ahliv's blog

I recently attended a talk at the New York Public library, featuring chef Rene Redzepi in conversation with chef David Chang.  Redzepi’s restaurant, Noma, is in Copenhagen, and has recently been named the best restaurant in the world; David Chang is the owner of the Momofuku restaurant group, which is to say that he is the revered head honcho of the kitchen where I work, and will likely never learn my name.

Redzepi was talking about how his food is distinctly Copenhagen cuisine: the food is foraged from the immediate vicinity and is cooked and presented in a distinctly personal way, influenced by the aesthetics unique to the chef’s extra-special Scandinavian personal histories.  

That’s awesome for Redzepi-- his restaurant is extraordinary, and extraordinarily expensive.  He proceeded to bemoan the state of fine dining all over the world, saying that if you were blindfolded and had a dish at a three star restaurant in a given nation, you would have no idea whether you were in Italy, France, America, Abu Dabi… there is a homogenized idea of what “high art” type food can be.  

At this point Chang stopped complacently swilling beer for a well-tempered retort, to point out the place of American pop culture in our food.  I thought immediately of the famous Doughnuts and Coffee dish served at Per Se.  The most ubiquitous dish for a stiff on the skids in the texts we’ve read, rendered with some artful attention, served at one of the best restaurants in our country.  People adore this dish.  Why?  Because doughnuts and coffee are our indigenous food: just as restiveness has been bred into our shiftless selves (love that idea, by the way, Agee-- very romantic), perhaps all we want in a restaurant experience is a bit of comfort and humility, a “donut” and a cup of coffee.  

This is far from the only example.  America developed an affection for hotdogs as cheap, efficient, one-hand snacking in the 1930s-- unabashed reverence for cheap cuts of pork is unavoidably in vogue in all the hot restaurants today (especially in Chicago, where the hotdog is a traditional star but increasingly the fodder of high cuisine as well).  Christina Tosi, also of Momofuku, is celebrated for making cookies with potato chips and candy corn embedded in them.  Fried chicken and pie cropped up on the menus of several Michelin two-star restaurants this year.   All of these traditional, road-friendly American foods are delivered with a little bit of a self-conscious laugh-- these chefs are owning up to the flavors of their American rearing, and that of their parents before them.  It’s kitschy and cute, but ultimately, it works because it tastes damn fine. 

A Cool Million: the Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin depicts an exaggeratedly doomed American tale.  The protagonist suffers relentless misfortunes on every front-- he is hassled by the legal system, robbed, exploited, and even his own physical form and his girlfriend are ruined.  How improbable that Pitkin should carry on, with the American dream beating on absurdly in his heart-- it is of course a farce, a takeoff of the prevalent bootstraps-y tales of the era.  In an especially postmodern stroke, according to Gary Scharnhorst's "From Rags To Patches, or A Cool Million As Alter-Alger", West lifted passages without alteration from Alger stories.  For anyone who would recognize the excerpting of those other novels, the spoofing would be especially blatant, and a reconsideration of those optimistic tropes would be all the more immediate.  The unadorned, unaltered appropriation of existing text, simply recontextualized in a new novel, is an action that confused some critics, but was pretty innovative, whether it accomplished its goal for all of its audience or not. 
 
In a way, the satire works on a second level.  Beyond being amused by the exaggerated misery befalling the protagonist, a reader might pause to consider that it is potentially strange to derive pleasure from reading these horrors, and experiencing them at a safe distance.  This points out the sort of strange politics of many of the texts we've engaged, which can verge on exploitive voyeurism and, dare I call it, poverty pornography, made for a middle class audience with an inexhaustible fascination with the truly destitute.  Perhaps a reader experiencing dissonance about enjoying this novel would recognize that the acceptability of such depictions in non-humorous settings is just as questionable, or at least worth being conscious of.  

The novel Waiting for Nothing is comprised of 12 episodic chapters, and the cuts between them give the reader little sense of how much time has passed.  By the end of some chapters, he has a relatively cozy domestic set-up with friends or a woman; at the end of others, he is in prison or seriously injured in an attack.  The dissolution of those relationships, or the resolution to those crises, are never shown.  The book simply proceeds into the next episode, and it is as though there is no past.  This structure reflects the hopeless redundancy of Tom’s existence: some days are good, most days are miserable, but one way or another he goes on, waiting for change that won’t come.  

