Teaching protest literature.

I was recently asked to review an article on protest literature for an online survey and review journal. In many ways it's a good piece of work. The author focuses on eleven instances in American cultural history in which the element of social protest was prominent. They are the right instances,

too: the American Revolution, Indian removal, abolition, the early feminist movement, Vietnam, and the like. But the article clarified for me a number of theoretical issues that I did not altogether comprehend when I taught my course on Social Protest literature. Like the author of this article, I had decided to focus on certain issues: war, racism, feminism, fascism, in my case. I do not think I had adequately theorized that choice, rather than, say, taking a more strictly historical approach, something to which I will return. Despite this similarity in organizational format, I found myself increasingly impatient with the article. Trying to figure out why led me to think through a number of the theoretical issues that, I believe, inevitably arise in teaching a course of this sort. One has to do with the roles of writers or artists in movements for social change, or, to say it differently, the relationships between individual creativity and social action. A second has to do with the differences between works directly involved in moments of conflict and those that, retrospectively, are set into those conflicted historical moments. A third involves genre: in what ways do different kinds of works--poems, stories, manifestos, declarations, laws, movies, speeches--function as social protest literature?

Is there any functional core, a set of tropes, a particular discourse, which obtains across genres? Finally, how are we to understand--and to teach--the ways in which historical and cultural contexts interact with protest texts?

To begin, then, with the subject choices. There is no way, realistically, in which one can "cover" all or even most American social protest art in a single course. So it seems to me that one must either trace certain key themes through a course historically or choose certain issues that seem important in a particular moment. Once upon a time, in 1969 or so, at a very different place and, obviously, moment, I taught a course on "revolutionary literature." It involved works like Lu Hsun's stories, Andre Malraux's Man's Fate, Gladkov's Cement, and a number of American works, as well, for theoretical bal last, Mao Zedong's Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature and a N chapter or two from Raymond Williams's Culture and Society. My logic had to do with two things: it seemed to me, naively to be sure, that we were in an historical moment in which it might be useful to learn from these pre- and post-revolutionary texts. In particular, I thought, it was important for my students to understand the distinction Williams drew between the politics of bourgeois individualism and that of working-class collectivity. They probably learned the most from having to decide whether to participate in a collective final exam (and, in most cases, actually trying to do that) or to take individual finals.

That was then; today, or rather in 2005, it seemed to me that both protest and repression were in the air and that students might learn something useful --in literary as well as in political terms--by reading and talking about earlier texts which confronted war, racism, patriarchy ... and the coming of fascism to the U.S. I assumed that few of my students--about a dozen undergraduates in a privileged college, Trinity, and about the same number of Master's degree candidates--would be directly involved in political protest, and that therefore I needed to organize the material more on the basis of certain intellectual concerns at a distance from immediate involvement in resistance, much less revolutionary, activity. So I arranged my course thematically though I tried to hold on to a modicum of historical context by organizing the thematic materials more or less chronologically. That allowed us to draw some comparisons between, say, the anti-war and anti-imperialist movements of the 1840s, 1890s, 1960s, and today. Or the very different conceptions of fascism and resistance painted by Jack London (in The Iron Heel, 1908), Sinclair Lewis (in It Can't Happen Here, 1935), and Philip Roth (in The Plot Against America, 2004). But in a certain sense, this approach constituted a kind of dodge. To be sure, it was interesting and fun to compare both London's conception of resistance--underground, violent, and socialist--and Lewis's--underground, violent, and liberal--with Roth's apparent incapacity to get beyond family decencies as the mode not so much of resistance as of survival. Whether that tells us something about Roth, about some aspect of pre-war Jewish consciousness, or about the draining of violence from any discourse of resistance I'm not sure.

What was even less clear to me was how useful were the comparisons between, for instance, anti-imperialist writing of 1848 and that of 1900. Or of anti-war poetry during Vietnam and today. Yes, the United States was, is, and probably will continue as an imperialist power, and I suppose there's a certain comfort in historical verification of that insight. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. But for me, such truisms are of far less interest than the precise, and rather different, roles protest writing actually plays in social movements. To understand that requires a deep plunge into a particular historical matrix and that seemed to me largely beyond the scope of the organizational format I adopted. There was, so to speak, too much history on my agenda. For instance, Robert Bly's "Counting Small-Boned Bodies" emerges from the very idea of body counts, a phenomenon that was supposed to measure "progress" in Vietnam but which has almost nothing to do with the war today or that at the turn of the 20th century. Differently, much anti-Vietnam poetry came alive in readings by Poets Against the War, whereas today, such work is much more a phenomenon of the Internet (in particular the web site "Poets Against the War" http://www. poetsagainstthewar.org). We are faced with differences both in discourse and in the material conditions within which protest literature is produced, deployed, and responded to. These issues point us toward a more profound set of questions: does protest literature exist, or more accurately perhaps, in what forms does it exist when it is lifted from its specific historical context? Is it then a fossil or a force? And, from the pedagogical standpoint, to what extent is it necessary to reconstruct a specific, and rich, historical context in order to approach many protest texts. For instance, I regularly teach a number of Lydia Sigourney's Indian poems, like "Indian Names."

