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Time, Transmission, Autonomy What Praxis Means in the Novels of Kenneth Fearing david jenemann and andrew knighton “All that is required is imagination and political good faith.” —Kenneth Fearing, Clark Gifford’s Body “Telling a story means having something special to say, and that is precisely what is prevented by the administered world, by standardization and eternal sameness.” —Theodor W. Adorno, “The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel” Today, with the exception of The Big Clock, each of Kenneth Fearing’s novels is out of print, out of sight, and largely out of memory. Among his contemporaries, even those who putatively shared his political views, Fearing ’s novels were dismissed as inconsequential. “To shift abruptly to secular matters ,” writes one reviewer, “The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing is a well-done book, though not, to my mind, worth doing” (Hardwick 587). The scant academic discourse currently devoted to Fearing concentrates almost exclusively on his poetry, and save for those few anthologized poems, Fearing has been excised from U.S. literary history. At one time, however, Fearing was perhaps the most important left-wing poet. Allen Guttmann credits his first book, Angel Arms, with inaugurating the genre of proletarian poetry (252),1 and Alan Wald claims that his death is the symbolic end of the Old Left (9).2 But even those scholars most attuned to the evolution of the literary Left who would give Fearing his due as a poet seem congenitally averse to granting him any credit as a novelist. Most recently, Rita Barnard, in her book The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance, condemns Fearing to be remembered almost exclusively as a poet, dividing her book neatly in two: the novels of Nathanael West are counterposed             to Fearing’s poetry. For his part, Wald describes Fearing’s novelistic output in terms of economic necessity as “an enforced new career as the author of thrillers and mysteries” (226). Indeed, the overall impression one gleans of Fearing as a novelist is that his work has been dismissed as apolitical pulp. Yet it may be Fearing’s overlooked thrillers that most clearly reveal his intervention into questions political, cultural, and ethical. Despite their heft and “proletarian” credentials, Fearing’s poetry volumes are confined by the formal limits of his man-on-the-street style and the impressionistic nature of poetry itself. On the other hand, by confronting the demands of realist narrative, Fearing ’s novels invite a sustained consideration of the form’s political implications as well as its limits. With his relentless use of multiple narrators, condensed and expanding timelines, and excerpts of simulated mass media publications uncomfortably shoehorned into the body of the text, Fearing conceals behind the seeming simplicity of pulp a challenge to literary norms and the structures of bourgeois experience. Diagnosing the conformity, bureaucracy, and dehumanization of modern experience,Fearing’snovelsreflectanuneasinessatthebadfaiththatresultswhen one persists in trying to tell an individual’s story at the same time that mass technologies threaten to render the very notion of “individualism” increasingly problematic . In recognizing this paradox, Fearing anticipates Theodor W. Adorno’s observations regarding the narrator’s tenuous position in postwar fiction: Apart from any message with ideological content, the narrator’s implicit claim that the course of the world is still essentially one of individuation , that the individual with his impulses and his feelings is still the equal of fate, that the inner person is still directly capable of something, is ideological in itself; the cheap biographical literature that one finds everywhere is a byproduct of the disintegration of the novel form itself. (Adorno, “Position of the Narrator” 31) In her study of Kenneth Fearing’s poetry, Rita Barnard makes use of Adorno as a lens through which one can assess Fearing’s appropriation of mass culture and his suspicions regarding the atrophying subject. While these concerns saturate Fearing’s novels—and beg a fair reconsideration—Barnard’s analysis of the cultural industrial aspects of both Fearing and Adorno falls short of illuminating the extent to which both writers treat mass-mediated modernity as part of a larger ontological question. Just as it has been a disservice to Fearing to underestimate his contributions as a novelist, it is similarly unproductive to label him as a “proletarian” or “leftist ” author without further probing those terms. Such a characterization would surely come as a surprise to those who supposedly knew Fearing best: “He didn’t believe in politics,” his son once wrote in a letter, “he believed in...

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