In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 63.4 (2002) 552-555



[Access article in PDF]
New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State. By Michael Szalay. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. 343 pp.

Okay, insurance. Until September 11, not something foremost in your mind. You pay your premiums and hope you don't need to make a claim. In fact, its point is to allow freedom from worry in the event of catastrophic events: accidents, illnesses, fires, hurricanes, death. But since then we've learned to view insurance as a major multinational industry worthy of government bailouts. It turns out that insurance and all the interlocking systems of finance it touches have global economic significance. New Deal Modernism, Michael Szalay's revisionist literary history of the Depression decade, claims that insurance also has tremendous literary ramifications.

We all know the apocryphal stories about Wallace Stevens strolling across the Hartford green tucking fragments of poetry into his breast pocket on the way to and from his office at the Hartford Accident and Insurance Company. Now we can imagine him running into Walter Huff's East Coast [End Page 552] doppelgänger out drumming up policies with the double indemnity clause from his company, Pacific All-Risk. It's a thoroughly modern, even postmodern, story. Recasting modernism is all the rage now, spurring journals and conferences and scholarly societies and dozens of books reassessing the ontological status of what was once a tired heuristic of literary history. Szalay's book, like a number of recent studies, seeks to overthrow the reigning paradigm of high modernism and replace it with a vernacular sensibility that includes works from popular culture—an American modernism at once corporate, industrial, institutional, and local. 1 Szalay also rehabilitates liberalism. In this time of the Eighteenth Brumaire of George W. Bush, a state of emergency resulting in permanent war (on terrorism) and the abrogation of civil liberties, this should be seen as a radical move. Szalay offers a quirky, synchronic slice of literary and movie culture from the 1930s, not only linking Stevens to James M. Cain but Richard Wright to Ayn Rand and Busby Berkeley to Gertrude Stein. They were all producing major works commenting on America's social disintegration and reorganization following the devastation of the Depression, so why not?

According to Szalay, liberalism dominated the production and dissemination of culture during the 1930s as the federal government moved into arts funding through Works Progress Administration (WPA) initiatives: the Federal Theater Project, the Public Works of Art Project, and, most important for this study, the Federal Writers Project. These programs, Szalay argues, paid artists to work on art whether they finished anything or not; thus they undermined the commodification of art that dominated post-Romantic ideas of the place of the art object under capitalism. Because the United States viewed art as a democratic practice open to all citizens, if not as creators, then as consumers, the WPA projects worked to eliminate the art object by smoothly aligning artist and audience. Thus artist and audience shadowed each other through public works of art that contributed to the developing modernist effect of doubling, which Szalay finds to be a theme in many of the works he analyzes: Berkeley's replicating chorines and overhead crane shots unsettle the mise-en-scène organizing classic Hollywood cinema; Cross Damon's ghostly assumption of new murderous identities, in Wright's novel The Outsider, defies the organization of the Communist Party in New York.

New Deal modernist doubling—the ability to see oneself both as an individual and as part of a conglomerate—is intimately tied to the emergence [End Page 553] of the "actuarial" as a guiding principle for distributing goods and services to a suffering population. Social Security spreads the pain of the Depression across a wide spectrum of citizens, enlisting each one into the state and corporate order by providing relief from life's "accidents." Szalay offers various literary forms of the double—from the sentimental evocation of empathy between reader and character effected...

pdf

Share