1. MERIDEL:
Meridel Le Sueur was a communist.
She’s often called easier things like “activist” or “radical” or “author who espoused feminism and social reform,” [1] but even at the very end, bedridden at the post-Soviet “end of history,” she told the Communist Party newspaper People’s Weekly World that she was “prone, but still in.” [2]
What a marvel.
Meridel was born in Iowa in the nice round year 1900, very convenient for figuring out how old she was when women got the vote (nineteen), or during the Minneapolis General Strike that was foundational to her artistic and political consciousness (thirty-four), or when, after decades of blacklists and FBI repression, she was finally resuscitated by second-wave feminists (something like seventy-five). It’s lucky, actually, that someone so dedicated to capturing historical spirit and memory and the voices and travails of people would have a nearly complete view of the fantastically dense twentieth century to do so.
Meridel’s mother, Marian, was a feminist and social democrat in a robust Midwestern tradition, “a complete culture outside of the establishment,” as Meridel described it, with widely distributed newspapers, Utopian colonies, independent colleges for educating workers and labor organizers, and North Dakota sort of under social democratic control. [3] A real cultural front, integrated with open political struggle. Marian taught at the People’s College of Fort Scott, Kansas, founded by Eugene Debs, whom Meridel was introduced to alongside John Reed and Helen Keller and Theodore Dreiser and just about whoever else was a traveling left-intellectual of the era. At the college, Marian taught English with a celebration of plainness, [4] and married her second husband, fellow teacher Arthur Le Sueur, former member of the social democratic Nonpartisan League and mayor of Minot, North Dakota. The family stayed happily in Kansas until antisocialist arsonists set fire to the college.
Meridel travelled for a while, had a brief and not entirely successful acting/stuntwoman career, lived with Emma Goldman in Greenwich, then shipped it back to the Midwest. There she joined the Communist Party and settled in Minneapolis, where she witnessed the Great Depression, its human costs, and her first example of true collective consciousness.
The strike wave in Minneapolis was primarily organized by the Trotskyists of the Communist League of America, most of whom had been recently expelled from the Communist Party. But nonetheless it was there, at the singularly well-organized Teamster’s strike headquarters, where Meridel saw her defining example of proletarian consciousness, the subject of her best reporting for New Masses called “I Was Marching”:
Our life seems to be marked with a curious and muffled violence over America, but this action has always been in the dark, men and women dying obscurely, poor and poverty marked lives, but now from city to city runs this violence, into the open, and colossal happenings stand bare before our eyes, the street churning suddenly upon the pivot of mad violence, whole men suddenly spouting blood and running like living sieves, another holding a dangling arm shot squarely off, a tall youngster, running, tripping over his intestines, and one block away, in the burning sun, gay women shopping and a window dresser trying to decide whether to put green or red voile on a mannikin.
In these terrible happenings you cannot be neutral now. No one can be neutral in the face of bullets.
We are particularly fortunate to have in writing that exact moment, that perfect record of consciousness burgeoning in the clarity of violence, when all the rhetorics are resolved very simply by one side’s obvious willingness to kill for the status quo. That’s when Meridel became a partisan, and therefore able to write The Girl. [5]
2. THE GIRL:
is a short book, one hundred thirty pages, written throughout the ’30s in a rhythmic, at times ecstatically individuated plainness. Sections were published contemporaneously as short stories, but the entirety wasn’t published for nearly fifty years, eventually compiled by West End Press in 1978. Reading in 2025, the vocabulary can at times feel unfairly stuck in the compressed cultural sediment of old-timey pastiche-feeling; e.g., it’s hard to imagine gangsters saying “horsefeathers” sincerely. But we know, thanks to Jolene Hubbs, [6] that the language was exceptionally current for its time, including in some cases the OED‘s first documented usage of slang terms, like pregnant women asking each other when they’ll “pop,” i.e. give birth. This is kind of important. Le Sueur saw herself as a recorder, and saw The Girl as a collection of many voices, of the real stories of real women alive and struggling next to her in these times.
A not-so-brief summary: The eponymous Girl—as she’s referred to by everyone, including her mother—finds less-than-legal work in a prohibition beerjoint in Depression-era Minneapolis. This job also functions as her passage into adulthood. Chief is the question of sex, and men. Girl seeks a state of “knowing” with the help of three other women: Belle, the maternal proprietress of the beerjoint; Clara, a fellow server, a cast-off wandering through social systems and sex work and hoping to one day leverage it into class ascension; and Amelia, the Workers Alliance organizer, the collectivizer and historical consciousness for all of them.
Men are presented as terrible, violent, inevitable marvels, destructively careless or willfully malicious, even when confronted with a woman’s kenotic love. Or at least, this is Girl’s incipient dynamic with Butch, the lithe and vicious man who acts as the anvil on which all her future knowledge will be wrought. Butch is a scab, a gambler, a pathetic and tragic egotist. He brags a lot about his former prowess in baseball and how one day he’ll have his own service station, his own Utopic symbol of class ascension and self-determination. He and Girl fall in love, providing Girl’s first sexual experience, and the same dynamic is amplified, i.e., mostly something terrible but with a kind of divinity breaching: “I would always now know…the awful wonderful need to enter each other…I would know fruits and like cutting an apple open, and seeing the tiny brown little seeds lying together, asleep in the core.”
