New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (review)

Abstract

Studies in American Fiction253 attention in this context) with the tour-de-force journey through poststructuralism of the book's last chapter. There are impressive commentaries along the way on such issues as masculinity (central to the construction of intellectual prestige) and the uses of dialect (one index of the "real" in realist fiction), and graceful moments of close reading (for example, on the meaning ofparentheses in James [67]). Barrish's attention to language within literary texts, and his flexibility with different critical vocabularies, is matched by the sophistication and readability ofhis own prose. So exciting are these readings that one could extend them in different directions. It would be useful to see, for example, how questions ofrealist taste and cultural prestige structure African-American writing. The well-known opposition between Washington and Du Bois in this period, as Barrish comments in an endnote, turns centrally on questions of"realer-than-thou" prestige (179), and debates over "authenticity" and African-American literature might be reexamined within his framework. This suggestion, however, is by way of expansion rather than criticism. It is a measure ofthe richness ofthis compact study that it suggests such possibilities for expansion, and asks questions that will continue to break new ground for understanding literary realism, critical theory, and "the real" against which both discourses have taken their shape. Mount Holyoke CollegeElizabeth Young Szalay, Michael. New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention ofthe Welfare State. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000. 343 pp. Paper: $18.95. Scholarship situating U.S. writing ofthe 1930s and 1940s within its political contexts typically emphasizes writers' relations to the age's starker ideological divisions. It tends to skirt the New Deal,judging its centrist, traditionally liberal concernwith "security" tobe irrelevant. Arguing otherwise, Michael Szalay shows that whether they came from the left, right, or center, many of the era's writers internalized the insurance-derived risk management procedures ofthe modem welfare state in specifically New Deal terms. As Szalay defines it, New Deal modernism reflects issues those procedures highlight: tensions between process and product as the essence of literary and other human activity, for instance, and between competing commitments to individual agency and collective affiliation in private and public life and in every sort of literary decision and device. A once widespread, now discredited analysis attributed the Great Depression to underconsumption (not overproduction). According to New Deal views, writers and other artists were especially vulnerable to the vagaries of laissez-faire markets and thus "model" victims of low demand for their products . The Works Progress Administration sought to alterthose circumstances. 254Reviews For example, it vigorously promoted the consumption of art. More importantly , the WPA reconceived the nature ofliterary labor. Since markets for art couldn't be rationalized and managed as the modern state required, efforts were made to evade or elide them. Writers became salaried professionals paid for the act ofwriting rather than for the writing they produced. This emphasized performance or process over product. When WPA works were produced, the writing was often collaborative and its authors unidentified. This stressed collective action over personal agency. Laws prohibiting sale for profit of WPA-sponsored work further protected writing from unmanageable markets. Meanwhile, New Deal rhetoric reimagined audiences as performative co-creators of art rather than passive receivers of it. This collapsed the barrier between producers and consumers. However surprisingly, these governmental interventions lined up as neatly with more or less conservative views of authorial intentionality (which shifted the locus ofmeaning from an individual writer's aims to readers' collective interpretation) as they did with radical, avant-garde desires to dissolve the art object into performance and erase boundaries between artist and audience. Szalay shows that even writers who resisted the government's assumptions and measures internalized New Deal forms. For instance, Stein and Hemingway dislikedNew Deal programs and celebratedthe organic autonomy of perfected written work in what seems like direct opposition to the New Deal trope ofwriting as performative labor. But in doing so they achieved by analogy what the WPA achieved as an institution; they rendered art impervious to the effects ofpublic consumption. The libertarian Ayn Rand detested both Stein and the New Deal, but her cult ofthe autonomous artist...