One segment that especially caught my attention was the episode with the queer man he meets in the park.  The person he’ll come to know as Mrs. Carter is initially referred to as “he”, and he is a frightening figure.  He is a strange and uncomfortable person to interact with for Tom, who acquiesces to his advances, knowing that it will mean a little bit of food and comfort.  Mrs. Carter’s persona shifts through the chapter; he is referred to as “she”.  She and her roommate are aggressive and petty, predatory with Tom.  I wondered about this portrayal, and what it meant to be queer in the 1930’s.  

After a progressive era in the 1920’s, attitudes about homosexuality regressed during the Depression.   According to John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s 1997 book Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality, a return to conservative and traditional values viewed homosexuality as emblematic of a culture of excess and frivolity in the 20’s.   Police raided bars that catered to gays for being vaguely “disorderly”.   In films such as The Warrior’s Husband and Girls in Uniform, characters that were implied to be gay frequently had sneaky impulses and loose ethic codes, or were destructive, seductive, and powerful.  They were generally seedy and tragic characters on the margins of society; it reflected a public discomfort with and repression of sexual minorities.  

This sounds a lot like our Mrs. Carter.  She is depicted as bizarre and exotic, powerful and somewhat predatory.  She is pushy but she is not evil.  Though I shared Tom’s wariness of her, I also pitied her.  She was clearly in a marginalized position, part of a culture that exchanged coded signals to avoid being locked up.  She was picking up a young straight stiff, knowing pretty well that he was not interested in her, and allowing herself to be taken advantage of as she bought him a meal and dressed him.  She seemed needy and lonely in a way that was very different from Tom, but nonetheless dire.  

Families on Route 66 to California in The Grapes of Wrath regularly came into close relationships with one another.  Through the experience of shared crisis, they considered one another “kin”.  There is similar circumstantial generosity and closeness among the men traveling on the trains and hitch hiking in Anderson’s Hungry Men and Guthrie’s Bound for Glory.  
Acel’s small company of Big Boy and Bill provide him interesting conversation and a bit of comfort in friendship.  There is no particular expectation or obligation to stay together: each man is cutting a different path with a different goal in mind.  As long as they are together, they scrape together meals to share, act as lookouts for one another.  They don’t need to be perfectly matched as people, and there will be other gangs to take their places after their paths separate.  
A man finds Acel to have a good face, which apparently means enough to find him food and give him a dime.  He casually refers to a man he has just met as “Dad”.  Big Boy peels off several dollars to give away to his new friend.  A gas station attendant takes a trade with Guthrie and his crew “just to prove my heart was in the right place”.  
Each of these interactions demonstrate a generosity, not only with food or money, but with one’s self.  Sharing stories and coming into close understanding of people with no expectation of their permanence is a remarkable act.  Those characters demonstrate trust and faith in some greater good. 

Flannery O’Connor wrote in her book Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, “"anything that comes out of the South s going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic."  I thought immediately of the style of Southern Gothic writing as I read Alan Trachtenberg’s partly defensive introduction to Caldwell and Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces.  

Trachtenberg admits the liberties that Caldwell took with the narration (such as instances where quotations accompanying portraits were fabricated, never spoken by the subject) but deems a characterization of the book as being a “wicked distortion” to be unfair.  They miss the “southern inflection”-- some Southern cultural quality that enabled the writer and photographer to manipulate to a somewhat dramatic end.  

In the Southern Gothic genre, characters are made grotesque to call attention to the peculiar social ills of the South.  In my experience, there is the sensation of being drawn into the charm of an individual, as indicia of their strange darkness slowly creeps into the narrative.  There is an unreal, sometimes outright supernatural, quality to these stories, steeped in a difficult history riddled with contradiction.  

“Mark against the south its failure to preserve its own culture and its refusal to accept the culture of the east and west.  Mark against it the refusal to assimilate the blood of an alien race of another color or to tolerate its presence. Mark against it most of, if not all, the ills of a retarded and thwarted civilization.”

