Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from Duke University Libraries https://archive.org/details/rebelsOOmedo NEW AMERICANISTS A series edited by Donald E. Pease YOUTH AND THE COLD WAR ORIGINS OF IDENTITY LEEROM MEDOVOI Duke University Press Durham and London 2005 © 2005 DUKE university press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Scala with Shortcut display by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Catalogingin-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. CONTENTS Acknowledgments 1. Identitarian Thought and the Cold War World 2. Cold War Literature and the National Allegory: vii i 53 The Identity Canon of Holden Caulfield 3. Transcommodification: 91 Rock ’n’ Roll and the Suburban Counterimaginary 4. Identity Hits the Screen: 135 Teenpics and the Boying of Rebellion 5. Oedipus in Suburbia: 167 Bad Boys and the Fordist Family Drama 6. Beat Fraternity and the Generation of Identity 7. Where the Girls Were: 215 265 Figuring the Female Rebel Conclusion: 317 The Rise and Fall of Identity Notes 331 Works Cited 359 Index 377 I am daunted by the numerous thanks that I owe. So many people contrib¬ uted to the writing of this book in so many different ways that I hardly know where to begin. For lack of a more elegant idea, I will simply begin at the beginning. I launched a very different version of this project while still in graduate school, at a time when I was blessed with a cohort of some of the most wonderful intellectual comrades I could have hoped for. I thank Shay Brawn, Elaine Chang, Alex Chasin, Lisa Hogeland, Diane Nelson, Kristin Nussbaum, Shankar Raman, David Schmid, and Eric Schocket for their generous help in shaping the questions and issues with which I began this project. I especially want to thank Robert Arch Latham, for his unstinting loyalty and for the way in which he always pushed me to think harder and with greater care. I likewise feel special gratitude to Kim Gillespie, whose indefatigable commitment to my Marxist education changed the way I saw the world. Finally, Benjamin Robinson remains my comrade in mind and heart. I thank him for always being there, as a profound interlocutor but most of all as a dear friend. My dissertation advisor, Regenia Gagnier, offered me moral and profes¬ sional support in difficult times, not to mention her thoughtful criticism of this project’s early drafts. David Lloyd and Russell Berman were also im¬ portant faculty mentors whose keen insights I deeply appreciate. I thank Sandra Drake for her warmth and historical acumen. Harry Stecopolous and Joel Foreman, who both helped me to publish early pieces of this book, gave me the courage to continue the work. Robert Corber and Donald Pease played vital roles in bringing this book to fruition. It is they who helped me to imagine the book it might become. I also thank Ranjana Khanna, Tomo Hattori, Ranita Chatterjee, and Karen Engle, who were important intellectual comrades and friends during some difficult years. I especially want to thank Srinivas Aravamudan, whose keen mind and generous encouragement kept me thinking and writing. It was in dialogue with him that I began to explore the vital relationship between postwar U.S. culture and the moment of decolonization. I thank fane Newman and John Smith for their caring friendship and for their deep intellectual integrity. They are scholars in the finest sense of the word. My gratitude also goes to Julian Carter, who helped me to think through several key problems in the latter half of the manuscript. Rey Chow, Mark Poster, and Robyn Wiegman, all in different ways, kept me professionally engaged and energized when I needed it. Thank you all. Thanks also to two wonderful people, Fred Pfeil and Henry Schwarz, for showing me what it means to be an engaged scholar. Clara Maclean, a dear friend, was kind enough to read, correct, and engage my work at a crucial moment. I can’t thank her enough. I appreciate the rich comments and en¬ couragement that Judith Halberstam offered me for my final chapter. The uci Humanities Center offered me deeply appreciated support. Several people offered me guidance with this project’s final transfor¬ mations. Rayna Kalas, Nic Sammond, and Andy Hoberek offered me in¬ valuable suggestions as I rewrote the introduction to this book. So too did Miranda Joseph, whose friendship and support have meant so much to me over the years. Amy Greenstadt is the finest colleague and the most gen¬ erous friend I could hope to have. She is also a profound interlocutor, who rescued me when I was hopelessly lost in revisions of my second chap¬ ter. I cannot be too grateful to the two anonymous readers who submit¬ ted reports to Duke Press. Their criticisms and suggestions improved the manuscript in incalculable ways. Reynolds Smith and Sharon Torian have been wonderful people to work with at the press. I thank them for all their support and advice. Sections of this book have been published previously and I appreciate the permission from these venues to reprint them here. One section of chapter one previously appeared in Minnesota Review for their special issue on the 1950s, edited by Andrew Hoberek (55:57 [2002]: 167-186). Several short sections in chapter two also appeared in an earlier version of my ar¬ gument that may be found in the anthology The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons, edited by Joel Foreman (University of Illinois Press 1997). Lastly, chapter four draws substantially from an essay that viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS appeared in the anthology Race and the Subject of Masculinities, edited by Michael Uebel and Harry Stecopoulos (Duke University Press 1997). My parents, Jorge and Cepora Medovoi, supported me in many differ¬ ent ways as I labored with this book. My brother, Amir, and sister, Ornah, were also great comforts and joys to me. Bob and Martha Klotz were end¬ lessly supportive of me and my family. They are kind and generous people. My closest friend, Jim Fina, kept me feeling loved even when I was most down on myself. The spirit of his care and wise encouragement inhabit this book. Lena Roth and Rosa Celestine both cared for my very young children as I struggled to complete the manuscript. In the most material of ways, my book would not have been possible without them. My deepest thanks goes to my life partner, Marcia Klotz. What can I say? She saw me through it all. She gave me the most precious of company, she loved me, thought every thought with me, she read every page. I can’t count the number of times when she put me back on the right path as I was veering away. She inspires me again and again with her intelligence, her articulateness, her strength of character, and her generosity of spirit. This book is as much hers as it is mine, and I dedicate it to her, as well as to those dear ones that we care for together. