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4. The Struggle for the Cultural Heritage: Christina Stead Refunctions Charles Dickens and Mark Twain The received cultural values with which we academic literary intellectuals most closely involve ourselves are the values of the ‘‘cultural treasures,’’ the canonized masterpieces, for which we serve our students as intermediaries.1 In the years between the first and the second world wars, the established canon and its transmission faced strenuous challenge and probing discussion, not just, as our training leads us to expect, because of modernism, but also through the revolutionary and reactionary political struggles of those years. The debates over proletarian culture and socialist realism in the Soviet Union counted heavily for the production and mediation of literature through the Western world. The French political strategy of the Popular Front first became visible as a cultural force the year before the Blum government was elected when in 1935 the League of Writers for the Defense of Culture sponsored a huge international conference.2 Prominent on the agenda for that conference stood the topic ‘‘The Cultural Heritage,’’ and at the second League conference, held in 1936, André Malraux addressed this topic with remarkable vigor. Amplifying observations from 1935, he defined the ‘‘cultural heritage’’ as created by each civilization ‘‘out of everything in the past that helps it to surpass itself.’’ This is no passive reception but an active struggle: ‘‘A heritage is not transmitted; it must be conquered.’’3 The antithesis of this position emerged a few years later in Walter Benjamin’s ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’’ written at a moment when the Popular Front (which Benjamin had never supported ) could be judged a dreadful mistake. Benjamin emphasized that ‘‘cultural treasures’’ form part of ‘‘the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate,’’ for ‘‘there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’’4 I want to explore the dialectic between these positions through the case of Christina Stead’s novel of 1940, The Man Who Loved Children, which takes two cultural treasures of Popular Front leftist humanism, Charles 47 48 Politics and the Canon Dickens and Mark Twain, and shatters them as false idols, even while finding within their works resources that make Stead’s own work possible. This critical redeployment of cultural power I analyze as what Brecht and Benjamin called ‘‘refunctioning’’ (Umfunktionierung).5 This exploration touches on issues still relevant to our current cultural and political debates, ranging from the values of ‘‘totality’’ and the strategies of feminism to the methods by which literary studies may be put in touch with the study of mass media and popular culture, a contemporary intellectual refunctioning. I Little direct connection can be positively established between Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Sam Clemens was seen carrying volumes of Dickens in Keokuk in the 1850s, but he was ashamed to admit that he never really read them.6 He attended a performance of Dickens’s reading tour in America in 1867, but he doubtless paid more attention to Olivia Langdon, his future wife, with whom he was on his first date.7 From such incidents I take the moral that Dickens was for Twain, as Twain himself later became for many Americans, a cultural presence that extended far beyond the merely literary act of really reading. Typically, Dickens and Twain have been brought together for contrast. From the beginning, Twain’s originality was set against the Dickensian imitativeness of Bret Harte,8 and if the project that led to Tom Sawyer bore some relation to David Copperfield, that relation was burlesque. James Cox has strikingly remarked on the disappearance of Dickens’s early pseudonym, ‘‘Boz,’’ while ‘‘Mark Twain’’ wholly displaced Samuel Clemens.9 In The Ordeal of Mark Twain, the study that formed twentieth-century critical debate on Twain, Van Wyck Brooks some half-dozen times set Dickens against Twain: Dickens succeeded in using ‘‘experience’’ as the basis for socially independent satire, in contrast to Twain’s socially disarming and disarmed humor.10 The most telling connection was made by William Dean Howells, who linked the two as preeminent among the world’s great comic writers for their ‘‘humanity.’’11 More recently this has been elaborated by students of popular culture: Dickens, and then Twain, became a ‘‘celebrity’’ by representing ‘‘the common sense and basic goodness of the mass of the people.’’12 In the 1930s, however, such insights were only formulated about each of the writers...

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