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or, hillbilly elegy for maoists.
‘People shuffled up and down the cars, each looking as if they were searching for something specific, as if they'd lost someone they knew or heard of open seats in the next car over. But really they were wandering aimlessly. There was no one to find, and nowhere better that could be reached from here. Some would stop near me, red-faced, taking swigs from dark bottles of erguotou, a dizzyingly strong liquor distilled from sorghum. They'd offer me some and try to ask questions in English: where I was from, why I was here, what America was like. America is pretty much like China, I would tell them. No, they'd shake their heads. America must be better, they said, because in America you have guns.'
broadly, two different types of marxists (or communists or whatever) write books like this. those like mike davis aim to popularize and translate left-wing positions so that they are legible to the neophyte. a dramatic writer like davis wants to make vivid the horrors of capitalism; you don't need to read a single volume of capital to get the gist. in contrast, you would not hand time, labor, and social domination to someone unfamiliar with the marxian debates that moishe postone takes up, because that book would read like gibberish to a lay audience. marx himself fits somewhat awkwardly in between these theatrical and theoretical registers, often veering between tones within the same text. ludovico silva—let's put him in the second camp—goes so far as to argue that marx's aesthetics & rhetorical style are at the core of his work. in my experience, though, people in my field (literary studies) tend to be guilty of overstating just how literary marx was. ultimately, he wants you to follow his arguments; he's not a gothic novelist.
phil neel is a gothic novelist. we open to ‘the stink of factories and endless, fertilizer-soaked fields pushed against the claustrophobic smell of food and bodies.' a train is a ‘steel carcass' where ‘thin windows slit in the metal like narrow wounds.' mountains—‘occulted gods'—hint at ‘the dark blood-churn of the mantle below.' sturgeons appear like ‘primordial sea monsters,' statues like ‘pale corpses being lifted out of tar.' wildfires move ‘in slow waves of ash-choked, ambient doom.' ‘oil pipelines cut across the landscape like black scars.' a dead body might be ‘melted to dust by swarms of insects.' tear gas and finance alike ‘drift[] . . . like mist rising from a corpse.' trump is ‘a golden-fleshed death god summoned by deindustrialization.' post-08 generations of workers join the ‘grand parade of the futureless.' the economic hinterland is a ‘vast sunken continent that met its ruin in some ancient cataclysm, populated now with broken-looking people sifting through the rubble of economies stillborn or long dead.' ‘The Crisis . . . is a vast creature, not contained by familiar scales of time or space' that ‘tear[s] into the flesh of economics itself.'
certainly not too academic in register, then. more than any left-wing writer, this put me in mind of an apocalyptic levi-strauss (despite neel's glass-house sniping at ‘flowery french prose'). to be honest, i found these flourishes a little overwrought and off-putting at first, an indulgence at the risk of making the subject seem less rather than more serious. the trouble with opting to write in such a highly stylized manner as a communist is that in the last instance your text has to measure up against the metric of practical utility. more generously, the style certainly makes an empirical study more interesting to read, the book calms down after a bit, and these moments show that neel is not a dispassionate academic observer but someone for whom these abstractions are real.
this style and these case studies ultimately serve to illustrate the central claims of the book: that global capitalism (‘that vast hostage situation called ‘the economy'') discards into peripheral ‘wastelands for global production' those surplus populations expelled from the ceaseless churn of economic development centered in the city, submitting this reserve army of low wage workers, the unemployed, and the unhoused—‘the migrant, the refugee, the slum-dweller'—to the horrifying living conditions that typify the nightmare hellscape of global capitalism for the majority of its subjects. and because this group of economic exiles tips the scales whenever erupts the fight for a life with dignity—that is, one not shackled to extraction, profit, and bloodletting (now i've caught it)—an emancipatory politics must take as its starting point the ‘unity of separation' that links everyone in this underclass excluded, at various distances, from the administrative centers of the world market.
in other words, ‘the economy takes shape in space. . . . there are factories and warehouses and ports and rail yards out there somewhere, they take up space, they tend to cluster and sprawl in certain patterns and certain locations, and the people who work in them also live somewhere.'
