of both mercy and judgment, John Hurston doubtless knew the weight placed on his multiple performances, as did his family. In the most important manifestation of such performative strength in Hurston’s oeuvre, occurs in the opening pages of Their Eyes Were Watching God. The “voice” of Eyes speaks from and of the body. Representations of the body figure prominently throughout the novel, especially in its crucial opening pages, where readers are won or lost, (and thus where one can infer the thematic and imaginary elements with which they cathect). Furthermore, it is through representations of bodies that the protest in this novel is figured, a protest that is at once very social and enormously private. Yet these representations have gone under-represented in critical discussion of the text. My intention is to recover these bodies, submerged in a flood of talk of “voice,” and consider their implications for the novel and for our understanding of Zora Neale Hurston, who as an African-American woman—one twice-bodied— knew the importance of our manifold schemes of embodiment all too well.2 The Janie Starks of the first few pages of Their Eyes Were Watching God, like the black handsome sailor of Billy Budd, gets readers and characters alike

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going. Forty-going-on-nineteen, dressed like a working man and built like the dream of every “natural man,” her confident strut through the gauntlet of Eatin’ville, where all the neighbors have her up in their mouths, self-announces the arrival of one of the signal heroines of American literature. I here quote at length for easy reference: The people all saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment. Seeing the woman as she was made them remember the envy they had stored up from other times. So they chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish. They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. A mood come alive. Words walking without masters; walking altogether in harmony in a song. “What she doin’ coming back here in dem overhalls? Can’t she find no dress to put on?—Where’s dat blue satin dress she left here in?—Where all dat money her husband took and died and left her?—What dat ole forty year ole ‘oman doin’ wid her hair swingin’ down her back lak some young gal?”—Where she left dat young lad of a boy she went off here wid?—Thought she was going to marry?—Where he left her?—What he done wid all her money?—Betcha he off wid some gal so young she ain’t even got no hairs—why she don’t stay in her class?—” When she got to where they were she turned her face on the bander log and spoke. They scrambled a noisy “good evenin” and left their mouths setting open and their ears full of hope. Her speech was pleasant enough, but she kept walking straight on to her gate. The porch couldn’t talk for looking. The men noticed her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets; the great rope of black hair swinging to her waist and unraveling in the wind like a plume; then her pugnacious breasts trying to bore holes in her shirt. They, the men, were saving with the mind what they lost with the eye. The women took the faded shirt and muddy overalls and laid them away for remembrance. It was a weapon against her strength and if it turned out to be of no significance, still it was a hope that she might fall to their level some day. But nobody moved, nobody spoke, nobody even thought to swallow spit until after her gate slammed behind her. (1–2)

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Few American novels about a woman begin with an entrance that so dramatically stages its central character as she is beheld and reviled by her community. Instead of a elaborately embroidered gown, however, Janie wears coveralls and a workshirt; and the transgression that is at explicit issue is not just one of sexual mores (though it is that); it is a matter of class-appropriate behavior, age-appropriate behavior, gender roles, and money sense. These questions that erupt from the porchsitters are the product of avid surveillance. In fact, after Janie politely greets them, “the porch [can’t] talk for looking.” Janie’s clothes, hair, and body are visually searched for clues about her recent past, for testimony of her humiliation, and, as we will soon learn, for erotic pleasure. Though the individual sources of these questions go unspecified, we see that the scrutiny to which her body is subjected divides the community along gender lines: men respond with erotic curiosity and women respond with envy and anger against an erotic threat to their marriages and their status. This beautiful woman, in refusing to “stay in her class,” threatens the stability of the community by challenging its class, gender, and domestic structures. Clearly, the porchsitters hope for confirmation of ruination and defeat for one who has so brazenly flaunted communal conventions and continues to do so. The rest of the novel will show readers that the community has been watching Janie’s body for years. As Joe Starks’s wife she has been displayed as a sign of masculine sexual potency, of economic prosperity, and of social respectability. Janie has been the keystone in Jodie’s programmatic effort to establish himself as a “big voice” (27), part of the symbolic and material apparatus with which he persuaded a once disparate, even diasporic, population to incorporate into a town and accede to his leadership. For this community Starks becomes mayor, post master, real estate developer, and retailer all rolled into one, a sort of über-developer. The town has participated in Stark’s Big House program every step of the way and therefore finds its own aspirations in some fashion, however distorted, mirrored in him. As the instrument of such a man, Janie’s body resonates with ideological significance. Just as Starks’s efforts clearly mark him as the carrier, beneficiary, and victim of “Big House” syndrome—the urge to reproduce the ideology and economic structure of a dominant white class—so Janie, whose hair is straight and whose manner is aloof (though not by choice) becomes the woman of that house. Her chief function has been to serve as clerk around Starks’s store and to otherwise be conspicuously without function, a “baby doll” who sits on high, a luxury no other black man financially south of Starks can afford. Thus, her bodily disposition is a sign of a particular social “order.” This order is endorsed by the community, at times grudgingly, at times with enthusiasm; it is fraught

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with the tensions of hegemony. It is not too much, however, to say that for years Janie has been helping, albeit grudgingly, to perform Eatonville, propping it up through her quiet acquiescence to the dictates of Starks. Thence comes the energetic response of the community at Janie’s return. Forget Janie’s voice, which has been the focus of so much critical discussion; she doesn’t have to say much because her walk says it all. Eatonville is watching anarchy, or revolution, with legs. As the passage makes clear, another dysfunctional social order also fuels the emotions of the porchsitters, namely the wider field of “Big House” relations in which the townspeople operate. The people of Eatonville are hot in from the fields, where they have been “tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences.” As a result of this radical appropriation of their senses, they are now keen to freely exercise the gamut of their human faculties, including the highest—and lowest—that of judging. They are passing nations—and individuals—through their mouths. (I might note in passing that here we catch just the tiniest glimpse, as we do elsewhere, of the fully developed protest novel that might have been—that would judge the nation.) Their displaced rage has a victim picked out, yet Janie will not make easy prey. She doesn’t just maintain appearances; she makes an appearance. This appearance rivets in part because beneath the breathless sequence of questions lies envy, as much, if not more, than disapproval. This envy, in turn, is a measure of the dissatisfaction of the community with its own regulatory structures, a conflict brilliantly captured in the vivid image of its members “chew[ing] up the back parts of their minds and swallow[ing] with relish.” Here is someone who has stepped outside communal sanctions and not been ruined. Ruining her therefore becomes part of the project of re-inforcing both the social structures she menaces and the individual repressions that enable one to reproduce these structures. So Janie is put to the stake and fed upon by people who have furnished “burning statements with questions and killing tools out of laughs.” In other words, Eatonville is watching a carnival overturning of their social world, and it brings out the carnivore in them. The problem with the community’s radical plan for containment, however, is that it can’t quite get its “mouth almighty” around Janie. Images of orality and food—figurations that recur throughout the novel—proliferate in this first scene. Nations are “passed through their mouths.” Parts of minds are chewed up and swallowed. Janie’s hips are described as grapefruits. Pearl Stone opens her mouth to laugh real hard because “she didn’t know what else to do”; Mrs. Simpkins “snort[s] violently and suck[s] her teeth” (2-3)—presumably for the same lack of emotional and intellectual resources for dealing with this vision of Janie. This salivating community is so bamfoozled that “nobody even thought to swallow

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spit until after [Janie’s] gate slammed behind her.” Given these images of its behavior, it is difficult to assess just how far the anthropophagus townspeople have really traveled from those brute-occupied beings that had worked in the fields. After all, the lines read, “the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt [emphasis mine] powerful and human,” leaving the humanity of this protean collective up for grabs, particularly if you are community-certified prey like Janie, or readers who might identify with her. And for all the bodily imagery that characterizes the porchsitters, they are also rendered strangely insubstantial—reduced to skins, open to possession by dumb brutes, incapable of mastering their own words. It is for this reason that they cannot swallow Janie, who resists being made their scapegoat and instead leaves them slackjawed. The poise with which Janie speaks her few words to the porchsitters and her steady, certain progression toward her house suggests that her interior life is in order in a way that that of those of her observers are not. And her body, or more accurately, her body parts—her hair, her breasts, and her buttocks—are taken as markers of an essentially undiminished “strength” that both sets in motion the anarchy at the heart of Eatonville and protects her from its effects. She is too much for them in every way. “The beginning of this was a woman,” says the first line of the novel’s second paragraph, suggesting a radical rewriting of another book with a great flood in it. At the beginning of Their Eyes Were Watching God, all eyes are watching Janie. Later we will learn that she is the killer of “‘I god” Starks whose servant she was. Janie is the closest thing to a deity on the scene. Eatonville both worships her and wants to kill her, but she is just too strong. This is the message of her stunning premier before the porchsitters in the novel and those out. Their gaze is not so much indicative and constitutive of power in this novel as it is of weakness. The “Watcher[s]” in Eyes are often abject figures, beginning with the landlubbing men in the book’s first paragraph, extending to the porchsitters on the second page, and carrying through to Granny spying Janie’s “laceration” by Johnny Taylor, the fearful houseful who watch the hurricane at the height of its fury, and certain of the observers at Janie’s trial. Watchers are passive, weak, desirous, envious, feckless, helpless, ignorant, and enthralled. Spectating is not a sign of power but of want thereof; power belongs to the object of attention, who is often, in fact, Godlike. The most signal body on the scene in Eyes, from start to finish, is Janie’s, the ship of every man’s dreams. It is difficult to overestimate the power of Hurston’s opening scene and the impact it has had upon readings of the novel. As suggested earlier, though Janie’s return to Eatonville sets in motion a firestorm of questions among Eatonites and readers, in one sense we already have our most important answer

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in Janie herself. Our heroine lives; she survives what few others have, and if anything, it has only made her stronger. Through Janie’s multiple trials, sympathetic readers possess the reassurance of what she will become; each obstacle and humiliation she encounters on her way becomes another opportunity to re-activate the reassuring vision of strength and beauty created in the opening pages. In such a manner can this scene be re-performed, after a fashion, virtually throughout the book. Hurston’s staging of moments of spectatorship not only calls into question conceptions of the dynamics of spectatorship that would locate power in the eye of the beholder, it also suggests performance as at once a form of empowerment and a display of an imbalance of power between white audiences and black performers, and between readers and writers. Hurston lived during a time of explosive interest in black entertainers in white America, and she possessed no mean faculty for gaining and holding a gaze (often Caucasian). Hurston’s representation of spectatorship looks beyond the economic difference that enables whites to “command” performances from black singers, musicians, and dancers to suggest that the play of power runs in the other direction, that the salaries commanded by these entertainers indicates rather that the upper hand is attached to a black body whose manifestations compel white interest. Yet, all of the above notwithstanding, the power to command spectatorship in Eyes is not absolute; in fact, it is subject to stunning reversals. Not long after readers witness Joe’s bravura performance on the bloated stomach of Matt Bonner’s mule, an imaginative glimpse under Joe Stark’s clothes results in his immediate social death and soon leads to his physical demise. And Janie’s light-skinned beauty, of course, provokes masculine desire to dominate, its instantiations ranging from Stark’s insistence that she dress a certain way to Tea Cake’s blows. It is important to note that Janie’s “strength”—in the opening pages and throughout the book—is intimately connected with her beauty as constituted in a male gaze that partitions her. Soon enough we will see the particular, embattled quality of this strength; it puts Janie at risk because of its existence within the ambit of a menacing masculine desire. Here in the novel’s first pages we get an idea of how Janie drives the men folk crazy—or, perhaps more properly, provides an occasion for them to drive themselves crazy. As the novel progresses, we will see other men shipwreck themselves upon their desire—constituted in gazing upon Janie—the last being Tea Cake, the insane man/dog. And we will see just how close they have come to taking Janie down with them. It is a danger Janie realizes as well. That is why in the end, she seeks simply to escape communal scrutiny, taking refuge in the upstairs bedroom of her house where she can wind herself in memory.

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HURSTON’S NOVEL OF PASSING Their Eyes Were Watching God was written in the aftermath of an on-again/offagain love affair with a man named Percy Hunter, whom Hurston first met in 1931. At the time of their meeting, Hunter was a college student of twentythree studying to be a minister. In Dust Tracks, Hurston depicts him as intellectually quick and physically beautiful. He was a young man, it seems, who had prospects. Robert Hemenway describes the relationship between the two as having been “stormy,” full of jealousies and misunderstandings, amidst great love and passion; and Hurston’s own account of the relationship is full of the sturm und drang of romance (Dust Tracks 181–92). (Hurston relates one incident of physical violence between the two. After she slapped Hunter, he paid her back “with interest.” They then reconciled in a fashion much like Tea Cake and Janie reconcile in Eyes.) One of the central problems of the relationship seems to have been Hunter’s inability to reconcile himself to Hurston’s career. According to Hurston, she broke things off for good after receiving news of her Guggenheim, which allowed her to go to Haiti and Jamaica to collect folklore. The trip seems to have in part served the purpose of enforcing a difficult breakup that she felt was in the best interests of both but that she dreaded attempting. In her autobiography Hurston claims that her second folklore collecting expedition similarly enforced a separation from her first husband, Herbert Sheen, an aspiring doctor (Dust Tracks 182–83). In both cases Hurston appears at least as motivated by concern for her own professional prospects as for those of her mates. Regarding Sheen, she wrote to a friend, “I hear that my husband has divorced me, so that’s that. Don’t think I am upset, for your lil Zora is playing on her harp like David. He was one of the obstacles that worried me” (qtd. in Hemenway 94). Throughout her life Hurston consistently removes the men who are obstacles to her writing. The writing of Eyes is also preceded by the virtual termination of another of Hurston’s significant relationships—that with Mary Osgood Mason, the wealthy patron whom Hurston called “Godmother.” Over a period of about five years, Mason provided, according to most estimates, around fifteen thousand dollars to Hurston to support her research in folklore (Hemenway 105). Mason’s funding opened significant doors for Hurston, enabling her first and second folklore gathering expeditions in the South, giving her an opportunity to explore in great depth the material that would inform virtually all of Hurston’s published work—anthropological, biographical, and fictional. Mason’s money, however, came with strings attached. As Langston Hughes, whom she also helped for a time, has suggested, and as Hurston’s own letters and actions have indicated, such support was forthcoming in part

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because, in Hurston, Mason sought confirmation of her own notions of African-Americans as “primitives.” Furthermore, she maintained contractual control over the publication of Hurston’s work and any profits that it might earn, and she looked down upon the fictional treatments of folkloric material to which Hurston was increasingly drawn (Hemenway 107–17). Gaining the Guggenheim afforded Hurston a degree of authorial freedom that she had never enjoyed before (and would arguably never enjoy again). Temporarily liberated by the Guggenheim from financial worry and the meddling of Mason, Hurston produces her best work, work that bears the potential not only for economic gain but for satisfying her own longing for artistic expression. Though in Mules and Men Hurston refers to the liberating effects of Anthropology, describing it as what allowed her to remove the “tight chemise” of her provincial past (1), at this point the discipline itself was constraining Hurston, who was no theoretician or cataloguer but had received an extensive informal training in the art of the story from a young age. Given these factors and that Hurston cuts herself loose from these relationships when she is, according to best scholarly estimates, forty-five years old, it is difficult not to think that Hurston might have seen these break-ups as potentially more final than her others, each of which involved a choice between a career and a lasting heterosexual relationship. At the same time that Hurston is paying homage to her love affair and in some sense honoring and preserving its pleasures and values, she also has to be, as an existential project, making sense of her decision to end it and justifying to herself the self-inflicted pain of doing so. Eyes manifests the threat to profession, independence, and financial security Hurston felt as a result of her involvement with Percy Hunter and suggests that underlying Hurston’s decisions was apprehension regarding how her aging body might affect her ability to sustain the relationship (and to preserve the patronage relationship with Mason on which she had relied). If Eyes is, as some have asserted, a female fantasy, it is a fantasy written in the aftermath of painful choice, at a moment of profound loss, liberation, and risk-taking. When Zora Neale Hurston writes Their Eyes Were Watching God, she is writing for her life. Hurston, more than most, raced the clock, and this novel should be understood in part as a novel of passing—passing for young. Like the other form of passing, this one can open doors. Patrons and sponsors, especially, are drawn to the young more than to the old, to those with an extended future rather than a long past. For Hurston, that socially constructed mocker Time informed a complex of obstacles to realizing her ambition, threatening to lock her out opportunities for education, for patronage, and for satisfying personal relationships with men. All her adult life Hurston lied about her age

