Editor's Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources

Abstract

This fountain of overwriting in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep captures the incommensurability between the frail human form and the power of electricity. After connecting himself to the rail powering trains that run through New York’s Lower East Side slums, Roth’s tenyearold protagonist, David, veers between life and death. His electrocution is selfinflicted and deliberate. Earlier in the novel David longs for the source of this “searing spray,” for the fantasied angelcoal that burned the prophet Isaiah clean: “where could you get angelcoal? Mr. Iceman, give me a pail of angelcoal. Hee! Hee! In a cellar is coal. But other kind, black coal, not angel coal. Only God had angelcoal. Where is God’s cellar I wonder. How light it must be there” (231). Although David also associates cellar coal with a promising disobedience, with sexual and religious transgression, Roth is more skeptical; he explores modernity’s coalmade economy as a dark power tarnishing America’s promise as di goldene medine (the golden land). In a country that offers opportunity, but at the cost of language loss and hard labor, survival demands a constant entanglement with dirty energy. This Editor’s Column peruses the relation between energy resources and literature. Instead of divvying up literary works into hundredyear intervals (or elastic variants like the long eighteenth or twentieth century) or categories harnessing the history of ideas (Romanticism, Enlightenment), what happens if we sort texts according to the energy sources that made them possible? This would mean aligning Roth’s immigrant meditations on power with Henry Adams’s 1 2 6 . 2 ]