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix IDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD The study of identity, then, becomes as strategic in our time as the study of sexuality was in Freud’s time. — Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society T his book examines the figure of the young rebel in postwar American _ culture, including such avatars as Holden Caulfield, the beat writers, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and James Dean. These figures emerged at the dawn of the Cold War era because the ideological production of the United States as leader of the “free world” required figures who could rep¬ resent America’s emancipatory character, whether in relation to the Soviet Union, the new nations of the third world, or even its own suburbs. The personality of the postwar rebel heralded new historical conditions that would soon inaugurate what we now call the “politics of identity.” By the 1960s, new social movements and countercultures would begin to articu¬ late themselves as emergent identities, pitted against a status quo cast as parental, repressive, and authoritarian. The motivating argument of this book is that the very concept of “identity” as it is commonly understood today was a new one in the 1950s. The meteoric rise of “identity politics” and the breakneck speed with which it had eclipsed class-based left poli¬ tics by the 1960s and 1970s demand a historical explanation that both ac¬ knowledges how recently this concept came into use and investigates the ideological grounds from which sprang its rapid appeal. For some time now, leftist thinkers and activists have grown skeptical of identity, whether as a proper basis for political action or, more radically, as an ontologically meaningful paradigm. Identity is frequently judged an essentializing category that articulates a political subject by denying dif¬ ference and enforcing exclusions.1 Even worse, identity sometimes stands accused of necessarily reiterating the very terms of the social relations of oppression that gave rise to it.2 Yet, for all these critiques of identity, the discourse itself has yet to be systematically historicized. Even so trenchant a philosophical critic of identity as Judith Butler, who persuasively argues that identity is the result of our practices and not their ground or origin, has not attempted a genealogy of identity of the sort that, for instance, Foucault once offered for sexuality. Gender Trouble, her groundbreaking first book, presents itself as a genealogical study that means to force the question, what kind of politics might be possible after the critique of identity? Nonetheless, in offering only a theory of identity rather than a history, it foregoes a philosophically hard-won opportunity to redescribe identity, not as the universal product of human practices, but instead as a bounded one tied to the contingencies of a historical moment. Butler instead limits herself to providing an antirealist and antifoundationalist ontology of identity. She declines to ask, as a genealogist should, when and how did “identity” become the product of our performative practices? What is the history of its emergence? And what, for that matter, might be provoking its discursive subversion at present? This book, taking the antirealist account of identity at full face value, brackets what might be called the “identity hypothesis” of most contem¬ porary leftist criticism: the notion that there has always been something we call “identity” in human history whose relevance to any given politi¬ cal situation should be theorized, critiqued, or deconstructed. Instead, I attempt to answer the question of when and why “identity” was first pro¬ duced. Terms such as “nationalism” or “race” are routinely granted gen¬ erative histories by their critics —explained as the discursive result of print capitalism or the colonial contest, for instance. Yet with a few exceptions, “identity” has remained without such a history.3 Why, for example, does it not appear in a book such as Raymond Williams’s Keywords? The answer surely has something to do with the fact that, unlike the bulk of Williams’s entries, “identity” is not a word bearing the mark of social struggles dating back to the sixteenth century, nor even to the nineteenth century. It is in fact so recently coined that Williams did not have the historical perspective to trace its development. As I will show, our contemporary politicized conception of identity first 2 CHAPTER ONE emerged a mere fifty years ago, as a lynchpin to the ideological contradic¬ tions in the Cold War order. Even as anticommunist ideology authorized the suppression of an Old Left rooted in radical class politics, the rise of a New Left, animated by identity politics, was actually abetted by a different face of the Cold War imaginary that envisioned the young American rebel as guarantor of the nation’s antiauthoritarian democratic character. After the 1960s, the narrative of youth, which subtends “identity poli¬ tics,” receded from view as identity became principally attached to race, gender, and sexuality. Nevertheless, its continued presence can be per¬ ceived in the youthful face through which the new social movements’ in¬ surrectional spirits were figured. The liberation movements of the late six¬ ties (black, Chicano, women’s, or gay) articulated as their political subject an emergent identity, a young self establishing its sovereignty against the forces of a racist, patriarchal, or homophobic “parent culture.” While race, gender, and sexuality have come to represent the manifest content of mod¬ ern identity activism, age has remained latently present, a structuring ele¬ ment in the post-New Left political unconscious. If we wish to understand why the identity paradigm seems less potent today than it did in previous decades, the answers therefore will likely be found in a historicotheoretical consideration of the end of the Cold War and its attendant identitarian ide¬ ology of age. This hidden history of identity is important not only for what it tells us about the recent past but also for how it might frame the political upheavals of the present. How are the political configurations of globaliza¬ tion reworking or engaging the identitarian rhetoric that saturated politi¬ cal culture in the Cold War years? What place might identity continue to have within an emerging new New Left associated with antiglobalization struggles? These are questions to which I will return in the conclusion. The Postwar Emergence of Identity Prior to the 1950s, the word “identity” did not apply to a collective sense of self, let alone to a notion of self understood as embattled or emergent. It was not modified by the terms of peoplehood as it now is in such locu¬ tions as “national identity,” “racial identity,” or “cultural identity.” Nor, with a single exception, did it function adjectivally, as it would in such later locu¬ tions as “identity issues,” “identity crisis,” or “identity politics.” In philoso¬ phy and mathematics, the word “identity” named a quality or condition of sameness or equivalence between several objects. One might, for instance, argue that the Phoenicians were originally Canaanites by observing the IDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 3 “identity” of their languages, or one might suggest that there is no identity of interest between capital and labor.4 Near the end of the nineteenth cen¬ tury, “identity” became an adjective, used only to designate objects manu¬ factured so as to “identify the holder or wearer,” such as identity cards, bracelets, or certificates. In this usage, “identity” indicated a person’s entry in an informational system of reference. One could assume, for instance, a “false identity”—a counterfeit name or social position. Nevertheless, iden¬ tity did not yet capture a psychological sense of personhood. Until 1957, the Reader’s Guide to Periodic Literature listed only one form of the word “identity”: a subject heading entitled the “Identification of Criminals.” In that year, however, a new entry appears in the periodi¬ cal: “Identity, Personal. See Personality.” Under “Personality,” one finds a variety of articles listed, including such revealing titles as “What It Means to Find Yourself,” “Traps of Identity,” “Person in a Machine Age,” and “Teenagers in Search of Themselves.” Both the New Left and the counter¬ culture of the 1960s seem to have made a decisive impact on the establish¬ ing of identity as a periodical topic. By 1971, the Guide no longer refers its readers to “Personality.” Instead, it begins to log an independent subject heading entitled “Identity (psychology)” that lists such articles as “Iden¬ tity Crisis in Black Americans Visiting West Africa” and “Masculinity and Racism: Breaking out of the Illusion: The White Middle-Class American Identity Role.” By 1973, the first subcategory