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as a strategy for overcoming disadvantages incurred as a result of her virtual orphaning at age thirteen, her ruralness, her Southerness, her blackness, and her gender. Ipso facto, her physical appearance allowed her to get away with it. Enrolled in high school at age twenty-six, with support from outside sources, enrolled at Barnard at age 34, with support from outside sources, Hurston—whose relationship with Percy Hunter was one of many that she carried on with men several years her younger—knew that her purchase on the ladder to love and success in part depended upon the value accorded to youth and “potential.” In 1936, when she finally ceased to be Mary Osgood Mason’s “sun-burn’t child” and began writing Their Eyes Were Watching God, she was substantially older than self-advertised, and time was running out. It is a telling juncture at which to write a novel about a forty-something woman who lies about her age, “looks like [her] own daughter” (4), and, most significantly, kills her husband by telling him that he looks like “de change uh life” (75). It is with this charged existential context in mind that one must read Hurston’s best novel—her only great novel. As noted, much important and useful critical discussion of Eyes has focused on the issue of “voice” and whether or not Janie ever acquires it.3 Obscured in this discussion has been the fact that the “voice” of Their Eyes Were Watching God speaks from its situation in a particular body, that the body of its author is nearing or even in the midst of a biological process that is culturally defined as a crisis. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the voice of the text returns obsessively to descriptions of bodies, sometimes young and beautiful, often ugly and aged, sometimes sodden, bloated, and dead. It is the particular urgency of Hurston’s circumstances that informs the audacious initial paragraphs of Eyes, the first of which serves to signify on a hazily defined yet discernibly “male” literary tradition and a particular male protagonist in Hurston’s own oeuvre. Henry Louis Gates, whose own writing on Eyes has been particularly influential in discussions of the novel focusing on voicing, has interpreted this paragraph to involve an allusion to a passage in Frederick Douglass’s writings (170–72); however, it has a less prestigious and more immediate relation: Hurston’s own first literary “hero,” John Redding, a man who dreams of going to sea but is persuaded by his mother to forego adventure and lead a “safe” life following the ways of the landlubbers. Redding becomes one of those man whose dreams are aboard ships at sea, a “Watcher” mocked by Time. The central irony of Redding’s life, as related in Hurston’s first known fictional work, is that as a result of his passive acquiescence to his mother’s will for his life, it is neither satisfying nor safe. In this brief story of life as it shouldn’t be, he instead marries, “settles,” and dies in a flood that sweeps his body out to the very sea he wished to voyage upon.

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At the outset of Eyes, among the many things Hurston does is fleetingly revisit her own first, tragic would-be hero, the moral of whose story is that there is no such thing as playing it safe in a world of contingency, so one might as well pursue one’s dreams. It is a moral fitting to a woman who herself seems to have suffered so much misfortune at a young age, and it is taken to heart in the act of putting the opening paragraphs of Eyes to paper, as Hurston takes what is by most critical accounts her highest jump at the sun. Hurston seizes her opportunity with substantial élan. As Carla Kaplan has most recently observed, Hurston wrote during a time when African-American writers in general and African-American women writers in particular were strenuously encouraged to avoid the erotic and anything that might feed stereotypes of blacks as primitives, sexually promiscuous, or otherwise slaves of the flesh (122–3). “Racist sexual ideologies” of the period, according to Hazel Carby, “proclaimed the black woman to be a rampant sexual being, and in response black women writers either focused on defending their morality or displaced sexuality onto another terrain” (176). This Hurston signally fails to do. In fact, particularly in the early pages of Eyes, Hurston seems to be performing a narrative analogue to Janie’s own performance: cross-dressing her prose, strutting her stuff, and writing what she wants to write—proper opinion be damned. Like Janie, Hurston has an interested audience, or so she thinks. The book with the flood in it has been “dammed up” inside her for months (Dust Tracks 155). As Robert Hemenway and others have noted, in Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston is not only harnessing the energy and inspiration provided by her failed love affair with A.W.P., she believes that she is on the verge of a breakthrough as a writer. She has seen the success of friend Carl Van Vechten’s controversial Nigger Heaven and spent enough time in Harlem clubs to know that, while her depictions might meet with disapproval from certain critics both white and black, there is also a substantial market for “racy” writing about Negro life. She has, finally, the right material, the right method, and the right audience; and it is all coming together just in the nick of time. Kaplan has persuasively argued that the basic narrative of Eyes is the story of one woman’s search for orgasm (“Erotics” 115), and Hurston’s willingness to engage readers with the erotic life of an African-American woman is evident from the outset. As the timing of its writing and, indeed, Hurston’s own description of its motivation indicates, her own lived conflict between Eros and its “respectable” social realization through marriage is very much at issue in the novel.4 From the famous moment in which she discovers the erotic pleasure her body can provide her—the scene itself a flagrant departure from the de-eroticized fiction urged upon black female writers—Janie goes off in search of the perfect “marriage”:

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Protest and the Body in Melville, Dos Passos, and Hurston She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid. (10–11)

It is at this juncture that readers first get a glimpse of the enormous distance Janie has had to travel in order to become the supremely confident and aware sexual being of the introductory sequence. Surrounded as it is by the lush, naturalistic imagery of blooms and bees, sixteen-year-old Janie’s sexual desire is here depicted as an unmediated product of nature, a kind of sympathetic response in harmony with the surrounding creation. She does not touch herself so much as she is touched by all that surrounds her. For her to spring to the revelation that “this was a marriage!” is bound to strike readers as dissonant. Following close at the heels of such overheated, celebratory, naturalistic rhetoric, the phrasing presents a strange anti-climax, because what we know and young Janie does not is that this is not, at least not in a typical sense, “a marriage,” a term fraught with the social rather than the natural. And in particular if we read Janie’s line as indicative that this “marriage” is representative, the scene provides us with an instance of her somewhat comic—and yet tragic—misprision of her erotic desire as having full, unqualified social sanction—and of marriage as a “natural” institution in complete congruence with the erotic. Janie’s innocence is arguably two-fold, comprehending not only her unfettered enjoyment of sexuality, but also her mistaken belief in the congruence of a foundational social institution and that enjoyment. (Janie therefore is stunned by Nanny’s shocked reaction to her having kissed Johnny Taylor and disappointed that her marriage to Logan Killicks fails to breed love.) Janie’s vision of marriage continues to unfold in the novel’s next paragraph, and it will expand to something of a communal vision, fleetingly and humbly realized. She finds herself stumbling inside the kitchen door and beholds, in the air of the room, “flies tumbling and singing, marrying and giving in marriage” (11). This fluid, politely orgiastic image of sociality and sexuality, more so than the flower and bee imagery, incorporates elements of communal play, role interchange, and hierarchical dissolution. As much as an ideal of sexuality, it conveys a sexualized ideal of community for the girl who as a woman will revel in play and seek not to “class off.” Janie will chase both of these closely related visions of marriage and community, and they will

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prove far more dream than truth. She will be encouraged soon enough to see her discovery of erotic maturity as a burden rather than a blessing, as “womanhood,” as in Nanny’s warning that “youse got yo’ womanhood on yuh” (12). This utterance, of course, is in perfect keeping with Nanny’s observance that “de nigger woman is de mule uh de world” (14). The sexuality of the black woman becomes her burden, that thing which draws men to make, in Nanny’s graphic figure for coitus, “spit cups” out of them. And it is in part this conception of her sexuality as a burden, a monstrous birth of Nanny’s monstrous past experience, that Janie steadfastly rejects through the course of Eyes. She struggles against Nanny’s terrifying, violently unifying vision, which “diffused and melted Janie, the room and the world into one comprehension,” by running away from her first husband and, as Michelle Wallace has put it, “loud-talking” her second to death (18). According to some readings of the novel, Janie finally finds her man in the form of Tea Cake, in union with whom Janie will come as close as she ever will to the “dream-truth”—the marriage union she imagines under the pear tree amidst the blossoms and insects, which combines a vision of heterosexual erotic bliss with one of a class-free community at play. Readers, however, are made aware of the problematic nature of the relationship between Janie and Tea Cake as early as the end of the first chapter of the novel, long before Janie provides the details of their time together. Responding to the intense curiosity of Pheoby and the porchsitters about whether or not she has been taken for a ride by Tea Cake, Janie says, “They don’t need to worry about me and my overhalls long as Ah still got nine hundred dollars in de bank. Tea Cake got me into wearing ‘em— following behind him” (7). There is a tinge of ruefulness behind this dash. Here Hurston would gesture a return to the metaphor of the “nigger woman” as “mule of the world,” this one docile—even enthralled—by its owner. (It is written that some African-American mule trainers so controlled their animals that they could work these clever, stubborn beasts to death.) In this brief line we get a counter-narrative to the ending of the novel, which tends to apotheosize Tea Cake. Janie, much as does Hurtson on her correspondence recalling her relationship with Percy Hunter, speaks in this early passage as one waking from such enthrallment, still wondering how it could have happened and why it would now be missed. After all, she has come dangerously close to being incorporated into Nanny’s narrative, which she had so strenuously thought herself resisting. In so doing, she contemplates, if only for a brief space, her complicity with a possessive masculine desire that effectively owned her and which came this close to killing her.

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The problem with Tea Cake is that, rather than proving the exception to male rule, with time he merely reinforces a sense of its ubiquity. Even Janie’s “dream-truth” is penetrated by a nightmarish masculinity. Tea Cake takes liberties with Janie’s money and takes pride in having been able to mark her with his fists. He is in disturbing ways merely a better-looking, wilder version of Joe Starks. The case of rabies he contracts during the flood only amplifies the jealous, violent, appropriative tendencies he has already manifested, which, significantly, began to show themselves in physical violence only after the couple has arrived down on “the muck,” where things already have a tendency to revert or “go wild.” Given the long history of associations of the canine with the masculine and that the dog that bites Tea Cake rides on the back of a cow, it is not too much to say that the dog itself is to be understood as representative of a kind of primal maleness.5 Truly, the dog attack signals a return of the repressed, Nanny’s nightmare version of male desire that has wreaked havoc on at least three generations of Janie’s family. Tea Cake dies, in this novel of a world full of mouths, preparing to bite Janie’s arm. His teeth imprint her flesh before he passes, his final effort at leaving his “mark” on Janie. By the time his rabies is in its last stages, Tea Cake has joined the porchsitters. Like them he cannot even swallow his own spit, and like them, he’s got Janie up in his mouth. He just can’t quite get her down. In attempting to take a bite out of Janie, Tea Cake also closely aligns himself with the other men in the novel. Readers of the first chapter of Eyes will register that the women among the porchsitters are under a regular domestic obligation to satisfy their men’s stomachs, and that this obligation, a condensation of other domestic obligations, governs and impedes their attempts at intimacy with each other. When Pheoby announces that she is going to take some food to Janie, Lulu allows that she can watch her house for Pheoby because “Mah supper is done” (3), and Pearl reveals that she “kin stay ‘way from home as long as Ah please. Mah husband ain’t fussy” (4). Coming as they do on the heels of Janie’s dramatic return to Eatonville and of the gossip regarding her love affair with Tea Cake, these statements serve as small but pointed reminders of the circumscription of these women’s lives. (And when Pheoby goes to serve Janie her dinner and is treated to her “rough” joking, it puts Janie on the male side of the usual dinner-time food transaction, which both further cross-genders Janie and reminds readers of another of those small ways in which “the nigger woman is de mule of de world.”) Before she tells her tale to Pheoby, Janie is careful to inquire if Sam is waiting on her for his supper, and it is only because “it’s all ready and waitin’” that Pheoby can stay to talk at length to an old friend that she hasn’t seen in months. By the time the chapter has concluded, the husbands of Eatonville have become an absent presence in

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the lives of its women, another kind of “Mouth-Almighty” that silently threatens retribution if not fed at the prescribed times. It is no accident that physical violence first enters Janie’s marriage to Joe Starks when she botches a meal for his protruding belly. He slaps her “until she [has] a ringing sound in her ears and [tells] her about her brains before he [stalks] back into the store.” This rage, which invites interpretation along Kleinian lines, casts a retrospective light on the repeated references to husbands and dinner in the first chapter, suggesting why the wives seem so preoccupied with whether or not the men folk have been fed.6 Their masculine and infantile insistence on having their material needs tended to is both feared and taken for granted by the women; it actively intrudes upon their discourse with one another—first by pre-empting it, then by becoming the topic of that discourse when it takes place. In Eatonville, husbands both usurp the opportunities for talk and shadow the minds of wives when they do talk in this novel. Women are under an obligation to have their relations with the community-at-large mediated through the institution of marriage, which not only codifies and enforces repressions of directly sexual desire but interferes with the other forms of intercourse among women. It participates in the construction and maintenance of rigid gender and class boundaries and generally seems to militate against the creation of communal relations resembling the flies “tumbling and singing, marrying and giving marriage.” Joe Starks maintains tight surveillance over Janie’s manner of dress, bars her from participating in the game-playing and tale-telling on the porch, and keeps her from the celebratory “mess of commonness” (56), the “drag-out” of Matt Bonner’s Mule. For much of Eatonville, save perhaps Pheoby, Janie remains a cipher. The men around the porch are drawn to speculating about her and the “understanding” that she and Joe have. The women become put off in part by the on-highing of Janie that Joe enacts; it is in part a harvest of the enmity sown through this process that Janie reaps when she returns to Eatonville following the death of Tea Cake. Joe’s prohibitions, furthermore, take their toll on the degree of intimacy that they attain in their marriage. Upon being struck by Joe following the ill-made meal, Janie discovers not only that “she had no more blossomy openings dusting pollen over her man” but that “she had a host of thoughts she had never expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had never let Jody know about” (68). It is only with Tea Cake that Janie achieves the form of male-female intimacy that she craves. Tea Cake also turns out to satisfy not only Janie’s desire for sexual-emotional intimacy but also her desire to “play” and take part in the activities of the community, whatever they may be. The form of intimacy she attains with him provides her access to these other forms and is bound up with them. It is through her relations with Tea Cake that Janie acquires and maintains