Even in this description, Caldwell’s meaning is obscured.  He is inviting the reader to blame the South for all of these problems, but he is also indicating that problems are more complicated, run very deep, and are not attributable to a single blameworthy party.   He exaggerates in that last sentence: the reader realizes that not all of civilization’s ills are attributable to “the South”, and this irony forces the reader to notice how much they arbitrarily disdain the South.

On page 44, there are several short paragraphs outlining the responses of various authorities (politicians, sociologists, and the like) to the plight of the tenant farmers.  Each of their views of the situation is simplistic, ill-informed, completely and near-comically twisted.   When you are forced to laugh dryly at the grossness of sociologists suggesting sterilization of particular farmers, you know it is to keep from crying frustrated tears: that is the territory of the Southern Gothic writer.  

So if some of the captions on Bourke-White’s photos seem dramatic and exploitive, perhaps we can keep O’Connor in mind.  For the inhabitants of the South, who had seen the worst of everything, lurid, vivid, dramatic and twisted is all that registers anymore.  Those people have a narrative style and a relationship with reality that is all their own.

As Asch rolls towards New York City in the final chapter of The Road, he wonders what he has learned or accomplished in his tour of the United States.  He is at a loss for an elegant and single summation for the observation and conversation he has made, and he reiterates the ideal he had had in mind as the trip unfolded:

“I had wanted to reach inside the miners and the field workers and the unskilled laborers and the poor farmers and the machinists and the construction men and the loggers, and their wives and and girls and sisters and their children that repeated the patterns,and with a million hands grasp their death and pull it out and show it is not death, it was not defeat; it was want that was fought and struggled against daily; and since it was not some exceptional, unique, exotic want, but usual, and everyday and common in its suffering, it united them all and someday it would by all of them be fought together, vanquished.”

This is a beautiful and cinematic idea, that the Americans at large are the striving, hardbodied mass.  He is not referring in this passage to any actual organization of change, but to some ethereal force that will turn the tides through sheer force of will vanquish the slow death of the workers of America.  A pretty idea, but not something he was able to find and document in his travels.

So his next paragraph begins, “But ahead was New York...”.  The hope of miraculous understanding of a definite American spirit is dissipated.  This does not spell his doom-- he met an amazing array of people, and he is coming away from their stories.  They cannot be summed up in a satisfying resolution, because they are factually in flux and incomplete, not a tidy narrative. What life, and what nation, could possibly be thusly summed up?  He is seeing people more clearly-- for example, the camaraderie easily assumed among bus travelers as he left the East coast at the start of his journey is no longer present, he perceives posing in social interactions in a way that he had once insisted was impossible among the grit of true Americans.  This doesn’t dismay him the way it might have at the beginning of the trip; he doesn’t care.  He is envisioning the life to which he is returning, and experiencing the relief of a return to the familiar after a long time away from home. 

   
In We’re on the road to nowhere: Steinbeck, Kerouac, and the legacy of the Great Depression, Jason Spangler posits both On the Road and Grapes of Wrath as ant modernist novels written in the a modern modality.  Though conforming to certain standards of narration, each novel depicts people who have been left outside of progress; society has no space carved out for them, so they are forced to make their own.
Spangler draws a distinction between the despair of the Joad family and the youthful exuberance of Sal Paradise and company.  The difference is between wandering and having an adventure, as he puts it.  
Conversely though, it seems to me, that the Joads are acting as intrepid pioneers with a particular goal, while Kerouac’s beatniks are crossing the country in vain, looking for something they cannot articulate.  Either way, there is a mixture of hope and frustration in inhabiting such an ambiguous and impermanent space.
One critical difference is that when Sal has not worked for a few weeks and needs money, there are people in his life that will bail him out.  He is not rich and neither are his family members back home, but he will not starve.  The life of the beatnik vagrant has its slim days, but theirs will only ever be an ideological hunger.  The Joads have nothing behind them and little hope ahead.  As Steinbeck attested in Harvest Gypsies, migrant worker families fought a losing battle against dooming structures and circumstances.  
There is a section of on the road in which Sal takes up with a Chicana named terry.  Living with her little son and picking cotton every day, he is allowed to appropriate the vestiges of Indian identity, and romanticized that sensation.  