appears: “Negroes —Race Identity.” Over the next few decades, other ethnic identities are gradually added to the Guide, while the politicization grows more explicit in such article titles as “American Identity Movements: A Cross-Cultural Confron¬ tation” and “Liberated Woman: Identity Crisis.” These articles, of course, were merely publicizing a lexicon of iden¬ tity already in use by post-New Left movements to describe the motives and goals of their activism. Although “identity politics” are today typically traced back no further than the mid-1970s, often to the rise of black femi¬ nism, its origins are in fact explicitly earlier and more disparate.5 Already by 1966, for example, “Black Identity” would appear as the subtitle to a key section of a sncc (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) mani¬ festo meant to justify the organization’s famous decision to reconstitute itself as an all-black youth organization: “Any re-evaluation that we must make will, for the most part, deal with identification. Who are black people, what are black people, what is their relationship to America and the world?” (SNCC, 158) This political usage of identity was an early one, but by no means un4 CHAPTER ONE usual. Nor was it restricted to activists of color. In 1969, for instance, Tom Hayden explained the irreconcilable differences between Judge Hoffman’s generation and his own during the Chicago 7 trial with the simple asser¬ tion, “Our crime was our identity” (Hayden, 440), arguing that the court had indicted them for living in a “liberated zone” that threatened adult America, not merely with its political opinions, but “even more around ‘cultural’ and ‘psychological’ issues” (442). In that same year, the Gay Lib¬ eration Front Women stated in their manifesto: “We denounce the fact that society’s rewards and privileges are only given to us when we hide and split our identity. We encourage self-determination and will work for changes in the lesbian self-image, as well as in society, to permit the ‘coming out’ of each gay woman into society as a lesbian” (Gay Liberation Front Women, 606). In all these cases, it is notable that “identity” is conceived as the product of self-defining and self-affirming acts that confront a punitive, authori¬ tarian Other: “America and the world,” Judge Hoffman’s generation, or a heteronormative society. The rhetoric of politicized identity hinges on pro¬ claiming the subject’s triumphant self-transformation as it detaches itself agonistically from the coerced expectations of “society,” “America,” or one’s “elders.”6 Black politics takes its identitarian turn, for instance, through explicitly asserting the arrival of black power and black pride. To this day, gay identity politics draws on the rhetoric of pride, and not only at annual marches. In the metaphorics deployed above by the Gay Liberation Front, we see an early example of how the collective identity’s “coming out” func¬ tions as a political debut, a coming into one’s own “self-determination” that may be replayed by the gay individual. What I will call the psychopolitics of identity begins then, not with a wounded attachment to one’s victim¬ ization, but rather with a proud declaration of emergence into power, a rhetorical move that has carried strategic value for many decades. The his¬ tory taken up by this book begins by asking the question, what conditions spawned this new sense of identity as realized psychopolitical sovereignty? How and from whence did this identitarian discourse become available to help launch the new social movements? Inventing Identity: Erik Erikson and the Cold War Psychopolitics of Youth “Identity” as we know it was coined in 1950 with the publication of Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society, a text that would exert a powerful influI DENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 5 ence on postwar American culture.7 Erikson’s book was the first to define the word “identity” as the normative psychic achievement of selfhood. It was also the first, as Jonathan Arac notes, to attach identity to such ele¬ ments as individuality, nationality, racial grouping, and even sexual ori¬ entation (20).8 In just a few years time, Erikson’s concept of “identity” •' would become hegemonic across the social sciences, come into use as an exciting new term in the humanities, and win a wide popular following. Many other writers and thinkers would take up the mantra of “identity,” but they would refer back endlessly to Erikson’s work, and to his first book especially, which became a college textbook bestseller. Robert Bellah is said to have remarked, “If there’s one book you can be sure undergraduates have read, it is Erikson’s first one. You can’t always be sure they’ve read Shake¬ speare, but you know they’ve read Erikson” (Friedman, 335). Identity discourse rapidly permeated postwar U.S. culture in no small part through its now largely forgotten relation to two key terms: “youth” and the “Cold War.” It is rarely remembered that Erikson erected the con¬ cept of identity as part of his influential model of the stages of human de¬ velopment, with adolescence playing the pivotal role. Moreover, Erikson relied heavily on the ideological terrain of Second World War and Cold War geopolitics to promote his understanding of the identity concept as part of what would soon become an emergent postwar common sense. The identity concept began as a key feature in Erik Erikson’s account of the human life cycle—the so-called eight ages of man. Erikson schema¬ tized individual human development through an ascending series of psy¬ chosocial stages, each characterized by a new polarity in the self’s possible relationship to the outer world. Despite the title’s emphasis on childhood, Erikson’s book is actually most concerned with the fifth stage, “puberty and adolescence.” Adolescence, according to Erikson, replays all the earlier conflicts of childhood, but now at a level that requires the self to negotiate its way between the poles of identity and role confusion (273). For Erikson, adolescence constitutes the crucial staging ground of identity formation. It names the moment at which a person establishes, not so much a cog¬ nitive distinction between self and other (which clearly begins far earlier) but rather what might be considered a psychopolitical one. In Erikson’s account, childhood ends and “youth begins” when young people start to wrestle with the basic issue of “what they appear to be in the eyes of others as compared with what they feel they are” (261). In one re¬ spect, the “search for identity” that comprises the stage of adolescence for Erikson reenacts a classical political metanarrative of the enlightened indi6 CHAPTER ONE vidual entering into full possession of his/her right to self-determination.9 Much like the ideals of liberty and independence that it incorporates, there¬ fore, “identity” is a normative term and not just a descriptive one. It names an accomplishment and a positive good. What Erikson adds, however, is a post-Hegelian psychological requirement to the liberal political narra¬ tive: the self must be capable of formulating a satisfactory self-image that is determined by neither blind acceptance nor unthinking rejection of the image offered by the other. Identity pivots on what has sometimes been called a “politics of recognition” derived from the Hegelian model of lordship and bondage.10 However, what specifically distinguishes the politics of identity is that the project of an uncoerced “self-recognition” becomes a prelude and a precondition to achieving recognition by the other. Because youth occupies the transitional stage between childhood and adulthood, it represents, in the context of the liberal theory that Erikson appropriates, a normative passage into self-determination. Identity’s political potency, however, derives from the fact that