neel maps these human dump sites of the ‘far' hinterlands in rural nevada and along the oregon/california border (where he's from) and ‘near' hinterlands in the first-ring suburbs where the displaced poor have been shunted in seattle and ferguson, missouri, though the scope of his analysis extends far beyond those places (the sections about shenzhen and houston are especially interesting). the global economy's simultaneous disavowal of and dependence on these cordoned-off places makes them of much greater political importance than you might imagine, given that ‘the very core of urban space . . . has become the blindingly singular focus of politics.' more effective insurrections, neel suggests, have drawn the frequently depoliticized people from the economic ‘hinterland' into the metropole, as ‘those excluded from the urban core and thrown out into that hinterland beyond suddenly flood back into it.' but the hinterlands aren't just nowhere, either. they are often essential for the global flow of goods and capital, even if the people are treated by capital as waste.
in nevada, neel notes the threat of militant far-right groups that manage local support systems akin to a perverse dual power strategy in devastated areas. right-wing groups ‘organize in the vacuum left by the collapse of local economies,' filling in the gaps of failing or nonexistent local social services/infrastructure (while opposing attempts to broaden the tax base). the frighteningly large crossover between far-right groups like the oath keepers or the three percenters and law enforcement enables this dual power approach, while fostering the rise of a right-libertarian ‘land politics.' in the oregon mountains of the next chapter, sub-poverty-wage seasonal contract fire-fighting and ever diminishing forest service work opportunities belie a similar absence of real state support or industry (or disaster relief), supplemented with black market activity (as often for smuggled consumer goods as for opiates). in the abandoned far hinterlands, then, ‘competitive control' over social reproduction matters much more than the ideological coalitions that tend to follow.
in the near hinterlands, the combined and uneven development of the ‘global city' and the ‘logistics city' within the same major metropoles (e.g., seattle) conditions the reversal of class trends in urban cores and suburbs. sprawling ever outward, logistics infrastructure comes to usurp all other industries than service. just-so stories about modern information economies or creative economies elide the actually determinate factors, in seattle's case its geographical position as a convenient node in the global supply chain & its residual military tech. ‘the old categories of urban, suburban, and rural may simply have less explanatory power for the contemporary capitalist city than they once had. Instead, we can define clear islands of affluence, encircled by a near hinterland composed of identifiable industrial-logistics expanses that gradually fade into a farther hinterland of agriculture, black markets, and (half-)abandoned fields, factories, and forests.'
the final chapter, on ferguson as a model of suburban insurrection/counterinsurgency in the new ‘global era of riots,' traces how networks of ngos, activist groups, and local governments tried to function as soft ‘ancillaries of the police.' but advantages (and constraints) attach to the near hinterland's suburban terrain of struggle: ‘The other features that extended the riots in Ferguson were largely artifacts of the area's own affluent past: the lack of surveillance, its decentralization, the ease with which rioters could move between street, forest, and fenced-in yard. Quite unlike the narrow street-and-alley geography of the urban riot, this suburban unrest had an enormous amount of space within which to operate—the main constraint was not the police or the physical obstruction of traffic and buildings, but instead the long, flat distance between decentralized targets.' if the suburbs have been reshaped, though, deputized white supremacist radicals of the exurbs emerge to support the administrative capitalist class of the urban core. alongside competitive control, then, organizing needs to understand the new geography of this ‘latent civil war.' (there's more to this argument that this review nicely teases out.)
ultimately, wars of attrition consistently quell sequences of insurrection, especially in cities where movements like occupy become the dog who caught the car, seizing buildings with no material connection to the circulatory struggles made possible in the hinterlands. as someone skeptical of marxist/anarchist eschatology, i found refreshing neel's candor about the intense experience of disappointment in these moments: ‘The return to normalcy is never really a return to anything—recognition of this fact is the only way you can escape the emotional ruin of these “recoveries.”' further, his attention as a geographer not just to industrial bases but to natural/ecological contingencies & even geological history made this a nicely concrete empirical complement to the more abstract theoretical stuff that tends to trend (e.g. søren mau, beverley best, even at times jamie merchant's book in the same series). and the tone matches the bleak scene he draws, substance for the stylistic surplus. neel asks: ‘Can a new communist politics emerge from capitalist sprawl?' that strikes me as a question worth asking.