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a set of relations with a larger, migrant black folk community whose mores suit her own. In the absence of her union with Tea Cake, this larger circle of relations dissolves.7 And finally, these relations are themselves the product of, and the form for, the “self revelation” that the narrator will elsewhere describe as “that oldest human longing” (6). In Eyes, therefore, it is through her union with Tea Cake that Janie is able to most fully enter communal life and give expression to all of her longings. The “muck” is as close as one will come in Hurston’s writing to a utopia. It is where Janie comes nearest to a full realization of her humanity, not only through her relations with Tea Cake, but through her involvement with the life of the community as a whole. Yet ultimately the difference between life on the muck and life in Eatonville is as open to question as that between Vergible Woods and Joe Starks. Life on the muck abruptly ends when Janie kills Tea Cake. Absent him, she finds no reason to stay, and the people on the muck quickly turn against Janie, depicting her at trial as the ungrateful wife of a hardworking man, wrongfully accusing her of taking up with another man, and urging that she be convicted for murder despite what are clear circumstances of self-defense. Though at Janie’s improbable request they will later shamefacedly attend Tea Cake’s funeral, the swiftness with which these persons turn upon Janie suggests she has never been fully accepted by them (and vice versa?—-after all, without Tea Cake, Janie finds no other reason to stay on the muck),8 and the charge of infidelity that the community levels against her would seem to spring from a deep and persistent anxiety about female sexual desire, as well as perhaps a projection of their own desire into the narrative of events. The opening and closing scenes of Eyes find two different communities confronting a “loose” woman, and in each instance, it sets them into a frenzy. Such a being cannot be allowed to run amok (Or run a muck—in both Eatonville and the Everglades Janie has effectively deposed communal leaders using “male” weapons they themselves have in some sense lived by). For if she does, much of the communal ligature is threatened. A critique of such communal fragility and rigidity, created by the structure of monogamous, heterosexual marriage and the over-investment of the community in it, is near to the heart of a novel that loves the African-American community by refusing to let it slide its own othering mechanisms under the rug. Notwithstanding her deep respect for them, Hurston is not interested in a blanket affirmation of the Negro folk; she has too many bones to pick for that. Through Eyes she dramatizes a critique of marriage as a gateway institution for women, the only way in which they can “become” women and fully participate in the life of the community. It is a critique brought to fruition in part by the crisis of the body

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to which she herself is in close chronological proximity, one brought on by a culture that endorses only certain forms of female production. Further adding to Hurston’s difficulty is that the culture’s endorsement of female reproduction and the institution in which it is to take place is itself qualified by the men who dominate it. We find in one of Hurston’s first fictional works, “Sweat,” the story of a possessive male sexuality that uses up young womanhood and disposes of the aging female body. Big Sykes marries young Delia, then works her hard, beats her, and and attempts to run her off the farm when she grows old and haggard. She refuses, and he tries to kill her with a rattlesnake that ends up killing him. Given the male characters who follow him in Hurston’s work, his name is surely meant as a pun, and his character as a representative male. One must construe the characters and fates of Tea Cake and Joe Starks in terms similar to those of Sykes and male protagonists in Hurston’s other long dream-truths, whether “autobiographical” or “fictional.” Both John Hurston and Jim Meserve are explicitly epitomized as babies. In Jonah’s Vine Gourd, the wayward preacher John Pearson is flattened by a train (in his youth an object of intense fascination, if not worship) while returning from an illicit liaison, and the symbolism is too heavy to be ignored. In Hurston’s texts, masculine desire to conquer has a way of circling back upon itself and self-destructing. The woman who would “go a ways” with men must also beware of their dangerous instability. So when Hurston writes in Dust Tracks that she has attempted to “embalm” all her passion for Percy Hunter in Their Eyes Were Watching God, one wonders at the paradox. Just how passionate could embalmed passion be? Eyes writes Hurston’s tense resolution in the face of a choice between the erotics of the text and the erotics of the flesh. The alpha and omega of this story is a woman, which means you’ve got to get rid of the men and their mouths, whether you are Hurston or Janie. Their Eyes Were Watching God ends with Janie at peace and in possession of all the trappings of conventional domesticity save one: a man. Janie kills Tea Cake with the gun he himself had taught her to shoot. Like Hunter, he ends up a memory. Here is the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Janie has just concluded narrating her tale to Pheoby: Soon everything around downstairs was shut and fastened. Janie mounted the stairs with her lamp. The light in her hand was like a spark of sun-stuff washing her face in fire. Her shadow behind fell black and headlong down the stairs. Now, in her room, the place tasted fresh again. The wind through the open windows had broomed out the fetid feeling of absence and nothingness. She closed in and sat down. Combing roaddust out of her hair. Thinking.

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Protest and the Body in Melville, Dos Passos, and Hurston The day of the gun, and the bloody body, and the courthouse came and commenced to sing a sobbing sigh out of every corner in the room; out of each and every chair and thing. Commenced to sing, commenced to sob and sigh, singing and sobbing. Then Tea Cake came prancing around her where she was and the song of the sigh flew out of the window and lit in the top of the pine trees. Tea Cake, with the sun for a shawl. Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes. She called in her soul to come and see. (183–84)

The passage begins with a description of Janie as she re-secures her home. The shutting and fastening satisfies a desire for security against the outside world and for internal order, suggesting a taking of inventory and a refamiliarization of Janie with the nooks and crannies of her house, which she is now arranging. The performance of this domestic ritual serves as a counterpoint to Janie’s mental processes. It describes a comfortable, almost unconscious, slipping into domestic routine, revealing Janie’s at-easeness in this place and a likelihood that she may now be ready to stay awhile. Never before in the novel has Hurston bothered to describe Janie’s performance of mundane, domestic duties in such detail. This securing of the home, mounting of the stairs, and combing of her hair takes the readers through the meditative, automated, end-of-the day tasks during which human beings often reflect upon their days. However much this space might have once imprisoned her and marked an “absence,” it now feels like home, and in this space, as in no other, Janie is able to order her existence, to experience for the very first time in the novel, peace. This peace, however, is tempered by the description of the surrounding darkness and the images of Janie’s shutting-in of herself to which I have just referred. To return to Kaplan’s apt narrative synopsis, if Eyes is the story of one woman’s search for an orgasm, here is le petit mort; the final passage of the novel is about the final passage. It is hard to miss the shadow that falls “black and headlong down the stairs,” (183), and though the “great fish-net” of her experience has “so much life in its meshes” (184), there is something of the shawl or winding sheet in this net. That there is “so much life in its meshes,” however, is precisely what makes any attempt to summarize this image so complicated. Janie’s shawl of fish net cannot fail, of course, to evoke the New Testament story of miraculous bounty given to the apostle fishermen, and to a trained anthropologist such as Hurston it is doubtless fertile with other mythic associations. Images of

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death vie with those of renewal in this conclusion, suffused as it is in the mythopoeic light given off by the “spark of sun-stuff ” that washes Janie’s face and the shawl of sun given Tea Cake. So there is an elemental wind here that “broom[s] out all the fetid feeling of absence and nothingness.” To a substantial degree, the victory that can be construed in this final passage can be indexed to the extent to which Janie is depicted as being in control, which for her is a new experience. Janie’s desire to be alone in her bedroom is implied at the end of the third to the last paragraph; Pheoby’s abrupt departure merely gives her an opportunity to go there. The routinized activities she carries out before mounting the stairs show her taking control of herself and her house. And when she begins to comb the “road-dust” out of her hair, readers understand this as the act through which she begins to deliberately inventory her experiences on that road and, in particular, with the men who have been so attracted to the hair that enabled her to travel it. As the final paragraph begins, control slips as these memories nearly overwhelm Janie; the anticipated haven of the bedroom comes threateningly alive as each corner and piece of furniture begins mourning the painful memory of Tea Cake’s death. The mood quickly changes, however, when the figure of Tea Cake comes dancing into the room, and Janie concludes that “he could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking.” The agency suggested in this line is tremendous. Janie not only acquires power over her memory of Tea Cake, a kind of say-so regarding her own death is intimated: it will come only after she has finished with her business. Her powers then grow to mythic proportion, as she pulls in the horizon “from around the waist of the world” and drapes it over her shoulders.” The final image literalizes the notion of someone content to keep her own company: “she called in her soul to come and see.” By the conclusion of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie has obtained a settled self-possession. She also has memory of a man, money in the bank, a house of her own, and a friend to talk to next door. Perhaps even more important is that Janie has privacy. Eyes begins with all the eyes of the community watching Janie as she walks a gauntlet of public opinion, the weight of which she barely acknowledges. The tale Janie relates to Pheoby is that of someone always on view, indeed, of someone prized chiefly as a high profile signifier of masculine power. Virtually every significant scene in this novel—with the exception of the conclusion and of her discovery of her sexuality under the pear tree—has Janie playing out the drama of selfhood in the presence of others.9 Peace, however, has not been readily available in their company. The activity of self-representation and performance that others have required has been fraught with misapprehension and struggle. In a sense, Nanny’s “single comprehensive vision” has proved accurate: the men folk have

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tried to make spit cups out of Janie: for Jodie she functions—like his great silver spittoon—to make the other folks feel small; Tea Cake dies salivating on her arm; the porchsitters have her up in their mouths. Alone in her upstairs bedroom of the nicest house in town, where she can sort through memory and answer to no one but her own soul, Janie is finally on high, safe for a time from all the threatening waters. Janie has two intimate relationships in this novel: one with Tea Cake, the other with Pheoby. The one provides the love of a man, amidst which there is the danger of erasure of certain qualities of the self and a particular kind of adumbrated relationship with the community; the other provides the opportunity to self-narrate to a listener “dilated” with eagerness and through this narration to communicate with the community at large. Hurston’s own relationships with men failed because they hamstrung her efforts to become a writer. Male assumptions about power relations in marriage, and male anxiety about living in the shadow of Hurston’s own abilities were among the forces responsible for the break-up of virtually all of Hurston’s extended relationships, both marital and non-marital. The choice between having the one intimacy and having the other seems for Hurston to have been painful, but there is rarely, if ever, any indication in her writing that she doubted that her decisions to break off these relations were anything other than correct. In her fiction, masculine will to power—in marriage as in other relationships—is presented as a given, and masculine infidelity and willingness to wreak violence upon women is hardly less a constant.10 Given these predispositions of the male, Hurston’s decisions are emotionally painful yet pragmatically simple. The one intimacy bears the promise of dependency—economic, emotional, and physical—upon an inherently unreliable source. The other is a paradoxical, public intimacy that Hurston has from a very young age been able, in some manner or another, to make work for her: “Don’t you want me to go a ways with you?” Hurston had great success with her variations upon this invitation, from her moments on the porch in Eatonville, to traveling with the Gilbert and Sullivan Troupe, to driving Fanny Hurst’s car, to her folklore collecting excursions. The encouragement she had received on her early efforts in fiction could only fuel the hope of achieving an intimacy that could be managed for emotional and monetary profit. There were, it would seem, two great impediments to achieving this latter intimacy. One was the opportunity to write what she wanted to write, and to own that writing fully. The other was the pull of heterosexual marriage. At the time Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, both were at least in temporary resolution. Hurston’s novel begins with a scene in which all eyes of the community are on Janie’s body, (and Janie’s body and psyche bear up under scrutiny) and

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climaxes in a courtroom scene in which she is again judged by a communal audience. But the book ends with a very private scene, Janie is in her bedroom and the house is closed up. She pulls her memories around her like a fish net—and like a shawl. Tea Cake is a part of these memories—and that part is sexually charged. But here also is “peace,” and the fact that Tea Cake is now just a memory has something to do with that. Eyes is not just about the burgeoning of Janie’s sexuality but about the laying down of what, within her circumstances, constrained as they were by the conventions of patriarchal marriage, and masculinist capitalism, became increasingly the burden of sexuality—or of the particular form of “womanhood” and sexuality that the culture has waiting for her. As Hurston aged she felt increasingly what it meant for someone to have her “womanhood on ya.” If the nigger woman is the mule of the world, try being an old one, especially one who, to write, has to display her body and manage it carefully. Eyes ends with an image of rest, of putting down the burden of the body by making it unavailable to prying eyes. DE CHANGE UH LIFE Eyes contains three detailed descriptions of what could be called aggressively aging bodies, each belonging to someone in a relationship with a person several years younger. Two of these bodies belong to Janie’s husbands, Logan Killicks and Joe Starks; the third belongs to a Mrs. Tyler, who haunts Janie’s thoughts as, from the inside of her boarding room in Jacksonville, Janie contemplates the absence of Tea Cake and the two hundred dollars she had pinned within her clothes: Way late in the morning the thought of Annie Tyler and Who Flung came to pay her a visit. Annie Tyler who at fifty-two had been left a widow with a good home and insurance money. Mrs. Tyler with her dyed hair, newly straightened and her comfortable new false teeth, her leathery skin, blotchy with powder and her giggle. Her love affairs, affairs with boys in their late teens, early twenties for all of whom she spent her money on suits of clothes, shoes, watches, and things like that and how they all left her as soon as their wants were satisfied. Then when her ready cash was gone, had come Who Flung to denounce his predecessor as a scoundrel and took up around the house himself. It was he who persuaded her to sell her house and come to Tampa with him. The town had seen her limp off. The undersized highheel slippers were punishing her feet that looked like bunions all over. Her body squeezed and crowded into a tight corset that shoved her middle up under her chin. But she had gone off laughing and sure. As sure as Janie had been.

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Protest and the Body in Melville, Dos Passos, and Hurston Then two weeks later. . . . All the capers that cheap dye could cut was showing in her hair. Those slippers bent and griped just like her work-worn feet. The corset gone and the shaking old woman hanging all over herself. Everything that you could see was hanging. Her chin hung from her ears and rippled down her neck like drapes. Her hanging bosom and stomach and buttocks and legs that draped down over her ankles. (113–114)

Abandoned and humiliated, Tyler has become a byword among the people: she is essentially what they hope Janie will be when Janie walks back into Eatonville: a nightmare vision of what happens to an older woman who entrusts herself to a much-younger suitor. This circumstance has worried Janie before, when Tea Cake had begun to court her: The next thought buried her under tons of cold futility. He’s trading on being younger than me. Getting ready to laugh at me for an old fool. But oh, what wouldn’t I give to be twelve years younger so I could b’lieve him. . . . before she went to bed she took a good look at her mouth, eyes, and hair. (100)

Hurston, of course, has recently ended a relationship bridging a similar difference, and it is impossible to believe that like anxieties wouldn’t have intruded upon her. Here, as elsewhere, Eyes scripts a persistent, personal, culturally sponsored fear of the effects of aging on the body. As significant as the description of Ann Tyler’s body is to Eyes, however, it is the description of Jodie’s aging body and Janie’s signifying on it that is most central. Janie’s righteously pugnacious body, for all the attention it receives from the porchsitters at the beginning of the novel, is economically described in two images. Jody Starks’s aging body, on the other hand, is described in exhaustive detail over the course of two chapters. Through her treatment of Jody’s body, Hurston begins to critique the communal arrangments in which a May-December match such as Jody’s to Janie is a sign of male power while Annie Tyler’s union is a joke. Hurston doesn’t just continue to re-inscribe personal anxieties about aging in describing Joe Starks body, she also delivers poetic justice to the patriarchy that so ardently sponsors them. This process of taking off the emperor’s clothes begins in chapter seven: One day she noticed that Joe didn’t sit down. He just stood in front of a chair and fell in it. That made her look at him all over. Joe wasn’t so young as he used to be. There was already something dead about him. He didn’t rear back in his knees any longer. He squatted over his ankles when he walked. That stillness in the back of his neck. His prosperouslooking belly that used to thrust out so pugnaciously and intimidate

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folks, sagged like a load suspended from his loins. It didn’t seem to be a part of him anymore. Eyes a little absent too. (73)

