waverly's blog

The WPA guides are very different from the Rick Steves books that accompanied many of my peers on our study-abroad semester. Whereas modern guidebooks seem to push readers to have a certain type of experience in the city, the WPA guides offer more insight into the culture and every-day life of each particular place.
 
It’s interesting to look at the guide to New York City and observe the changes that have occurred since it was written. There is a map of the shopping centers in Manhattan that seem to be divvied up by ethnicity. There are the “Russian shops,” the “Syrian, Turkish and Armenian shops,” and the “Jewish and Italian shopping centers.” I can’t imagine seeing this on a contemporary map of Manhattan.
 
The section on the Brooklyn Bridge really portrays the way that people interact with the architecture of the city. It explains what a local might do on a Sunday afternoon, and how New York was beginning to take form.
 
There were also some strange facts, such as “The trading center for the 7,500,000 cases of eggs and 3,500,00 tubs of butter which New Yorkers consume each year is the New York Mercantile Eschange at Hudson and Harrison Streets.” I guess removing these random tidbits could have cut the page count down a little, but it’s a funny statistic nonetheless.
 
Naturally, reading the sections on lower Manhattan, my mind was perpetually drawing comparisons to the New York that I live in now, and how many of these neighborhoods have been taken over by hipsters and college kids.
 
The dramatic, intensely human story of the Lower East Side is a familiar chapter in the epic of America; a host of writers – some seeking out in the Lower EAs Side and others originating there- have described its people. Here have dwelt the people whose hands built the city’s elevateds, subways, tubes, bridges, and skyscrapers. Its two square miles of tenements and crowded streets magnify all the problems and conflicts of big-city life. The inhuman conditions of its slums and sweatshops brought about the first organized social work in America. Crowded, noisy, squalid in many of its aspects, no other section of the city is more typical of New York. (108)
 
Well, the last time I was on the Lower East Side I walked into the boutique down the street from my friend’s apartment only to realize most things in the store exceeded my monthly food allowance. The rent in the area is now about 100 times as much as it was when this guide book was written (purportedly below $19/month, at the time).
 
So, the times have changed. Though I’m not sure who would have sat down and read these hefty guide books from front to back, they are fascinating indicators of development and gentrification.

The USA has come up with some great tourist attractions. The national parks are some of the most majestic outdoor spaces in the country, Las Vegas has been built into a monument of tourist folklore, not to mention the massive Disney resorts that are sprinkled across the coasts and Florida.
 
South Dakota, however, has largely failed at creating successful tourist attractions with the exceptionof the Bad Lands which, to be fair, no one created.
 
Madeline, her sister and I fell into the “See America First” trap. We bought into the idea that as good and informed citizens, we should travel the country and thus see all that America has to offer. We planned a cross-country-and-back car ride.
 
From the beginning, I was obsessed with going to South Dakota. Afterall – there’s Mount Rushmore! And a mammoth excavation site! And a corn palace!
 
The Corn Palace turned out to be one of the biggest disappointments that a Halloween-lover (such as myself) could encounter. We pulled up outside the so-called Palace with images of a great, world-class corn maze. Or at least free popcorn.
 
Well, what we found was a hollowed out school-gym with ears of red and yellow corn hot-glued onto the wall at different, pseudo-decorative angles. There were some wall didactics, too, and a basketball game going on somewhere inside the building. Bad news.
 
We left very, very vexed. The only redeeming quality in the visit, since none of us are fond of corn dogs, was the ice cream shop across the street, which luckily turned out not to be a mirage.
 
Afterwards we headed off to the rest of the great South Dakota tourist attractions – Wall Drug, “1880s town,” the Crazy Horse memorial… But none of them turned out quite like we were expecting. Not even Mount Rushmore, where you had to pay $15 to get a full-frontal view of Theodore Roosevelt’s face receding into stone and the mountain goats that populate it.
 