predictably, as an overeducated urban beneficiary of the processes of exclusion and exploitation that he describes, i was frustrated by neel's intermittent hostility to any perceived ‘identitarian' politics in the name of a kind of class-first-class-only approach. this frustrated me in part because he himself makes a convincing argument that the normative ‘urban subject' of contemporary politics depends on excluded populations it disavows (mimicking the dependence/disavowal that marks capital's relation to the same groups). in other words, processes of identity formation are politically determinate. these processes set limits that can't be overcome through half-baked exhortations to prioritize connection over difference but rather require the same working-through as the geographical problems of political organizing that neel outlines. as another reviewer points out, many of neel's key examples of insurrection centrally involve race, but they are frequently assimilated here into general anticapitalist protest. occasionally neel usefully corrects assumptions about the racial makeup of various rural populations & poverty rates, but his dismissive invocations of the ‘identitarian' left made it seem as if in his mind only white liberals could possibly care. there's no engagement with the rich work done on the relation between race and class outside of these dismissals. such unreconstructed criticisms of left ‘identitarianism' just feel like empty cliches, at best. (he's slightly better on the question in this interview.)
which returns us to the question of audience. is neel in the first or second camp? hard to say. he has the dramatic flair of a mike davis type, but sometimes it's hard to imagine what the uninitiated or the unconverted would glean from his internecine swipes. maybe more than tailoring the work to an audience, his style demonstrates his lived relation to this stuff (not to sound like a metropolitan elite venerating lived experience). the hinterlands are not an abstract theoretical construct but a real place with real people, neel among them. so both form and content won me over by the end. sometimes it's just nice to read something written by, as this reviewer puts it, ‘a literal communist.'
this book taught me the word ‘semelparous.'
She led an amazing life. What else can you say? She was an amazing woman. Whether you agree or not, she was an amazing woman who led an amazing life.
few writers lived a life so synecdochic for a century as the novelist and socialist storm jameson. whatever modernity means—call it the total, irreversible transition from a whole way of life to another—jameson lived three, four times. born in the provincial seaport whitby, where her father was a sea captain and her mother came from a shipbuilding family, jameson journeyed to the university of leeds, where she was the first woman to study english literature, and then to a rapidly modernizing london where she sought work as a writer and journalist, eventually becoming the president of pen international. she found her way to a circuit that runs through france, italy, (née) czechoslovakia, hungary, germany, poland, and the u.s., a circuit that unhappily coincided with two world wars. along this circuit, jameson navigated between ‘the instinct to withdraw completely, and the desire to live a flashing life in the world.'
pushkin press has newly republished her formerly out-of-print, two-volume journey from the north, collected in one mammoth 800-page tome and introduced by vivian gornick's uncharacteristically abysmal preface. rather than frame jameson for a new generation of readers, gornick decides to relate a charming story about her (gornick's) mother's reading habits and then goes on to dismiss all of jameson's other writing by comparison to this one, reciting the tired cliché that jameson's writing is too political, too ideas-driven, etc. (wake up! the cold war is over and everyone lost!) there's no real context for who jameson was, no acknowledgement of her interest for the present moment (despite a steadily increasing readership), and very little evidence that gornick has even read much of the enormous body of work that she spends a baffling amount of the brief preface disparaging. there's not all that much evidence that she's read this book.
rather than take as read the redemptive work of dutiful life writing that gornick describes, we might place jameson's chronicle of her ‘flashing life in the world' in the lineage of the great modernist autobiographical sequences a la pilgrimage or proust.* for her part, jameson claims tolstoy as a lodestar, and her francophilia finds her seeking models in stendhal, girandoux, and malraux. but her drive-by literary-critical judgments show the taste of someone confidently, consistently, interestingly wrong: she is scandalized by joyce, robbe-grillet, and abstract expressionism, but praises j.b. priestley and minor english novelists as luminaries.** similarly, her thoughts on the relation of art and politics–a relation under strain in the 1920s and 1930s but one that her life made manifest–unfortunately seem yoked to the retrospective cold war bromides that were in the air when she was writing this in the late 1960s (her 1930s writings on this topic are great). beyond the judgments themselves, the freedom with which she inserts her literary criticism into intimate personal scenes, broader political reflections, and geographical and historical sketches helps to build a genuinely unique patchwork structure, one that jumps around in time with impressive grace. (consider, for instance, her striking technique of suddenly narrowing in on a character or motif, tracing it through time in a kind of vertical enlargement, and then returning to where we left off on the ‘horizontal' line of narrative.)
