Revising the 1930s in the 1990s, Or the Work of Art in the Age of Diminished Expectations

The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West, and Mass Culture in the 1930s. By Rita Barnard. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 271 pages. $59.95. American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930s. By Jonathan Veitch. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. 182 pages. $50.00 (cloth). $19.95 (paper). The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the United States and Canada During the 1930s. By Caren Irr. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. 293 pages. $54.95 (cloth). $18.95 (paper). Each generation of scholars, it seems, must come to terms with the cultural legacy of the 1930s. A period that somehow seemed codified even before it was concluded, the decade has regularly been revisited by intellectuals who grapple with it in toto, pushing it to the Left or to the Right, or who, at key moments, rescue one select cultural figure from the political fray (William Faulkner in the 1940s, Tillie Olsen and Zora Neale Hurston in the 1970s, and Nathanael West, apparently, in the 1990s). And as with any historical endeavor, each generation returns to the scene (the scene of political possibility in this case) with its own set of ideological and aesthetic questions, its own intellectual [End Page 159] curiosities and needs, and its own definitions of a "usable past." This truism belies, however, a gulf that divides this newest group of scholars from their predecessors. Coming of age while the Watergate hearings played in the background, assuming the betrayal of both the Old and the New Left, and writing, significantly, after the demise of the Soviet Union, these scholars investigate the "Red" 1930s with a decidedly different sense of the limits and possibilities of cultural radicalism. The three books under review give us a new vision of the 1930s that is, in the main, consonant with the general mood of Left cultural criticism in the U.S.--at once resigned to the failure of socialism and, paradoxically (or in compensation), deeply invested in the radical possibilities of culture per se (the much noted "affirmative character of U.S. cultural studies" 1 ). What distinguishes this form of radical critique from the cultural radicalism of the 1930s is that the cultural text does not need to derive its political value from an alliance with a party or a set of political doctrines. Indeed, for a group of cultural critics who have imbibed poststructuralism's critique of totality and postmodernism's critique of the party (any party) in equal measure, the cultural text can have the power of "resistance" only in as much as it does not cohere to a predictable program or teleology. The effects of this paradigm shift range from the obvious to the implicit. One notes, for instance, that in their analyses, Barnard, Veitch, and Irr de-center the workings of the Communist Party--a main protagonist or antagonist in most previous studies of the period. While Barnard and Veitch are wont to invoke the CP as a straw man in all the familiar ways (as a metonym for doctrinal politics, sentimental producerism, and thick-headed mimesis), a position which Irr (following James Murphy and Barbara Foley 2 ) rightly debunks, the issue is not actually integral to their reformulations. For them, what mediates between the text and the reader is not a political sphere governed by parties or saturated with the concepts one has come to expect in a study of the 1930s (commitment, class struggle, revolution) but a set of concerns that have, heretofore, remained largely unexamined (consumerism, the avant garde, and nationalism). Undeniably this focal shift gives these three studies a palpable intellectual energy that leads to arresting new conclusions. But one notes, as well, the extent to which these new formations--which trouble any easy articulation between text and class or text and party--leave the cultural

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• The affirmative character of U.S. cultural studies

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• Radical representations

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