In response to his own fears of aging, Jodie begins to comment obsessively upon Janie’s appearance and to remind her of her own age, now about forty. It gets to be “terrible” in the store, and “the more his muscle dissolved into fat and the fat melted off his bones, the more fractious he became with Janie. Especially in the store. The more people in there the more ridicule he poured over her body to point attention away from his own” (74). Finally when Janie miscuts a plug of tobacco for a customer Jody explodes, “I god almighty! A woman stay round uh store till she get old as Methusalem and still can’t cut a little thing like a plug of tobacco! Don’t stand dere rollin’ yo’ pop eyes at me wid yo’ rump hangin’ nearly to yo’ knees” (74). The store denizens laugh, but only for an instant because “it was funny if you looked at it right quick, but it got pitiful if you thought about it awhile. It was like somebody snatched off part of a woman’s clothes while she wasn’t looking and the streets were crowded.” This is the one thing that Janie, who as the lead-in to this confrontation makes clear, has hitherto been able to weather Jodie’s abuse with stoicism, will not let pass. She returns fire, accusing Jodie of “talkin’ under people’s clothes” and asserting, finally, “Ah’m a woman every inch of me, and Ah know it. Dat’s uh whole lot more’n you kin say. You big-bellies round here and put out a lot of brag, but ‘tain’t nuthin to it but yo’ big voice. Humph! Talkin’ ‘bout me lookin’ old! When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak de change uh life . . . Then Joe Starks realized all the meanings and his vanity bled like a flood. Janie had robbed him of his illusion of irresistible maleness what all men cherish, which was terrible. The thing that Saul’s daughter had done to David. But Janie had done worse, she had cast down his empty armor before men and they had laughed, would keep on laughing. When he paraded his possessions hereafter, they would not consider the two together. They’d look with envy at the things and pity the man that owned them. When he sat in judgment it would be the same. Good for nothings like Dave and Lum and Jim wouldn’t change place with him. For what can excuse a man in the eyes of other men for lack of strength? Raggedy-behind squirts of sixteen and seventeen would be giving him their merciless pity out of their eyes while their mouths said something humble. There was nothing to do in life anymore. Ambition was useless. (75–76)

Janie’s insult that Jodie “looks like da change a life” not only feminizes him, it both prophesies and brings about his death: socially and physically, she kills him. He dies physically because of the kind of social being he is, so dependent

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is he upon his image of himself as he believes it to be in the eyes of all around him. At the center of this social being is his illusion of his own “irresistible masculinity”—now utterly destroyed. Unable to perpetuate the illusion of being able to hold women in his sexual thrall—his self-imagined stature among men is now gone, and with it his raison d’être. The Post Office, the store, the mayorship, the ownership of land—all the ostensible signs of his priapic power are so much “empty armor.” One might find in this passage Hurston’s own assessment of patriarchal capitalism and its homosocial motivation. In Eyes the cast of capitalists scrambling for a piece of the pie in the U.S.A. trilogy are boiled down into the character of Joe Starks, who is merchant, real estate man, government, police force, and public relations man all rolled into one. Joe brings capital to Eatonville. Hurston comments upon the process of its arrival at some length, and her protagonist is directly threatened by her entanglement with it and its representative. Joe uses Janie as a symbol of his male power/money through an extended process of stilling, binding, and displaying her young, energetic, and exuberant body, which stands in as a sign of the virility of his own. (Neither of the great male owners in this tale, both of whom would have Janie as non-paid labor, possess compelling bodies. Both Killicks and Starks are defined by this lack and seek “armor” as compensation and protection. Tea Cake, on the other hand, is a make-itspend-it man uninterested in accumulation.) As long as Joe can maintain the sense of a linkage between his possessions and sexual potency, they provide him with status, but Janie de-links Jody’s virility from his possessions. As an ultimate signifier of his power, she has become a kind of phallus, his phallus, ever and always there in the store, standing handkerchief-headed for Starks’s masculinity. Janie’s killing insult demonstrates her apprehension of exactly what it is she is supposed to be signifying and adroitly signifies upon that signification, calling attention to an important slippage in Jodie’s body, which is like “candle grease.” It lacks the virility for which she is supposed to stand and cannot serve as a stable referent for the other signs of his masculinity. This is Janie’s greatest blow, because what matters even more than the illusion Jodie holds of his “irresistible maleness” is his belief that other men read his possessions as signs of his bodily potency. Hurston sees through to the homo(-anti-)social core of Eatin’ville, where a man needs armor because there is no excuse in the eyes of other men for lack of strength and the pity of others is “merciless.” As in the novel’s opening, laughter once again becomes a killing tool, literally, as the social death effected by the community will lead to Joe Stark’s physical death. Walter Thomas taunts Joe, “You heard her, you ain’t

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blind” (75), indicating that others have been thinking under Jodie’s clothes long before Janie has talked under them and that Jodie—like Annie Tyler—has played the fool. The result is a rage that the narrator can articulate but the suddenly shrunken “big voice” cannot. Joe’s next move underscores the totality of his defeat, since the main point in playing the dozens is in displaying poise and wit under verbal fire.11 His response is violence—now a resort from linguistic impotence—against Janie rendered in terms suggesting the desecration of the temple of maleness: “So he struck Janie with all his might and drove her from the store.” Janie kills old “I god” by putting on the street his slack one-eyed god. No more poetic justice can befall Joe Starks. Now he knows the humiliation of being an old woman in the community he has so carefully constructed for the celebration of masculine accomplishment. His ambition and tunnel vision with respect to the dignity of Janie and all others within the town has earned him their deep, killing enmity. The second paragraph of the next chapter returns to Joe’s body as topos in a remarkably visceral passage. [Janie] noticed how baggy Joe was getting all over. Like bags hanging from an ironing board. A little sack hung from the corners of his eyes and rested on his cheek-bones; a loose-filled bag of feathers hung from his ears and rested on his neck beneath his chin. A sack of flabby something hung from his loins and rested on his thighs when he sat down. But even these things were running down like candle grease as time moved on. (77)

Here, as in other detailed descriptions of bodies both in this text and in Hurston’s autobiography, the body is inventoried from the top down, in an organized, even practiced manner, suggesting that this sort of anatomization is an art with significant social consequences.12 This return to Joe’s body in part manifests Hurston’s justified fear of aging and what it could mean to her professionally and personally. More than that, however, this particular variation played on Joe’s body underscores his body’s importance to the novel as a whole—it is in many ways the text’s turning point—and by virtue of its content affirms the important connection between Joe’s body and the body of Matt Bonner’s mule. It is through this connection that much of the protest of this novel gets figured. The dragging out of Matt Bonner’s mule is a “mess of commonness” (56) (to use Joe’s own gustatorial phrasing), a parodic, cathartic, blowout in which “everything human in death” gets mocked. Joe himself serves as the people’s choice for Master of Ceremony, and his inspired mock preaching from the distended belly of the mule makes him “more solid than building the

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schoolhouse had done” to the town. Hurston, however, provides nothing more than a synopsis of the speech, and all the carryings on are commenced and concluded in the space of a paragraph. In other words, these big doings are only so much build up; it is the chilling description of the buzzard meeting that follows that sticks to the mind’s ribs: Everybody enjoyed themselves to the highest and then finally the mule was left to the already impatient buzzards. They were holding a great flying-meet way up over the heads of the mourners and some of the nearby trees were already peopled with the stoop-shouldered forms. As soon as the crowd was out of sight they closed in circles. The near ones got nearer and the far ones got near. A circle, a swoop and a hop with spread-out wings. Close in, close in till some of the more hungry or daring perched on the carcass. They wanted to begin, but the Parson wasn’t there, so a messenger was sent to the ruler in a tree where he sat. The flock had to wait the white-headed leader, but it was hard. They jostled each other and pecked at heads in hungry irritation. Some walked up and down the beast from head to tail, tail to head. The Parson sat motionless in a dead pine tree about two miles off. He had scented the matter as quickly as any of the rest, but decorum demanded that he sit oblivious until he was notified. Then he took off with ponderous flight and circled and lowered, circled and lowered until the others danced in joy and hunger at his approach. He finally lit on the ground and walked around the body to see if it were really dead. Peered into its nose and mouth. Examined it well from end to end and leaped upon it and bowed, and the others danced a response. That being over, he balanced and asked: “What killed this man?” The chorus answered, “Bare, bare fat.” “What killed this man?” “Bare, bare fat.” “What killed this man?” “Bare, bare fat.” “Who’ll stand his funeral?” “We!!!!!” “Well, all right now.” So he picked out the eyes in the ceremonial way and the feast went on. The yaller mule was gone from the town except for the porch talk, and for the children visiting his bleaching bones now and then in the spirit of adventure. (57–58)

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This scene is not merely an odd bit that Hurston has inserted for its value as a folk artifact. As the extended staging of his call and response exchange with the congregation indicates, what the Parson and his congregation have to say is integral to the novel’s message. They are passing judgment, and not just on a mule. Joe Starks is killed not only by his wife but by “bare, bare fat”; his body at the end of his life is “running down like candle grease.” When the man with the pushy stomach holds forth from the mule’s bloated belly, he stands on the image of his own demise. When Janie tells him that he looks like the change of life, Joe Starks becomes feminine, “the mule of the world,” someone others will tell stories and jokes about, and it kills him. The fat this man whose god is in his belly has lived off is the expropriated labor of others. “Where all dat money her husband took and died and left her” goes the question uttered in the novel’s opening sequence (2). Sim Jones asserts, during a porch debate upon the merits of Starks having run Henry Pitts out of town for stealing some of his cane, that everything he has he has made off the townspeople. (Representative capitalist that he is, Starks, in addition to his other dealings, also sponsors a university of sorts on the front porch of his store. Here anything from anthropologically oriented discussions of nature and culture to socio-political debates over the merits of the sponsor’s own contribution to society take place. Jodie even turns, in accordance with the Big Man formula, to a kind of philanthropy in his later life, becoming the benefactor of Matt Bonner’s mule, whose own dead belly he will later use as a platform for solidifying his status before the community.) Jodie’s own position at the top of the town food chain—a chain that he has to a large degree forged—has excused him from the fieldwork others have to do and given Starks his diet of bare fat and that stomach. Thus it is that Hurston plays upon a long-standing critique of “civilization,” or a certain kind of civilization that would make mules of some people so that others could ride on top. As an assiduous seeker after “white” forms of status and power—whether economic and political hegemony, the learning to enable him to “come at people with books in his jaw” (46), silver spittoons, or a trophy wife—Starks can hardly expect to escape the white man’s disease, brought on, as popular wisdom during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would have it, by too much “civilization.” The unexpected but poetically just outcome of such an arrangement was that the body itself would pass judgment on these arrangements in a fashion more certain than the soul ever could: the oppressed would be made strong, the oppressors feeble, and the new strong would feed off the old and survive. So goes a significant strain of social critique in the novel. What happens to Jodie is what happens to so many other men in Hurston’s work: they ruin themselves on their own desire. To leave a reading of the relationship between

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Jodie, the mule, and the rest of Eatonville at such an antagonistic point, however, would be to ignore what is shared between Jodie and the community. During the course of the aforementioned debate on Starks’s impact on the townspeople, Sam Watson proclaims in reference to Starks, “Speakin’ of winds, he’s de wind and we’se de grass. We bend which ever way he blows . . . but at dat us needs him. De town wouldn’t be nothin’ if it wasn’t for him” (46). Sam’s statement goes unchallenged among the porchsitters, and the chapter concludes with narration compatible with Sam’s assessment, in which a kind of partial, folk description of the operations of hegemony is offered: The town had a basketful of feelings good and bad about Joe’s positions and possessions, but none had the temerity to challenge him. They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down. (47)

In the dialectical relationship between Starks and the town expressed in these chapter-ending lines, one finds that Joe encompasses the community’s contradictory desires. It is not going too far to say that Starks incorporates Eatonville in more than merely the legal sense. If there is a body representative of the social body of the town, it is that of the man without which “de town wouldn’t be nothin”—a phrase which in its double negative leaves the “solidness” of the whole place in some doubt, in need of the constant ideological and practical re-enforcement that he is always willing to provide. Eatin’ville does worship this big-bellied man who has set his wife for “still-bait” and staged barbecues to raise public funds, personal profile, and communal feeling. His god is in his belly, the same as theirs; their eyes have been watching him, loving him, and hating him. Thence the catharsis of the “dragging out,” which provides an outlet for the community’s repressed feelings of rage against Starks—now displaced upon the mule whose liberation he has sponsored. And Joe, ever the master propagandist (consciously or not), even manages to preside over the ceremony, cooking up the meal that will allow Eatonville, again, to “[chew] up the back parts of their minds and [swallow] with relish.” However ably he negotiates power in the minds of the porchsitters, Starks can manage neither the material effects of his expropriative relations with the community on his body nor the behavior of the one citizen he has purposefully excluded from the drag out: his wife (whom Eatonville has also been watching closely). The former will provide opportunity for the latter; the latter will direct the community’s killing laughter at Joe. The tale of the vultures foreshadows Joe’s death and the behavior of the community in its aftermath. Just as the vultures would first pluck out Joe’s eyes and then pick the bones clean, men will first participate in Joe’s symbolic castration and then

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come from miles around to pluck up Janie and what is now legally her fortune, once every bit of it Joe’s.13 So the utterance of the phrase “you look like you gone through the change of life” proves Jodie’s undoing and Janie’s liberation. Janie’s constative announcement is performative, for it affixes the label of the aging feminine to Jodie. At this moment, he begins to learn what it feels like to be “the mule of the world” and it effects that other, final change of life. Janie’s identification of Jodie with aging womanhood, among other things, warrants some consideration of the operation of the “permeable membrane” of gender in the constitution of Eyes, and, of course, the free and indirect narration of this text invites challenges to all sorts of identity boundaries we would establish between characters, narrator(s?), and author(s) of this text.14 Certainly, “the change of life,” as one of the culture’s most forceful formulations of the end of menses and an indicator of its reproductive imperative for women, is a term with which Hurston at circa forty-five must come to grips, and there are other parallels to warrant the claim that Hurston identifies with Jody’s predicament. She too knows what it is to be in a relationship with someone much younger, to be jealous of their attentions, to be made to feel vulnerable because of difference in age. She herself must be anticipating— if not experiencing—her own “change of life,” and considering what that could mean for her, a black woman without the “protection” of marriage or income. Hurston, who to a degree known to few other successful authors performed without a net, depended deeply on her friends, particularly her white friends who supported her career. And her body has been part of her protection, because it has allowed her to pass for young (and in the case of Mary Osgood Mason and, perhaps, Fanny Hurst, because Hurston’s youthful vitality has enabled the projection of their fantasies of the African-American body as the home of the primitive erotic.)15 But how much longer will her body hold out? The most graphic descriptions of the body in this novel are reserved for those that betray the ambitions of their “owners,” older bodies that desire younger ones. The inventory conducted upon them is not merely unsparing; it is brutally disparaging. Ultimately, what is projected in Eyes is not a fear of aging as such but a fear of the ridicule, the soul-killing signifying practices, to which aging within a relationship to a much younger person can expose one, both in Eatonville and in America at large. (The final question uttered by the porchsitters in the opening scene is “why don’t she stay in her class?,” but it follows hard on a sequence of questions regarding Janie’s relationship to Tea Cake, questions focusing on the difference in their ages. Finally, they speculate, “Betcha he off wid some gal so young she ain’t even got no hairs” (3). In the wake of such utterances, one wonders exactly what kind of “class” is being

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referred to here. And of course, soon enough we will learn that, for Pheoby, “The worst thing Ah knowed her to do was taking a few years offa her age and dat ain’t never harmed nobody” (3).) Killicks, Tyler, and Starks each suffer the humiliation the porchsitters wish upon Janie. Eyes doesn’t challenge hegemonic scripting of aging in a significant way; it rewrites it obsessively, with remarkable rhetorical force. In the wake of Janie’s verbal dressing down, Jodie despairs: “There was nothing to do in life anymore. Ambition was useless” (76). The only response he can mount to his crisis is to begin seeing “root doctors” and “people he never bothered with one way or the other,” because he is “driven by a desperate hope to appear the old-time body in her sight” (78). This hope is singularly deluded. Jodie’s root doctors can no more restore his old-time body than Annie Tyler’s corsets can restore hers. Nothing appears more abased, more abject, in this novel than the old trying to be young again. Faced with her own change of life, however, Hurston, like the representative woman of the novel’s second paragraph, gets busy: she (re)produces.16 Reproduction is discursive in this novel in which children are neither seen nor heard; Janie tells her tale to Pheoby and that is her reproductive act. In doing so, she makes good on her statement that “mah tongue is in mah friends mouf ” (6), a formulation that at once provides an image of generative coitus and narrative intimacy and trust (at the same time that it distinguishes Pheoby from the rest of Eatonville, which could be counted on to chew that tongue up). The tale that Pheoby enables by virtue of her “hungry listening” is for women and it is about female generativity: “Now, the beginning of this was a woman.” Jehovah, Joe Starks, and John Hurston must all stand aside while Zora Janie—on behalf of Pheoby, Nanny, Annie, Lucy Hurston and diminutives everywhere—provides the Word. Its message is something like Nanny’s, only it doesn’t put the black woman “on high,” it does something better: it makes her feel like she’s “growed ten feet higher” (182). That way, wherever you go, you take your advantage with you. Zora Hurston, who as a child defied her preacher father, the man she and her siblings called “Big Nigger” behind his back, by insisting on gobbling up dime fiction and Nick Carter novels and all manner of the devil’s work (Lyons 144), has our eyes following her bodies, her text.

