Lecture 6: The Economy That Jack Built; The Novel That George Built

English 104ASpring 2012

18 April 2012

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed bymadness, starving hysterical naked,dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawnlooking for an angry fix […]”

—Allen Ginsberg, Howl, lines 1-4

Speculation

On Mr. Jack: “He was convinced that the fabric of his world was woven from threads of steel, and that the towering pyramid of speculation would not only endure, but would grow constantly greater.” (166; ch. 12)

“What happened in Wall Street was only the initial explosion which in the course of the next few years was to set off a train of lesser explosions all over the land.” (311; ch. 25)

“Bond issues involving staggering sums were being constantly ‘floated’ until the credit structure of the town was built up into an inverted pyramid and the citizens of Libya Hill no longer owned the streets they walked on. The proceeds of these enormous borrowings were deposited with the bank. The bank, for its part, then returned these deposits to the politicians, or to their business friends, supporters, allies, and adherents—in the form of tremendous loans, made upon the most flimsy and tenuous security, for purposes of private and personal speculation. In this way ‘The Ring,’ as it was called, which had begun as an inner circle of a few ambitious men, because in time a vast and complex web that wove through the entire social structure of the town and involved the lives of thousands of people. And all of it now centered in the bank.” (310; ch. 25)

Real Estate Speculation in Babbitt (1922, set in 1920)

“‘Now look here!’ Purdy wailed. ‘I know f’r a fact that a piece of property ’bout same size, right near, sold for less ’n eighty-five hundred, ’twa’n’t two years ago, and here you fellows are asking me twenty-four thousand dollars! Why, I’d have to mortgage— Why good God, Mr. Babbitt, you’re asking more ’n twice its value!” (41; ch. 4, sec. 5)

“The work of the world was being done. Lyte had made something over nine thousand dollars, Babbitt had made a four-hundred-and-fifty dollar commission.” (42; ch. 4, sec. 5)

Speculation in Libya Hill

“Mrs. Delia Flood […] was a woman of property, and her favorite topic of conversation was real estate. In fact, long before the present era of speculation and skyrocketing prices, she had had a mania for buying and selling land, and was a shrewd judge of values. With some sixth sense she had always known what direction the development of the growing town was likely to take.” (85; ch. 6)

Sam Pennock: “Made three hundred thousand dollars in the last two months. . . . Why, it’s the truth! Made a trade yesterday and turned around and sold the lot again not two hours later. . . . Fifty thousand dollars just like that!” (98; ch. 7)

“For their ruin had caught up with them. Many of the people in that throng had lost their life savings. But it was not only the bank’s depositors who were ruined. Everyone now knew that their boom was over. They knew that the closing of the bank had frozen all their speculations just as they were, beyond the possibility of extricating themselves. Yesterday they could count their paper riches by ten thousands and by millions; today they owned nothing, their wealth had vanished, and they were left saddled with debts that they could never pay.” (313; ch. 25)

This is also a crisis in representation

The Great Depression (1929-1947)

● Many, but not all, economists see the Stock Market Crash of 1929 as beginning the Depression.

● Interest rates and wages remain low, while unemployment remains high● Unemployment reaches 25% in 1933.● In the U.S., from 1929-1932 …

– Industrial production decreases 46%

– Foreign trade decreases 70%

– Unemployment increases by 600%

● Economic recovery begins about 1933, with gradual recovery of prices and values.

● Government spending in World War II results in post-war boom

On George Webber: “He had used the phrases as symbols of something real, something important that he had felt instinctively but never put into words. And that’s why he hadn’t been able to make her [Esther] understand. Well, what was it? What had he been afraid of?” (221; ch. 16)

Home to Our Mountains

● Fictitious novel by George Webber, published November 1929, shortly after the Stock Market crash.

● Webber’s first published novel.● The story of the novel and its reception largely

describe the publication of Wolfe’s own Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life (1929).● Like You Can’t Go Home Again, Wolfe’s (not

Webber’s) earlier novel is a Bildungsroman.

Reflexive Commentary

● Wolfe sometimes uses this identification to comment on his own writing:

Nebraska Crane: “Boy, you shore do write ’em long, don’t you? […] Makes me tard just to tote it aroun’!” (292; ch. 22)

George: “I must have written half a million words or more.” (330; ch. 26)

● Or think of the waiter’s “Armenian story” (“she—takes—off—her—veil!’) (354-8, ch. 27) in comparison with his monologue about the pregnant waitress (359-60).