Winter arrives. In the season’s desperation the two are driven into a robbery plot with Ganz, a gangster who provides protection to the beer joint. Ganz has been leching after Girl since the beginning, but now she’s with Butch, and Butch feels subordinate to Ganz, and in a pathetic fit of jealousy and desperation, Butch “offers” Girl to him. Girl, for her part, thinks that by sleeping with Ganz, she will make enough money to buy Butch his service station, because that’s what Ganz tells her.
In the hotel, Ganz assaults her, knocking her unconscious. Though it is neither depicted nor confirmed, the narrative progresses with an implication that he has raped her: “when it happens to you then it makes you different and you can’t tell anyone about it but you will act different and someday it will all come into you and into others that know the same thing. I thought of Clara and how all those that are covered with filth and are rotting from the same thing will know it together.” When Girl wakes, Ganz acts as if nothing has happened, discussing the robbery plot matter-of-factly and insisting on the necessity of speed and surprise, “like Hitler does it.” He doesn’t pay her.
Girl realizes she is pregnant with Butch’s child. He forcibly takes her for an abortion, but she escapes, and takes great comfort in the knowledge of her pregnancy: “I had already robbed the bank. I had stolen the seed.”
Then there’s a mishap during the robbery. Ganz and Hoinck (Belle’s husband) wind up dead, and Butch limps out to the car. Girl drives them through farmland until they come to “a service station built like a cottage, there were paper geraniums in the window,” and Butch says to the owner it’s “a swell place you got here,” and the man tells him that Standard Oil is about to repossess it: it’s “a racket, they make you feel like you got your place, like you’re going to be the boss, a big shot…you could work twenty-eight hours out of twenty-four, you could starve your wife and kids and throw them in with it…and when you give up, when they’ve sucked you dry, they get another sucker.” This admission crushes the fragile architecture of Butch’s worldview, his hopes and self-perception. Bleeding profusely, he offers his repentance, apologizing to Girl, expressing confusion and impotence over the shape of his life. He reveals that Ganz fired first, intentionally shooting Hoinck in the back, probably to keep the money. When he saw this, Butch in turn shot Ganz, who then shot him back. Weighing the hopelessness of his life in retrospect, he says, “my God, do we belong to the human race or don’t we?” He dies in a ditch.
With all the men dead, the narrative is freed. In the remaining community of women, Girl is more resolved than ever to have her baby. They move into a tenement and then a squat. There’s general squalor and everyone is going some type of crazy: Belle is distraught from her husband’s death and so perennially drunk, Butch’s mother is in the depths of dementia and constantly hallucinating her sons and husband, and Clara is feverish and thin and getting thinner, writing letters to imaginary boyfriends, imaginary friends, making all of them talk to each other about her own prospects for a marriage and a big house and a bright future.
Girl begins spending more time with Amelia, who “makes things go together,” revealing their systemic function. For instance, Girl gets less food from the relief, after a woman following her around falsely informs the agency that Girl has been living with a man: “we can’t have any immorality around here,” the agent says. As Girl leaves the office, she sees the sheet of paper continually referenced by the agent is blank, realizing the agent has arbitrarily reduced her rations under the pretense of binding guidelines. Amelia affirms the Girl’s feelings of enmity, but extends them, speaking with alarming frankness about class relations, explaining the agent’s willingness to sacrifice the desperate in order to ease the burden on the state. Girl reflexively resists the intense depiction of the world, but is continually forced towards Amelia’s perspective: when she returns to the relief office, she finds a sheet recommending that “the girl…should be a referral to a psychiatric clinic…[and] should be tested for sterilization…[which] would be advisable.” Shortly afterwards, Clara is forcibly taken for electroshock therapy.
Amelia explains the role of psychiatry as a bludgeon to enforce class position. In the midst of the Depression, Minnesota (along with other states) forcibly sterilized thousands of “feeble-minded” people, justifying it with openly eugenicist rhetorics in an attempt to reduce state expenditures. In a perverse logic reminiscent of Manifest Destiny, people’s poverty was often used as evidence of their “feeble-mindedness,” and the mental anguish created by their material circumstances was attributed to immoral dealings, then used as further proof of instability. The poor would then be given IQ tests as a ludicrous measure of “scientific” confirmation, and assigned to asylums for whatever involuntary treatment was considered appropriate. It is a central tension of the book’s latter half that nearly all the social workers involved in these decisions are women.
