Sixth lecture for my students in English 104A, UC Santa Barbara, spring 2012. Course website: http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/s12/index.html

1. Lecture 6: The Economy That Jack
Built; The Novel That George Built
English 104A
Spring 2012
18 April 2012
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix […]”
—Allen Ginsberg, Howl, lines 1-4

2. Speculation
On Mr. Jack: “He was convinced that the fabric
of his world was woven from threads of steel,
and that the towering pyramid of speculation
would not only endure, but would grow
constantly greater.” (166; ch. 12)
“What happened in Wall Street was only the
initial explosion which in the course of the next
few years was to set off a train of lesser
explosions all over the land.” (311; ch. 25)

3. “Bond issues involving staggering sums were being
constantly ‘floated’ until the credit structure of the
town was built up into an inverted pyramid and the
citizens of Libya Hill no longer owned the streets they
walked on. The proceeds of these enormous
borrowings were deposited with the bank. The bank,
for its part, then returned these deposits to the
politicians, or to their business friends, supporters,
allies, and adherents—in the form of tremendous
loans, made upon the most flimsy and tenuous
security, for purposes of private and personal
speculation. In this way ‘The Ring,’ as it was called,
which had begun as an inner circle of a few ambitious
men, because in time a vast and complex web that
wove through the entire social structure of the town
and involved the lives of thousands of people. And all
of it now centered in the bank.” (310; ch. 25)

4. Real Estate Speculation in Babbitt
(1922, set in 1920)
“‘Now look here!’ Purdy wailed. ‘I know f’r a fact
that a piece of property ’bout same size, right
near, sold for less ’n eighty-five hundred, ’twa’n’t
two years ago, and here you fellows are asking
me twenty-four thousand dollars! Why, I’d have to
mortgage— Why good God, Mr. Babbitt, you’re
asking more ’n twice its value!” (41; ch. 4, sec. 5)
“The work of the world was being done. Lyte had
made something over nine thousand dollars,
Babbitt had made a four-hundred-and-fifty dollar
commission.” (42; ch. 4, sec. 5)

5. Speculation in Libya Hill
“Mrs. Delia Flood […] was a woman of property, and
her favorite topic of conversation was real estate. In
fact, long before the present era of speculation and
skyrocketing prices, she had had a mania for buying
and selling land, and was a shrewd judge of values.
With some sixth sense she had always known what
direction the development of the growing town was
likely to take.” (85; ch. 6)
Sam Pennock: “Made three hundred thousand
dollars in the last two months. . . . Why, it’s the truth!
Made a trade yesterday and turned around and sold
the lot again not two hours later. . . . Fifty thousand
dollars just like that!” (98; ch. 7)

6. “For their ruin had caught up with them. Many of
the people in that throng had lost their life
savings. But it was not only the bank’s depositors
who were ruined. Everyone now knew that their
boom was over. They knew that the closing of the
bank had frozen all their speculations just as they
were, beyond the possibility of extricating
themselves. Yesterday they could count their
paper riches by ten thousands and by millions;
today they owned nothing, their wealth had
vanished, and they were left saddled with debts
that they could never pay.” (313; ch. 25)

7. This is also a crisis in representation

8. The Great Depression (1929-1947)
● Many, but not all, economists see the Stock Market
Crash of 1929 as beginning the Depression.
● Interest rates and wages remain low, while
unemployment remains high
● Unemployment reaches 25% in 1933.
● In the U.S., from 1929-1932 …
– Industrial production decreases 46%
– Foreign trade decreases 70%
– Unemployment increases by 600%
● Economic recovery begins about 1933, with gradual
recovery of prices and values.
● Government spending in World War II results in post-
war boom

9. On George Webber: “He had used the
phrases as symbols of something real,
something important that he had felt
instinctively but never put into words. And
that’s why he hadn’t been able to make her
[Esther] understand. Well, what was it?
What had he been afraid of?” (221; ch. 16)

10. Home to Our Mountains
● Fictitious novel by George Webber, published
November 1929, shortly after the Stock Market
crash.
● Webber’s first published novel.
● The story of the novel and its reception largely
describe the publication of Wolfe’s own Look
Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life
(1929).
● Like You Can’t Go Home Again, Wolfe’s (not
Webber’s) earlier novel is a Bildungsroman.

11. Reflexive Commentary
● Wolfe sometimes uses this identification to comment
on his own writing:
Nebraska Crane: “Boy, you shore do write ’em long,
don’t you? […] Makes me tard just to tote it aroun’!”
(292; ch. 22)
George: “I must have written half a million words or
more.” (330; ch. 26)
● Or think of the waiter’s “Armenian story” (“she—takes
—off—her—veil!’) (354-8, ch. 27) in comparison with
his monologue about the pregnant waitress (359-60).

