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Introduction (Left) Contexts and Considerations janet galligani casey How to narrate stasis? The question cuts to the core of fictional expression during the Great Depression, acknowledging the special artistic concerns of an America in crisis. Aesthetically speaking, one unique element of the cultural moment lay in its resistance to linear notions of progress, of movement, of hope—precisely those notions that had driven the most powerful American narratives to date. The story of the crash, of social and economic impasse, was not easily accommodated within a national imagination propelled by the great forward-looking mythos of manifest destiny or the boy-makes-good, rags-to-riches paradigm of Horatio Alger’s dime novels. As Tillie Olsen was to write of this period some twenty years later, the 1930s were more aptly represented by the monotonous actions and circuitous thoughts of a dispossessed middle-aged woman, in the throes of unending housework, reflecting on her young motherhood “during the years of depression, of war, of fear” (“I Stand Here Ironing” 12). In 1934 James Agee, writing for Fortune magazine about the American roadside industry, asserted that the American spirit is inherently “restive,” and that the “hunger for movement” is “very probably the profoundest and most compelling of American racial hungers.” What’s more, he added, we move not for any substantive reasons, but “for the plain unvarnished hell of it.” If we are to believe Agee, and many observers since, then the paralysis engendered by the Depression in the United States posed not just physical hardships, but metaphysical ones, necessitating cultural maneuvers that would relieve the fear associated with stagnation. Morris Dickstein, for instance, has suggested that the popularity of 1930s movies featuring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire is related to the sheer attraction of fluidity, of motion, for a culture that had been forcibly immobilized. Michael Denning advances a similar argument concerning the             enormous symbolic resonance, in song, narrative, and film, of the Okie migration , a movement of epic proportions that held out the tantalizing promise of narrative resolution. And as one historian of the ’30s remarked, the popular dance marathon, in which a cessation of movement meant the loss of a cash prize, was a quintessential Depression concept, encapsulating the dilemma of an exhausted populace running on empty, imitating “the aimless, endless movement of superfluous people around and around the country in rickety cars or on freight trains.”1 For some artists of the decade, the “new” stasis became a kind of dark national joke, given our longstanding association of America with literal and figurative mobility. It seems somehow fitting, for instance, that October 1930 saw the publication of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, in which the ironic journey of a fetid corpse exposes the noble quest motif as a preposterous culturalnarrative framework for those in the lowest social classes. And at the other end of the decade, filmmaker Preston Sturges exploited the genre of the road movie to highlight, like Faulkner, submerged assumptions about class, movement, and representation: Sullivan’s Travels (1941) features a socially-minded Hollywood director who hits the road in search of the downtrodden, but winds up, propitiously , on a chain gang. It appears that, in the context of the Great Depression, the classic American belief in movement as progress, in the journey as a means to an appropriate and desirable social or economic end, is not just invalid; it’s hilarious. Indeed, the tension in the culture between involuntary stasis and the desire for mobility offers a rich organizing framework within which to consider some of the most compelling artistic statements of the period, ranging from the black humor of Faulkner and Sturges, to the iconic potency of Dorothea Lange’s photographic portrait, Migrant Mother (1936), to the distinctive image-cumnarrative genre of the “documentary book,” including Erskine Caldwell’s and Margaret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1937) and James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Moreover, such artistic exploitations of the dichotomy between aimlessness and direction, fixity and locomotion, only extended the tensions implicit in a vocabulary that had grown up with nineteenth-century working-class culture but that achieved new currency with the large-scale labor disputes of the early twentieth century. Terms such as speed-up, work stoppage, walkout, and strike collectively demonstrate how assertions of movement or nonmovement, action or inaction, became counteractive strategies in a socioeconomic war. Not coincidentally, the stasis/motion framework also elucidates the precarious...

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