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.17When deployed on stage, the alienation effect often presented theater audiences with individuals who were more like cartoon characters than deep psychological portraits, albeit cartoon characters who exposed real social contradictions through their words and actions.Caldwell definitely was not the theoretician of his craft that Brecht was,nor did the mass-culture qualities of his work form a self-reflexive critique of the culture industries.Caldwell’s unselfconsciousness of the method he created is nicely illustrated in his biography by Harvey Klevar, which revealed his deep anger toward critics who claimed that his work was not strict realism.Thesecritiques drove him to document his narratives of the South with the natural-Erskine Caldwell’s Challenge to Gone with the Wind109istic authority of the photograph in You Have Seen Their Faces, a photo-essay collection with his second wife, Margaret Bourke-White (159, 169).And onegets the distinct sense that some of the mass-culture qualities of his work—particularly the sensational sexuality—are there not as part of a larger social critique, but because of the author’s own desires.But despite the lack of self-reflexivity in Caldwell’s novels, his incorporation of mass-culture modes and the grotesque within his self-described “realism” does produce a kind of alienation effect between character and reader, generated by the contradictory traits within each character, humor, the avoidance of deep characterization, and the absurd scenes in which he sets his figures in motion.And though his use of humor and sexual pleasure did not show the constructed nature of desire under capitalism (“productive enjoyment,” as Brecht might call it), it could nonetheless drawreaders into a critique of capitalist social relations and southern racial formations.As I have argued, the humor Caldwell projected onto Ty Ty’s absurd quest for gold, when juxtaposed with Will’s class-conscious battle with mill owners in the city, works to produce this critique.Ty Ty’s ogling of Griselda does not.While their politics were decidedly limited, the best-sellers of Erskine Caldwell offered an opportunity to establish a reading of southern society within American mass culture that was generally in line with the mid-century left.A suitable context for his reception had been paved by the social struggles of the 1930s and 1940s, which had established a “common sense” for both understanding andusing the novel’s positive politics, particularly in Northern cities.Perhaps most uniquely, his eroticism and grotesque brand of humor yoked pleasure to these politics, particularly for straight male readers, with very mixed consequences to be sure.Strikes, racism, lynching, misery in both town and country—all the themes a political novel of the 1930s and 1940s was expected to cover—seemedto demand the most serious tones imaginable.In this milieu, a story that covered these themes and attempted to be entertaining stood out; one could argue that Caldwell’s best-sellers marked a unique attempt to strike a compromise between proletarian literature and consumer culture.The fusion of realism, comic repetition, exaggeration, and the southern grotesque within Caldwell’s novelscalled into question many of the class and racial structures of the United States, particularly those of the South.Yet it is uncertain whether Caldwell’s dangerous dance with stereotypes of poor whites made audiences any wiser in gaug-ing southern social relations.Perhaps the real value of Caldwell’s best-sellers, like so much of Popular Front culture, rests in our hands as we examine thekinds of authorial subjectivity and aesthetic compromises necessary for a politically didactic work to appear before the largest of audiences.C H A P T E R F O U RAsian Yeomen and Ugly AmericansCarlos Bulosan, H.T.Tsiang and the U.S.Literary MarketIn November, 1942, when there was too much pain and tragedy in the world,I found the story [“My Father Goes to Court”] in my hat.I sent it to The New Yorker, a magazine I had not read before, and in three weeks a letter came.“Tell us some more about the Filipinos,” it said.I said, “Yes, sir.”— C A R LO S BU LO S A N , from Afterword to The Laughter of My Father, 1944Poor Wong Wan-Lee, who had made no ten thousand fortunes, was a failure;but his cousin Wong Lung [ sic] had made a million and had become the hero of The Good Earth—Horatio Alger!— H.T.TS I A N G , And China Has Hands, 1937The case of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Mitchell illustrates how the labelrealism was necessary to confer narrative authority and literary respectability in the 1930s and 1940s.Far from being a hindrance in the mass market, socially committed authors who deployed realism in a way that earned the label couldgain access to the mass audience they desired [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]