The novel ends with Girl living in the top floor of an abandoned warehouse, with holes in the floor and a stifling summer heat and no food or nutrients for the many pregnancies among them. The novel’s final act, then, is organized by Amelia, who insists the state will never willingly provide what the women really need, and that the only way to secure their necessities is via collective action: the “city fathers” won’t “give you anything for love…[and] you can’t just cry for yourself…some face has got to shine with every other face.” When a social worker returns Clara from electroshock, she’s a husk: her “eyes opened in an awful horror. Her little mouth formed a round O but nothing came out. I saw in her eyes a terrible thing.” To try to save her, Amelia prints leaflets from a mimeograph machine, organizing a demonstration to get her milk and iron pills. Girl wants to take part in this organizing but feels her labor pains beginning, and so misses the massive demonstration: “hundreds outside the courthouse and the cops threw tear gas…and some of those ballplayers caught the bombs and threw them right back.”
But while the streets are in upheaval, Clara dies in the squat. The crowd comes to mourn collectively for her, which transitions organically into a people’s assembly, planning further action. Amelia looks “like the mother of them all.” Just then, Girl’s baby is crowning. She thinks “this is your face, Butch, coming back down the great river, the great dark,” and she hears the mimeograph start again, “like a beat.” She gives birth to a girl, and the face is her mother’s: “like a mirror.”
3. WOMEN, MEN; CAPITAL, LACK
Each of the Girl’s guides has a different vision of men:
- Clara: “O kid, that’s bad, you’re in trouble if you love a guy. He can do anything to you and he will.”
- Belle, when her husband is gearing up to get shot in the robbery: “I can cry if I want. That’s one thing is free—tears. No taxes and to Hell with bravery.”
- Amelia: “A man is a mighty fine thing, there is nothing better than a man. It’s the way we have to live that makes us sink to the bottom and rot.”
- All the women in the squat collectively celebrating Girl giving birth to a girl: “a sister a daughter…no rod of Satan.”
An intense set of contradictions, aesthetically and theoretically productive, because in Girl’s world men are an ontological factor, overdetermining the course and experience of women’s lives. But there’s a simple explanation to this otherwise near-mystical terrible/wonderful dichotomy the men present: behind these symptoms of paired extremes we see plain power, amplifying any outcome, be it terror, boredom, love and wonder, or be it constantly, exhaustingly, terrifyingly shifting between these things as the world moves and moves the men with it. It’s a singular expression of women’s oppression, and by necessity, never for a moment separates this from all other chains of causation, from capital, from the state. Women are depicted as fully separate from men, forced into their own cult by the dialectically opposed cult of masculinity. At times, sexes are spoken of like different species: after her first sexual encounter, Girl says, “he even called my name and Belle says when they do that they love you,” like there’s a stable category of othered behavior (“their” behavior) fully distinct from her own experience. But this grinding, bifurcating group-creation is set in relation almost straightforwardly to the realities of wage labor, or lack of it, when Girl’s mother describes the terror/wonder of the family:
He got two dollars a day then, only ten hours work and two dollars. But every night I felt him lighter and barking like a wolf…Every single night I would lie there and he would cough and spit up blood…Papa’s coming, [the children would be] yelling, papa’s coming, and there he was in the door looking at us kind of angry like he always was…He was like the wrath of God, something strong and good in your papa. He was good to me….It’s a fierce feeling you have for your husband and children like you could feed them your body, and chop yourself up into little pieces…He wasn’t made for the way they used him, that’s fact. He was made for different things.
Many second-wave feminists might, for good reason, call the fonder thoughts here false consciousness. But without taking these thoughts seriously we miss half the equation, and things get pretty interesting when we see that combining these two axes—capital and lack; women and men— changes the proletarian/woman’s consciousness into something beyond and discrete from either.
It becomes most notable in Le Sueur’s focus on the collective, but before we get there, consider the case in the negative. Butch’s “beating’s everything. Everything there is,” and “it takes guts…that’s what it is, to go through the night. You got to be tough and strong alone” is a conception of masculine self-discipline that is also an extremely useful paradigm for capital, who loves for its providers of labor-power to self-consciously select miserable conditions out of some kind of pride, and receive no special compensation for them. There’s more than one bent plumber who’s bragged about how much work for such little pay it took to win his way to the lower middle class.
Or maybe more accurately, it’s very convenient to withhold labor-power’s true value and instead pay the wages of manhood. Men are ruined by these wages and their desire for them, and throughout their pursuit, they depend on women’s invisibilized labor and lives. The fact that it’s so invisible is perhaps why Girl encounters her mother’s world as such a secret, something unrevealed until her father dies, when finally “[the Girl] was into [her] mama’s life for the first time, and knew how she all the time, chased like by a pack of wolves, kept us alive.”