despite the brevity of jameson's flirtation with modernism (woolf dismissed her work as ‘middlebrow'), then, journey from the north overcomes the burden of its avowed influences to achieve a reflexivity about memory and matter that bears the stamp of jameson's era: ‘in any life a few, very few, key images turn up again and again, recognizable even though deformed by the changed light or the angle at which they appear.' ‘these primitive or underworld images, voices out of sleep, out of a lost harbor . . . may indeed be the only things i ever, in the positive sense of the word, hear or see.' and yet: ‘do not believe that the earliest memories are anything but disguised choices.'
the primitive, underworld images of jameson's youth in whitby feature her mother, who takes out her frustrated ambitions on her children, in the foreground. jameson's refusal to lie or hedge, secure in knowing many of her subjects will never read this, proves bracing: ‘Every evening I prayed avidly that God would kill her in the night.' the ambivalent relation between jameson and her mother shapes the entire first volume, including jameson's flight from her parent's antipathetic marriage to study literature at the university of leeds and then to work in publishing, thanks to her ‘specious air of competence.' at one point, jameson is offered an editorial job at the egoist; she declines and the job goes to rebecca west. a counterfactual literary history with jameson in the place of west would be interesting, but jameson feels more at home on the outside of any coterie, as her brief encounter with a manic wyndham lewis and her later political battles with h. g. wells confirm. her ‘deep unrealized contempt for novel-writing' puts her out of step with the religion-of-art crowd. ‘Nothing is more ridiculous than a writer, an animal whose response to disaster is a phrase.'
she writes novels anyway, though, throughout her first miserable marriage and then her brief unconsummated infatuation (‘in the claws of a raging want') with an oafish man beguilingly referred to as ‘the texan.' ‘Since there was nothing else I could do, I began to write a novel.' she sends the novel to a publisher under a different name. then she meets with an editor who sees through the ruse, rejects her manuscript, and hands her a book to read to emulate in future submissions. ‘Somewhere between London and Reading, after trying to read it, I dropped it from the window of the train.' she gives birth to a son, she works in advertising, she works in publishing, she writes and publishes novels that do well, she writes and publishes novels that do less well, she writes political essays, she joins socialist and pacifist groups, she finally separates from her shitty first husband, she happily re-marries (‘Any marriage worth the name is no better than a series of beginnings'), she and her mother develop a much closer and fonder relation than in childhood, she and her younger sister similarly draw closer—things speed up.
while jameson britishly maintains a controlled, sober tone throughout, her frequent flights of stylistic ambition reward: ‘I saw roofs and the black gulfs of streets, an alphabet I could not spell out, and behind them a sky with a veining of darker clouds like twisted roots.' ‘Hell is five or six memories which are able occasionally to enter the intestines through the mind and tear them.' ‘The image for my life in the years between 1919 and the end of 1923 is that of a vacant lot between crowded streets.' ‘This church is part of my life: it speaks to my skeleton, which remembers clearly the worn places in stairs, the grain of old wood, the moment—each time as piercing as the first—when a man crossing the moors above Sleights sees the sea leaning against the sky, the edge of the cliff, and the church kneeling on it, waiting, beside the ruined Abbey. How could it forget, since those who live in me—and live nowhere else—have stared at it from the moors, from the harbour, from the sea, for eight hundred years? There is nothing here but what's mine.' (i like to imagine jameson loudly strumming an electric guitar after that passage.)
it's not all as serious as that. jameson's talent for zingers rivals her talent for the poetic turn: ‘A cynical old woman told me: ‘No mother ever woke her second child to make certain it had not died in its sleep.'' ‘During these years I came to know so many people that I almost died of it.' ‘If only, I shall say to myself, when I am dying of not being able to stay alive any longer, you had had a little more coolness and foresight.' ‘I began my first attempt to write well.' ‘the bladdernovel, that great modern industry.' ‘We talked for a few minutes about ‘the novel', with a certain delicacy, as if it were a disreputable relative of his or mine.'
