Throughout his writing career, Nelson Algren was fascinated by criminality and the apparatuses of

335 Pages·2011·1.59 MB·English

RAGGED FIGURES: THE LUMPENPROLETARIAT IN NELSON ALGREN
AND RALPH ELLISON

by

Nathaniel F. Mills

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(English Language and Literature)
in The University of Michigan
2011

Doctoral Committee:

Professor Alan M. Wald, Chair
Professor Marjorie Levinson
Professor Patricia Smith Yaeger
Associate Professor Megan L. Sweeney
For graduate students on the left

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Acknowledgements
Indebtedness is the overriding condition of scholarly production and my case is no
exception. I‘d like to thank first John Callahan, Donn Zaretsky, and The Ralph and Fanny
Ellison Charitable Trust for permission to quote from Ralph Ellison‘s archival material,
and Donadio and Olson, Inc. for permission to quote from Nelson Algren‘s archive.
Alan Wald‘s enthusiasm for the study of the American left made this project
possible, and I have been guided at all turns by his knowledge of this area and his
unlimited support for scholars trying, in their writing and in their professional lives, to
negotiate scholarship with political commitment. Since my first semester in the Ph.D.
program at Michigan, Marjorie Levinson has shaped my thinking about critical theory,
Marxism, literature, and the basic protocols of literary criticism while providing me with
the conceptual resources to develop my own academic identity. To Patricia Yaeger I owe
above all the lesson that one can (and should) be conceptually rigorous without being
opaque, and that the construction of one‘s sentences can complement the content of those
sentences in productive ways. I see her own characteristic synthesis of stylistic and
conceptual fluidity as a benchmark of criticism and theory and as inspiring example of
conceptual creativity. Megan Sweeney, despite joining my committee at a later date, has
been invaluable as a teacher and professional mentor whose critical rigor and expertise
are matched only by her enthusiasm for working with beginning scholars. I hope that my
dissertation reflects the diverse influences, priorities, and investments of my dissertation
committee, a committee that it‘s been nothing short of an intellectual pleasure to work
with. In my time as a graduate student at Michigan I‘ve also benefitted from
conversations with Sara Blair, Gregg Crane, Linda Gregerson, June Howard, Steven
Mullaney, Eric Rabkin, Vivasvan Soni, and Theresa Tinkle. Portions of my dissertation
were helpfully workshopped by the participants of the 2010 Mellon Humanities
Dissertation Seminar at Michigan. George Bornstein has been an invaluable mentor and
good friend since I began my Ph.D. work. Finally, I owe a lasting debt to Harvey Teres,
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who first introduced me to the possibilities available in working on the encounter
between American literature and leftist politics in the twentieth century.
My friends in the graduate program in the English Department at Michigan, and
those I‘ve met through my fellow graduate students, have been both helpful critics and
close friends. I would have been at a loss in multiple ways if I had never known Meg
Ahern, Sarah Allison, Chris Barnes, Ben Beckett, Alex Beringer, Geremy Carnes, Alison
Carr, Manan Desai, Sarah Ehlers, Andromeda Hartwick, Molly Hatcher, Korey Jackson,
Konstantina Karageorgos, Chung-Hao Ku, Megan Levad, Sarah Linwick, Asynith
Malecki, Brian Matzke, Karen McConnell, Danny Mintz, Rebecca Porte, James Reichert,
Mikey Rinaldo, Casey Shelton, and Mike Tondre. I‘m also grateful for productive
conversations with graduate students at the Ohio State University, particularly Tiffany
Anderson, Brad Freeman, Anne Langendorfer, and Brian McAllister. I‘ve had the
pleasure of being both friends and colleagues with former graduate students from
Syracuse University, including Rachel Collins, Michael Dwyer, Brigitte Fielder, Lindsay
Metzker, Mike O‘Connor, and Jonathan Senchyne. My work on the dissertation was
further strengthened by insights, suggestions, and challenges gleaned from conversations
with Geoff Eley, Barbara Foley, Christine Guilfoyle, Bryan Palmer, and Joseph Ramsey.
Patrick Lucey helped me grasp some of the finer points involved in translating Marx‘s
German.
One of the pleasures of writing this dissertation was the opportunity to work with
skilled and always helpful archival specialists like Dr. Alice Lotvin Birney at the Library
of Congress, Moira Fitzgerald at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale
University, and Rebecca Jewett at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at the Ohio
State University. The staff of the English Department at the University of Michigan
regularly go out of their way to assist graduate students, and I‘m very grateful for the
myriad efforts made on my behalf by Jan Burgess, Bonnie Campbell, Lisa Curtis, Linda
Deitert, Beth Dethloff, Karena Huff, Donna Johnston, and Senia Vasquez.
Finally, I owe debts I can never repay to Corinne Martin, whose love, support,
patience, intellect, and critical acumen stand behind every page of this dissertation. My
relationship with her is at once my greatest achievement and my most rewarding project.

