The Popular, the Populist, and the Populace—Locating Hamlin Garland in the Politics of Culture

BILL BROWN The Popular, the Populist, and the Populace—Locating Hamlin Garland in the Politics of Culture It is observed that the people contradicts itself, tears itselfasunder, and annihihtes itself, that it is triflingand enshved to opinions. —It is not ti\e people that is fickle, but "hnguage." Lyotard rORKiNG t? re-frame what criticism might say about Hamlin Garland by using Garland's career to frame the critical endeavor, the following remarks are occasioned by three distinct and well-known developments of the 1980s: the renewed historical and political interest in American Populism, the theoretical exploration of what might be called the "populist potential" ofpopular culture, and the re-invigorated literary-critical return to American realist and naturalist fiction. Garland surfaces nowhere in these conversations, although he once served the literary-historical function of marking the advent of determinist realism in American fiction, although his later romantic fiction helps mark the advent of the popular Western, and although he has long been America's most famous Populist writer, who lectured and campaigned for the Farmers' Alliance and the Peoples' Party, part of the "movement culture's" task of educating farmers. The failure to surface may well be conditioned by the pressure of the fact that Garland was and remains known chiefly for his first volume of Arizona Quarterly Volume 50, Number 3, Autumn 1994 Copyright © 1994 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 90Bill Broten stories, Main-Traveled Roads (1891), a group of "realist" portrayals of the poverty-stricken farm life of the Midwest. His subsequent artistic and political "defection"—he began writing romantic adventures in 1896—has left us with a literary biography cast as a tragic fall. As critics once put it, this "foremost literary radical of his day," after being lionized "in literary and academic circles," then "affected a velvet coat, drank tea, and forgot about abolishing the unearned increment"; as early as 1930, literary historians mourned that, after his early achievements , Garland then "went off into literature as a business, literature that was safe and salable."1 These comments, paired, stage a double disappearance —into the world ofgenteel culture and the world ofpopular culture, into the hands of the cultural capitalists and the capitalists both, from which the earlier Garland is thus dutifully protected, and the later abandoned without hope. While even such a brief sketch shows why the conversations I've named might have regenerated interest in Garland in the 1980s, such interest, pursued, might have forced them to converge against their will. The new attention to American Populism has been most clearly signaled by Christopher Lasch's The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (1991), which became the "point of departure" for a Telos conference—"Populism vs. the New Class"—that sought to supplement the journal's trajectory from Western Marxism to post-Critical Theory with serious attention to those traditional American alternatives , Populism and Pragmatism.2 This interest in American Populism might be said to have had an Eastern European origin to the degree that the death of state socialism at the hands of its populace highlighted the need to reassess the history of collective agency, to move beyond a dismissal of"the people" as a phantasmatic projection, which means beyond a characterization of "the masses" as perennially duped and/or disciplined. The long-standing reassessment offered by Cultural Studies, centralizing the study of popular culture, and grounded in the work of Gramsci, Laclau, and Stuart Hall, was all but ignored by Telos, although the Cultural Studies conference staged by the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) in 1990 signaled the American academy 's full recognition ofthe paradigm.3 Ifdie "populist" regimes ofReagan and Thatcher—which, as Stuart Hall has said of die latter, regard "democracy" in "its populist aspect, as the site to be occupied, the stake to be seized"—made the possibility of imagining an oppositional pop- Locating Hamlin Garland91 ulism all the more remote in the late capitalist context, nonetheless this "authoritarian populism" (Hall's phrase), winning "the people" in the name of residual values but in die cause of corporate advance, necessitates , now as then, contesting terms and radically reappropriating them.4 While the Telos conference...