Around Quitting Time: Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fiction (review)

A peculiar limbo sets in "around quitting time." The calm of dusk announces not only the ebbing of the rhythms of the work world, but also the promise of a repose yet to be realized; there is the palpable sense of one project just finished and another only barely begun. It is this dual quality that Theodore Dreiser invoked in the opening pages of Sister Carrie with a plaintive sigh: "Ah, the promise of the night. What does it not hold for the weary! What old illusion of hope is not here forever repeated!" The daily yearning for something other than alienated labor appears in this intertwining of deliverance and expectation, where the energies of work and leisure—one slackening, one quickening—mingle with each other. These are the transient moments quite properly known as "happy hour."

The transition between the stultification of work and quitting time's promise of leisure is the central figure of Robert Seguin's intriguing Around Quitting Time: Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fiction. Detecting this fundamental ambivalence between work and leisure—along with those between action and passivity and between movement and stasis—at the heart of the notion of "middle-classness," Seguin sets out to complicate that concept and to debunk the "almost totemic or talismanic power" it wields in the American imaginary. It has been precisely the exceptionalist construct of the middle class, he argues, that has enabled the fiction of a society in which the determinations of class are transcended (despite the abundance of socioeconomic evidence to the contrary); the demographic bloat and ideological force of the dominant middle readily conceals the persistent reality of the extremes. Resisting the urge to merely mock the mystifications inherent in this conceit, Seguin instead discerns in the category of the middle class an index of the latent and tortured impulse toward a truly classless society.

Seguin's embrace of class as the central category of his analysis rejects identitarian hermeneutics in favor of a dialectical model that, he suggests, is better equipped to capture the constitutive ambivalences of the American middle-class mentality. Suspended "between working and not working," middle-class space and time are necessarily "shifting and variable," unfolding in an "imagined zone of interface" comprising contradictory vectors (9, 5). He thus understands the class-consciousness proper to such space and time as exceeding the conceptual limits of mere identity, stressing instead the experience of pliable subjects tugged to and fro by tidal forces of proletarianization and embourgeoisement.

The works of Dreiser, Cather, West, Hemingway, and Barth stand as exemplary instances for Seguin's attempt to itemize some of the many ways in which middle-class liminality finds literary expression. Work and leisure, activity and passivity, agency and fate are interwoven throughout the disparate texts he considers—in the third-floor garret of Cather's The Professor's House, along the fuzzy boundary between sport and labor traversed by The Old Man and the Sea, adrift with the entertainments of Barth's Floating Opera. Adequate as these accounts are, the most insightful passages of Around Quitting Time are found in the extensive chapters on Dreiser's Sister Carrie and West's The Day of the Locust, in which Seguin dwells on how the pastoral and frontier mythologies dominant in the American nineteenth century are refashioned, generating, on the occasion of their uneasy convergence, a paradoxical static energy.

Like much in Seguin's book, the analysis of Carrie begins where the workday ends—in this case with the "utopian breathlessness" of Dreiser's depiction of twilight in Chicago. A seductive panorama of lighted shop windows and mingling throngs in the street, Dreiser's quitting time trembles with the promise of material security and untroubled living; its vision of easy plenitude, as Seguin argues, translates the conventions of the agrarian pastoral into the context of urban consumerism. As with the various impulses betokened...