“Between the outhouse and the garbage dump”: Locating Collapse in Depression Literature

At the conclusion to my 1994 book on documentary, They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary, I pointed to what I referred to as the “largest group of those who must be represented: children” who “hold no social, economic, or political power in our culture. . . . [and are] despised, ignored, abused, and condescended to even as they figure among the stock pieties cherished in the popular imagination” (217). Even with my acknowledgement, children remained marginal, an afterthought noted in the book’s coda. This essay considers how the image of the child and narratives about children offer an uncanny entry into understanding representations of depressions, what might be called an optics of depression. I follow two tracks—the first and longest looks at a few 1930s novels, and the selections are a bit arbitrary in part to demonstrate the pervasiveness of demarcating locations of collapse “between the outhouse and the garbage dump” (Olsen 4); then I glance, through a brief look at Mark Nowak’s poetry, at how those etched borders seem less defined within our current “great recession” as home foreclosures and unemployment spread across all sectors of the country—from inner core urban areas to suburbs and edge city exurbs, from Detroit to Miami, etc.—reframing the locations of collapse. What remains across temporalities, however, is the shame, panic, anxiety, and fear.¹ To some extent, the spatial notation I’m interested in has already been sketched by Frank Rich’s recent New York Times article, “Hollywood’s Brilliant Coda to America’s Dark Year.” In it, he succinctly describes why the iconography of the Great Depression is insufficient for our current “Great Recession” (9). Yet, it still must be reckoned with if we are to comprehend fully what depressions mean to working-class aesthetics and how this meaning holds gendered resonances.

1. Kenneth Fearing: Dead Reckoning

Flying by the seat of one’s pants, guesswork because the instruments have failed, the stars cannot be sighted, one’s location unfixed: Dead Reckoning. This was the title of Kenneth Fearing’s mid-Depression volume of poems—a navigational term of unknown origin describing the method of plotting a course based on past positions. Because space and velocity are relative—because the rug’s been pulled from beneath one’s feet—with each reckoning, the possibility for error increases exponentially. In Fearing’s words from a poem in the volume Dead Reckoning, “En Route”:

  . . . It’s fixed, I tell you, fixed,   there’s nothing to it, listen: We will meet across the continents and years at 4 A.M. outside   the Greek’s when next the barometer reads 28.28 and the   wind is from the South South-East bringing rain and hail   and fog and snow; Until then I travel by dead reckoning and you will take your   bearings from the stars

(75)

As such pathbreaking works by Caren Irr (The Suburb of Dissent [1998]) and Jani Scandura (Down in the Dumps [2008]) have shown, Depression-era literature was rife with tropes of positioning, of location, of place, or rather, of displacement, derailment, missing locations, and missed connections. Spatial order—central to demarking borders between industrial and residential zones, between men and women, between workers and their bosses, between races, between parents and their children—while sharply visible, still tangibly in effect, could no longer be counted on to signify as they once had. Fearing again, in “Memo”:

Between the haberdasher’s and the pinball arcade, There, where we stood one night in the warm, fine rain, and   smoked and laughed and talked.

Is there now any sound at all, Other than the sound of tires, and motors, and hurrying feet, Is there on tonight’s damp, heelpocked pavement somewhere   the mark of a certain toe, an especial nail, or the butt of a   particular dropped cigarette?—

(77)

In our current “Great Recession,” these “heelpocked” locations of collapse have become even harder to discern as they have extended beyond the cheesy cityscapes “Between the haberdasher’s [if there any left in America] and the pinball arcade” across landscapes...