to say that this is jameson is not quite right either. there are always at least three jamesons at every moment: ‘the threefold images dissolve into one behind my eyes—then, now, always.' a ‘chimera of a book has haunted me all my life,' ‘one book which recorded only the essence of my life, the one or two ideas that were mine, not picked up from other people or books, the one or two feelings, impulses, acts, in which my whole self had been engaged.' as in proust, the layers of author, narrator, and narrative separate and recombine from sentence to sentence. ‘time is not a succession of minutes but a labyrinth where the threads of past and present cross and recross, fusing, separating, turning on themselves, without rest.'
but the world interrupts her reflections on poetics. her younger brother's death in the first world war shadows the remainder of the text, seeping into her relationships with her mother and with her younger sister. further, his death permanently wrecks the fragile relations between her devastated mother and her ineffectual, self-pitying father. jameson allows herself a rare moment of naked emotion: ‘My brother, his small round body, as hard as a green apple, convulsed with laughter he could not contain, rolled across the floor between the piano and the horsehair sofa... Ah, let me go back, I begged. Nothing got since is worth a minute of that infinite world.'
seeded here in the sense of a world lost, jameson's slow disillusionment in the liberal international order marks her career at pen international. ‘the whole of our civilization was living only in the internment camps where they played Beethoven.' the build-up to the second world war occupies much of the book, making it seem inevitable even as all of europe remains in denial. she goes from country to country, everyone she meets either assured that war won't come or convinced that hitler will wrest control of the continent. her time spent in her ambassadorial role among antisemitic czechs and among anxious hungarian jews is especially ominous. she tries to warn jewish friends in england about the possibility of internment there, but does so too late. (the book really gives the lie to benevolent britannia.)
notable moments from this period: when she arrives in berlin, an avant-garde play on the topic of marx's law of value is being performed. she and her pen colleagues bond over shared contempt for jules romains. her son falls down an elevator shaft and is mostly unharmed, though she feels this is a failure of hers as a parent. she continues to write, somehow at an absurd rate of a novel a year or so. she is so self-effacing, at times, it's easy to forget her tireless refugee advocacy. somewhere in this sequence her mother dies, another moment where jameson's even-keeled mask slips.
jameson helps her younger sister with her children after they move out of london during the war (a move jameson dangerously delays). among the most powerful scenes in the whole book is her younger sister's death. her sister is volunteering at a camp for the wounded when she hears a bomb descending; at the last moment, a survivor hears her sister say, with stoic dryness, ‘that's for us.' if jameson's ambivalent relationship with her mother informs the first volume, jameson's deep grief for her sister suffuses the second.
perhaps the most accomplished sequence in the whole book is the whirlwind of postwar poland, where jameson arrives for a conference that turns out in a kafkaesque twist not to have been planned or scheduled. ‘The drive into the centre of Warsaw was disquieting, like the onset of a nightmare.' ‘In the morning I stared from my single pane of glass at sprawling pyramids of rubble under a hard blue sky. So far as I could see there was nothing else, only these ossuaries of fractured stone and brick. A great tangled arc of steel sprang from the collapsed skeleton of some large building to hang grotesquely in mid-air.' ‘Behind the disembowelled fronts, cataracts of rubble and dark dust.' ‘narrow lanes traced the lines of vanished streets between the scorched shells of houses, each vomiting its dust-choked torrent of rubble.' ‘One part only of the ruins was without life, an emptiness—that was the vast level plain of broken brick where the ghetto had been. Here nothing existed, no single line or form, not even a seed fallen among thorns, nothing.'
this visit tests jameson's sometimes naïve, sensible liberal-socialist politics: ‘The Germans did not occupy Poland in the way they occupied other countries, as a military measure. In that sense it was not an occupation. It was a first stage in colonization. They were going to settle in Poland. Towards the defeated Poles they behaved with the ruthlessness of brutal colonists.' (elsewhere, after hiroshima, she declares the very idea of european civilization dead.) in one mysterious scene, the impatient visiting party leaves their tour guides in a stuck cab on the barely navigable road from warsaw to krakow in the ‘history-soaked night' ‘to be murdered by brigands.' (no follow up on this.) milosz, who jameson clearly admires, makes a couple appearances.