If, after seeing Mount Rushmore, you want to turn the tape over for “History,” Side B, you can travel about an hour to the Crazy Horse memorial, where you’ll have to pay a similar fee to see the unfinished face of the Lakota chief, whose race was decimated by all the guys immortalized over at Mount Rushmore.
 
So, anyway South Dakota itself proved to be quite distopic when it comes to Great American tourist attractions, each destination costing around $10 for entry and a lifetime of regrets for the time you waste seeing what’s inside.

Investigating The Grapes of Wrath was, in some ways, disheartening. I have always admired Steinbeck as one of the great American writers, someone whose words seemed honest and without underlying motives. However, in investigating his techniques and the strong biblical structure of the novel, I started to think about the power that writers like Steinbeck have over our collective memory of the past. How can certain representations of the past provoke such emotional reaction? How has a novel like Grapes of Wrath changed our perception of the 1930s?
 
In his article "Les Lieux de Mémoire," French historian Pierre Nora differentiates between memory and history. He writes, "Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past" (8). So, according to Nora, it seems we should interpret the material for this class as historical - a representation of the past, whether fictionalized or not. However, the artistic devices that authors and artists utilize seem to all tend toward memory - the memoir, the first person narrative, the entire social realist genre of photography.
 
Nora goes on to argue that the two structures are mutually destructive, saying:
 
             At the heart of history is a critical discourse that is antithetical to spontaneous memory. History is perpetually suspicious of memory,
            and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it (9).
 
Memory is phenomenal and fleeting, while history is relative to the events that surround it. It seems like many of the texts that we have examined appeal to certain crevices of memory in order to draw out nostalgia. As seen in Walker Evan's photography, the smallest details become monumental, the plain and ordinary becomes sorrowful or even tragic. There's no question that the immortalized work of the 1930s - Steinbeck, Anderson, Evans - portrays a sense of glory and excitement, even in hardship. This emotional spin on the 'hard facts' serves as a mechanism that allows readers to certain ideologies that feel exclusively American.
 
Photography walks an especially interesting line between memory and history because it is so widely assumed to be "true." The photographic image becomes an instrument of record making, a way to repel the terrifying process of forgetting.
 
If nostalgia is a yearning for the past, often in an idealized form, then how does it connect memory and history? How does this distinction between history and memory change the way we should understand these texts? 

Waiting For Nothing is dark and depressing. Kromer’s brutal honesty and short, terse sentences create an atmosphere of hopelessness.
 
I can understand why this novel has been poorly remembered. It does not align with the genre of romantic vagabond adventure tales like Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory. Kromer exhibits no desire to fictionalize or glorify his life as a stiff; there is nothing uplifting, no hint of Hollywood in the story. At times the book is also guilt-inducing, since many readers were and are much more able to identify with the stories “antagonists” – those who walked out of restaurants full and satisfied, change jingling in their pockets – than Kromer’s character.
 
The story lacks a typical plot-arc, but there are several motifs of depression-era writing that exist in other novels we’ve read. Early in the novel, Kromer decides to hold up a bank. He says, “This is the last time I will whine for a feed. I am going to show these bastards I will get mine” (55).
 
In Grapes of Wrath, the characters lamented the oppression of higher powers, whether that came in the form of the sharecropping institution, government, or the bank. The Jim Casey martyr figure, the man who risks his safety to rise above the abuse, takes an interesting turn in Waiting for Nothing. As Kromer waits in line at the bank, his gun resting in his pocket, tension builds and the reader anticipates an exciting moment, maybe even a redemptive moment. But Kromer pathetically fails to even pull the gun out of his pocket because it is stuck on the lining of his pants. It’s a total anti-climax.
 
Kromer is the anti-Horatio Alger. The antithesis of the sexy bank robber savior. In an era where gangsters and bank robbers where romanticized, and the Robin Hood myth loomed in the back of the national consciousness, of course Waiting for Nothingwas a total bust!
 
The book is useful because it highlights the writing techniques of the era’s famed fiction writers. It is gritty and sad. Kromer is powerless and paralyzed by poverty.
 