The Novel’s Reception

“On a postcard, sealed in an envelope:

‘We’ll kill you if you ever come back here. You know who.’” (289; ch. 22)

“they said that he had turned against the South, his mother, and spat upon her and defiled her. They they leveled against him the most withering charge that they could think of, and said that he was ‘not Southern.’ Some of them even began to say that he was ‘not American.’” (290; ch. 22)

A critic: it is “a barbaric yawp” (349; ch. 27)

What it’s not

● It isn’t Piggy Logan’s wire circus, which is portrayed as …

– Pretentious– Ineffectual– Meaningless– Avant-garde

● It isn’t “intellectual.” (350; ch. 27)● It isn’t an academic project.

Fox Edwards: “You see, Miss Allen is an – an academic kind of a person […] and that kind of person, darling, just wouldn’t be able to understand what Whitman and Mark Twain and Keats are like […] It’s a pity! Too bad you’ve got to hear about it first in schools.” (390; ch. 28)

● It isn’t concerned with conventional truisms about morality:

“Mr. Stoat’s literary and critical standards were derived from a pious devotion to the welfare of the jeune fille. […] Mr. Stoat had no young daughter, but in his publishing enterprises he always acted on the hypothesis that he did have, and that no book should be printed which he would be unwilling to place in her hands. The result, as may be imagined, was fudge and taffy, slop and goo.” (479; ch. 34)

Margaret Shepperton: “‘I’ve never done anything immoral.’ By this she meant solely and simply a deviation from the standards of sexual chastity.” (287; ch. 22)

● It isn’t concerned with what’s trendy in literary criticism:

Fox Edwards “did not write nine-page reviews on ‘How Chaplin Uses hands in Latest Picture’ – how it really was not slap-stick but the tragedy of Lear in modern clothes; or on how Enters enters; or on how Crane’s poetry can only be defined, reviewed, and generally exposited in terms of mathematical formulae.” (412; ch. 28)

Richenbach Reade’s critical works: “They were examples of critical biographies of literary men and politicians, and were examples of the ‘debunking school’ of historical writing. […] They were the kind of books that debunked everything except themselves.” (519; ch. 36)

To Randy: “Not the facts, you understand – not just the record of my life – but something truer than the facts – something distilled out of my experience and transmitted into a form of universal application.” (330; ch. 26)

“He was just an American who was looking hard at the life around him, and sorting carefully through all the life he had ever seen and known, and trying to extract some essential truth out of this welter of his whole experience.” (350; ch. 27)

“A Ulysses kind of a book”

“He was still very much under the influence of James Joyce, and what he had written was a Ulysses kind of a book.” (282; ch. 22)

“The vision may be shrewd, subtle, piercing, within a thousand special frames accurate and Joycean – but within the larger one, false, mannered, and untrue. And the large one is the one that matters.” (329; ch. 26)

Allan Ginsberg (1926-2001)

● Probably best known for Howl, a 1955 epic poem that became the subject of an obscenity trial due to its depiction of illicit drug use and both hetero- and homosexual encounters.

● Studied under WC Williams● Key terms (for our purposes):

● Beat poetry● San Francisco Renaissance● Autobiographical poetry● Free verse

Ginsberg in 1978Photo by Ludwig Urning

Poetic devices in America (1956)

● Anaphora – the repetition of words and phrases:

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17,

1956.I can’t stand my own mind.America when will we end the human war?

(lines 1-4)● Parataxis – Elements of the poem are put one after the

other without grammatical indications of the relationship between them.● This implies a sort of equality between the elements, in

contrast to the opposite stylistic technique, hypotaxis, which tends to subordinate one element to another.

Other notable characteristics of America

● Consciously & intentionally speaks for marginalized groups (anarchists, the poor, the queer, unionists, drug-users, the psychically troubled, Communists).

● In most cases, lines are end-stopped (there is very little enjambment).

● Reinstates the personal “I” in a self-consciously ironic way.

● Draws on Whitman, Blake, and Keats in constructing this type of narration.

Personal Narration in America

● The speaker is (initially) an individual who addresses the nation directly, as another individual.

● Later in the poem, the speaker identifies himself with the object of his address:

It occurs to me that I am America.I am talking to myself again. (lines 49-50)● The speaker here uses the “bardic” or “prophetic”

first-person narrative technique, in which he identifies himself with “a people.”

Language Absorption

After the identification, common political sometimes discourse bleeds into the speaker’s language, especially in the last 15 lines:● “Asia is rising against me

I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.” (51-2)● “The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s

power mad. She wants to takeour cars from out our garages.Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red

Reader’s Digest. Her wants ourauto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running

our fillingsta-tions.” (80-84)

“This Is Just to Say” (William Carlos Williams, 1934)

1 I have eaten2 the plums3 that were in4 the icebox

5 and which6 you were probably7 saving8 for breakfast

9 Forgive me10 they were delicious11 so sweet12 and so cold