Canonizing Economic Crisis: Jack London’s The Road

The Great Recession, as the early years of twenty-first-century America have been termed, surely dislodges literary study from whatever economic comfort zone it previously occupied. At this writing, US home foreclosures are climbing toward the one million mark, according to RealtyTrac, while the nation’s jobless rate hovers close to 10%.¹ Some eight and one-half million jobs have been lost in the post-2007 downturn, and economists caution that many years will elapse before the job market fully recovers. Experts and pundits speak of a jobless recovery, and some warn that paid work per se is undergoing a permanent shift into temporary and contingent status no matter what the employee’s level of education. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people who describe themselves as self-employed but working fewer than 35 hours per week because they cannot find full-time work has “more than doubled since the recession began, reaching 1.2 m in December, 2009” (Luo A14).

The correlative deterioration of material and employment conditions on college and university campuses nationwide constitutes a wake-up call to scholars and critics. True, scholarly and classroom literary engagement in the name of canon reform may seem initially far afield of budget cuts and furlough days. Yet literary critics are summoned newly to approach the familiar—perhaps overly familiar—canon(s) in the context of pressing social problems whose foreground extends at least to the 1980s, when increasing wealth inequality in the US first came to the attention of social scientists and journalists. Crisis may be an overused term, but not one of overstatement in the early twenty-first century, when the need is for renewed canonical relevance that speaks to the present moment as urgently as it did in the 1960s and 1970s era of civil rights activism, of feminist and Native American initiatives, and of the Vietnam antiwar movement.

Numerous possibilities for the reinterpretation of the fiction published in recent years may come to mind. For instance, Tom Wolfe’s novel, A Man in Full (1998), might be reapproached as a prescient representation of the American real estate boom and bust of the 2000–10s. Jane Smiley’s One Thousand Acres (2003), widely regarded as a reinscription of King Lear, might now be reconsidered in the context of much-critiqued practices of the dubious economics of industrial agriculture. Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo (2002) can readily be contextualized within the political firestorms over immigration along the southern border of the US.

Short fiction, too, lends itself to canonical reconfiguration. Raymond Carver may be best known for stylistic minimalism, Louise Erdrich for Native American rootedness, George Saunders for postmodern stylistics, and Walter Mosley for the genre of detective fiction. Yet placed in opposition, several of their short stories disclose a remarkable complementarity. Such short stories as Carver’s “The Bridle,” Erdrich’s “Scales,” and Saunders’s “COMM COMM,” together with Walter Mosley’s “Equal Opportunity,” converge as related accounts of social dislocation in the recent decades that pundits and economists have called a second Gilded Age marked by extremes of wealth at one end of the social spectrum and by job loss or rock-bottom wages at the other in a “winner-take-all society.”²

Texts that are historically more distant must also come in for reconsideration. David Zimmerman’s new readings of the fiction of Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and others in the light of late-nineteenth-century financial panics is particularly relevant in terms of the Wall Street scandals of 2008–10.Zimmerman’s Panic! Markets, Crises, & Crowds in American Fiction (2006) unsettles the prevailing rubrics of realism and naturalism by focusing on the interrelationship of fiction and the financial press in moments of financial and social upheaval. Without displacing the long-codified terms of realism or naturalism, Panic argues that financial crises, like those of the natural world, attracted novelists to new subjects and settings “because panics exposed cultural and economic dynamics that were invisible under normal conditions” (2). Dreiser and Norris and others functioned, Zimmerman argues, like “seismologists converging on the...