No wonder figures like Pretty Boy Floyd have are so revered. To an economically starved public who feels victimized by the forces in power, any way to “stick it to the man” feels good. Sometime those who are being trod on don’t even know who to point a finger at, or what to accuse them of (obviously the Occupy Wall Street protests come to mind, but that’s a subject for another post). 

Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory gives us a first-hand account of the hobo lifestyle. Written in the first person, the chapters paint a very physical picture of riding a freight train – what it is like to be hungry, to encounter police, and to hold on to the back of a car for dear life even when it is freezing cold.
 
Through Guthrie’s experiences, we begin to see a community among vagabonds.  One man advised Guthrie not to go into Tucson, saying, “Don’t go up in the fine part of town to try to work for a meal. You’ll starve to death, and they’ll throw you in jail just for dying on the streets” (202).
 
There is a distinct camaraderie between Guthrie and fellow travelers, evidenced throughout the story by instances of sharing meals, though they are few and far-between, as well as in the last words of the chapter, when an old, weathered man says, “People has just got to have more faith in one another, believe in each other. There’s a spirit of some kind we’ve all got. That’s got to draw us all together” (230).
 
Friendships that form between these men mirror the experience of their travel. They are fragmentary, short lived and based on fundamental needs or desires, like food, cigarettes, avoiding cops or how to get to the next town. Guthrie’s relationship with Wheeler, though very brief, ends on hopeful and even caring terms (“Been good to know you!” (223)), though they’ve only spent some days together.
 
On the other hand, silence seems preferable to small talk. Loneliness is a constant companion on the road, even within the sense of community that vagabonds share. In the beginning of the selection, Guthrie tries to talk to the driver, but the driver “said that we could ride together better if we asked each other less questions” (196). Furthermore, the wind even seems to be an extended metaphor for loneliness, which is both a communal and an individual experience (“Uncle Sam windburn” (218)).
 
The vagabond lifestyle is an interesting sense of travel.  There is an inherent freedom as well as an appreciation and enjoyment of nature and landscape reminiscent of a “vacation” as we have come to understand it. Guthrie spends a lot of time on the top of the train car, enjoying the sun - “Being a big hand for sunshine” (222) – as well as the beauty of the countryside that he is passing by. 
 
Finally, is there a modern equivalent to the box-car bum? My mind drifts immediately to the gutter-punks who take the East Village by storm, but I also found this photo essay online. One of the photos, the picture I used for this post, immediately brings to mind this iconic image by Ryan McGinley. How has the image of the vagabond or drifter been picked up by modern culture?  How have these harsh realities been romanticized and idealized?

The power of Walker Evans’s photographs in Let Us Praise Famous Mendoes not derive from politics or social positioning. As Melissa Rachleff writes, “Photography was not Walker’s crusade.” Evans’s images are timeless, or at least their worth to Americans is preserved in a long tradition of similar work (see: Robert Frank's The Americans).
 
The workingman - the tired and hungry and worn-out woman or man - is a universal symbol, something that every individual can relate to. We see this phenomenon in today’s political jargon, where politicians strive to ally themselves with the “common man.” There is a reason why Evans remains a revered figure in photography, especially the documentary genre. He distinguished himself from the other W.P.A. photographers in part because of his distrust of the government’s federal funding and refusal to let Roy Stryker, head of the RA's documentary photography program, assign particular subjects to photograph. 
 
Though his use of text, and his preference for simple subject matter were revolutionary in the American way of seeing and photographing, I find his portraits to be some of the most moving images within Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Portraiture, as a genre, especially in photography, began as a depiction of the rich and famous. Nadar's portrait of 19th century actress Sarah Bernhardt helped spawn the modern notion of celebrity –an individual whose likeness and personality is recreated and projected throughout popular culture (also a prominent theme in Frank's photo books). Though the genre of portraiture has expanded, and its boundaries blurred to mirror the quickly developing field of photography, it remains a very purposeful and meaningful process.
 