Indian Names
by Lydia Sigourney

   "How can the red men be forgotten,
   while so many of our states and territories,
   bays, lakes and rivers, are
   indelibly stamped by names of their
   giving?"

   Ye say they all have passed away,
     That noble race and brave,
   That their light canoes have vanished
     From off the crested wave;
   That 'mid the forests where they
   roamed
     There rings no hunter shout,
   But their names is on your waters,
     Ye may not wash it out.

   'Tis where Ontario's billow
   Like Ocean's surge is curled,
   Where strong Niagara's thunders wake
     The echo of the world.
   Where red Missouri bringeth
     Rich tribute from the west,
   And Rappahannock sweetly sleeps
     On green Virginia's breast.

   Ye say their cone-like cabins,
     That clustered o'er the vale,
   Have fled away like withered leaves
     Before the autumn gale,
   But their memory liveth on your hills,
     Their baptism on your shore,
   Your everlasting rivers speak
     Their dialect of yore.

   Old Massachusetts wears it,
     Within her lordly crown,
   And broad Ohio bears it,
     Amid his young renown;
   Connecticut hath wreathed it
     Where her quiet foliage waves,
   And bold Kentucky breathed it hoarse
     Through all her ancient caves.

   Wachuset hides its lingering voice
     Within his rocky heart,
   And Alleghany graves its tone
     Throughout his lofty chart;
   Monadnock on his forehead hoar
     Doth seal the sacred trust,
   Your mountains build their monument,
     Though ye destroy their dust.

   Ye call these red-browed brethren
     The insects of an hour,
   Crushed like the noteless worm amid
     The regions of their power;
   Ye drive them from their father's lands,
     Ye break of faith the seal,
   But can ye from the court of Heaven
     Exclude their last appeal?

   Ye see their unresisting tribes,
     With toilsome step and slow,
   On through the trackless desert pass,
     A caravan of woe;
   Think ye the Eternal's ear is deaf?
     His sleepless vision dim?
   Think ye the soul's blood may not cry
     From that far land to him?
                                   --1834

It seems to me that there is no way to understand that poem, much less to appreciate its moves, without first understanding something, at least, about the politics of Indian removal in the Jackson administration. That is, in my experience, possible to manage in one 90-minute period--maybe. It is much harder to accomplish something similar with Richard Wright's wonderful story "Bright and Morning Star." For it is a rare student indeed, in America today, who can imagine some one wanting to be a Communist, much less being willing to die for that privilege. Or try Tillie Olsen's amazing "Tell Me a Riddle." If we move such stories out of their historical moments--as we must if we organize by issues--are we converting them to fossils, beautiful perhaps but often quite remote from students for whom the dynamics of Old Left aspirations are even more distant than those of Indian removal?

I am insisting here on the particulars of historical contexts because it seems to me that without them we stumble into a quite false picture of how works of protest art function. I want to return to the article I mentioned earlier to offer an instance. The writer cites as his or her central narrative for Vietnam protest the 1968 photograph by Eddie Adams of General Loan shooting at pointblank range what my writer calls "a Vietcong suspect in civilian clothes." "Americans were struck by its simplicity," the writer says; "this was two men and an execution, no complex maneuvers or jargon." He or she goes on to comment:

   The image was reprinted across the world. Public opinion polls
   showed the greatest single shift ever recorded by Gallup: between
   February and March, doves jumped from 25 to 40 percent, and hawks
   dwindled from 60 to 40 percent. Numerous editorials proclaimed the
   whole Vietnam effort doomed. Expanded media coverage of the war was
   shaping public attitudes, and anti-Vietnam protest dominated the
   front pages, while the government tried to write off protesters as
   un-American cowards. Amid this frenzy, one image could prompt a
   dramatic shift in public opinion, and be a rallying point and a
   justification for protest.

The image was, needless to say, powerful. But it can hardly be seen as so instrumental in reshaping attitudes toward the war. That was in fact primarily accomplished by the Tet Offensive carried out by the National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese fighters; they were indeed willing to pay a very heavy price in casualties to accomplish that goal. They were able to do so for at least two other reasons. First, the American brass had lied so much and so often to the American people about the supposed progress in the war that a strike like that of Tet could fatally puncture the balloon. A Herblock cartoon captures that moment: it shows an army officer hiding under a bunker table, but still operating a mimeograph machine on the table and saying into a phone something to the effect that "everything is OK--they didn't get the mimeo."

Second, the anti-war movement had been since 1965 mobilizing larger and larger actions against the war. While still a minority, the numbers of those opposing the war had grown steadily and significantly. Adams's photograph, that is, helped give shape to what was an already accelerating sentiment and provided a visual translation of some of the impact of the Tet Offensive. Important, to be sure, but it could not be said, as my author does, that "the photograph, a frozen moment, stopped" the flow of optimism from American headquarters in Saigon.

