Abstract
A belief shared by all of the writers examined thus far is the notion that the lower- and working classes could not adequately represent themselves and therefore required representation. Especially with Whitman, Davis, London, and Toomer, this representation is crucial because the class they had in mind was as yet inchoate and unformed: a class of the future, in varying degrees and categories, egalitarian, democratic, transracial, spiritually renewed and rescued. Representation, these writers believed, conduced to class formation and definition—not as Adorno might have it, in the form of a “politics migrat[ing] into autonomous art” (32) when the moment for “political art” abates, but rather in an open-ended reader–narrator relationship. The poet in Leaves and the first-person narrators in Cane, Abyss, and Life all held that language, the representation of an event, encounter, or incident is just as significant as its experience. Whitman, Davis, London, and Toomer all insist that the relationship between the reader and the laboring and poor masses must be other than one of mere witnessing. Particularly in their narratively performative forms, they all emphasized the need for blurring the divisions between the self and the other; they all insisted on class transactions, on changing one world for another throughout. It is in this kind of ideology of artful exchange that perspectives on class can appear at their most revealing.
The Silence seems terrific like a great form moving of itself. This is a real movement issuing from the close reality of mass feeling. This is the first real rhythmic movement I have ever seen. My heart hammers terrifically. My hands are swollen and hot. No one is producing this movement. It is a movement up which all are moving softly, rhythmically, terribly.
(“I Was Marching,” Salute to Spring, 188)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Much of the primary literature of the 1930s, including the writings of Le Sueur, Josephine Herbst, Richard Wright, Muriel Rukeyser, and Langston Hughes, continues to be pegged as “political” with negligible “aesthetic interest.” For challenges to this view, see Robert Shulman, The Power of Political Art ( Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000 );
Barbara Foley, Radical Representations ( Durham: Duke UP, 1993 );
and James F. Murphy, The Proletarian Moment ( Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1991 ).
See Bill Mullen and Sherry Lee Linkon, “Introduction: Rereading 1930s Culture,” in Radical Revisions: Rereading 1930s Culture, ed. Bill Mullen and Sherry Linkon (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1996 ), 1–12;
Alan Wald, “Introduction,” in Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism by Daniel Aron (1961) (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), xiii–xxxi;
and Laura Hapke, Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s ( Athens and London: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1995 ).
See Morris Dickstein, “Depression Culture: The Dream of Mobility,” in Radical Revision: Rereading 1930s Culture, ed. Bill Mullen and Sherry Linkon, ( Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1996 ), 224–242.
See Norman Sim, The Literary Journalists ( New York: Ballantine, 1984 ), 8–12.
For more on 1930s reportage, see Constance Coiner, Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur ( Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1998 ), 27–28;
Robert Shulman, The Power of Political Art: The 1930s Literary Left (Chapel Hill and London: The Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000), 13, 27, 51, 67, 183;
and John Hartsock, A History of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 241–242. While Le Sueur was certainly working out of the “reportage” tradition of the 1930s (as Robert Shulman puts it, she was the “Chekov of the form” 67), she also transcended this tradition , shaping her journalism into stories and sketches that incorporate narrative and rhetorical techniques generally attributed to fiction and not to reportage. As Elaine Hedges has remarked, “Many of Le Sueur’s pieces have been called both reportage and fiction” (10). For the Le Sueur works I discuss in this section, I favor the term “literary journalism,” following John Hartsock’s definition of the term, “in which it is understood that [the work] is written largely (but not exclusively) in a narrative mode” (11).
Copyright information
© 2009 William Dow
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dow, W. (2009). Meridel Le Sueur’s Salute to Spring: “A Movement Up Which All Are Moving”. In: Narrating Class in American Fiction. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617964_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617964_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37627-8
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-61796-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)