it has applied —from its inception —to collectivities as well as to the individuals that comprised them: for Erikson, it was not just persons that sought iden¬ tity, but also tribes, nations, races, and even sexes. From the perspective of such collectivities, the political ideal upon which the concept of identity drew most directly was that of sovereignty. Like personal liberty, sover¬ eignty too is a political norm, but the rights that it historically designates belong not to individuals but to states, which are entitled first to domestic autonomy (self-determination within their borders) and second to inter¬ national recognition (acknowledgment and respect for that right by other states)." As scholars of international law have shown, however, the doctrine of sovereignty is itself based upon what is sometimes called the “domes¬ tic analogy,” in which the liberal individual’s natural rights are writ large, so that each state is itself conceived as an individual among other indi¬ viduals, equally entitled by natural law to self-determination.12 State sov¬ ereignty therefore acts as the projection of individual liberty onto the level of the body politic. Insofar as identity likewise moves from the individual’s achievement of psychopolitical autonomy to an analogous one sought by the figure of the collectivity, it mirrors the political ideal of sovereignty. Identity expands upon sovereignty in one very important way, however, for sovereignty, as a normative attribute of states, constitutes in Alexan¬ der Murphy's words a "political-territorial ideal” that takes primacy over peoplehood, or that at the very least makes state governmentality and terri¬ tory into the obligatory complements of peoplehood. It assumes, in short, IDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 7 that “the land surface of the earth should be divided up into discrete ter¬ ritorial units, each with a government that exercises substantial authority within its territory” (81). At the level of collectivity, identity may therefore be thought of as a psychologized, conception of sovereignty detached from ter¬ ritory and the state. It treats both the person and the people as bearing a right to psychopolitical self-determination that precedes any questions of statehood or territory, and that indeed constitutes them as fully endowed persons or a people. Identitarian governmentality (insofar as it conceives one) begins with the self-rule of the personality.13 It is no accident that this decisively new locus for sovereignty’s appli¬ cation coincided with the beginning of the Cold War, at a moment when U.S. political culture was being permeated and redefined in complex ways by the critiques of totalitarianism and colonialism. As we shall see, the new discourse of identity aimed to resolve a paradox for the traditional ideal of political sovereignty, namely that a state (like Nazi Germany or like a former European colony) might be nominally independent while its people remain psychologically subjugated. This was a problem that con¬ cerned thinkers and writers from many backgrounds, but it received spe¬ cial attention from psychoanalytically trained thinkers, including Wilhelm Reich and Eric Fromm (on fascism) and Franz Fanon (on colonialism). Erikson’s work, and the discourse of identity that it spawned, belong to this tradition. The politics of identity began in the metanarrative of youth’s psycho¬ political struggles, which Erikson brought directly to bear on the broad geopolitical dilemmas posed by the Cold War world. The study of iden¬ tity, he famously asserted, “becomes as strategic in our time as the study of sexuality was in Freud’s time,” but the reason Erikson considered iden¬ tity so indispensable a concept was because it enabled analytic judgment of the psychopolitical stakes involved in different paths to industrializa¬ tion. Though titled “Youth and the Evolution of Identity,” the important concluding section of Erikson’s book does not examine individual identity formation but rather compares the respective national identity crises that the industrial revolution provoked in fascist Germany, communist Russia, and liberal capitalist America. This section of his book thus carves up the world according to the Cold War logic of the Vital Center, with the United States neatly balanced between the right-wing and left-wing extremes of fascist and communist totalitarianism.14 Adolescence remained just as central to Erikson’s discussion of na¬ tional identity as it was to individual identity, underscoring his conviction 8 CHAPTER ONE that all nations and collectivities possess group psychologies that must pass through a youthful stage of identity formation. Indeed, Erikson’s book seems to take as axiomatic (setting the table, as it were, for develop¬ ment theory) that the moment of industrialization represents a collective “coming of age” for nations, in which the achievement of identity appears even more vital than economic growth.15 Mediating between individual and social psychology, Erikson uses representative youth figures to analyze both German and Russian national identities. In the study of Germany, for instance, Erikson brings Freudian group psychology to bear on Hitler’s youth-based charisma. If, for Erikson, excessive rebellion and sycophantic obedience represent the dueling risks of the adolescent struggle for iden¬ tity, then Nazism emphatically embodied the former pathology. Erikson characterizes Hitler as an ersatz adolescent gang leader whose bid for po¬ litical power began with an appeal to estranged adolescents, whom he in¬ duced to defy their parents. Eventually, Erikson argues, Hitler swayed the entire nation to the antiadult position that Germany had been betrayed by the parental afflictions of adjustment and conscience. In their place, Hitler offered them an aggressive, amoral “imagery of ideological adoles¬ cence” (344).16 In his discussion of Russia, Erikson directs his study of national iden¬ tity through the “legend of the young Maxim Gorky,” whom he presents as an apostle of an emergent industrial society. Working with a Soviet biopic about the famous novelist and playwright, Erikson interprets the events of the young Alyosha’s boyhood in a backward, tribal world on the fringes of the Russian empire. Over the course of his childhood and adolescence, the young Alyosha develops a revolutionary identity that prepares him for a future in the Soviet intelligentsia. Though Erikson endorses Gorky’s de¬ veloping struggle against tsarist feudalism, he also hints at the eventual failure of his Bolshevik solution to Russia’s identity crisis, which yielded only a totalitarian “machine logic” captured in such nicknames as “Stalin.” Toward its conclusion, the Gorky section turns decisively to a new topic, as the young Alyosha suddenly becomes representative of something other than merely Russian identity: “We must be able to demonstrate to grim Alyoshas everywhere that our new and shiny goods (so enticingly wrapped in promises of freedom) do not come to them ... as so many more opiates to lull them into the new serfdom of hypnotized consumership. They do not want progress where it undermines their sense of initiative. They demand autonomy together with unity; and identity together with the fruits of in¬ dustry” (402). This passage bears a complex relationship to the analysis of IDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 9 Russian identity for which it serves as an epilogue. Erikson’s “we” trans¬ parently designates an affluent postwar America. The “grim Alyoshas” of the passage, however, represent not the Soviet Union but instead, as we shall see, the nations of the third world. Moreover, what “we” need to dem¬ onstrate to “them” is emphatically not what one might expect in a time of Cold War, namely the perils of Bolshevik revolution, but rather the lack of perils posed by “our new and