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Table of Contents

Dedication……………………………………………………………………………ii
Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………….iii

Introduction: Figuring (Out) the Lumpenproletariat……………………………….....1

Chapter
1: Starting Out in the Thirties: Nelson Algren and the
Depression Lumpenproletariat………………………………………………………44
2: Doing it the Hard Way: Nelson Algren, the Lumpenproletariat,
World War II, and a New Internationalism………………………………………..111
3: The Addict‘s Revolt: The Postwar Anti-Capitalism of
The Man with the Golden Arm………………………………..................................154
4: Ralph Ellison, the Lumpenproletariat, and Slick: The Development
of an American Marxism…………………………………………………………...188
5: Lumpenproletarian Science, Lumpenproletarian Blues: Invisible
Man and the Literary Practice of American Marxism……………………………...243

Conclusion: ―Yes, but…‖: Notes on the Form of Lumpenproletarian Marxism…...313

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1

Introduction

Figuring (Out) the Lumpenproletariat

Paper Planes Straight From Hell
Marxism has often struggled with the sociopolitical consequences of those who
lack class identity, or social location of any kind, in capitalist society. The poor and the
criminal, the desperate and the inventive who haunt the recesses of modern society have
been epistemological and political challenges for Marxism and for anti-capitalist politics
more expansively. In part, this is because Marx considered this group—which he named
the lumpenproletariat, or ―ragged proletariat‖—irrelevant to the concerns of Marxism.
But it‘s also because the fluid, diverse composition of the lumpenproletariat (Marx
introduced the term to describe nearly everyone without an identifiable class position or a
role in reproducing the main social arrangements of capitalism) and its underworlds
reminds us of the internal complexity of modern society and its processes, a complexity
that often resists explication by pre-formulated theoretical paradigms. The lumpen
remind us that theory—particularly of a revolutionary kind—must take that complexity
as its starting point. Furthermore, proper Marxist thought proceeds from real conditions
understood in their internally-dynamic fluidity and multivalent composition.
Paradoxically then, one of the most marginal categories in Marx is in fact central to the
development and continued effectiveness of the various, ever-urgent epistemological and
political tasks that go by the name of Marxism.
Through an extended analysis of the lumpenproletariat in the mid-twentieth-
century fiction of novelists Nelson Algren and Ralph Ellison, my dissertation introduces
this concept of the lumpenproletariat to American literary studies. Reading for the social
and conceptual places of the lumpenproletariat is my strategy for redefining the practice
of Marxist writing, reevaluating the theoretical and formal experiments of the American
literary left in the 1930s-1950s period, opening up new approaches to Algren and
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Ellison‘s lives and work, and demonstrating the remarkable epistemological and political
work of which literary form is capable.
Before proceeding to a full exposition of this project in the introduction proper,
however, I offer a tactile demonstration of the aesthetic, political, and theoretical energies
of the lumpenproletariat as mobilized in a work of contemporary popular culture: the
2007 song ―Paper Planes,‖ by Sri Lankan-descended British hip-hop artist M.I.A. The
song‘s portrait of social outsiders, and the theoretical project to which it subjects that
portrait, demonstrate the specific stakes of Marx‘s concept. ―Paper Planes‖ foreshadows
my dissertation‘s treatment of the more extensive literary implementations of the lumpen
in Algren and Ellison‘s fiction, and it indicates why I insist on preserving Marx‘s term (in
all its Germanic clunkiness) as the object of my study, rather than supplanting it with
empirical descriptors like ―homeless‖ or ―outcasts.‖ M.I.A.‘s acclaimed song vividly
demonstrates some of the theoretical intricacies of the lumpenproletariat. Its clever
lyricism and self-conscious attempt to ―do theory‖ in a cultural text lead us straight to my
dissertation‘s correlation of the formal and theoretical work performed by and through
the ―ragged figures‖ of the lumpenproletariat.
―Paper Planes‖ describes, in rather romantic terms, the life of those who struggle
to get by on the legal and material margins of globalized capitalist society: people denied