despite this virtuosic set piece, though, the second volume suffers from repetition. this repetition works in the build-up to the second world war both as a mechanism of suspense and to convey bureaucratic banality in the face of looming catastrophe, but in the second volume finally becomes excessive, especially as the writing loses its earlier rigor. this feels inevitable: her political conviction is gone, her novels are doing poorly, her younger brother is gone, her mother is gone, her younger sister is gone, gossipy bits and celebrity cameos dry up, and, honestly, she just spends too much time in france. the juxtaposition of pre-war and post-war prague helps to re-energize the final quarter of the book, which finally picks up as she moves to pittsburgh with her husband to teach creative writing and hang with the leavises.
her awed impressions of the united states show the sublime effect of the new imperial hegemon at midcentury, and her travels in the u.s. showcase her writing at its best. a busy road is an ‘unbroken rippling chain of lights' that, after wartime petrol shortages, she initially doesn't recognize as headlights. she describes ‘crossing the Middle West, where for hour after hour the same field, the same town—called Warsaw or Troy or Macon—is repeated and repeated, an endless stuttering of the same unintelligible phrase.' every place she visits makes for ‘Another splendid fragment of a country which does not exist.'
‘These memories have to end somewhere, or the world would be choked by them like a gutter by dead leaves.' remarkably, jameson writes her own obituary (!) and inserts it into the final volume. of interest in this obituary especially is her final verdict on her own fiction, listing ‘Cousin Honoré, Cloudless May, Black Laurel with its prologue Before the Crossing, [and] The Green Man' as the works that she hopes survive. (for those keeping score, the journal of mary harvey russell, which she cites earlier as her best, is curiously absent here.) i found jameson's authorship of her life, in both senses, profoundly moving: ‘I am my choice. I am what I made of my original condition.' her talent for self-diminution is equally affecting: ‘An old woman dies.'
an old woman dies; maybe gornick takes her at her word. gornick wants to parse storm jameson the didactic middlebrow novelist from storm jameson the shrewd and evocative life-writer. (what about jameson the activist?) in a sense, jameson anticipates gornick, who merely metabolizes the neurotic self-criticism that peppers journey from the north. as scholars note, jameson's lifelong habit of masochistic self-deprecation may have hurt her career. but the division of fiction and not—the dismissal of jameson's avowed fictions—comes undone as jameson stages scene after scene with novelistic flair and charges her prose with a stylistic ambition that does not always but quite frequently reaches vertiginous heights. in fact, jameson intermittently interpolates language from her own novels, novels that many readers rate highly (i would certainly contest jameson's assessment of 1933's a day off as a ‘failure'). she narrates her own death in the final, unbelievable passages of the—i want to write ‘novel.' but even if we write off jameson's novel-writing as unimportant (and bracket her political activity), gornick ignores the work to bring jameson back into circulation done by jennifer birkett, chiari briganti, katherine cooper, and elizabeth maslen, among others. i'm not asking for peer-reviewed scholarship. i'm asking for an acknowledgement that storm jameson matters, in the preface to a—sorry—magisterial book that is haunted by her sense that she might not. i think she does.
this book taught me the words ‘biophage,' ‘consanguinity,' and ‘contumacy.'
* jameson would disagree: ‘I am prejudiced in advance against a novel I might enjoy, sensible, perceptive, a decent very drinkable little vin du pays, when I am told that its author is ‘the English Proust'.'
** joyce–‘a purely disintegrating force, a sacred monster, . . . a great anti-humanist, the destroyer by his devilish skill and persistence of the thin walls against barbarism'–really disturbs english writers, i've noticed, inspiring similar histrionics from forster and woolf.
postscript
in addition to aiding and abetting vivian gornick's crimes, pushkin press has also decided to omit the photographs that accompanied earlier editions of this book. this seems to me like cost cutting at the expense of the book. plus, pushkin press has inexplicably inserted the subtitle ‘a memoir' on the cover and title page. but i'll stop whinging since it is still thanks to pushkin press that this, again, magisterial book enjoys a second life.
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