shiny goods.” Put another way, the danger that occurs to Erikson following his analysis of Russian identity is not the Soviet threat to America, but instead the third world’s erroneous suspicion that American affluence leads to unfreedom. Erikson’s seemingly peculiar fear points toward yet another secret of identity’s potency as a Cold War political concept. The Age of Three Worlds Erikson’s “grim Alyoshas” come into focus only if we approach the Cold War era less as a simple squaring off between two postwar superpowers than as what I have elsewhere called a triangulated “age of three worlds.”17 As James Cronin has observed, the Cold War was first and foremost a postwar settlement that, following the defeat of the Axis powers, estab¬ lished highly stable geopolitical spheres of influence for both the United States and Soviet Union, even while it incited vigorous ideological con¬ flict between them. Militarily speaking, the United States and the Soviet Union typically waged their territorial battles through proxy forces, but they confronted one another directly on the ideological playing field as selfappointed harbingers of rival universalisms: the world-historical claims of liberal capitalism and state socialism respectively (5-6). The special urgency of these ideological conflicts derived from the main historical event of the era: the rapid decolonization of much of the earth. Even as the Soviet Union and the United States competed with one an¬ other to widen their respective social systems and spheres of influence, the old European world empires were breaking up. Between 1945 and i960, Penny von Eschen points out, “forty countries with a total of eight hun¬ dred million people —more than a quarter of the world’s population at that time —revolted against colonialism and won their independence” (125). U.S.-Soviet rivalry thus did not play out on a dichotomous globe in a simple scenario of “us against them,” as a “containment” approach to Cold War cul¬ ture implicitly presumes. Rather, it took the form of a triangulated rivalry over another universe that only now became known as the “third world.” 10 CHAPTER ONE The emergent nation-states in South and East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean collectively became, as Eric Hobsbawm notes, “the zone in which the two superpowers continued, throughout the Cold War, to compete for support and influence, and hence the major zone of friction between them” (227). By the mid-1950s, the “three worlds concept” had become the globe’s dominant topological imaginary.18 Hobsbawm’s choice of the oddly gentle words “support” and “influence” inadvertently offers a vital observation to be made about the altered geo¬ politics of the postwar moment: although the United States and the Soviet Union, without question, aimed to win new territories for their social sys¬ tems, it was no longer permissible to do so in the old modality of em¬ pire. The ideological as well as the material waning of formal imperialism, already well under way by the First World War, only accelerated during the Great Depression and the Second World War. By the moment of the post-World War II division of the globe, an anticolonial “global common sense” had firmly found its place as a necessary element in the formation of any hegemonic Cold War discourse. The very term “third world” was thus meant to name a region of the earth for which the experience of coloni¬ zation was putatively now in the past, and whose present would therefore encounter only problems of “modernization,” not foreign domination. Put another way, the third world designated a region in which newly sovereign “national characters” were emerging from their former “depen¬ dence” upon colonial masters. After the First World War, the Versailles Treaty had fashioned for the tottering colonial order a new political ratio¬ nale and juridical code whose “ideological origins [lay] in Western legal instruments for the protection of minors and the tutelage of children” (Grovogui, 121). This Kantian rhetoric of colonial nonage, according to which some people were “not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” imaginatively positioned colo¬ nized populations as up-and-coming peoples, approaching though not yet arrived at a state of self-determination (Grovogui, 121). Already by 1918 then, the ruling ideology of colonialism hinged upon the human life cycle as its master metaphor. The three worlds imaginary of the postwar years constituted a key turn¬ ing point in this rhetoric, for it envisioned the colonized as having finally begun the passage out of nonage, a transition that Erikson would emphati¬ cally associate with adolescence and the quest for identity. Within this net¬ work of meanings, the first and second worlds benightedly represented, in turn, rival paths to modernization between which the nations of the IDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD II third world would have to choose as they passed through national adoles¬ cence toward maturity.19 It is within the terms of this global imaginary of emergent sovereignty that the United States competed with the USSR to win client states among the emergent nations. As the newly elected Harry Truman proclaimed in a 1949 speech promoting a new program of assis¬ tance to the third world, “Our aim should be to help the free peoples of the world, through their own efforts, to produce more food, more cloth¬ ing. ... The old imperialism—exploitation for foreign profit—has no place in our plans. What we envisage is a program of development based on the concepts of democratic fair-dealing’’ (916-917). Truman here advances a by now familiar Cold War rhetoric, position¬ ing America as “inherently anti-imperialist, in opposition to the empire¬ building of either the Old World or of communism and fascism, which col¬ lapse together into totalitarianism” (Amy Kaplan, 12). The United States, stressing whatever anticolonial credentials it could muster, presented itself as the only reliable model for achieving national self-determination. It pro¬ moted its first world as the genuinely “free world,” a truncated but hope¬ fully expanding version of the free and equal “one world” that Senator Wendel Wilkie had famously espoused following his travels through colonial Asia and Africa in the midst of the Second World War. One principal way the United States validated itself as the proper model for developing third world nations was by mobilizing its claim to a his¬ tory of colonial revolt. As even the hawkish secretary of state John Foster Dulles proclaimed in 1954, “We ourselves are the first colony in modern times to have won independence. . . . We have a natural sympathy with those everywhere who would follow our example” (Paterson et al., 504). With these words, Dulles enjoined an influential postwar national fantasy through which the United States transfigured itself from an informal im¬ perial superpower into the first of the world’s postcolonial states. It de¬ picted itself, in other words, not as the imperial parent but as an elder sib¬ ling to the world’s new nation-states, which had at last begun to follow in the footsteps of America. This geopolitical fantasy served several ideological purposes. Not only did it explain why third world nations should gravitate toward the Ameri¬ can over the Soviet alliance, but it also bolstered a proprietary relation to the discourse of freedom. As nation after nation cast off the colonial rule of European states, these newly independent countries possessed, on the geopolitical playing field, immediate legacies of national liberation move¬ ments that could make a rhetorically stronger claim to the title of the free 12 CHAPTER ONE world than the United States. The third world’s claim on freedom was in many ways furthered by efforts made by many new nations to escape domi¬ nation by either the United States or the