full subjectivity and recognized citizenship in a post-national economy, the refugees from
the third world struggling on the margins of the first world. While capitalist processes of
dislocation and compelled migration necessitate the criminal acts of the song‘s figures,
those oppressive structural determinations are de-emphasized in the lyrics. Instead,
M.I.A. affirms the criminal means (violence, robbery, black market transactions) to
which these figures resort as alternative routes to material subsistence, even affluence.
She appears to cast the lives of global capitalism‘s non-subjects as anything but deprived.
In fact, those marginal lives no longer even seem marginal: these figures may be
excluded from the legitimate global market of capitalism, but they engage in processes of
commodity exchange on a global black market. M.I.A. rewrites their marginality as an
empowering temporal distinction. In an age of faceless transnational capitalism, her
hustlers resemble an earlier model of the capitalist as crafty entrepreneur. She invokes
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and appropriates the aura of a previous stage of capitalism whose practices purportedly
sustain and encourage, rather than efface, individual subjectivity.
Is the song then a weird production of capitalist nostalgia, a nostalgia which
masks economic deprivation and social marginality by transposing both into heroic
registers? Is M.I.A. telling us it‘s an opportunity—that it‘s even cool—to be poor and
placeless? Even if we see the song‘s brazen, violent rhetoric as a political attempt to
claim and inhabit a devalued identity, her claiming of that identity would seem to rely on
a sort of ghetto exoticism, glamorizing the very forces which devalue that identity in the
first place. But M.I.A. is actually doing something more intricate. ―I fly like paper get
high like planes,‖ she tells us at the outset, and goes on to describe her skill for forging
immigration visas. M.I.A. gives us a persona who literally rewrites marginality as a
mobile subjectivity. Because she has no place as a national citizen, she is potentially a
citizen of any and all nations because she must forge her own visas. She appropriates her
exclusion in order to produce her own freedom, flying ―like paper‖ quite simply because
she makes (a certain form) of paper. Citizenship, the mode of social inclusion examined
here, is always tied to authorized written papers. Non-citizens are routinely deprived of
access to the means of survival by not having their papers in order. In the reality of global
migration, ―papers‖ are a loaded signifier. But precisely because national inclusion and
exclusion are processes of writing and documentation, they are vulnerable, at their very
center, to rewriting and forgery. In an era in which capital itself crosses borders and
negates national distinction, paper figures the permeability and fragility of the border
between inclusion and exclusion, center and margin, legitimacy and illegitimacy. Those
borders still matter, of course (literally: they have material consequences), but ―Paper
Planes‖ suggests that the parodic resemblances between the structural agents of
transnational capitalism, and those marginalized subjects hustling on a transnational
black market, make marginality a condition of potential. Here is the song‘s central
dialectic: there really are people who must fend for themselves because of the structural
exclusions of capitalism, yet those same people are potentially and frequently enabled by
the very ontology of global capital. They are both marginal and not marginal, the border
between the two states being as real but also as slight and as revisable as a blank sheet of
paper.
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We can theoretically situate M.I.A.‘s project by reference to the figurative
extensions of the ―raggedness‖ of Marx‘s ―ragged proletariat.‖ For if the
lumpenproletarian types of ―Paper Planes‖ are economically and discursively ―ragged‖—
materially deprived, and unrecognized as subjects—they recuperate that raggedness as
generative mobility, an open-ended rather than hemmed in condition, a state of exclusion
that is not absolute but frayed around the edges and open to its own possibilities. The
material history of paper production from rags gives us a handy historical figure for
conceptualizing this passage from deprivation to subsistence and the processes by which
those Marx called the ―refuse of all classes‖ recycle their condition as one of productivity
(Eighteenth Brumaire 65). When read symptomatically, Marx‘s lumpenproletariat