To win her liberty, the middle-class feminist accedes to the man’s challenge on his terms, forced into increasing individualism. Take our now ubiquitous girlboss archetype. Maybe its most generous form is a kind of popular front amongst women, the type we see in a film like Babygirl, in which the CEO and her protègé each recognize the necessity of the other to their professional success, but are otherwise locked in subterranean struggle: the boss needs defense against encroachment from men, thus keeps women close, but in so doing inevitably delays her protègé’s ascension, who, in exactly the same capacity as her boss, wants to climb onto rungs on which successively fewer people fit. There can be a pretense of détente while there are men left in the c-suite, but one of the film’s (many, I guess) climaxes sees the protègé rinsing her boss for abuses of power. She (Sophie Wilde) keeps secret the knowledge of the boss’s affairs, in order to keep her (Nicole Kidman) as a useful lynchpin in the fragile architecture of women’s corporate power.
Much of the film explores the failure of an older generation’s mores, suggesting that in sex as well as capitalist culture, updated ideological frameworks can salvage institutions without changing their fundamental economic basis, from marriage and the family to the joint-stock logistics enterprise. Unfortunately, here I think pup play can’t make the leap from its metaphorical enclosure, failing to describe superficially similar power dynamics more than analogically. At the end of the day, Kidman as CEO is not at the top of the ladder, as we can see in daily life by a regular shift-change of executives whenever the board feels it desirable—for the good of the shareholders, of course—including because they just feel like they should be making more money. In fact this is also true at the beginning of the day and for the length of lunch and all other times, because the structure of our very lives is set and maintained by those controlling the venture.
Consider one other case, a recent essay in Public Books, “Autofiction Writers of the World, Unite!” by one of the definite best, Sarah Brouillette, with a more frank depiction of tensions between women competing for the upperest of middle classes. Brouillette’s essay on I’m a Fan, a 2022 novel by Sheena Patel, describes a “propertyless, feminized cultural worker[‘s]” desire for class ascension, chiefly through fantasies of a loveless affair with an older, white, well-established visual artist. But “every day, Patel’s protagonist focuses her attention less on the man she dreams of dating and more on another woman who he is also involved with, whose social media profile she finds herself obsessing over.” She envies and comes to resent the woman, who has easy access to capital for chic boutiquey ventures and somehow, eventually, a book deal. It drives the narrator insane, who would also very much like a book deal, something chiefly perceived as a means to fix her dingy-feeling life, and to this end is constantly self-performing “pornographic trauma ballads for a little bit of status” and wishing she knew which paintings to buy, an off-putting conception of desire for cultural knowledge, reifying its social role as class signifier and store of financial value. Patel’s narrator comes to (accurately) articulate this experiential gulf as a product of each woman’s class background: cultural production is dominated by the prestigiously educated, their cultural expectations, and their informal networks. In Brouillette’s read, the narrator feels she must constantly gratify these people’s established cultural influence, becoming a true Fan to keep alive her own dream of ascension, thus desperately flailing for attention in a way Brouillette claims is “an almost inevitable affect for writers now—an industry command. To push back against it is to risk….the oblivion of being unknown.”
I get this feels pressing, and have certainly been contorted by similar things myself. But it’s part of why I cling to Le Sueur’s example, or all the many others who never flinched when their much more stringent principles were tested, even when things were worse, a kind of worse not presently imagined and that in fact often seems trite or fake to many contemporary writers because they experience that past reality not as real choices made by people the same as they but as some symbolic paragon of destitution. Obscurity is intentional erasure by the state, and you can fight it with a press in someone’s basement. Obscurity is not a guillotine for your principles whenever you don’t get enough likes on instagram.
The review is framed as a partial repudiation of Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy‘s claim that autofiction fails to meaningfully abstract individual experience, leaving us in a “culture of narcissism” that can’t “perceive its own structural causes.” But I’d argue that far from refuting, this view of I’m a Fan proves it. The narrator’s self-reporting of class-resentment does nothing to free her from it because to paint accession of class anxieties as a material compulsion is to preclude any collective effort against them: if we must all struggle to casually own a boutique, we cannot then struggle against them. Brouillete suggests that “Patel skewers not narcissism per se but rather the conditions that make it a necessary recourse,” but there is nothing necessary about intra-class ascension, [7] and to claim so contradicts more basic claims about the inevitable proletarianization of the lower rungs of the middle classes, which must be appreciated, if not celebrated, as an education in real necessity, as the forcing together of 1. those whose class background allows them any serious access to higher education with 2. the majority of the rest of the people on Earth, who toil to provide it. There’s no shame in this, unless they (we—me!) continue to turn so eagerly to the hand that might, maybe, pat their heads with fleeting affection.
If “I’m a Fan contextualizes and situates the aesthetics of immediacy…as a means of access to an industry of cultural production that is otherwise beyond one’s reach and that, whatever style you deploy, still takes more from you than you ever get back,” the novel deploys its lack of abstractive capacity to depict that lack of abstraction. Whether or not this is a valuable form of intervention seems, I think, up for debate. Whether or not it addresses the core problem—the lack of mediation and thus inability to name and know deeper structures—is not, because it doesn’t, and can’t.