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Afterword

After the completion of my dissertation in 2000, a new biography of Zora Neale Hurston, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, written by Atlanta-based journalist Valerie Boyd appeared, as did Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, a collection edited by noted Hurston scholar Carla Kaplan. To read these new publications is to be impressed anew, and more deeply, at the extent to which Hurston’s life was a continual exercise in practical ethnology, of studying the ways of the white farthest up so she could study and write about the “negro farthest down.” Puzzling out how to navigate the “folkways” of white friends, professors, patrons, universities, and foundations—while jockeying for position among African-American contemporaries seeking intellectual recognition, literary fame, and financial support—required an astonishing proportion of Hurston’s astonishing energy. The letters especially, with their accounts of foundation grants extended then denied; of patrons flattered, cajoled, and perhaps even threatened; of university administrators courted and jilted; of friends and rivals made and unmade; as much suggest the career that might have been as explain the career that was. The effort Hurston expended merely for the opportunity to write would leave most writers with nothing left for the actual writing. One wonders at the tower she might have built. Though there is little in these publications, then, that fundamentally alters my reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God, they nevertheless provide material for a more richly matrixed understanding of the biographical and discursive forces that produced the novel. Looming large among these forces is the pressurizing poverty that was Hurston’s nearly constant companion from age thirteen until her death, and both the newly published biography and the letters allow a more vivid understanding of Hurston’s financially straightened circumstances. It is not overdramatic to say that poverty, beginning at the moment her father sent her away to Florida Baptist Academy in Jacksonville after the death her mother, 123

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stalked Zora Neale Hurston right up to her death. It was at the academy, where a school administrator made a habit of yelling out a window at the thirteen year old near-orphan that she must pay her bills, that Hurston first encountered money-related humiliations that left her “shrunk up inside” (qtd. in Boyd 53). As Robert Hemenway notes in his foreword to Kaplan’s collection, an analysis of Hurston’s letters would reveal that over 50% of their content was in some way about her lack of, and need for, money (4). The correspondence itself is limited by lack of money, as Hurston avers in a letter to Mason where she indicates that the expense of postage and materials has narrowed her circle of correspondents (277). From the letters that she could not afford not to write, however, emerge passages like this one found in a message to Barnard College trustee Annie Meyer while Hurston was at that institution: I have been my own sole support since I was 13 years old. I’ve taken some tremendous loss and survived terrific shocks. . . . If I am losing my capacity for shock absorbing, if privation is beginning to terrify me, you will appreciate the situation and see that it isn’t cowardice, but that by being pounded so often on the anvil of life I am growing less resilient. Physical suffering unnerves me now. (66)

One also finds in an important letter to Franz Boas regarding the Rosenwald scholarship that Hurston received (only to have it summarily reduced from $3000.00 to $700.00, a reduction that made Hurston’s pursuit of the doctorate it was supposed to support impossible). In the correspondence, Hurston connects, for the famed anthropologist, the dots between “lack of discipline”—a complaint frequently leveled against her by white academics and foundation administrators—and poverty: Now I know that this is going to call for rigorous routine and discipline, which every body seems to feel that I need. . . . I wonder if it ought not to be taken into consideration that I have been on my own since fourteen years old and went to high school, college and everything progressive that I have done because I wanted to, and not because I was being pushed? . . . I have had two or three people say to me, ‘why don’t you go and take a master’s or doctor’s degree in Anthropology since you love it so much.’ They never seem to realize that it takes money to do that. I had such a hard time getting the money to take my bachelor’s that I could appreciate what it meant to attempt to attend a college on nothing. Another thing, it is hard to apply ones self to study when there is no money to pay for food and lodging. I almost never explain these things

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when folks are asking me why don’t I do this and that. I have to make a living, and consequently I have to do the jobs that will support me. (326)

Reading through correspondence like the above, one is struck by the tremendous emotional work required of Hurston to mask the frustration, fear, and humilation of her dependency on white patrons and institutions. Many of Hurston’s letters to “Godmother” Mary Osgood Mason, can be read as painful signs of Stockholm syndrome, or as subversively parodic flights of rhetorical excess, or as both at once. Amidst paeans to her sponsor, one finds descriptions of Mason that closely resemble that given to the god of the hurricane in Eyes. Mason is inscrutable, arbitrary, and a law unto herself: For after all you are the last word, no matter what I do or don’t. I can [not x-ed out] neither be present when you sit in judgment, nor cry out under sentence. You cannot be wrong, for [any x-ed out] everything that I am, I am because you made me. You can smile upon me, and you can look off towards immensity and be equally right. You have been gracious, but you were following no law except your inclination. (249–50)

It is impossible to read the letters without sensing the substantial liberation a commercially successful novel would provide to Hurston. The failure of individual and institutional patrons to understand Hurtson’s predicament—and their concomitant capriciousness—motivates the writing of Eyes and especially its final scene, where a financially secure and self-possessed Janie is ready to gather her memories to herself. Robert Hemenway comments in his foreword that “Hurston spent an entire lifetime trying to buy time to create” (5). Hurston’s letters testify to the full expense of gaining purchase, and Eyes’ ending imagines the liberatory result of its own success. The letters argue, as well, that the settled quality of the Eyes’ ending is a function not only of Janie’s financial security but of her secure finding of place, and they reveal the depths of Hurston’s own desire for such a haven. By the time Hurston had begun Eyes, she had experienced enough hardships on the road to tire of her Roads Scholarship and yearn for something else. A Negro woman traveling by automobile in an impoverished American South where lynching was a weekly occurrence, Hurston slept many a night in her car and was nervous enough about her vulnerability to carry a gun. She begins Eyes sometime after narrowly escaping a knife fight while gathering folklore in a Louisiana Turpentine camp, and she suffered what she believed to be deliberate, acute poisoning while doing research in Haiti. Hurston’s constant battles with gastrointestinal illness were at the least exacerbated by—and perhaps entirely due to—unsanitary food, drink, and water that courtesy and ne-

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cessity dictated she consume on her folklore gathering missions. Hurston, who insisted on living alone most of her life, who, indeed, never lived with any of her husbands, often, especially in her letters written in thirties, pined for the “peace and quiet to sit down and try to learn how to write in truth” (qtd. in “Forward” 5). Both Boyd’s biography indicates still other reasons why Hurston might fear an aging body that would one day “tell on her” and end or alter important relationships. Boyd plausibly argues that the events that effectively orphaned Hurston at age thirteen led her to maternalize and paternalize potential and actual patrons in later life. Hurston reserved terms not merely of patronage but of parentage for her greatest financial and academic benefactors, Mary Osgood Mason and Franz Boas. Hurston’s consistent deployment of “papa” and “godmother” and her willingness to adopt the “posture of the supplicant child—the irresponsible, adorable pickaninny” (Kaplan 49) in some of her correspondence with Mason indicate her willing play with the powerful stereotype of negro as child and her calculation that it could be made to serve her purposes. And the playfulness of some of her references does not undercut the parent-child dynamic but, in fact, re-enforces it, because such play is often a strong feature of fond parent-child relations. Boyd’s Freudianization of these relationships indicates the presence of less opportunistic motive. They also suggest that the prospect that Hurston’s alwaysfraught relationship with Mary Osgood Mason might change—age—in irrevocable ways was a source of considerable anxiety. And finally, Boyd’s biography reminds us of the contemporaneousness of Hurston with Dos Passos and encourages further contextualization of her age dissembling within a larger cultural framework. The Jazz Age is, after all, the Sex Age. The twenties form a watershed in changed attitudes toward the body, its youth, and its pleasures. Boyd tells us that is was during this period that the term “sex appeal” was created and that the Allain Locke’s “New Negro” was, implicitly, a young negro (110). Hurston was not the only African-American woman in her circle of friends in twenties Harlem who lied about her age—they all did. In light of the over-determination of the culture to burden them with each year, it would be a great wonder if they hadn’t.

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Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1. This is not to say that Lynn’s biography, with which I am unfamiliar, lacks these considerations, only that Crews’s appropriation of Lynn scants them. 2. Mary Elaine Tyler provides an extended discussion of momist discourse during this period in her book about post-WW II America, Homeward Bound. 3. It should be noted that in his retrospective chapter on Sins of the Fathers Crews himself advocates an approach that would balance biography with sociological and discursive analysis. 4. Sociology has long studied aging, but literary and cultural studies have been slow to engage with discourses of aging. 5. This issue is also, obviously, one of class, gender, and race as well. Poverty greatly contributes to the misery of these groups, and minorities are more likely to be poor. Because on average they live longer, women make up a greater portion of the elderly, and because women, on average, make less than men, they are often poor. Finally, in many cases it is women and women alone who are charged with the care for poor children.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 1. The biographical background that immediately follows here is summarized from Robertson-Lorant’s Melville: A Biography and Herschel Parker’s two volume Herman Melville: A Biography. 2. This assessment, made in the preface to the first volume of his Melville biography, is Herschel Parker’s. Parker assiduously documents the reactions of readers to both Typee and Melville, remarking, “However warm the feelings [Melville] excited over his fears of being devoured by cannibals, the warmest feelings he excited were always sexual” (265). Parker also provides ample evidence that feelings of nearly equal warmth were generated in those who believed Melville’s novel exerted a corrupting influence and that Melville himself was “sexually dangerous, and even depraved” (529). 3. Robertson-Laurant claims that in defending Typee Melville is defending not only the integrity of his book but his own integrity as well, since family and friends had nicknamed him “Typee.” She goes on to say, “Whether he liked it or not, [Melville] had become a product of the marketplace, a piece of public property to be shown off, then

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5. 6.

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fattened up for the kill, just as Tommo had feared he might be in the Typee Valley” (149). The extent to which Melville felt that his honor was truly endangered, however, is a matter of conjecture. The preface of Typee seems to purposely tease readers on the veracity issue. And there is reason to believe that defending his honor served Melville’s commercial interests by stirring the pot of controversy. As for the second part of Robertson-Lorant’s claim, Melville may well have come to see himself in somewhat the same light that she does, as a victim sacrificed to a voracious, essentially envious readership. I will pursue this point later. In the preface and opening pages of Typee one finds substantial evidence that Melville is already jousting with readers over their perceptual frame and values. His is the condescension of the worldly sailor and intercultural traveler for the culturally landlocked. His decision to name his protagonist after his 14-year-old brother who so hangs on his stories is suggestive of his estimation of the emotional and intellectual maturity of readers who over-invest in the character of Tommo. Leyda, Log, 703–4 I take this particular formulation from Face Value: Physiognomical Thought and the Legible Body in Marivaux, Lavater, Balzac, Gautier, and Zola. Rivers’s book provides important discursive background for my reading of Billy Budd. Melville begins Billy Budd in 1886, the year the Haymarket Square bombing, when there was substantial labor strife and social unrest, much of it linked to the immigrant influx during the period. Melville read of Cloots in Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. Cloots’s name arises, usually earlier than late, in much of Melville’s later work, including Moby Dick, The Confidence-Man, and Pierre. Melville may have brought Cloots up so frequently as much for his name as for his deeds. The Prussian aristocrat—who participated in the French Revolution, voted for the execution of Louis the Fourteenth, and later was himself guillotined—was likely a figure foolish, noble, and dangerous to Melville, his name both outrageous and appropriate in the way it confounds anarchy and catharsis, then begins to hoot. Melville also knows that his readers see the body and “civilization” as often opposed, that they perceive the body as a source of discontent within civilization. Decades of exposure to nineteenth-century anthropology, evolving evolutionary science, and incipient health sciences have taught them that civilization holds dangers for their bodies, that reliance on the technological products of their minds can render them lazy and flaccid, that the overwork of their minds in complicated systems of exchange and organization can bring on disease and mental illness, and that even the manifest pleasures of the body that the explosion of wealth and production during the nineteenth century affords exacts its price in the form of obesity and its liabilities: gout, dissipation, and general slackening. Melville’s opening implicitly adumbrates a critique of “civilization” and its effects on male bodies that is familiar to his readers. In the process he arguably activates anxieties and fantasies of the body that are equally familiar. For a thorough account of nineteenth-century middle class fears of becoming the victims of prosperity, see Harvey Green’s Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport and American Society. For nineteenth-century anthropology and biology, see John Hoberman’s Mortal Engines: The Science of Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport.

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Knowing what we do about Melville’s life and career, it is impossible to read the lines “In the time before steamships” without thinking that it resonated with enormous and varied meanings for Melville, at the same time that, as he must have sensed, for the reader it began the story with a light, adventuresome tone. This line marks Melville’s acute awareness of distance between readerly expectation and interpretation and writerly intention. Otherwise interpreted as, in keeping with the strength and beauty motif, the Belle et Potent. Melville originally named the ship the Indomitable but later changed it. Much of the following account is summarized from Christine McHugh’s “Phrenology: Getting Your Head Together in Antebellum America.” One thinks here of Bartleby and the speculations of the lawyer/narrator when he discovers the scrivener in his chambers on a Sunday in a state of “deshabille.” And it is evident that the narrator, insofar as he seeks a diagnosis for the behavior of all his employees, explains most of it as the result of perversions of diet, exercise, and temperament rather than of woeful work conditions and bleak prospects. For a recent discussion of homosexuality and cannibalism in Melville’s work, see Caleb Cain, “Lovers of Human Flesh: Homosexuality and Cannibalism in Melville’s Novels.” Cain, following a discussion of the way in which male-male love and cannibalism, both of which “shared the trope of preterition and the topos of the South Seas,” were conflated in the nineteenth century mind, notes that it is commonplace for readers to see homo-erotic longing in the gaze Claggart aims at Billy but that “the hunger in the gaze could be subject to a simpler exegesis” (43). In “Billy Budd: A Psychological Autopsy,” Nathaniel Floyd comments upon the “paroxysm of homosexual panic” and “phantasmagoria of rape imagery” (46) in this passage. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in pursuing her argument about the workings of paranoid knowledge in Billy Budd while examining the story’s function at the historical moment of the formulation of the “homosexual,” makes a similar observation. Georges Buffon, Oeuvres Philosophiques de Buffon Paris: PUF, 1954. Remembering Roberston-Lorant’s claims regarding Melville’s usage at the hands of readers, one is tempted to pursue this comparison further. Not only have readers and critics fattened Melville up for the kill but also—like Claggart viewing Budd—readers have gazed upon the body of Tommo/Melville with a mind for cannibalism and sexual experience. That Melville may not have actually experienced on Nukuheva all that he claims to have seems to “ruin it” for some of his audience, further bearing witness to a prurient, voyeuristic impulse that the young Melville both takes advantage of and scorns. And Melville is in an essentially enviable position vis-a-vis an audience that will never have his experience. Envy is the one explicitly clear motive attributed to Claggart in his dealings that prevent the happy marriage of “two of Nature’s nobler types,” Vere and Budd, who, in the allegory I now pursue, represent Melville the sailor and Melville the writer. Finally, Claggart occupies a kind of middle ground; his station is above (though undeservedly so) Budd the common sailor but far below Vere the bookish and insightful captain. Just so the relation of readers to Melville as a sailor and Melville as an author (he of Olympian perspective). In other words, readers are Claggarts, the marplots of Melville’s fiction and life, and Claggart is the image of a reader.