Evans’s images (especially this one) of the men and women of these Alabama tenant-farming families adhere to the traditional theory of portraiture. He (reportedly) allowed the individuals to project their own personality, giving them a chance to represent and/or defend themselves. And in approaching the project with this sense of humility, Evans mirrors Agee’s reverence for the individuals. Unlike the notorious photograph of a bleached skull in the Badlands, Evans work does not raise questions of immorality or of fictionalized narratives (as Dorthea Lange might) because he alludes to and recreates an intangible mood and feeling rather than statistics of drought and hunger.
 
Finally, I am interested in the investigation of Lange and other photographers as charlatans. Though I understand the feeling of emotional trickery that a “fake” or covertly staged photograph may create, photography is an inherently biased practice - if not by the natural and subconscious practice of personal vision, then by the editing, the cropping, or the printing. Evans and the other W.P.A. photographers helped to visualize and mythologize American culture, and in the process many of their images became iconic representations of hard times. And, as is the nature of an icon, the photographs are perhaps more symbolic of the American attitude than any actual events that took place. 

“I wanted to write of the legend of men’s hunger for always, of death every day, little and not dramatic death, death from watching your children so hungry they were too weak to play…” (Asch, 269)
 
In our discussions of The Grapes of Wrath, we tried to decipher the difference between moving and traveling. I have always distinguished traveling by a sense of added pleasure – leisuretime, family dinners, relaxation. Even business trips sounded adventurous to me, the idea of nice hotels and fluffy white towels a luxurious break from reality.
 
In pieces by Nathan Asch and Louis Adamic, we see two very different experiences of traveling. Both written in the first person, the pieces put us in a position of empathy. Asch’s short vignettes allow us an almost bird’s-eye view of the places he visits and the people he sees. Even as he sits on the bus and remembers what he had already seen: sickness, poverty and misfortune told through the lives of his roadside acquaintances.
 
Adamic, however, finds an apotheosis of the depression on the roadside. His technique of allowing her to tell of her own experiences is, for me, most striking. Hearing an individual’s jargon and unique method of storytelling adds a level of authenticity, hollows out a more compassion than even the most articulate retelling of suffering that one has seen.
 
Reading the plight of this roadside woman, which seemed to be far from over, brought me back to many of the stories my grandmother told. Because her mother dated a series of military men, often sailors, my grandmother moved with them around the country until, at age 16, she was left in a state similar to Adamic’s hitchhiker. I couldn’t help but imagine how Adamic’s woman might have spent the rest of her days, if she got cleaned up or if she stayed on the road.
 
As I read many of these intellectual, Robert Frank-style accounts of America’s sad times, they feel almost phony or sensationalistic. No matter how sympathetic the writers are, their experience is that of an outsider looking in on someone’s suffering and bringing tales back to the public. They are traveling into a world of hunger and desolation, and then returning to a big city to type away on a type writer while their subjects still starve.
 
Travel is, by nature, a luxury. It means being able to take time off of work and go somewhere new. It means having the money to eat in diners and buy gas, to engage in road culture. Yet this culture is composed of more than just travelers – it is full of women like Adamic’s hitchhiker, truck drivers and waitresses, people who serve as “primary sources,” of sorts, for writers like Asch. 

As a flood of almost biblical proportions envelops The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family seems to have finally collapsed. All of the strong men – Tom, Casey, Connie  and even Al – have left, either by choice, by necessity or by death, leaving only Pa to do the man’s work. Pa seems to raise the most fuss about Ma making the guiding decisions for the family, complaining that she has usurped his role, yet he is old and frail and incapable of taking control of the family.
 
Near the end of the novel Steinbeck displays his masterful understanding of human emotion, toying with the reader’s empathy in a culminating moment of both hope and sorrow. Rose of Sharon’s pregnancy becomes a guiding factor of the book. The family has sacrificed for her, Ma has nurtured her, and Rose of Sharon, having suffered the abandonment of almost every strong male figure in her life except Pa, has staked her future upon this child. So, when the baby is still-born the reader suffers what seems like the greatest loss of the entire story.
 