encompasses these two poles of marginality in an ongoing process of negotiation. It
conceptualizes the relation, in various concrete historical forms, between material and
discursive exteriority and the possibility that such exteriority could lead to new
sociopolitical options and theoretical directions. ―Paper Planes‖ gives us an aesthetic
representation not of an empirical social category, but of the form that this conceptual
relation takes in twenty-first century global capitalism. To fault M.I.A. for glamorizing
illegality and thereby providing an alibi for the iniquities of capital is to miss this point,
to read the song only as an empirical portrait. The political shrewdness of the song can
only be grasped when it‘s approached as a song about the lumpenproletariat as a concept,
and not just third-world immigrants and hustlers.
But for all her bravado, M.I.A. doesn‘t lose site of the material hardships of the
global migrant. The song‘s lyrics are built upon a musical sample of the opening of The
Clash‘s 1982 punk anthem ―Straight to Hell.‖ ―Straight to Hell‖ also describes the
experiences of marginalized groups, but in what could be called a strictly materialist
manner. The song references multiple forms of the oppressions and destitutions wrought
by late capitalism: immigrants from the third world facing racism and material exclusion
in the first, American imperialism in Vietnam, and the economic disenfranchisement of
workers in a post-industrial economy. The song‘s lyrical distinction derives from the way
it interweaves these conditions from a perspective that refuses to get sentimental about
them, but at the same time refuses to modulate its outrage over them. The song is a
powerful protest text, drawing effectively on a punk sensibility of anger and bitter
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sarcasm to articulate an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist perspective. Clash singer Joe
Strummer‘s ironic advice for the victims of these global capitalist iniquities is to go
straight to hell, words that indicate the material conditions of those victims as well as
their irrelevance, their utter lack of any significance, to the agents of their oppression.
The song protests these injustices, and diagnoses their social and economic causation, but
portrays marginality in all forms as an unbearable and absolute hell. The song‘s
dislocated persons inhabit a ―no man‘s land,‖ but this excluded place is no productive,
sustaining underworld: ―there ain‘t no asylum here.‖
By citing the Clash‘s portrait, M.I.A. intends to build on it, to supplement the
position of the politically well-intentioned yet socially and culturally-privileged British
punk rocker with the perspective of the third-world immigrant. We‘re ―already going to
hell, just pumping that gas,‖ M.I.A. insists: life goes on in hell, which actually offers its
own conditions for sustainability, even material success. To see the globally displaced as
socially dead is to unintentionally mirror the vision of hegemonic ideologies, which think
that those who don‘t matter for capitalism, or don‘t matter for the nation, can‘t matter at
all. The Clash echo (although with considerably more sympathy) Marx‘s conscious
understanding of the lumpenproletariat. For the thinker invested in how capitalism
―produces . . . its own grave-diggers,‖ those who have no functional role within
capitalism are irrelevant (Communist Manifesto 16). The proletariat‘s inevitable
revolutionary capacity ultimately derives in Marx not from absolute oppression, but from
their structural place at the center of capitalist production. So between the sampling of
―Straight to Hell‖ and her own lyrics, M.I.A. limns the terms of a very old debate on the
left about the political effectiveness and the creative capacities of the oppressed. Her
lyrics explore the possibility that a specific, post-national form of global capital might
actually now enable creativity, vibrancy, and resistance not among those integral to its
economic processes, but among those it marginalizes. This political vision should be
familiar to us, due especially to Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt‘s endeavors to locate
revolutionary alternatives in the sociocultural productions of a mobile, global poor.
But ―Paper Planes‖ stops short of ontologizing this vision, of stating with absolute
certainty that this is now how capitalism and resistance work. After all, the instantly-
recognizable opening of ―Straight to Hell‖ remains: ―Paper Planes‖ signifies upon, but