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Notes to Chapter Two Barbara Johnson comments that Claggart, in appearance and practice, is “a personification of ambiguity and ambivalence” (237) but focuses on Claggart as an ironic reader. See her “Melville’s Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd.” And perhaps, again, as a delicate morsel. According to Cain, Georg H. von Langsdorrf (whose Voyages and Travels in Various Parts of the World during the Years 1803, 1804, 1805, 1806, and 1807 served as a source text for Typee and Omoo), in a passage on eating human flesh, comments that “‘the inside of the hand and the sole of the foot are the nicest parts of the human body” (qtd in Cain 36). Langsdorrf also makes explicit comparisons of the bodies of young Marquesan males with Greek statuary. One wonders to what degree Melville’s return to the sea may have meant a return to old source texts. Parker reports that Melville last pencil revisions of Billy Budd leave ambiguous clues for interpreting Vere’s actions, stating that they go “in at least two directions” (Vol. 2 886). See, for example, Herschel Parker in Reading Billy Budd, 174. Parker reports that late in life Melville cultivated an unobtrusive air. At the custom’s house he strove to avoid calling the attention to himself, quietly refusing bribes and resisting attempts at extortion in such a way as to avoid bringing the attention of superiors. John Hoadley, a friend of the extended family, delivers the following report: “Proud, shy, sensitively honorable—[Melville] had much to overcome, and has much to endure; but he strives earnestly to so perform his duties as to make the slightest censure, reprimand, and even reminder,—impossible from any superior” (756–57). Parker concludes from this and other sources that at work Melville exercised “formidable self-control” (757). Outside the workplace as well, Melville produced a Vere-like near-invisibility. A Dr. Samuel Arthur Jones reports his surprise at viewing a portrait of Melville in his copy of the 1892 edition of Typee and realizing that he had often seen the author haunting bookstores: “In the flesh, he did not show either strength or determination; on the contrary, he was the quietest, meekest, retiringest man you can imagine. He moved from shelf to shelf so quietly—I never saw him speak to anyone—and his air was that of shrinking timidity; by no stretach of the imaginataion would one have thought him an author of any repute” (757–58). For a discussion of Vere’s reading that follows lines similar to my own, see Brook Thomas, “Billy Budd and the Judgment of Silence.” This quote is extracted from a discussion of Freud and the Law. For a consideration of the father-son relationship between Billy and Vere, see Peter L. Hays and Richard Dilworth Rust, “‘Something Healing’: Fathers and Sons in Billy Budd.” Hays and Rust, using details of Melville’s relationship with his wife and children, especially Malcolm, who committed suicide with a pistol while dressed in full military uniform, argue that Melville—a man known to have terrorized his wife and children on occasion—achieves something of an imaginary reconciliation with his son, whom he apparently disciplined frequently for carousing. The suffocating or menacing quality of care is a frequent theme for Melville, as it is in the lengthy, previously quoted passage from Freud that suggests the vicarious pleasures to be derived from infantalizing or prolonging the infanthood of another. In Typee Tommo never shakes the suspicion that he is being well cared for because he is to be eaten. Pierre must escape his suffocating mother. Bartleby grows more and more

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thin while the lawyer/narrator cheaply purchases a “delicious” sense of his own charity. Babies turn out to be as much fed upon as feeding. Gregory S. Jay, in America the Scrivener suggests that Bartleby, by withdrawing from writing and refusing to copy, is demonstrating “a willed disobedience to every prescription in his culture’s general text”(21). Billy’s response is just the opposite, and some commentators have wondered whether his “innocence” is therefore so easily maintained. It is not my purpose here to pursue a comparative reading of Melville’s two great infants, Ba(rtle)by the Scrivener and Baby Budd, Sailor, but I will note in passing that their responses to texts, food, and fathers differ in suggestive ways, and that the degree to which a reading can both pursue Vere for moral culpability and preserve Billy as innocent depends upon our reading of the latter as infant. Just how much Shakespeare might have been on Melville’s conscious mind here is a matter of conjecture, but certain intertextual linkages with the playwrite’s own final work, The Tempest , seem worth noting, beginning with the projection on the part of Billy that he will be changed to a “jewel-block,” a “pendant pearl”—transformations that call to mind Ariel’s song about Ferdinand’s father, the King of Naples, who, drowned in a shipwreck, undergoes a “sea-change,” his bones becoming coral, his eyes, pearls. Both works trace the fates of savages (one manifestly noble, the other arguably originally so until corrupted by European contact) at the hands of isolated, mature, book-wielding men of extraordinary manipulative ability and intention. Whereas Melville mentions Montaigne in passing, Shakespeare quotes from his “Of Cannibals” in his play. Their three texts bring together issues of patriarchy, imperialism, textual production, and learning to speak a language, either to curse or to bless one’s oppressor. Prospero and Melville share old-manhood, a certain enfeeblement, and pronounced, forced marginalization, though both have also purposely embraced a library and certain experiments in metaphysics rather than the life of a man of the world. James Duban makes narration the focus of his discussion of Billy Budd in Melville’s Major Fiction: Politics, Theology, and Imagination. He builds a strong case, as have others, for the arch-conservative bias and unreliability of the narrator. In general terms, I agree with Duban on the character of the narrator, but I perhaps differ with him regarding the degree of separation achieved between Melville and his storyteller. In Subversive Genealogies Micheal Rogin discusses the involvement of Melville’s father in the importation of clothing and dry goods, the commercial activity that led to his ruin and threw Herman and his mother and brother upon the mercy of relatives. Rogin argues persuasively that the senior Melville was deeply ambivalent about this involvement in a trade that enabled persons—in an era not too far removed from that in which sumptuary laws were enforced—to misrepresent social station and “self ” so brazenly. Clothing thus became linked early on in Melville’s mind with corruptions of market place, of character, and of personal relations. Finally, these weeds might be further connected intertextually with both labor exploitation and the act of writing. The maids in “The Tartarus of Maids,” whose tale companions “The Paradise of Bachelors” and on whose labor that paradise so clearly depends, toil in a mill, shredding clothes for the production of paper. A strong sense of sibling rivalry and Claggart-like envy are also likely motives. Both Melville’s father and his mother had high hopes that Gansevoort, the eldest, would enjoy great success, but Herman was considered the slow one.

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NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 1. Both Dos Passos and his father were, in bodily appearance and in ethnicity, if not in dress and station, a part of this “swarthy” immigrant horde that aroused the very anxieties that helped fuel the physical culture movement. 2. Dos Passos describes this effort to separate wheat from chaff in his memoir, The Best Times (44). For a characteristic reference to his “sponginess,” see diary entries on pages 89 and 127 of The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos, edited by Townsend Ludington. All subsequent references to diary entries or letters are taken from this volume, unless otherwise noted. 3. Thomas Strychacz likewise makes the claim that U.S.A. “seems to document the increasing powerlessness of the writer” (121). 4. All quotations from U.S.A. are taken from the 1996 Library of America edition. Though the three novels are gathered in one and paginated consecutively, all references will include the title of the novel from which the passage is quoted. 5. This reborn author, oddly enough, has in it something of the contrary discourses of agrarianism and modernism that inform one of Dos Passos’ own arch-villains, Henry Ford, who as much as anyone in this century could be said to have “dominate[d] the machine of production,” yet who lived out his last days attempting to recreate the world that machine had destroyed. 6. In Camera Eye 50 in The Big Money, Dos Passos figures the death of the two anarchists as a blood sacrifice that has “redeemed” the language, a move that would allow him to continue to write, in the face of the failure of his writing—and everyone else’s—to save the anarchists. 7. The biographical account offered here, unless otherwise indicated, draws upon Dos Passos’ The Best Times, Townsend Ludington’s Twentieth Century Odyssey: The Life of John Dos Passos, and Virginia Spencer Carr’s Dos Passos: A Life. 8. Dos Passos’ childhood provides him with a significantly touristic outlook that he attempts to both take advantage of and transcend. The tourist’s body is valuable mainly for where it has been and what it has seen, smelled, heard, felt, and tasted that someone else has not. It is a crucial instrument in textual production, the “camera eye” that records impressions that will later be catalogued, and stylized by the writer. Dos Passos’ letters are crammed with such description, and it is for this kind of writing that his influential professor at Harvard, Charles Townsend Copeland, most often praised Dos Passos. For examples of these latter comments, see Carr 66–68. 9. Ludington indicates that Dos Passos was sheltered from contact with other children. He writes, “DP’s memories often reflected his acute sense that as a child he was intimidated by a threatening world beyond his own intimate one” (16). He cites one particular memory of Dos Passos, who once, at his mother’s behest, gave a pretzel to a boy on the street, “a pitiably ragged boy with smudged face, through whose torn shirt I remember catching sight of grimy little ribs.” For days after, he remembers the boy’s hand, which “very rough and very hard, brushed against mine” (17). 10. Dos Passos went by his mother’s name, Madison, until she and his father were married after the death of his first wife. 11. Linda Wagner notes that in manuscript all mentions of failure to skate are underlined (106).

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Gradually, inevitably, awe would be supplanted by a more ambivalent attitude, as Dos Passos became aware of the way in which his father’s business ambition and egotism contributed to his mother’s extraordinary emotional burden and his own deep insecurity. “Painfully” thin, myopic, prone to illness, deferential in face-to-face encounters, and shy before crowds, the son in many ways could not have been more different from his father. Nevertheless, Dos Passos maintained throughout his life an admiration for his father’s willingness to take unpopular positions, noted closely the care in correspondence he took with both his mother and his son, and cherished many of the times he spent with him. The literary ambitions his father pursued in his spare moments became the central pursuit of his son’s life. His ability to stand against a crowd became for his son the hallmark of a principled masculinity. Dos Passos’ letters and journals find him making explicit, proud references to the distances of his walks. While Dos Passos eyes feasted on the sights of “the cheaper parts” of Boston, his palate similarly enjoyed a grand tour. Habituated to gourmet occasions while abroad with his mother, he and his friends made a ritual of Friday nights spent gourmandizing in the variety of restaurants Cambridge offered, going from one establishment to another and thereby piecing together, over the course of an evening, a several course dinner, sometimes fitting in a play, symphony, or ballet in between. In his senior year, he describes a picnic in which he and some friends took cold roast chicken, cheeses, jellies, and other items out into the country, where, as Dos Passos exclaims, they had “a most delightful souper sur l’herbe on a hillside that fronted the sunset. I’ve never known anything so delightful. It was a wonderful red-orange sunset, fading gradually through rose-purple and violet to a sort of dim lavender with a yellow sheen” (Fourteenth Chronicle 37). The overlay of descriptive detail in this passage is characteristic of Dos Passos at Harvard and after. While much of his writing from this time asserts the limitations of the privilege he and his classmates enjoyed, decrying the “ethercone” in which they existed, it also, by its subject matter, its references, and the sensuous detail in which it is rendered, exults in the privilege he decries—and testifies to his feeling that his refined senses are important to his success as a writer, that they are cultural capital to be protected and invested in his writing. As is often the case with Dos Passos, irony expresses his sense of the limited potential for the privileged to shed their privilege. The spice metaphor suggests the degree to which elites will ultimately be guided by the boundaries of good taste as they are carefully negotiated through politely impolite conversation. Dos Passos comments in a letter to Rumsey Martin express dismay at the paradox of being “democratized” in an undemocratic institutional setting: After expressing approval of the army “because it would make young men rub shoulders more, get to know people outside of their class—be actually instead of theoretically democratic,” he continues, “But the devil of it is that military affairs lead the other way—Just think of the insufferable snobbery of army officers, of the swagger everything in uniform puts on when it runs up against a poor civilian (why I expect to be shoved off the very pavement by the breadth of your shoulders—your chestiness when I see you again)— and the messy picture of a military democracy—poet and peasant, doctor and butcher, arm in arm, sweating together, marching together, heroizing together, to the tune of a patriotic song . . .” (Fourteenth Chronicle 45).

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Notes to Chapter Three A letter to Rumsey Marvin is again revealing of Dos Passos attitude: “Don’t think that I’ve gone militarist or believe in conscription—far from it. I merely want to see a little of the war personally—and, then, too, I rather believe that the deeper we Americans go into it, the harder we put our shoulders to the muskets and our breasts to the bayonets, the sooner the butchery will stop” (Fourteenth Chronicle 71). This passage is from a letter to Charles Norman written decades after the event. Dos Passos’ ship was only two days behind the first American troop convoy to launch for Europe. He describes its cargo as “fear, patriotism, and young men in uniform” (qtd. in Carr 123). If he sneered at the ideology espoused in the YMCA songbook, Dos Passos was a willing, if not eager, participant in the nightly songfests it supported. Buoyed by the adventure of his enterprise and by finding five socialists on board, including the playwright John Howard Lawson, to whom he would become a good friend, Dos Passos enjoyed his voyage, later describing it as “one long party” (qtd. in Carr 124). Though troubled by an overheard, bellicose conversation between the sons of Teddy Roosevelt and constantly attended by his life preserver—worn in case of submarine attack—Dos Passos spent much of his time lying on deck, his mind in a “grey, cloudy nirvana” (qtd. in Carr 125). Landing in France, the party continued. Dos Passos and his fellow volunteers soon found themselves in Paris, where they awaited the tailoring of uniforms from a fashionable city shop. Dos, as he had come to be called by his friends at Harvard, carried special I.D., as did his friends, which allowed him to freely roam a city where gendarmes stopped and closely questioned all men of fighting age. He and friends Robert Hillyer and Frederick van den Arend began calling themselves The Three Musketeers. Outside of the maimed or wounded soldier occasionally encountered on the streets, little evidence of the carnage of the war filtered to the city. Paris teemed with soldiers on leave, prostitutes, and people glad to see the Americans. “Athos, Porthos, and D’Artagnan” made the rounds through the city, taking in its gardens, its architecture, its ballets, and its operas. At one point, writing to Rumsey Martin, Dos Passos tells of the exhilaration he felt upon serving as a stretcher carrier in a French hospital, where, he later said in The Best Times, he carried “buckets full of amputated arms and hands and legs from an operating room” (70). In the letter, Dos Passos first praises Martin, who had just procured work in a shipyard, for seeking out such work, then compares his own present duties—details of which he leaves out—to farmwork, adding that “doing ‘unskilled’ labor must make one lay hold on the elementary facts of existence in a wonderful way” (Fourteenth Chronicle 193–94). It is a strange conflation of types of “unskilled labor,” given the grisly qualities of Dos Passos’ duties, and it seems to want to assert that temporary experience of such work gives one a kind of baseline experience that enables universalized understanding of life. It is not at all clear, looking at the letter, that Dos Passos is being intentionally, darkly ironic in suggesting that he can “lay hold” of the “elementary facts” of existence when his differs so radically from those of the men whose limbs he carries, many of whom can no longer perform manual labor. Pierre Bourdieu asserts that “there is an instrumental relation to the body which the working classes express in all practices centered on the body . . . which is also manifested in the choice of sports requiring a considerable investment of effort, sometimes of pain and suffering (e.g., boxing) and sometimes of gambling with the body itself ” (838). Bourdieu’s comments suggest the functional interplay between realms of work