12. The Novel’s Reception
“On a postcard, sealed in an envelope:
‘We’ll kill you if you ever come back here. You
know who.’” (289; ch. 22)
“they said that he had turned against the South,
his mother, and spat upon her and defiled her.
They they leveled against him the most withering
charge that they could think of, and said that he
was ‘not Southern.’ Some of them even began to
say that he was ‘not American.’” (290; ch. 22)
A critic: it is “a barbaric yawp” (349; ch. 27)

13. What it’s not
● It isn’t Piggy Logan’s wire circus, which is
portrayed as …
– Pretentious
– Ineffectual
– Meaningless
– Avant-garde
● It isn’t “intellectual.” (350; ch. 27)
● It isn’t an academic project.
Fox Edwards: “You see, Miss Allen is an – an academic
kind of a person […] and that kind of person, darling, just
wouldn’t be able to understand what Whitman and Mark
Twain and Keats are like […] It’s a pity! Too bad you’ve got
to hear about it first in schools.” (390; ch. 28)

14. ● It isn’t concerned with conventional truisms
about morality:
“Mr. Stoat’s literary and critical standards were
derived from a pious devotion to the welfare of the
jeune fille. […] Mr. Stoat had no young daughter,
but in his publishing enterprises he always acted on
the hypothesis that he did have, and that no book
should be printed which he would be unwilling to
place in her hands. The result, as may be imagined,
was fudge and taffy, slop and goo.” (479; ch. 34)
Margaret Shepperton: “‘I’ve never done anything
immoral.’ By this she meant solely and simply a
deviation from the standards of sexual chastity.”
(287; ch. 22)

15. ● It isn’t concerned with what’s trendy in literary
criticism:
Fox Edwards “did not write nine-page reviews on
‘How Chaplin Uses hands in Latest Picture’ – how it
really was not slap-stick but the tragedy of Lear in
modern clothes; or on how Enters enters; or on how
Crane’s poetry can only be defined, reviewed, and
generally exposited in terms of mathematical
formulae.” (412; ch. 28)
Richenbach Reade’s critical works: “They were
examples of critical biographies of literary men and
politicians, and were examples of the ‘debunking
school’ of historical writing. […] They were the kind
of books that debunked everything except
themselves.” (519; ch. 36)

16. To Randy: “Not the facts, you understand – not
just the record of my life – but something truer
than the facts – something distilled out of my
experience and transmitted into a form of
universal application.” (330; ch. 26)
“He was just an American who was looking hard
at the life around him, and sorting carefully
through all the life he had ever seen and known,
and trying to extract some essential truth out of
this welter of his whole experience.” (350; ch. 27)

17. “A Ulysses kind of a book”
“He was still very much under the influence of
James Joyce, and what he had written was a
Ulysses kind of a book.” (282; ch. 22)
“The vision may be shrewd, subtle, piercing,
within a thousand special frames accurate and
Joycean – but within the larger one, false,
mannered, and untrue. And the large one is the
one that matters.” (329; ch. 26)

18. Allan Ginsberg (1926-2001)
● Probably best known for Howl, a
1955 epic poem that became the
subject of an obscenity trial due
to its depiction of illicit drug use
and both hetero- and
homosexual encounters.
● Studied under WC Williams
● Key terms (for our purposes):
● Beat poetry
● San Francisco Renaissance
Ginsberg in 1978
● Autobiographical poetry
Photo by Ludwig Urning ● Free verse

19. Poetic devices in America (1956)
● Anaphora – the repetition of words and phrases:
America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17,
1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
(lines 1-4)
● Parataxis – Elements of the poem are put one after the
other without grammatical indications of the
relationship between them.
● This implies a sort of equality between the elements, in
contrast to the opposite stylistic technique, hypotaxis, which
tends to subordinate one element to another.

20. Other notable characteristics of America
● Consciously & intentionally speaks for
marginalized groups (anarchists, the poor, the
queer, unionists, drug-users, the psychically
troubled, Communists).
● In most cases, lines are end-stopped (there is
very little enjambment).
● Reinstates the personal “I” in a self-consciously
ironic way.
● Draws on Whitman, Blake, and Keats in
constructing this type of narration.

21. Personal Narration in America
● The speaker is (initially) an individual who
addresses the nation directly, as another
individual.
● Later in the poem, the speaker identifies
himself with the object of his address:
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again. (lines 49-50)
● The speaker here uses the “bardic” or “prophetic”
first-person narrative technique, in which he
identifies himself with “a people.”

22. Language Absorption
After the identification, common political
sometimes discourse bleeds into the speaker’s
language, especially in the last 15 lines:
● “Asia is rising against me
I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.” (51-2)
● “The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s
power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red
Reader’s Digest. Her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running
our fillingsta-
tions.” (80-84)

23. “This Is Just to Say” (William Carlos
Williams, 1934)
1 I have eaten
2 the plums
3 that were in
4 the icebox
5 and which
6 you were probably
7 saving
8 for breakfast
9 Forgive me
10 they were delicious
11 so sweet
12 and so cold