USSR, particularly after the con¬ cept of a “third path” gathered force following the 1957 Bandung Confer¬ ence of so-called nonaligned countries. In contrast to the culture of containment nourished by the “red scare,” Cold War America’s phantasmagoric affiliation with the third world led in notably different political directions. Specifically, the newly indepen¬ dent nations of the third world prompted assertions of America’s status as their historical precursor, and thus as a postrevolutionary society. Among the most influential of such assertions was Erikson’s identity concept, which explicitly shared this Cold War fantasy of a postcolonial revolution¬ ary American character. Decolonization had unleashed, in Erikson’s view, a wave of new national self-images whose “common denominator is the freeborn child who becomes an emancipated adolescent” (299). Yet in this respect, they followed a path already blazed by American identity since “the American farmer’s boy is the descendant of Founding Fathers who them¬ selves were rebel sons” (399). Implicit in Erikson’s reasoning, then, is the geopolitically vital question, would the new freeborn children of the world recognize their likeness to America? These, then, are the “grim Alyoshas” of Erikson’s Russia chapter. The historical Alyosha, it would seem, stands in metonymically for the young Russian nation as it moves beyond feudalism and into a revolutionary mo¬ ment of “identity crisis.” Against the Cold War backdrop for Erikson’s book, “Alyosha” names not the Stalinist totalitarian enemy (who will be known by the name “Maxim Gorky”) but rather a Russia in the pivotal moment before it had become the metropole of the second world, when it was still a third world nation, seeking a path to “autonomy together with unity; and identity together with the fruits of industry.” The many other Alyoshas, fol¬ lowing suit, would appear to be the new cast of young nations mounting the postwar stage, now poised (like prerevolutionary Russia) to make a choice between state socialism or liberal capitalism as their path to sovereignty. Erikson, as a famously patriotic emigre to the United States and a par¬ tisan of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, does not even bother to denounce the communist model. It is taken for granted that the young Alyosha’s commendable struggle for identity ends tragically in Stalinist tyranny. Communism, the false road to industrialization, promises collec¬ tive sovereignty and an industrial future, only to send one hurtling back, in the damning words of Cold Warrior Robert Hayek, on the road to a second IDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 13 serfdom. It may provide unity (a communist empire), but not autonomy. It may deliver the fruits of industry, but only at the bitter price of identity. Gorky’s new regime thus proves as unfree as the old one that his earlier self, the young Alyosha, had sought to overthrow. It remains less clear, however, why Erikson would expect the young Alyoshas of the third world to view America’s “shiny goods” as embody¬ ing, not its “freeborn” passion for identity but instead yet another “new serfdom,” here based upon industrial consumerism rather than commu¬ nist tyranny. Erikson’s poetic language, which describes “shiny goods” as “enticingly wrapped” to seduce their buyers into a “hypnotized consumership,” paradoxically draws his reader toward a threat that he ostensibly be¬ lieves does not exist. In other words, he insists that consumerism does not represent a “new serfdom” for emerging nations even as the rich de¬ tail of his description suggests that it must. The passage marks Erikson’s profound ambivalence toward American mass consumption as a threat to identity, an attitude that was not untypical of the generalized social anxi¬ eties wrought by the new relations of postwar U.S. capitalism. Cold War Suburbs as a Mode of Regulation The emergence of identity discourse in the United States was conditioned, not only by the postwar decolonization of the globe but also by the rapid transformations of everyday life within the nation’s borders. While decolo¬ nization led to an intensified rhetoric of American freedom, the emerging postwar culture of consumption called forth a more complicated response in the United States, one that was often self-congratulatory, but at times also included palpable fears that Americans were becoming more passive and unfree. The identity concept spoke directly to these fears that plagued the social arrangements of postwar life. Because my reading of the culture of postwar U.S. capitalism relies heavily on the technical and theoretical insights of the French regulation school, it will be necessary at this point to make a slight theoretical de¬ tour.20 Like its post-Marxist cousin, British cultural studies, the French regulation school theorists have developed a complex account of the re¬ lationship between economics and culture. While both schools reject the traditional base-superstructure model, however, the regulation school has focused, not on the degree of autonomy between spheres (as has been the tactic of cultural studies) but instead on the extent of their mutual inter¬ dependence; special stress is placed on the political, juridical, and cultural 14 CHAPTER ONE as sites for preconditions of capitalist economies.21 In lieu of “base” and “superstructure,” the regulation school theorists distinguish instead be¬ tween what they call a “regime of accumulation” and a “mode of regu¬ lation.” The “regime of accumulation” describes the particular processes utilized in production for profit at any given moment in the history of capitalism. The “mode of regulation” describes the ensemble of regulat¬ ing institutions, formations, and subjects that make for the stability of a particular “regime of accumulation.” In this respect, the regulation school treats cultural and political institutions not as superstructural, but in fact as potentially infrastructural, as genuine conditions of possibility for the reproduction of any particular historical form of capitalism.22 The 1950s, as it happens, launched an episode in economic history that regulation school theorists have studied carefully under the rubric of the Fordist regime of accumulation. The term “Fordist,” borrowed from An¬ tonio Gramsci, is taken from Henry Ford, who combined a Taylorist pro¬ duction model (fragmenting the work process so as to intensify labor pro¬ ductivity) with compensatory higher wages that, along with a system of credit, would enable his workers to purchase the cars they manufactured. In the crudest sense, Fordism represents an economic system in which an assembly-line model of mass production was articulated with a culture of mass consumption, all under the regulatory guidance of an expanded pro¬ fessional managerial class and a Keynesian welfare state. Roughly speak¬ ing, the regulation school traces the roots of Fordism to the Great De¬ pression, which it describes as a crisis precipitated by the incompatibility between an old “competitive mode of [economic] regulation,” the laissezfaire political arrangements of nineteenth-century capitalism, and the new Taylorist production model, which they describe as an “intensive regime of accumulation.”23 The difficulty posed by this intensive regime’s vast improvements in economic productivity was that it required social demand to keep pace with the potential increase in supply. Left to the vagaries of market forces in a laissez-faire “competitive mode of regulation,” late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century capital experienced repeated crises of overaccu¬ mulation, culminating in the Great Depression. The solution to these re¬ curring crises came through the development of what the regulation school calls a “monopolistic mode of regulation,” spearheaded by the Keynesian state’s use of fiscal