“We bent down and began picking cotton. It was beautiful. Across the field were the tents, and beyond them the sere brown cottonfields that stretched out of sight, and over that brown arroyo foothills, and then as in a dream the snowcapped Sierras in the blue morning air…But I knew nothing about cotton picking. I spent too much time disengaging the white ball from its crackly bed…Moreover my fingers began to bleed…My back began to ache. But it was beautiful kneeling and hiding in that earth; if I felt like resting I just lay down with my face on the pillow of brown moist earth.”

The moment that he’s sick of his back aching, though, he picks up and leaves his charming Mexican family.  Terry is single mother with no money; she does not have the option to leave behind a life making a dollar-fifty a day.  What is beautiful simplicity by virtue of its brevity for Sal is harsh reality for Terry: it is not fun to live with “just enough to buy groceries in the evening”.  Sal’s experience of migrant farmwork reveals the privilege with which he views the world.  

So even though the Joads and the beats might have been seeking new lives, and an understanding of what it was to be American, their experiences are made very different by the mobility afforded to middle class artist types, the mobility that renders their ramshackle nation-crossing strictly voluntary. 

When the sharecroppers were forced from their land, there was suddenly an enormous population of unemployed and underemployed.  Their desperate acceptance of the poorest compensation and living conditions as migrant labor in California devalued their work, meant that wages could be dropped further and further, because there would always be a man willing to take a 25 cents an hour, and then a dollar a day…

In the capitalist frame of supply and demand, a commodity is worth less as its availability increases.  Knowing this, large landowners in California left acres and acres fallow, lest the excess crop depress market prices, without regard for the rampant malnutrition and starvation around them.  To view migrant work as a commodity, in the harshest Darwinian economic sense, they were thinning their ranks as members of families broke apart from one another or died.  It would have helped those who could persevere if the glut of available bodies was to decrease.  But an epidemic outbreak would really do nothing to help-- the poor are a virtually inexhaustible resource, and have demonstrated that if they cease coming from one locale, another population will arrive.

People are not equivalent to bushels of peaches and I am not advocating that they be viewed that way.  But for the sake of strategizing survival in a capitalist society, that is the contrast I’ll put up.  An option in this era was urbanization and specialization of labor.  Especially in 1915-1930, another massive population shift was happening in America: the Great Migration of black people from the south to Mideastern, Midwestern, and Northern urban centers.  Though there was certainly poverty and struggle, it seems to me that the formerly agricultural laborers were more successful entering cities and powering rapidly expanding industries: meatpacking, automotive, and otherwise.  I realize that families like the Joads had been misinformed, lead to believe that they would soon have their own land again, and could farm as they had, prosperously.  Of course, by the 30’s, they would have been far from the only people looking for jobs in factories.

The Joads and other families were deciding how rapidly and in what manner they would meet their demise.  Let their families perish while they served prison terms after attempting to organize laborers, or continue eking by on a few dollars at a time?  Those who had a fair amount of hope, a middle class background, even-- in Harvest Gypsies, Steinbeck predicts they might last half a year more than the family that already shows wear, already walks around with the strain of constant fear on their faces.  

The landowning class of Grapes of Wrath knows itself to be softened by an easy life, and they know how easy it would be for the migrant class to take everything away.  They have hunger on their side, a primal urgency.  For the same reason that the landowners needed police to break up any semblance of unionization, powerful people in agriculture were sure to condemn Steinbeck and his novel: defenses go up when people start speaking about injustice, damning labels imposed to attempt to bring silence and maintain dominance. 