However, the conclusion diverts the novel from total tragedy, tying up the loose strings of many thematic elements of the book, in particular the more hopeful, yet often contested symbolism of the Great Mother and circle of life. Lorelei Cederstorm writes,
 
This archetypal gesture and mysterious smile are… the fitting conclusion to the novel, for it is in this affirmation of the power to give life and to take it, to nourish even while surrounded by the death and destruction she has wrought, that the full power of the Great Mother is evident.
 
Cederstorm’s article offers an interesting counter-point to the heavy Christian symbolism that appears throughout the book. While Steinbeck is clearly playing on biblical lore, he emphasizes woman’s connection with nature, their ability to nurture, and the ability to both give and take life.
 
Ma, in particular, is shepherd of sorts. She lies next to Granma for the duration of the ride within the desert, clutching her even after she has died, but still having guided her to California. Taking great pains to care for Rose of Sharon throughout her pregnancy as well, Ma lies with her after her failed birth, finally leading her away to safety and leaving the men behind.
 
The final image of the novel, one of the most haunting and most memorable, can be read in myriad different ways, either Pagan or Christian. As Steinbeck reiterates many times throughout the book, birth and death are integral to the cycle. In the last, heavily symbolic moment, both beautiful and terrifying, Rose of Sharon completes this cyclical pattern, taking Ma’s nurturing and passing it on to a weak, dying man. Whatever the implied symbolism, I think it has its roots in Steinbeck’s understanding of the physical world around us. Throughout the novel he describes nature as if it were an interlocking puzzle or a clock in which humans are a gear. However, Erich Neumann defines the Great Mother archetype is defined as "Woman=body=vessel=world," which validates much of Cederstorm's Great Mother argument.

"Every night a world created, complete with furniture - friends made and enemies established; a world complete with braggarts and with cowards, with quiet men, with humble men, with kindly men. Every night relationships that make a world, established; and every morning the world torn down like a circus."

In chapter 17, Steinbeck elaborates on the roadside camps that the Joads and other migrant workers on their way to California created. I was struck by the sense of community, and how these camps seemed to be formed around hope rather than pessimism despite the brick wall of problems facing the travelers.

Camps and other short-term communities raise interesting questions about the idea of home, comfort and community. As I was reading I couldn't help to think back to my last experience with something akin to these roadside clusters.

Two summers ago, several friends and I piled into a Jetta and made a pilgrimage to Bonnaroo, a music festival in Manchester, Tennesse. As we slowed down to take the exit ramp off the highway, one of us remembered that we had neglected to pack any camping supplies. So we headed to Wal-Mart.

The scene in the parking lot was astounding -  unlike any other I'd ever seen. Imagine the Joads and their friends being given a surplus of tie-dye kits and some camping chairs, and perhaps even a small beer allowance. Or thousands and thousands of road-tripping teens and twenties clustered in and around one of America's most notorious superstores.

The place was a temporary city, complete with concerts, crimes, kinship and barbecues - right there on the tarmac. I have rarely experienced such openness and friendliness from so many complete strangers. People bonded over the states on each other's license plates, just as Steinbeck's travelers categorize each other by the starting point of their journeys.

I think humans thrive when they feel needed and wanted. It creates a sense of belonging that might quell loneliness (an emotion that feels ever-present in Grapes of Wrath). The desire to feel included drives individuals to specify, to draw out talents that might be useful and offer them to their peers, whether that is playing guitar or Tom Joad's handy-man sensibilities.

For many people, especially those on the road (by choice or by necessity), "home" and "family" are very loose terms. The Wal-Mart tent city, as well as Bonnaroo itself, was definitely a temporary community, one that continues, for some, for the entire music festival season. Some men and women that I met hitchhiked throughout the festival circuit, until they reluctantly found another home for the winter months.