The Girl offers a consciousness to resist not only its primary characters’ most immediate vectors of oppression—undoubtedly men—but to understand them as mediators of capital. Hubbs characterizes “this attention to the imbrication of capitalist production and sexual reproduction” as Le Sueur’s own brand of labor politics, citing Paula Rabinowitz’s observation of “the family-making kind [of labor], rather than the factory floor kind…as a defining experience in many proletarian women’s lives.” For instance:
One doctor asserted…in 1938 that eugenic sterilization made sense “from a purely economic and practical standpoint” because it not only allowed institutions to parole inmates who had been confined for the purpose of curbing their access to sexual partners of the opposite sex, but also reduced the number of feebleminded children born to feebleminded parents who would likely saddle the state with “the burden of their care and support” throughout their lives.
Plainly, the doctor verbalizes the state’s desire to mutilate women in order to reduce the cost of so-called dependents who, in the most extremely limited perception, deplete instead of create economic value. It is, in fact, the mirror logic of Butch’s attempt at enforced abortion, enacted at scale. But again (and excuse my repetitions), the understanding of causality and therefore any resistance to it would be incomplete on this alone. Hubbs continues:
The Girl represents eugenic sterilization as a kind of New Deal-era jobs program for the middle class…During the 1910s and 1920s, a research institute called the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) trained eugenic field-workers—85% of whom were women—to collect and analyze information about heredity. As Daylanne English observes in her scholarship on eugenics, these women workers’ “professional and social mobility depended on, indeed could be defined by, the enforced immobilization of others” via “compulsory institutionalization or sterilization.”
And this is how proletarian/women’s consciousness becomes its own discrete category, a specific set of radically binding and separating experiences. The most radicalizing excesses experienced by these people are, in fact, never shared with bourgeois women, nor proletarian men—it produces new feelings, and new times, in new ways, and if they occur along similar axes to the others, they occur at such different scale as to change the fundamental qualities beyond recognition. We can think of the women in Russia, February of 1917, who worked their entire shifts and then left to spend the rest of their waking and sleeping hours in bread lines with their children, waiting for a dole that never came. It was they who rioted, they who began the revolution against both their own and the revolutionary parties’ expectations. In hindsight, it is perhaps not that difficult to see, unless their experience of proletarianism is invisibilized. At least in part.
This may sound like a long road back to standpoint epistemology, but instead of mining various permutations of individual identity—or even combining them into a polity based on symbolic appeasement—socialism offers class as a universalizing category, allowing, theoretically, these many different mediations of the experience to resolve within a shared political project for collective ownership and control. Linda Ray Pratt [8] digs into this, showing that in Le Sueur, specifically anti-male depictions are almost exclusively reserved for non-communists; that when Party men show up they often “help female characters recognize their true identity as members of the communal group.” If this is truer in fiction than history, it leaves a clear indication of the work necessary within a theoretical direction for American socialism. [9]
One of The Girl‘s central achievements, then, is the illumination of class as a far from stable category; there is a universalizing truth to it, but it appears vastly different almost every time it appears. In the contemporary US there is a resurgence of class politics, but in the popular imagination it often still carries an image of a union ironworker, or the disappearing white male of the 1950s Ford plant, instead of recognizing ICE raids at Home Depot as pressing sites of class warfare, terrorizing the economically necessary illicit labor as an ersatz explanation for the middle classes’ declining quality of life; seeing the police murder of George Floyd as the enforcement of a class order, the repression necessary to manage recurring crises which find their resolution in the further immiseration of an intentionally racialized underclass, targeted to absorb the worst shocks of, say, rampant unemployment following a pandemic. The Girl is an early example of these differential mediations ultimately presented as a unitary whole; a depiction of the subset not subordinated to the set, but rather a set composed only of subsets, only possible with the integration of these subsets, integrated by the only real mediator powerful and flexible enough: something we might call communism. It sidles up to this realization in its impressionistic and yearning language, because its truth was not yet consciously conceivable to the culture creating it. So here, at once, is the ordering force of socialism, and the artistic reach creating its prerequisite, prerational consciousness.
IV: “REALISM,” “IMPRESSIONISM”; CENTRAL, INDIVIDUAL
In post-revolutionary Russia, the question of art was profoundly open. Multiple modernist avant-gardes had erupted in the decade or so preceding the war and these energies were amplified by the spirit of total recreation. Mayakovsky still trafficked in extremely sharp image and unprecedented enjambments, Eisenstein leapt from theatre into film to establish some of the earliest and most lasting technical and theoretical innovations, and left-Bolsheviks like Lunacharsky and Bogdanov promulgated experimentation in nearly every artistic field, with all of this occurring alongside a new extension of the classical forms towards the working masses.