Chapter seven brings the reader into the frantic thoughts of the used car salesman.  He makes his money turning completely battered, tired old cars at steep mark-ups to people who have no other option, and whose naiveté and politeness obligates them to make the poor purchases under pressure.  
“Soften ‘em up, Joe.  Jesus, I wisht I had a thousand jalopies! Get em ready to deal, an’ I’ll close ‘em.  Goin’ to California? Here’s jus’ what you need.  Looks shot, but they’s thousand’s of miles in her.” (p 89)
From his feverish calculations and frenzied speech, the reader is given a distinct picture of this man-- charging around his lot with his grimy sleeves rolled, drops of spit and flinging off his lips.  He cheats the customer at every opportunity: giving them a distracting run-around about the price of a vehicle he’s saw-dusted into ostensibly smooth-running silence.  He says to himself, “This won’t last forever.”  This second, the land is clearing, and he wants to be the one to supply as many of the impoverished and desperate folks with the means to clear it as possible.  If he can turn enough jalopies while the demand exists, he knows he will retire comfortably on the easy money.  
Though we’re given plenty of evidence that the car salesman is a hustler and a slime ball, it is another instance of responsibility falling somewhere higher up the ladder.  It is like the case of the farmers who become tractor drivers: no, it isn’t right that they should knock in a corner of an old neighbor’s house, but they are doing their best to support families in a system that uses people up and discards them; this is the only option they see.  
When the story cuts back to the Joads in the next chapters, though, we see the hooptie car in a new light.  Though they’ve been jerked around by buyers and sellers as they try to leave their homes, the Joads’ car is their hope.  It will bring them into ridiculous physical closeness and discomfort, and is a total hunk of junk, but it is the connective device between a dismal present and the prosperity promised in their future, Californian lives.  
“The family met at the most important place, near the truck.  The house was dead, and the fields were dead; but this truck was the active thing, the living principle.  The ancient Hudson, with bent and scarred radiator screen, with grease in dusty globules at the worn edges of every moving part, with hub caps gone and caps of red dust in their places-- this was the new hearth, the living center of the family; half passenger car and half truck, high-sided and clumsy.”  (p 135-6)
They weren’t fooling themselves or thinking it was the finest ride, but as usual were bravely accepting yet another crummy fact and persevering. 

Asch’s anticipation of his journey expresses the hope of getting to the essence of people across the country.  He knows that encountering strangers can be uneasy—whether in an American town interacting with natives, or in the comparatively formal setting of a traincar, people are performing for one another, allowing a stranger only partial vantage into their lives.  Some people shut out the unfamiliar person entirely, uninterested in participating in any exchange of culture.  People in Richmond might have harbored bitterness towards a Northern reporter after being portrayed as backward and apalling too many times in the press.  Asch or any subsequent interloper had nothing to do with their lives, and a discourse with him didn’t seem productive.  For one reason or another, people are reserved in revealing their true selves.

Some exteriors may be breached, though.  Asch sees the shared discomfort and slight indignity of the bus ride as a sort of social equalizer.  People were less able to put on airs as they were juggled down the road together, unable to sleep reasonably, taking their breaks and meals together on remote stretches of the highway.  He favors buses for this quality of opening people up—he isn’t only trying to see the cities and towns that comprise the nation, but is also concerned with meeting the other people who for whatever reason had the travel impulse and found themselves on the bus with him.  In all his interactions, he is composing a picture of  people who live and think differently from him, even when it means engaging people who are antagonistic to him. 

He is frustrated in Richmond by suggestions to visit the Chamber of Commerce, or see the historic sites downtown.  He cannot specifically articulate what it is he seeks, but it is some texture or essence that is RICHMOND, that defines it.  Once he feels that sensation he will be able to walk away satisfied, knowing he didn’t part with the almost-beautiful Jerry for nothing, able to say “Yes, I have seen Richmond.”  For whatever that means.

I was reminded by the brief interactions with Jerry of the Simon and Garfunkel song America.  Though written decades later, the sentiment is similar to that in The Road’s introduction: seeking an understanding of and identification with the vast nation, and the occassional alienation inherent in undertaking such a quest.  Over the course of a few hours, Asch and Jerry rapidly get to know each other, brought into some comfort and intimacy due to the strange circumstance.  Yet just as rapidly, their divergent goals in travelling separate them.  The idealistic lovers in Simon and Garfunkel’s song lose steam and lose one another in the course of their bus journey… the parallels aren’t perfect, but the song is perhaps a useful depiction of the ambitious project of “finding” America, and the unsatisfying way that journey might go.