What we are dealing with here is not only a question of historical accuracy. It has, rather, to do with a conception of how an artist, in this case a photographer, can be understood to be functioning in society. Here Adams's picture is presented as an instance of genius working its powerful will on a public suddenly enlightened by its brilliance. The artist as genius and as hero reemerges to rescue us from our sloth, misperception, or indifference. Well, it don't happen that way. Uncle Tom's Cabin could reach so many hearts and minds not because, as Mrs. Stowe proposed, god, that quintessential genius, had really written the book through her. Rather, it came into being in response to the Fugitive Slave Act and found millions of hearts and minds profoundly distressed, like Mrs. Bird in the novel, by the implications of the law, which effectively stripped away the moral defenses of northerners by turning them into handmaidens of the slave power. Hearts and minds, too, that in ways large and small had been disturbed, perhaps enlightened, even engaged by twenty years and more of abolitionist evangelical agitation. Individual artists can create enormously significant and powerful visual and written works: the late Goya etchings, "Guernica," "Howl," The Bluest Eye, "Life at War," Angels in America, "The School Among the Ruins." But to understand how they work as social protest, we must see them in relation to concrete events and social movements.

Which, it seems to me, is made manifest by the particularity of discourse and trope. I have mentioned the instance of the body count, unique I think to Vietnam. Joe Lockard has pointed to the omnipresence of images of the mob and the martyr in abolitionist poetry of the 1830s. (1) Writers on all sides of the issue of imperialism and immigration a century ago engaged the question of what constituted civilization and who bore it forward. We can, on one hand, think of Mark Twain's "To the Person Sitting in Darkness." On the other hand, we might think about Thomas Bailey Aldrich's 1895 "Unguarded Gates":

   O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well
   To leave the gates unguarded? On
     thy breast
   Fold Sorrow's children, soothe the
     hurts of hate,
   Lift the down-trodden, but with
     hands of steel
   Stay those who to thy sacred portals
     come
   To waste the gifts of freedom. Have a
     care
   Lest from thy brow the clustered
     stars be torn
   And trampled in the dust. For so of
     old
   The thronging Goth and Vandal
     trampled Rome,
   And where the temples of the
     Caesars stood
   The lean wolf unmolested made her
     lair. (2)

I cite this poem, first, to indicate that right-wing protest poetry is not altogether an

oxymoron, though it often seems to be so. But mostly, I want to illustrate that while the issues of immigration may remain, the terms of the discourse are altogether altered--no one would mistake these images and this language for that of 2006, however familiar the politics. The State of Liberty and the questions of barbarism and civilization, not to speak of race, characterized the turn-of-the-century discourse, whereas borders and, now, the Trade Towers mark ours. The distinctiveness of discourse seems to me a peculiarly useful focus for classroom discussion: for students to see why this is not a poem of our own era is by itself enlightening--a meat and potatoes question for a final exam.

The last issue I want to address also involves the particularity of the relationship between text and context. If you look, for example, at Bruce Franklin's excellent anthology of works focused on opposition to the Vietnam war, (3) you find that the majority of them, especially the fiction, were published after the war was over. Are these works of social protest? When Denise Levertov read "Life at War" or "What Were They Like?" or Robert Bly read "The Teeth-Mother Naked at Last" to an auditorium filled with students and others, we can understand the function and dynamics of their work. They are stirring up political opposition, partly by engaging members of the audience in a secular service. Their poems and songs provide equivalents to scriptural readings that enunciate certain values and draw members of the group into a kind of oppositional community, a community that sustains and inspires the often difficult individual task of engaging in protest. One can observe similar processes in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's readings of "Aunt Chloe's Politics," or in Bernice Reagon's singing of "Woke Up This Morning With My Mind on Freedom" at a SNCC rally. But what roles in or toward a Movement are played by Tim O'Brien's powerful stories or novels of the Vietnam war published in the 1980s? Or, for that matter, in this connection, of books like Toni Morrison's Meridian or Beloved?. Or, indeed, seeing Picasso's "Guernica" in the Reina Sofia National Museum of Art?

All of this leads to a broader reflection. The question of protest literature is imbedded in the ambiguity of both of those terms. "Protest" is not, after all, a conventional literary term like "iambic pentameter," "sonnet," or "fiction." It is a social dynamic, and the relationship of art--largely produced by individuals--to such social movements is always, at best, ambiguous and conflicted.

NOTES

(1) Joe Lockard, "Jacksonian Mobs, Free Speech, and the Rise of American Antislavery Poetry," REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literatures, 2006 (Brook Thomas, issue editor): 117-144.

(2) Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Unguarded Gates and Other Poems. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1895; in The Poems of Thomas Bailey Aldrich: Revised and Complete. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company,1907, p. 276.

(3) H. Bruce Franklin, ed. The Vietnam War in American Stories, Songs and Poems. Boston: Bedford, 1996.