The Communist Party’s official position on art was undeveloped because it had not been a priority or really a possibility before the unexpected seizure of state power, and afterwards there was Civil War and famine and international intrigue and broken production, etc. Lenin, devout apostle of Russian classical literature, openly admitted his incomprehension of the avant-garde, and routinely categorized it as nothing more than bourgeois indulgence. But he almost always let Trotsky convince him not to repress it, and Trotsky, for his part, always defended the avant-garde, even if he didn’t exactly encourage it. A primary question centered around Proletkult, an organization dedicated to developing new, “proletarian” forms of art, as well as its imbrication with worker education and development. It simultaneously included ventures we’d call Utopian if they hadn’t been so successful—like the agit-trains, with constructivist-inspired murals and poets’ slogans beaming pamphlets and speeches and films out to the peasantry, or the agit-streetcars roaming through cities with a mobile stage for experimental street theatre—as well as literacy initiatives, adult education, worker workshops to develop worker-poets. Most of it never got a chance to fully develop.
It was critiqued along two major lines. The first is roughly Lenin’s and was shared by many Bolsheviks: that these avant-gardes were bastions of the bourgeois intelligentsia operating almost entirely in a vacuum, and though new forms of art would certainly develop in socialist society, they could not and should not be steered by a tiny côterie of intellectuals in city centers; that in reality, socialist culture cannot begin before teaching something like one hundred million peasants how to read, and this not even from an ethical standpoint, but from a fundamental understanding of the material roots of culture. [10] The second is extended by Trotsky and more ideologically inclined: that the development of an explicitly proletarian art is a total misstep, an actual impediment towards socialist culture and consciousness, because the whole point of the revolution was the destruction of classes. Everyone is painting pretty broadly, and understandably so—they’re in the midst of perpetual crisis.
This question is never really resolved, but closed by Stalin. Upon gaining control of the politburo and, by extension, the comintern, he encouraged and eventually made official policy the aesthetic of socialist realism, idealizing the construction of the USSR and lionizing heroic self-sacrifice of workers. Of course, these themes were a convenient boon to smoothing out extreme instabilities and repression. The total commitment to political convenience over complexity horrified old Bolsheviks. [11]
But the reason we’re discussing all this is because it’s pretty similar to the ideological waters the stories forming The Girl were born into. Though socialist realism only became official Soviet policy in 1934, some version of the idea was already widely prevalent internationally, and had been trending that direction since Lunacharsky’s removal in ’29. Mike Gold, New Masses editor, had been writing about (and enacting) a similar sort of idea (though initially much less hidebound) in the American context for more than a decade by the time Le Sueur began publishing excerpts of the eventual novel.
In Gold’s early essays, like “Towards Proletarian Art,” [12] he’s a little confused and highfaluting, or at least, is not operating under an exact conception of the “proletarian,” speaking rather generally about the masses and imbuing them with somewhat essentialized exuberance and authenticity, which is understandable, because he wants this to be his great subject, believes it already is a great subject that deserves serious artistic treatment and that this serious artistic treatment may further class-based political efforts in a similar way to nationalist literatures. [13]
His first novel, Jews Without Money, enacts these ideas in a semi-modernist style, and it was so popular the publishers reprinted it eleven times in a single year. In the midst of the Depression, it directly depicted for the first time the death and misery and intense energies of the Lower East Side, ending (maybe a little bit peremptorily) with its protagonist’s conversion to revolutionary politics.
The Daily Worker immediately critiqued it. The official Communist Party review claimed the novel was “semi-proletarian” and that “the suspicion of ‘pure artist’ creeps up on one out of Gold’s pages.” [14] This is, at least in part, where our sense of communism’s enforced adherence to a bureaucratically determined line comes from, and this is what the lingering thumbsucking drool about “political art” and its insufficiencies has as its origins. Because Gold never seriously reprises the style, and when Le Sueur starts publishing similarly energized stories, Gold—along with other party members—pours the same critique down her throat, leading her to later repudiate her use of “beautiful language” and “mysticism and vagueness” and producing, as Linda Ray Pratt would have it, her least aesthetically powerful writing.
There’s a problem for artists of all stripes here because the Communist Party and its satellites also undoubtedly nourished Le Sueur, both intellectually and artistically, educating her, publishing her, providing a political home and her most powerful perceptions. But I wonder if this confusion might be resolved kind of simply, if paradoxically, by the same source.
There’s this depiction of Lenin by Russian Formalists (Shklovsky, Eikhenbaum, Tynianov) in a eulogy edition of LEF, a magazine of the Left Front for the Arts, in 1924. [15] The formalists were decidedly not Marxists and had a facile understanding of it. But they were wonderfully well-equipped to highlight contradictions between developing Soviet policies towards art and Lenin’s own beliefs and deployment of language and rhetoric. As Tynianov quotes him, against cliché, against repetition of slogans into nullity: “One must know how to adapt the schemes to life, and not repeat words that have become meaningless.” Eikhenbaum characterizes his post-1917 “fight against revolutionary phrase-mongering” as one of the “constant themes of his irony and ridicule.” And Shklovsky brings us especially prescient considerations, focusing on irony and defamiliarization: “The peculiarity of Lenin’s style was the absence of incantation. Every speech or article begins everything as if from the beginning. There are no set terms. They appear now in the middle of a given piece, as the concrete result of disjunctive work.” And they were right. Lenin was actually not a particularly gifted public speaker, but his greatest tact was in always formulating thoughts in his original language, fashioned to the exact moment and set of historical circumstances. His writing, while obviously (and intentionally) unstylized, nonetheless comes across with a force and clarity that well exceeds that supplied by his tendency for vituperative intervention.
