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Monstrous Modernism Disfigured Bodies and Literary Experimentalism in Yonnondio and Christ in Concrete joseph entin One of the central reasons for the tortured tone of the textual portion of James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s celebrated 1941 portrait of three Alabama tenant farming families, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, is Agee’s expressed frustration with the incapacity of language to convey the full materiality of the sharecroppers’ existence. “This is a book only by necessity,” Agee states. “More seriously, it is an effort in human actuality in which the reader is no less centrally involved than the authors and those of whom they tell” (xvi). How, Agee asks, can “human actuality” be represented? Asserting that “language cannot embody . . . it can only describe,” Agee contends that he would do better to provide a variety of extra-textual evidence that would bypass the inability of language to render the “actuality” of the real: “If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odor, plates of food and of excrement” (13). And then, in a sentence given the significance of a full paragraph, Agee declares: “A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point” (13). The grotesque image Agee paints here is designed both to signify the limits of any “book” to capture the materiality of lived existence and to represent a figure that, although delivered in words, gestures beyond language toward the actuality that language inevitably fails to embody. Although Agee’s image of the torn tenant farmer’s body is striking, it is by no means unique—images of wounded proletarian bodies litter the literature of the ’30s. Early in The Disinherited (1934), for instance, young Larry Donovan ’s aunt takes him to the home of a miner who has been crushed by falling rock. The man “lay trussed like a blue fowl, his feet protruding beneath a cheap             cotton shroud”; his “scarred hands,” coal dust-blackened nails, and lips, “glued in a hideous grin,” serve as a gruesome and foreboding specter of life in the mines (68). The middle-class narrator of Meridel LeSueur’s short story “I Was Marching” (1934) is moved to join a local strike when she is confronted by the bodies of picketers who have been injured by police: “whole men suddenly spouting blood and running like living sieves, another holding a dangling arm shot squarely off, a tall youngster, running, tripping over his intestines” (159). Dalton Trumbo’s novel Johnny Got His Gun (1939) channels its critique of industrial warfare through the body of his protagonist Joe Bonham, who returns from the battlefield without legs, arms, or a face. “He was nothing but a piece of meat like the chunks of cartilage old Prof Vogel used to have in biology” (63), nothing but “raw material” (82); “a side of beef” (109); a “stump of a man” (162). Like Agee’s “piece of the body torn out by the roots,” these graphic images of disfiguration signal the complex negotiations between social existence and literary representation that characterize much Depression-era working-class literature . For proletarian literature, a genre frequently dedicated to conveying the immensely extra-literary quality of physical harm inflicted on working-class persons , images of disfigured bodies serve as potent symbols both of the limits of literary representation and of experimental efforts to transcend those limits, to create what Agee calls “illusions of embodiment” (13). This essay examines two novels from the ’30s, Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete and Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio, that employ images of wounded workingclass bodies to mediate traditionally distinct literary and epistemological modes. Using tropes of the body, especially the injured body, to fashion literary representations , these two novels interrogate and ultimately destabilize hegemonic boundaries between social “experience” and literary aesthetics, political critique and formal innovation, producing highly self-reflexive works of literature that employ modernist techniques to narrate social injustice. Both novels represent monstrous modernisms, hybrid literary forms that fuse a modernist emphasis on rhetorical experimentation with a materialist focus on bodily harm.1 In 1940, historian Caroline Ware, author of an innovative 1935 book on the ethnic and working-class culture of early twentieth-century Greenwich Village, wrote the introduction to a collection of new historical essays entitled The Cultural Approach to History.2 In...

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