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and play, the aestheticization of functional body types that are now pursued in sport (or Foucauldian truth games). Certainly one can also read in this passage a pose of aristocratic disdain for the danger and privation that war brings. And it is possible to overstate the degree of privilege that Dos Passos “enjoyed” during the war. Though none of the drivers in the Norton-Harjes service were mortally wounded during the war, they were by no means strangers to danger or suffering. Most drivers, after a fortnight in the field, “looked out from sunken eyes and cheeks, and most suffered dysentery from the gas. Their weight had fallen off fifteen to twenty-five pounds no matter how successful they may have been in foraging for food” (Carr 137). The crucial advantage of Dos Passos’ position is that such suffering can be assimilated to an “experience” that is convertible into marketable text. The soldiers, when they aren’t being killed, are being deskilled; he, reskilled. Dos Passos ended up far behind the lines in Italy. The Italian government apparently viewed the ARC’s function as primarily “ornamental,” and the ARC saw its role in many ways as making for good relations with the Italian government. Opportunities for sightseeing far outnumbered the occasions for meaningful driving. Dos Passos grew bored and railed against the idiocies of war and governments. A journal entry from the time summarizes his hardening sentiments regarding the causes of the conflict: “The one thing that enslaves people more than any other to the servitude of war is nationalism—the patriotic cant . . . all the noxious influences of the world seem to have thrown their tentacles about it—Its the mask of all the tradegreed and glory greed” (Ludington 139). Some of these thoughts began to make their way into letters that passed before the eyes of censors. Dos Passos’ textual production while in training in Allentown, Pennsylvania was a poem entitled “Queen Ennui”; his principal activity, washing windows. He later served a brief stint as a quartermaster sergeant, as which he ran his ship’s mess and drilled his section in marching. Proving inept—or indifferent—at the latter, he was eventually demoted to private. Arriving in England, his camp was struck with influenza and quarantined. Dos Passos suffered an attack, but unlike so many, survived his four day ordeal (a success he attributed to a refusal to go to the hospital and selfmedication with a bottle of rum). When his classes ended (Dos Passos rarely—if ever—attended, preferring to spend his days at the typewriter), he was re-assigned to a casuals company to await his discharge. While there, Dos Passos’ army records were lost and he became a nonperson—an unknown soldier. He whiled away his two weeks there—under orders—moving scrap iron back and forth across railroad tracks, a form of manual labor, judging from his letters, which did not warrant any further comment regarding being put in touch with elemental facts. Finally, “in a state of despair such as I’ve never suffered before,” he went AWOL, found army headquarters at Tours, managed to find his records, and got his discharge (Ludington 181), but not until, of course, the institution had proved as bureaucratic, regimented, and authoritarian as he had feared. Though sympathetic to the plight of the rank and file, Dos Passos is also disparaging of them. In a letter to Rumsey Martin he asserts, “None of the poor devils whose mangled dirty bodies I take to the hospital in my ambulance really give a damn about this ridiculous affair. They fight because they are too cowardly and too unimaginative

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Notes to Chapter Three not to see which way they ought to turn their guns” (92). In “One Man’s Initiation,” Martin Howe comments, “Have you ever seen a herd of cattle driven to an abattoir on a fine May morning? . . . The herd can be driven by a boy of six . . . or a prime minister” (Carr 132). In another letter to Rumsey Martin, Dos Passos refers to the role of the media in the herding of Americans, calling the public a “bunch of sheep with newspapers for sheepdogs” (qtd. in Ludington 120). Barbara Foley contends that Dos Passos “invites,” “challenges,” and even “requires” readers to construct a totalizing analysis of the forces at work in U.S.A. (429–31). Though she does not explicitly address the stylistics of the narrative sections, she argues that the interplay between the various “belts” in Dos Passos’ factory sets in motion a dialectical process of sense-making conducive to a Marxian understanding of the historical forces at work in the novel. Extrapolating from this argument, one could claim that readers are likewise motivated to a similar participation in making sense of the factory prose in the narrative sections. But it seems that insofar as it challenges conventional reading practices (which often seek closure) through its stylistic innovations, U.S.A. could just as easily be said to discourage such totalizing tendencies, to rather encourage suspicion of them. Such an interpretation aligns more closely with what we know of Dos Passos’ relationship to communism and socialism during this period and with his frequently expressed doubts about the strength of his own political commitments. Absent, too, from the trilogy are the linguistic ties that supposedly bind Dos Passos’ Vag to others—ties given specific reference in the prologue to U.S.A. In the trilogy, it turns out that there are no “homey stories of long ago”—or comic narratives bandied about by males in tightly knit homosocial groups. There are, in fact, no characters who manage to create and sustain strong communal bonds. Rather, its main cast of twelve characters remain vagabonds throughout the novel, chasing their ambitions across continents and oceans to no satisfying effect. If the narrated consciousness of Dos Passos working class and middle class characters is strikingly empty and banal, the quick sketch descriptions of minor characters in the trilogy are invariably disparaging. Here is a representative sample of descriptions of the minor working class characters who people the first fifty pages of The 42nd Parallel: “a lame cavechested man with a whispy blonde-gray mustache”; “a skinny man with a knobbed red face and blurry blue eyes”; “under the beady eyes of a woman with the long neck and pointed face of a hen”; “Pops and Uncle Tim’s faces looked red and snarling”; “a man with a face like a raw steak”; “a big man with a big drooping jaw that gave him a little of the expression of a setter dog”; “a big man and the fat hung loosely on him as he walked”; “a sharpnosed waxyskinned young man with straight black hair standing straight up”; “the greasy sallow jowls . . . hair [stuck] out in a sudden fuzzycurl over the beefy ears”; “a little man with protruding ears who sat in a corner”; “a big scrawny [?] woman with her scant sandy hair done up in a screw on top of her head . . . her red-knuckled hands on her hips”; “a dimplefaced pudgy woman.” The effect of the unrelenting brutality of these descriptions—reinforced by Reginald Marsh’s harsh pen and ink drawings—is unavoidably prejudicial. They cannot be redeemed by an appeal to the conventions of a naturalism that would affect to present the physical effects of lower class life. Donald Pizer’s thesis, for instance, which resonates with my own, is that “[i]n the Camera Eye Dos Passos depicts his maturation into literary radicalism both as a

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30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

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sexual development into a proper masculinity and as a discovery of a literary creed which is symbolically a father and a home” (“Camera Eye” 419). There are, of course, two other distinct “belts” to this factory that I have yet to mention—the Newsreels and the Biographies, and the characteristics of the writing in each of these sections has some relevance to the point I pursue here. The biographies are, for the most part (with two important exceptions that I will talk extensively about later) about famous and influential figures of the first third of the twentieth century. In them we get a kind of impressionistic journalism that rapidly and often deftly covers the trajectory of a “great man’s” career (Isadora Duncan is the only woman Dos Passos deems worthy of a bio). Some figures, such as Randolph Bourne, Wesley Everest, and the Wright brothers, are treated sympathetically. Many others—Ford, Taylor, Morgan—are not. Often the biographies end in ironic anti-climax or defeat: Frederick Taylor dies with his watch in his hand; Henry Ford, in his fabricated pre-iron horse town. Yet if the agency of these figures is often frustrated, it is not absent: all enjoy a certain day in the sun, and they are, ipso facto, granted “influential” status. As for the newsreels, among other things, they provide chronology and context for readers, containing, as they do, snippets of popular songs, headlines, snatches of newspaper stories. They are a barometer of the zeitgeist, or at least of the media’s representation of such. For an illuminating discussion of how readers make these Newsreels function within the trilogy, see Strychacz. Strychaz, who also discusses Dos Passos’ gendered relation to mass culture, notes the strangeness of this choice as well. Indeed, part of the genius of the “unknown soldier” is that it enables such strong identifications on the part of a spooky by-product of modernity, what Howell’s Basil March in A Hazard of New Fortunes calls the “deeply underlying nobody” in everyone. Perhaps hocus pocus would be the better term to use in this particular case, given its derivation from the eucharist’s “Hoc est corpus.” Dos Passos himself had swum in the Marne. A camera eye segment in the novel has him tracing the outlines of his own mortal skull in a Hamlet moment. William Solomon remarks this pun—and the strangeness of the fact that no one has previously bothered to (813). Dos Passos thus shares the fate of J. Ward Moorehouse, who, long having ceased writing ad copy himself and ill at the end of The Big Money, has been strangely disembodied and virtualized, a victim of the very forces of media he has so long wielded. One of his employees says, when he hears that Moorehouse is not feeling well, “J. Ward Moorehouse isn’t a man . . . it’s a name. . . . You can’t feel sorry when a name gets sick” (1199). The brutality of these descriptions calls to mind the treatment of lower class bodies provided in the early pages of The 42nd Parallel. These later desciptions are clearly intended as a critique of the morality of the upper class, but their detailed focus on women’s bodies leaves them compromised by misogyny. Ian Colley uses this term to describe the movement of characters in Manhattan Transfer (49). Given this pointed references to the “transcontinental passengers,” one wonders if Dos Passos is not consciously reworking the dystopic outcome predicted by Thoreau

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40.

in Walden, where, using the transcontinental railroad as a convenient reference, he argues that the upshot of “this activity of joint stocks and spades” will be that “when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding but the rest are run over.” Dos Passos here may be recalling his wartime experience in Italy, where he was often far from the action and living in comparative luxury while others are being blow apart. Ludington records the following ruminative lines of poetry written while Dos Passos was there: “Thick to the lips and velvety/ Scented of rum and vanilla/ Oversweet, oversoft, overstrong/ One goes/ And pukes beautifully beneath the moon,/ Champagne covered” (Dos Passos 153).

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1. Regarding the public and private realms, Bertram Wyatt-Brown delineates the general, long-standing historical differences between North and South in Honor and Violence in the Old South. 2. As Michael Rogin has put it, “Women are what they are; men are what they do. Women, especially black women, are embodied; men transcend” (“Democracy” 16). 3. See Mary Washington’s foreword to the popular Harper Perennial edition of Their Eyes Were Watching God (xi-xiii); and her “‘I Love the Way Janie Crawford Left Her Husbands’: Emergent Female Hero,” Robert Stepto and Michael Awkward have also written extensively on “voice” in Eyes, as has Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 4. I refer to Hurston’s oft-quoted comment that she tried to “embalm all the tenderness” of her passion for A.W.P. in the novel (Dust Tracks 189). 5. While early scholarship on Eyes tended to downplay or ignore Tea Cake’s less savory qualities, critics were not long in coming to a re-assessment. Of these, Kathleen Davies notes, drawing upon a conversation with Eriene Stetson, that Hurston would have been acquainted with the expression “the dog in a man” common among Southern blacks (158n18). Thomas Cassidy comments that Tea Cake’s transformation upon being bitten “does not seem to be the result of a totally foreign element invading his psyche as much as an acceleration of forces already evident in his personality” (263–4). Houston Baker calls the image of the dog atop the cow emblematic of the exploitive, patriarchal economic relationships between men and women depicted in the novel (38). 6. The trope of men as infants is, of course, a common one. Hurston summarizes her father as “the baby of the family” in her autobiography, and Arvay, the heroine of her final novel, eventually comes to the conclusion that her husband, Jim Meserve, who has dominated her throughout the novel (at times quite brutally) is essentially infantile. 7. In Hurston’s own life, she experienced the closest thing to “life on the muck” while gathering folklore in Louisiana work camps. In one of these camps she was befriended by a woman named “Big Sweet,” a powerful, charismatic personage whom one male worker called “uh whole woman and half uh man” (Boyd 169). Sweet aided Hurston as she moved amongst impoverished workers in the camps, charming and cajoling reluctant workers into sharing material while also protecting Hurston from rougher types who might intend violence. Hurston, in fact, flees Louisiana after a near fight at a “payday party” at which Big Sweet pulls a knife in her defense. Tea Cake and his

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relationship with Janie might well be partially based upon this woman/man and her relationship with Hurston. 8. In “Feminist Fantasies: Zora Neule Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jennifer Jordan offers an especially penetrating discussion of the distance between Janie and the others on the muck. 9. A sense of self-display dominates Janie’s consciousness for much of the novel. Mary Washington notes that “even when Hurston sets out to explore Janie’s internal consciousness, her internal speech, what we actually hear are the voices of men” and suggests that Janie has internalized the male gaze as well (“Emergent Hero” 101–2). 10. Boyd quotes Hurston as saying, “On two occasions I heard my father threaten to kill my mother if she ever started towards the gate to leave him” (30). 11. As Bruce Jackson has noted, playing the dozens involves not only giving insult, but “taking it . . . moving the plane of action to a purely verbal level. In the process of this action certain anxieties are excited and eased; one may explore one’s own, and the cathartic effect applies to both audience and speaker.” Clearly, Starks doesn’t have the resources necessary to “explore” his anxieties; they scare the hell out of him. The punch he delivers is a blow both for and against his own masculinity, here defined by a waning-if-not-quite-gone physical strength and an utter lack of intellectual and emotional resources. 12. Logan Killicks’s shortcomings are similarly organized, as is a lengthy passage of body insults in Dust Tracks. As Hurston would have it in her autobiography, both humor and body talk lie close to the center of the culture of the rural South. Writing of her experiences with a traveling Gilbert and Sullivan show as a young teenager, she relates why she was able to charm a long line of audiences: In the first place, I was a Southerner, and had the map of Dixie on my tongue. . . . it was the idioms. They did not know of the way an average Southern child, white or black, is raised on simile and invective. They know how to call names. It is an everyday affair to hear somebody called a mullet-headed, mule-eared, wall-eyed, hog-nosed, ‘gator-faced, shad-mouthed, screw-necked, goat-bellied, puzzle-gutted, camel-backed, butt-sprung, battle-hemmed, knock-kneed, razor-legged, box-ankled, shovel-footed, unmated so-and-so. Eyes looking like skint-ginny nuts, and mouth looking like a dishpan full of broke-up crockery! They can tell you in simile exactly how you walk and smell. They can furnish a picture gallery of your ancestors, and a notion of what your children will be like. What ought to happen to you is full of images and flavor. Since that stratum of the Southern population is not given to book-reading, they take their comparisons right out of the barnyard and the woods. When they get through with you, you and your whole family look like an acre of totem poles. (98)

Here a map of the South means a thorough mapping of the body, and it is via a mapping of the body that your family, its station, and its future are mapped as well. Body is destiny. Humorous insult creates a new way of looking at you through base comparison, in some manner immobilizes you, “puts you in your place” by insisting that you are ever and always there to begin with. The body is also established as a principle site for the display of linguistic virtuosity. That virtuosity is aggressive and disfiguring at the same time that, in this particular passage, that virtuosity becomes the subject of the passage, supplanting the body as focal point, calling attention to itself as much as to its referent.