And why not The Girl? Why not fashion language and narrative and artistic effort exactly suited to its task, which is the construction of specific consciousness, if we call that the self-knowledge of what it’s really like to be alive?
The Girl is obsessed with knowing. It begins with this great mystery of men, of sex, that Girl can only truly know one way, and once achieved she knows how to know: “And I kept walking and looking at men and now I knew something…Nobody knew anything that didn’t do it. Down below you know everything and there are some things you can never tell, never speak of, but they move inside you like yeast.” And immediately she needs to know all the women around her to know herself and her child and what the state is inflicting and what Amelia knows and what any of them might really hope to do about it, “for what is one voice alone, or what good is it to cry in a room with the door shut?” And when she finally gives birth, in the squat amidst death and the yet-insufficient efforts to rectify it, “then I saw Butch’s mother and I touched her and she knew everything…O Butch, I laughed, you didn’t know what your mama knew, that little woman, door to you all.”
Her language often tilts into the figurative because it is operating at the edge of its own consciousness; it’s reaching for new knowledge and relying on image in the same way our dreams do, as the brain reflects and assembles new meanings in sleep. After sex it’s “like my hair sprang up out of my skull green, or a terrible root went in the dark with a hundred mouths looking for food,” and later love is “smiles breaking out all over my body,” and when she feels the baby, she feels it “leap inside me like a fish in clear water.” All of these images rely not on their strict meaning—the water need not be clear for the fish’s motion to resemble that of the child—but on the connotative web of associations to create a complex of meaning that defies a single word: the clear water a tangled suggestion of clarity and light and lightness, of freedom from evils. This is essentially the point of art. Why else can you metonymically invoke a character in place of its larger web of connections, the way Trump just resuscitated Shylock, or how I used to think of “Et in Arcadia Ego” whenever I got so happy it made me sad. These structures of experience must be actively created, and if they are to adequately scaffold new experience, they require new methods.
This is perhaps why, just after Girl has been assaulted by Ganz, she says, “and I ran out and down the stairs, past the clerk at the desk, and into the street, and I looked back and saw all the windows behind me brightly lighted and the smooth furniture inside and the nice beds. I always wanted to see what they did in there. Now I knew. I ran into the park and I touched the trees and I leaned down and picked up some dirt and ate it. It tasted bitter.” She’s overloaded with new knowing, some sensory connection back to strictly perceptible reality as a necessary recourse to her own confusion, and this necessary action is strange, strange as the world has now revealed itself to be. As anemic pregnant women often crave dirt, there is perhaps no better image for The Girl to encapsulate itself: a woman follows her inexplicable craving to address a real lack that her broader social reality refuses to acknowledge, and without this acknowledgement, the action presents as inscrutable mysticism or insanity.
In “I Was Marching,” Le Sueur describes a burgeoning collective consciousness, one that may not yet have consciously understood all its own implications. It would not only make sense, but be actually valuable for a literary mode to reflect this. Art is rather uniquely suited to offer more than perfect clarity (which does not exist anyway) or unyielding adherence to a pre-existing schema, which in any type of fiction restricts the imaginative capacity and impoverishes its greatest strength, which is a real living dialectic rendered in language.
In discussing his intellectual work, the Palestinian revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani said, “I can say that my personality as a novelist was more developed than my personality as a political actor, not the other way around, and that is reflected in my analysis and understanding of society.” [16] He continues:
My observation of this reality and my writing about it led me to a proper analysis. My stories themselves lack analysis. However, they narrate the way the protagonists of the story act, the decisions they make, the reasons that motivate them to make those decisions, the possibility of crystallising those decisions, etc. In my novels I express reality, as I understand it…I was astonished when I listened [again] to the dialogue of my characters about their problems and was able to compare their dialogue with the political articles I had written in the same period of time and saw that the protagonists of the story were analysing things in a deeper and more correct way than my political articles.
This seems like precisely the explanation for La Sueur’s looser, more figurative, more pressingly sound-sensed and rhythmed language, trying to make something she’s just beginning to know feel right, with that feeling acting, again, as a form of preconscious thought. The Girl’s contributions to proletarian/woman’s consciousness would then be inseparable from its aesthetic mode.
So its example as a novel is twofold: first, a deep engagement of the author with the most urgent fights of its time, as a prerequisite to advanced understanding; second, a hewing to whatever word the brain wants next, regardless of what it says, regardless of whether it’s immediately understood.