Futhermore, to the festival newcomer, or travelers like the Joads, there is a sense of the destination as Utopia. A soon-to-be-written success story. It's interesting to look back in hindsight at how these aspirations played out.

(to be continued in the next post!)

“The hell with it! There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain’t nice, but that’s as far as any man got a right to say.”
 
As Steinbeck embarks on The Grapes of Wrath, he immediately draws the reader’s sympathies to several characters that are admittedly flawed. Jim Casy enters the novel early, creating a jolt of dialogue and an interesting moral dilemma. After straying from his position as a preacher, Casy struggles with guilt for having behaved immorally and having been a religious leader for the wrong reasons. Through Casy, Steinbeck creates an almost amusing dichotomy in which a character who defies traditional religious values, also exemplifies the sense of camaraderie and integrity that seems to be holding society together.
 
Tom also rejects the societal sense of guilt, openly discussing the crime that kept him in prison for four years. A secret would seem dark and depraved, but embracing one’s “crime” indicates sincerity and honesty.
 
Big organizations – banks, churches and, by extension, government – seem perennially untrustworthy. They become great faceless enemies. “It’s not us,” writes Steinbeck, “it’s the bank. A bank isn’t like a man. Or an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn’t like a man either. That’s the monster” (33).  Even a man working for the bank is depicted as intrinsically good; he rapes and pillages land like a soldier enslaved to his government, doing so only in order to bring home three dollars to his family.
 
Casy plays an important role in the formation of Grapes of Wrath’s moral guidelines and ethos of self-reliance. He derives pleasure from the human spirit, both in friendship and in love, and is unwilling to feel guilt because of it. Steinbeck glorifies the individual, showing him as a great, lonely wanderer. Characters seem to relate through this loneliness, reaching out through common needs and desires such as sex, liquor and food.
 
Furthermore, Steinbeck invokes religion in an interesting manner. He seems to renounce the organization of the church but continually makes biblical references (Tom Joad remembers his prison nickname, “Jesus Meek (26)). While a sincere distrust of big organizations is developing, we begin to see societal guidelines of morals, faith and friendship reinstated by characters themselves. 

"But there is no tradition of suffering when you're born you're not born to suffer. If the American slogan, everyone is born equal, with an equal chance, has so often proved to be a misleading slogan, still for all its falseness it's better than no slogan at all, better than the knowledge so many people have abroad, that what they were born for is to die some day." ( Asch, 10)
 
Though these authors paint a gritty picture of America, depicting a country plagued by ill luck and poverty, there is an underlying excitement hovering between their words. Even as Asch describes the ex-slave in Richmond, a huddled mass of black cloth crippled by enslavement and then turned loose to sit idle and corroding on a street corner, he omits judgment, does not verbalize sadness. It seems almost as if witnessing tragedy, for those Americans not experiencing it, serves as a way to define where they stand in among the American community.
 
The "American slogan," as Asch termed it - the idea that all Americans are created equally with an equal chance at success - is a myth so deeply ingrained in our cultural consciousness that it seems almost inherited. Many have called this slogan, or a version of it, the American Dream, sometimes portraying it as an eternal promise or making great lengths to call attention to the implicit irony. No matter how many cynical or expository gazes fall upon this Dream, however, it seems to prevail.
 
The American slogan became our national myth, the image of the collective American self that we project onto our families and ourselves. And when we can't trust our government, we put faith in our neighbors, our families, and strangers that we meet in diners or on the road. Caldwell's Some American People illustrates this tendency to rely on another and his or her stories. His collection of moments - funny, sad and otherwise - creates a sense of community for those who were growing more despaired by the day. The need to share experiences, to gain empathy rather than sympathy, must have been a great motivation to set out on the road and really "travel," as Caldwell says, rather just move.
 
In East of Eden, John Steinbeck wrote, "The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man." The power of American mythology must come from the weaving together of these lonely minds. The catalogues of experiences by writers such as Asch, Caldwell, Anderson and Rorty are the building blocks for the Dream, no matter how sad and shattered the anecdotes may seem.