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Notes to Chapter Four Fittingly, it is a relatively well-to-do undertaker who becomes the leading “respectable” candidate for taking custody of Janie after Joe’s death, the realistic quality of this detail lending eerie force to Hurston’s critique of those who would rush headlong to the white respectable. The figure of the “permeable membrane” is Carol Clover’s, whose analysis of crossgender identifications in slasher films informs this reading of Eyes. For male readers this kind of identification begins in the novel’s second paragraph, where doing, dreaming women are favorably compared to dreaming, do-nothing men—who console themselves through the sententious, self-memorializing Tragedy parodied in the novel’s opening lines. Mason’s casting of Hurston as primitive is well documented. Hemenway provides a summary of this aspect of their relationship on pages 107 and 139 of his biography. Hurston’s autobiography uses images of pregnancy in referring to the writing of Eyes. In a single paragraph she writes that the novel was “dammed up inside” her, that she wrote “under internal pressure,” that “there is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.” She ends referring to the tale of “the Spartan youth with the fox under his cloak” (Dust Tracks 155–6).

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Index

A Aging in cultural and literary studies, 13–16 discourses of, 13 market forces in, 13 American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, 30 American Renaissance, 2 Anxiety of influence, 14 Arnold, Matthew, 23, 128n. 8 Arnold, Ruth, 3

B Balzac, Honoré de, 34, 38–39, 41–42 Beecher, Henry Ward, 30 Bennett, William, 2 Bentham, Jeremy, 31 Billy Budd and aging, 13 anarchy in, 24, 47, 128n. 8 “Billy in the Darbies,” 49–51 biographical aspects, 22, 51–52 cannibalism, 128n. 14, 130nn. 19–20 characters Billy Budd as baby, 47–48, 131n. 28 as body, 35 death of, 44–51 as “handsome sailor,” 37–38, 46 having intention, 45–46 lacking intention, 45 loss of control, 35 as political signifier sacrifice of, 28–29, 44–51

as son, 46 as textless, 45, 46 black handsome sailor, 24–27, 37–38, 40–41 Claggart, John, see Claggart, John Nelson, Lord Admiral, 39–42 sailors on leave, 24 Vere, Captain, 38–39, 41–47, 129n. 18 child-rearing, 22, 130n. 28 critical interpretations Duban, James, 131n. 30 Floyd, Nathaniel, 129n. 15 Hayes, Peter L., 130n. 26 Johnson, Barbara, 92–93, 130n. 19 Mizruchi, Susan, 28–29 Parker, Herschel, 130nn. 21–22 Rust, Richard Dilworth, 130n. 19 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 129n. 16 Thomas, Brook, 130n. 24 generational conflict, 13 homosexuality in, 128nnn. 14–16; see also Claggart, John iconic male forms, 22 narrative tone, 26–27 narrative trajectory, 10, 26 narrator, 22, 33–34, 40, 49–50, 131n. 29 politics age, 22 class, 22, 27 gender, 22 race, 22 sexuality, 22

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146 readers, 29 sacrifice, 22 surveillance, 28–29, writing/text in, 22, 51 Biographical scholarship, 1–6 Bloom, Allan, 2 Bloom, Harold, 14 Body/civilization dialectic, 128n. 9 Body/machine dialectic, 54 Body/text dialectic, 39, 51 Body, as threat to writing, 10 Bourdieu, Pierre, 1, 134–135n. 20 Bourne, Randolph, 81 Boyd, Valerie, 123–124, 126, 139n. 9 Buffon, Georges, 36–37,

C Cain, Caleb, 128n. 14; 130n. 20 Carby, Hazel, 103 Carr, Virginia Spencer, 132n. 7 Claggart, John 35–38, 44–45, 128n. 14, 129n. 18, 130n. 19 Cloots, Anarcharsis, 25, 128n. 8 Clover, Carol, 140n. 14 Cowley, Malcolm, 69–71 Crews, Frederick, 1–6 advocacy of biographical criticism 1–6 critique of New Americanism, 1–6 Freudianism in, 5 momism in, 5 psychologism in, 5 readings of “Big Two Hearted-River,” 3 “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” 3–6 The Sun Also Rises, 3, 5

D Discipline and Punish, 30–31 Dos Passos, John adolescence, 12, 66–69, 132n. 11 aesthete, 55, 70–71, 133n. 14 American Red Cross, 74, 135n. 21 “Americanness” of, 53, 65 Army service, 74–75, 135n. 23 attitudes toward being a writer, 13, 55–60, 64, 86, 132n. 3

Index body, his as American, 54 as feminine/masculine, 54, 58, 66 as foreign, 54, 65, 132n. 1 as illegitimate, 54, 65–66, 132n. 10 as liability, 54, 56, 65–70, 132n. 11 as parasitic, 54 as productive, 54, 57–60, as spongy, 54–55, 65, 132n. 2 childhood, 12, 53–54, 65–69, 89, 132nnnn. 8–11 at Choate, 53, 66–69, 132n. 11 connoisseur, 71, 133n. 14; 138n. 40 correspondence with Martin, Rumsey, 69, 71–72, 133n. 16; 134nn. 17, 19; 136n. 25 efforts to Americanize himself, 53–54 “declass” himself, 11–12, 73–76, democratize himself, 54, 75–76, 133n. 16 masculinize himself, 54–55, 66–70, 72–73 exercise programs, 69–70 financial circumstances, 56, 86 at Harvard, 69–72, 132n. 8; 133n. 14 in Hollywood, 13, 86–87 “illegitimacy” of, 64 manual labor, 134n. 18, 135nn., 23, 24 masculinity of, 54–55, 58, 66–70, 73, 133n. 12 middle-class liberal/intellectual, 56, 86, 136n. 26 mid-life crisis, 12, 13, 56 Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service, 72–74, 135n. 21 observation of war propoganda, 75 parents Dos Passos, John Roderigo, 54, 56, 64–70, 89, 132n. 1; 133n. 12 Madison, Lucy Addison Spriggs, 64–66 in Paris, 134n. 118 physical appearance, 66, 69, 132n. 1, 133n. 12 physical culturist, 55, 69–70 physical infirmities, 53, 56, 65–66, 86

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Index at Sidwell Friends School, 53, 65–66 as tourist, 65, 71, 74, 132n. 8, 134n. 118 as walker, 53, 133n. 13 witness to suffering of soldiers, 72–74, 80, 134nn. 18–19; 135nn. 21, 25 written works “Aesthete’s Nightmare,” 71 Best Times, The, 66, 132nn. 2, 7 Three Soldiers, introduction to, 56 U.S.A., see U.S. A. “Writer and His Tools, The” 64, 79–80

E Eagleton, Terry, 45 Engels, Frederich, 6

F Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 1 Ford, Henry, 132n. 5, 137n. 29 Foucault, Michel, 1, 14, 31–32, 44 Fowler, Lorenzo, 30 Fowler, Orsen, 30–33, 35 Franklin, Benjamin, 47 French Revolution, 25, 128n. 8 Freud, Sigmund, 48, 130nn. 25–26

G Gall, Franz Joseph, 29–30, 34 Generational conflict, 14–16 Green, Harvey, 128n. 9

H Harvard aesthetes, 70–71 Haymarket bombing, 128n. 8 Hemenway, Robert, 103, 124–125, 140n. 15 Hemingway, Clarence, 3 Hemingway, Ernest, 9 cross-gendering, 3–5 myth of, 4 psychological scarring, 3–5 upbringing, 3–5 works “Big Two Hearted-River,” 3 “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” 3–6

147 The Sun Also Rises, 3, 5 Hemingway, Grace, 3–6 Hemingway, Marcelline, 3–4 Hoberman, John, 128n. 8 Hughes, Langston, 100–101 Hurtson, Zora Neale childhood, 91–93, 112, 123–124 dissembling her age, 12, 92, 101–102 fellowships, 100–101 with Gilbert and Sullivan troupe, 92–93, 112, 139n. 12 in Haiti and Jamaica, 100, 125–126 male protagonists, 94, 102–103, 109 menopause, 102 mid-life crisis, 12–13, 101–102 mobility of, 91, 112 performances of age, 91–92 of gender, 91 of race, 91–92 of regionality, 91–92 of sexuality, 91 poverty of, 123–125 relationships Boas, Franz, 124, 126 father, see Hurston, John Hunter, Percy, 100–101, 109, 138n. 4 Hurston, John, 93–94, 122, 139n. 10 Hurston, Lucy, 122, 139n. 10 husbands, 12, 112; see also Sheen, Herbert lovers, 12, 112, see also Hunter, Percy Mason, Mary Osgood, 100–102, 121, 125, 140n. 15 mother, see Hurston, Lucy Sheen, Herbert, 100 Van Vechten, Carl, 103 Stockholm syndrome in, 125 travels in the south, 125–126, 138n. 7 vis-à-vis masculinist literary tradition, 12 works Dust Tracks on a Road, 91, 139n. 12 “How it Feels to be Colored Me,” 91 Jonah’s Vine Gourd, 109 Mules and Men, 101 Their Eyes Were Watching God, see Their Eyes Were Watching God

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J Jackson, Bruce, 139n. 11 Jay, Gregory S., 131n. 28

K Kaplan, Carla, 103, 110, 123–124 Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou, 6–9

L Lafite, Jean (pirate), 7–8 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 33–34 Leverenz, David, 25 Leyda, Jay, 128n. 5 Locke, Allain, 126 Lucacs, Georg, 6 Ludington, Townsend, 132nn. 2, 7 Lynn, Kenneth, 3, 127n. 1

M Marvin, Carolyn, 10–11, 39 Marx, Karl, 6–9 Masculinity, 11 McHugh, Christine, 129n. 12 Melville, Herman ancestry, importance of, 18 anonymity in later life, 17, 130n. 23 body of, 19, 20–21, 52 childhood, 18–19 class identifications, 11, 131n. 31 comparison with Prospero, 131n. 29 composing process, 10–11 critical success, 21 customs house, 17, 22 family, see also marital problems father, see Melvill, Allan Gansevoort, Peter, 18 Melvill, Allan, 18–19, 131n. 31 Melvill, Thomas, 18 Melville, Elizabeth Shaw, 17 Melville, Gansevoort, 131n. 31 Melville, Maria, 22, 131n. 31 Melville, Tom, 20, 128n. 4 mother, see Melville, Maria sons, 130n. 26 wife, see Melville, Elizabeth Shaw

Index financial circumstances, 17, 21, 131n. 31 life as sailor, 10, 19–20, 129n. 18 literary ambition, 17, 20–22, 27, 51; see also military-literary complex literary sex symbol, 20–21, 127n. 2; 129n. 18 marital problems, 130n. 26 military-literary complex in, 9–10, 18–19, 22, 45 novels Confidence Man, The, 17, 128n. 8 Moby Dick, 17, 28, 128n. 8 Omoo, 21 Pierre, 11, 17, 22, 51, 128n. 8; 130n. 27 Redburn, 47 Typee, 17, 20–21, 127–128n. 3; 128n. 4; 129n. 18; 130n. 27 White Jacket, 21 old age, 17, 131n. 29 poetry collections John Marr and other Sailors with Some Sea-Pieces, 17 Weeds and Wildings Chiefly; With a Rose or Two, 17 relationship with readers, 17, 20–22, 25–26, 127–128nn. 2–3; 128nn. 4, 9; 129n. 10; 128n. 14; 129n. 18 self-marketing, 20–21 short fiction “Bartleby the Scrivener,” 11, 39, 51, 128n 13; 130n. 27; 131n. 28 Benito Cereno, 25 Billy Budd, see Billy Budd “Paradise of Bachelors, The,” 131n. 31 “Tartarus of Maids, The,” 131n. 31 Montaigne, Michel, 42–43, 131n. 29

N Natural language, 23, 34 New Americanists, 1–2 New Historicist practice, 2 New York Review of Books, 1

O Oates, Titus, 35

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Index “Of Cannibals” (Montaigne), 131n. 29

P Parker, Herschel, 127nn. 1–2, 130nnn. 21–23 Phrenology, 22, 29–37 Physical culture, 54, 87–88, 132n. 1 Physiognomy, 22, 29–37 Poe, Edgar Allen, 36 Poverty among children, 16, 127n. 5 among elderly, 16, 127n. 5 among minorities, 127n. 5 among women, 127n. 5 Protest in Their Eyes Were Watching God, 94, 97 in U.S.A., 55, 59, 63, 89 of Vietnam war, 16

R “Race suicide,” 54 Rivers, Christopher, 33–34 Robertson-Lorant, Laurie, 127n. 1; 128n. 3; 129n. 18 Rogin, Michael, 131n. 31; 138n. 2 Ross, E. A., 28–29 Rowe, John Carlos reading of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, 6–9 reductionism of critical practice, 9

S Sacco and Vanzetti, 11, 55, 60, 132n. 6 Scarry, Elaine, 1, 9 reading of Marx, 6–7, 9 on the socialization of sentience, 6–7 Shakespeare, William, 50, 60, 131n. 29 Sheen, Herbert, 100 Spencer, Herbert, 28 Spurzheim, Johann Gasper, 30

T Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 62, 137n. 29 Tempest, The, 131n. 29 Their Eyes Were Watching God attitudes toward “the folk,” 108

149 capitalism, critique of, 112–113, 116 characters Annie Tyler, 113–114, 122 Janie body as ideological signifier, 96, 111 final scene, 109–113 entrance into Eatonville, 94–99 inventory of body, 95–99 readers response to, 94–95, 98–99 Joe Starks, 93–94, 96–97, 107, 113–122 Matt Bonner’s mule, 99, 107, 117–120 Pheoby, 105–106. 109 Tea Cake, 105–107, 111–112, 138–139nn. 5, 7 community, 103–104, 107–108 critical assessments Awkward, Michael, 138n. 3 Baker, Houston, 138n. 5 Cassidy, Thomas, 138n. 5 Davies, Kathleen, 138n. 5 Gates, Henry Louis, 102, 138n. 3 Jordan, Jennifer, 139n. 8 Kaplan, Carla, 103, 110 Stepto, Robert, 138n. 3 Wallace, Michelle, 105 Washington, Mary, 138n. 3; 139n. 9 descriptions of aging bodies, 113–119 existential circumstances of composition, 101, 103, 109, 112, 121, 138n. 4 fat, 114–119 food and eating imagery, 97–98, 106–107 inventories of bodies, 95–99, 113–114, 121 male desire, 106, 109, 112 marriage, 103–105, 107 masculinity,* men as infants, 106–107, 109, 138n. 6 performance, 112, 139n. 9 protest in, 94, 97 spectatorship, 13, 112, 139n. 9 voice, 138n. 3 Thoreau, Henry David, 137–138n. 39 Tyler, Mary Elaine, 127n. 1

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Index

U U.S.A. trilogy aging of characters, 13, 88, 137n. 37 biographies in, 61, 137n. 30 “Body of an American” 80–85, 137nnn. 32–34 Camera Eye segments, 60, 67–68, 78–80, 132n. 6, 136–137n. 29 characters Doc Bingham 59–60, 87–88, J. Ward Moorehouse, 61, 77 Mac, 59 Richard Ellsworth Savage, 79 Uncle Tim, 59 Vag, 61–64, 89–90, 136n. 27, 137–138n. 39 class bias in, 77; 136n. 28 critical assessments Foley, Barbara, 79, 136n. 26 Kazin, Alfred, 76–77 Pells, Richard, 88–89 Pizer, Donald, 136–137n. 29 Pritchett, V. S., 53 Sartre, Jean Paul, 56, 76–78 Strychacz, Thomas, 76, 77, 132n. 3; 137nn. 30–31

Wagner, Linda, 132n. 11 description of underclass, 136n. 28 elements of personal biography in, 64–80; see also Camera Eye segments media in, 59–61, 63–64 newsreels, 60, 137n. 30 prose style in narrative, 56, 76–78, 80, 87 protest in, 3, 55, 59, 63, 89 Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, 137n. 32; see also “Body of an American” as “voice of the people,” 53, 61–64, 76–78

V Veblen, Thorstein, 56

W Walden, 138n. 39 Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, 138n. 1

Z Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, 123–124, 126