This would seem to offer a theoretical direction similar to that in Le Sueur’s depiction of proletarian womanhood: the different mediations of class as they all relate to class struggle; the individuated mediations of experience as they all relate to reality. So if the Stalinist party line was Proletarian Realism, we could perhaps call The Girl a Proletarian Impressionism: not approaching anything like full abstraction, and yet focused considerably more on the sense of a given reality than perfect fidelity to the likeness you’d like it to have.
You could get optimistic about this mode—and considerably more experimental variations predicated upon its rough structure—offering a way forward to a contemporary literature otherwise siloed into various contradictory and tired angles: autofiction of middle class anxieties, for one; a return to social omniscience, as suggested by Kornbluh or Jameson; a lightly progressivized nonprofitty thing, in millennial idiom/occasional repeat experiment; or the so-called experimentalism à la Shklovsky that sees art as an independent system from political reality.
After years of empty cultural appeasement from the neoliberal center, or a generally repoliticized spirit suggesting the “pleasures” of art are or should be subordinate to an objectively determined political line, there has perhaps been a prevailing sentiment that art does not, exactly, matter, or that its chief function is to propagate other ideas, or to ornament more serious struggle. Meridel claimed she was merely a recorder. The Girl suggests something very different: that it in its most reaching modes–its romanticisms, surrealisms, or that beyond any single cognomen—art can function as the active creation of new consciousness, of new ways of being, formed by and for their given historical topography. It suggests this is meaningless if pursued alone, without a collectivity to create a rhythm in which its individuated sounds can exist;that this collectivity is only truly realized in struggle, one in which the artist bleeds and learns.
Footnotes
[1] On her official website, in her NYT obituary, and the Encyclopedia Britannica, respectively.
[2] This and more good stories from Alan Wald's obituary in Monthly Review, September 1997.
[3] Interview in Northern Lights and Insights, 1988.
[4] She wrote a textbook called Plain English,which taught basic literacy using readings from social movements and left thinkers and insisting on language as an evolving group dynamic, not a closed set of strictly adhered to rules.
[5] "I Was Marching" can be found in New Masses of Sept. 18, 1934 on marxists.org. It has quite a bit to say about the experience (including her own) of middle class people not quite sure how to enter into class struggle, feeling awkward, maybe a little scared of relinquishing the desperate quest for individuality. Another article, "The Fetish of Being Outside," published in 1935, is pointed more directly at writers, especially middle class writers trying to remain "objective." Consider: "You cannot be both on the barricades and objective or removed at the same time. I suppose you can but you are likely to receive the bullets of both sides."
[6] Hubbs, Jolene. "’I Saw and Felt the Class Lines’: Class Divides, Forced Sterilization, and Literary Form in Meridel Le Sueur's The Girl”. Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 70, No. 3, 2024.
[7] The pervasive middle-class sense that animates I'm a Fan (and Pride and Prejudice, for instance) is that downward mobility (or even stagnation) is a type of death, and therefore resisting it is a "necessity," is justified even at the price of any seriously collectivist politics.
[8] Pratt, Linda Ray. "Woman Writer in the CP: The Case of Meridel Le Sueur." Women's Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3. 1987.
[9] Not that male chauvinism wasn’t rampant elsewhere, but that, at least in the pre-Stalin Soviet examples, we’ve seen figures like Kollontai and Krupskaya given latitude to pursue new experiments in robust public education or communal housing.
[10] This seems extremely reasonable, but things get a bit itchy when you consider physicists are never expected to reduce their work to its most accessible layers. Yes, culture is mostly a collective affair, but should Marx have waited for the full participation of the proletariat to assist in the descriptions of capital? Did they absolutely have to make the poet stop the new amalgams of thought and feeling and experience until they could argue over it with every citizen of Siberia? Bogdanov, one of the main drivers of Proletkult—especially its worker education and workshops wing—had been critiquing Lenin's own intelligentsia-led vanguard for at least a decade, and was actively trying to develop a new layer of worker-intellectuals, worker-artists, worker-leaders.
[11] It is said that Stalin's favorite poetry was that with simple rhymes.
[12] In The Liberator, Vol. 4 No. 2, Feb. 1921.
[13] Gold mentions this in the Notes section of the Sept. 1930 edition of New Masses. It makes for interesting comparison with Fanon's chapter on culture in Wretched and Ghassan Kanafani on the role of literature.
[14] Hoberman, J. “Mike Gold, Avant-Garde Bard of Proletarian New York”. The Nation. May 2021.
[15] See also Samuel D. Eisen’s "Whose Lenin Is It Anyway? Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum and the Formalist-Marxist Debate in Soviet Cultural Politics (A View from the Twenties)," The Russian Review, Vol. 55, No. 1, pp. 65-79. 1996. Thank you to libgen for access and no one else, especially not CUNY's technology departments for categorically refusing to make an authentication system that works.
[16] Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings. Pluto Press, 2024.
J. Arthur Boyle
J. Arthur Boyle’s recent work has appeared in Spectra, Verso, Fence, and elsewhere. He teaches at CUNY and wants to break the Taylor Law real bad.