policy (i.e., government spending and taxation) and monetary policy (manipulation of the money supply) to stabilize aggregate demand. Though governmental regulation of the U.S. economy had roots IDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 15 in early-twentieth-century progressivism, it expanded rapidly with the New Deal, and took hold in earnest when the state took command of industrial output during the Second World War. The proto-Fordist wartime model demonstrated that, by providing big business with a secure market that would allow it to safely increase its output, a Keynesian state could provide much of the institutional structure necessary for capital accumulation. Seen against this historical preface, the Fordist regime that motored the “peacetime” economic boom appears to have been achieved by finding suitable replacements for the peculiar conditions of the wartime economy, thereby forming, in combination, what I will call the Cold War mode of regulation. Wartime state coordination of industry, in other words, evolved into the standard set of “peacetime” Keynesian legal, fiscal, and financial state institutions. But in another sense, as many have argued, the state of war never ended, as Cold War hostilities led to a perpetually militarizing security state, and consequently, a means of upholding aggregate demand. Postwar Fordism became regulated, to borrow Herbert Marcuse’s term, by a “welfare/warfare state.”24 Fordism also entailed a new mode of regulation for labor, similarly mod¬ eled on a wartime precedent: an ideology of compelling national interest. During the Second World War, the state had managed its labor problems through a propaganda apparatus that mobilized workers as self-sacrificing Americans willing to labor heroically to defeat their fascist adversaries. Soon after 1945, as it declared a “cold” war with Soviet Russia, the state mandated, once again in the name of national security, that American labor desist from challenging capital. As America’s right-wing fascist nemesis was supplanted by a left-wing communist one, the Cold War succeeded in justifying far greater hostility to the radical politics of labor than had the comparatively benign atmosphere of the war’s antifascist agenda. Left¬ wingers who challenged the terms offered to labor in the Fordist social con¬ tract could be vilified, not merely as unpatriotic saboteurs of a war effort, but as apologists for the totalitarian ideology of the communist enemy. The Cold War undermined class politics in other ways as well, some more indirect but no less effective. Fordism, for instance, greatly expanded in size a more politically acquiescent white-collar managerial class, both in the public sector, where this class administered the regulatory state, and in the private sector, where it managed the Taylorized workforce on behalf of corporate elites. Though they labored for wages just as surely as their blue-collar counterparts, white-collar workers, as critics have often noted, imagined themselves as a middle class situated between capital and labor, 16 CHAPTER ONE at least in part because the labor they performed was deemed mental rather than physical. They thus possessed a sort of “knowledge capital,” which set them apart from the working class.25 Fordism found its most powerful means of social regulation, however, in the great postwar suburbs, which brought the blue-collar working classes together with the expanding white-collar managerial class into a single sys¬ tem of everyday life. Politically, the suburbs deradicalized labor; culturally, they interpellated Americans as consumers; economically, they propped up social demand. As it matched the new scale of production offered by the Taylorized assembly line with a new mode of mass consumption, Fordism completely transformed the way of life for the wage-earning classes (Lee, 73). During the late forties and fifties, the state helped to finance, build, and administer an entirely new form of the everyday: suburban living. As devel¬ opers assembled concentric rings of suburban housing tracts around urban centers, government subsidized them by providing the infrastructure nec¬ essary to sustain them, including water, power, and crucially, a highway system of beltways and interstates linking the new suburbs to urban work¬ places. As workers purchased the new homes, using their hefty wage in¬ creases and state-supported Federal Housing Administration financing, they launched what London Jones describes as the single largest internal migration in the history of the United States: In the twenty years from 1950 to 1970, the population of the suburbs doubled from 36 million to 72 million. No less than 83 percent of the total population growth in the United States during the 1950s was in the suburbs, which were growing fifteen times faster than any other segment of the country. As people packed and moved, the national mo¬ bility rate leaped by 50 percent. The only other comparable influx was the wave of European immigrants to the United States around the turn of the century. But, as Fortune pointed out, more people moved to the suburbs every year than had ever arrived on Ellis Island. (38) Suburbanization on such a mass scale allowed automobile companies in turn to market cars that the millions of relocated workers now needed to commute on the new highway system. It also eventually led to the rise of the shopping mall, a suburban alternative to urban commercial districts that added further convenience to new rounds of purchases for the home. In short, suburbanization established the mode of mass consumption nec¬ essary for Fordism to stave off another accumulation crisis, absorbing as it did the excess production capacity unleashed by postwar demobilization. IDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 17 For a working class with few material assets, which had survived the depression in miserable urban tenements or even in tent cities, suburban home ownership was a deeply attractive postwar opportunity. Yet this pro¬ cess of suburbanization quickly came to regulate postwar labor insofar as it led them to reimagine themselves, no longer as proletarians, but at last as fully enfranchised nationals, as Americans whose socioeconomic sys¬ tem could now “deliver the goods” and thus no longer deserved to be criti¬ cized. The suburbs facilitated this imaginative work on numerous fronts. To begin with, the suburban home relocated the worker both physically and imaginatively at a distance from the site of production, where worker consciousness might be nourished; in its stead, it offered an environment that reorganized life around the pleasures of private consumption. The suburbs also radically reordered race and ethnicity to the detriment of class consciousness. During the Second World War the city became a rich space for proletarian affinities, as workers across ethnic and racial groups labored and lived together, building solidarities amidst the war effort.26 Suburbanization rent asunder this emergent wartime working class. Euro¬ pean immigrants, whose class-stratified enclaves in the cities had encour¬ aged a strong sense of themselves as ethnic groups akin to “other” non¬ whites, were now enticed to the suburbs by appeals to their understandable post-depression era desire to escape urban tenements for the security of home ownership. Once dispersed among the suburbs, however, their prior friendship and kinship networks were increasingly supplanted by patterns of sociable consumption to be shared with their new neighbors. Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, meanwhile, were pointedly excluded from the new suburbs through an ensemble of policies that included “redlining” by banks and the fha, as well as “restrictive covenants” enforced by developers and homeowner associations. The Cold War suburbs transformed not only the basic terms of race, but also those of family, gender, and sexuality through its prevailing ethos of domesticity. As it removed people from the city, Fordism eroded the insti¬ tution of the extended family, erecting in its place a streamlined nuclear family, the new atomic unit of postwar consumer society characterized by ownership of a home, at least one automobile, a television set, re¬ frigerator, washer and dryer, and much more. Like suburbia itself, this new domesticity served a political as well as an economic purpose. As Elaine Tyler May points out, “Purchasing for the home helped alleviate tra¬ ditional American uneasiness with consumption: the fear that spending would lead to decadence. Family-centered spending reassured Americans 18 CHAPTER ONE that affluence would strengthen the American way of life. The goods pur¬ chased by middle-class consumers, like a modern refrigerator or a house in the suburbs, were intended to foster traditional values” (166). The Cold War American family was thus a radically new institution that paradoxi¬ cally took on a status as a traditionalist bulwark against communist (and analogized forms of) amorality, thereby easing the transition into a massconsumption society. For all these reasons, the postwar suburb must be understood, not simply as a geographical phenomenon, nor even as a new mode of mass consumption, but as a primary Cold War ideological apparatus. A “ma¬ chine for living,” the suburban home (in contrast to the city apartment) hailed its subjects not as a multiracial working class with common labor¬ ing interests to defend, nor even as citizen members of a heterogeneous public, but instead as white Americans participating in a national ideal (the much ballyhooed “American dream”) that itself needed defending against its communist enemies.27 Moving to the suburbs was tantamount to doing one’s national duty by building the affluence and strength of America’s Fordist order. From Containment to Identity Culture: A New Cast of Cold War Characters Insofar as the new regime of accumulation depended upon a Cold War ideological system of social regulation, it can be said that Fordism and the Cold War worked neatly together as the respective economic and the politi¬ cal faces of a powerful postwar hegemony. Cold war discourse proclaimed the new suburbs as the apotheosis of American freedom, a utopian space of national abundance in which people could at last fully realize their indi¬ viduality by making consumer choices that expressed and satisfied their inner wants. From this perspective, Americans who questioned or opposed the promise of suburbia could be constituted as the internal enemies of American freedom who, like the external Soviet enemy, needed to be pre¬ vented from acting out their subversive intentions. This dimension of Cold War culture in the fifties has been widely in¬ vestigated by numerous scholars under the rubric of “containment,” and Cold War culture is indeed often conceived in the scholarship as above all an ideologically driven system of sociopolitical repression. Originally, “con¬ tainment” named a foreign policy, first devised by diplomat George Kennan in his famous Long (or X) Telegram, in which the United States aimed IDENTITARI AN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 19 to “contain” or restrict the expansionary intentions of the Soviet regime. As a number of critics have argued, the policy of containing communism abroad provided flexible terms for a repressive cultural logic on the home front that identified various “un-American” characters and forces as domes¬ tic equivalents of the Soviet menace. The most obvious (and also least figurative) example of such Cold War “domestic containment” is surely McCarthyism, the right-wing political campaign that rolled back New Deal progressive politics by accusing its partisans in Washington, Hollywood, and elsewhere of serving Soviet inter¬ ests.28 But, as Elaine Tyler May first suggested in her groundbreaking book Homeward Bound, a version of containment policy was also brought to bear on postwar gender relations, as fear of the bomb —and the Soviet threat generally—drove women and men into the sense of security offered by suburbia’s powerful new norms of nuclear family living. May’s arguments find revealing parallels in the work of John D’Emilio, Robert Corber, Gerald Horn, Alan Nadel, and others, who have each shown in quite different ways how the “red scare” dimension of postwar culture set in motion farreaching forms of social regulation, with detrimental effects for unmarried or working women, gays and lesbians, sexual bohemians of all stripes, po¬ litical radicals, labor unions, racial minorities who challenged white privi¬ lege, and numerous other deviants from the norms of the Cold War sub¬ urban imaginary.29 It would be a mistake, however, to assume a seamless relationship be¬ tween the material relations of Fordism and the ideological imperatives of the Cold War. Indeed, one of the era’s most distinctive cultural fea¬ tures was an abiding fear that Fordist consumer culture and the Cold War were not aligned, that the new suburbs did not at all constitute the sort of “free world” that the three worlds imaginary of the Cold War required America to be. One highly condensed expression of this fear is found in Erikson’s concern that America appeared more as a system of “hypnotized consumership” than as the preeminent democratic society of the “free¬ born son.” But while objections to the “soft tyranny” of postwar culture — its suburbs, its white-collar world, its system of mass consumption—were legion, the image demanded of Cold War America as land of the “freeborn sons” made Fordist masculinity into an especially sensitive site of social cri¬ tique. William Whyte’s renowned sociological study The Organization Man and Sloan Wilson’s best-selling novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit pro¬ vided two well-known monikers for a widening critical discussion of the 20 CHAPTER ONE “new” white-collar, suburban masculinity, as did a high-profile Life maga¬ zine article entitled “The New American Domesticated Male.” Too often, scholars have viewed these figures as instituting a new nor¬ mative model of American manhood, when what they in fact connoted was at best a distressed form of masculinity, and at worst a degenerate one.30 As Barbara Ehrenreich reminds us, Sloan Wilson’s protagonist represented what she calls an “early rebel,” or a “gray flannel dissident” who was “ad¬ justed; he was mature; he was, by any reasonable standard, a success as an adult male breadwinner. But... he knew that something was wrong” (29). William Whyte’s classic treatise likewise polemicizes against the Organi¬ zation Man, denouncing him for his conformist “social ethic” and entreat¬ ing him instead to “fight the Organization” in defense of his own indi¬ viduality (13).31 Indeed, as Whyte suggests in his introduction, for all his Fordist affluence, the Organization Man’s dilemma seemed very similar to that of a people ruled by communist tyranny: “The word ‘collective’ most of them can’t bring themselves to use—except to describe foreign coun¬ tries or organizations they don’t work for—but they are keenly aware of how much more deeply beholden they are to organization than were their elders” (4). Such criticisms were widely extended, not merely to the Orga¬ nization Man, but to the suburban world in which he lived. As Helen Puner noted with exasperation in her 1958 magazine article “Is It True What They Say about the Suburbs?” these naysayers included the entire range of “soci¬ ologists, psychologists, playwrights, novelists and assorted peerers at the American scene” (42).32 In the popular forays against the Fordist world, a consistent theme appears: the new system of mass consumption was de¬ priving Americans —and most vitally its men —of their hitherto distinctive autonomy, and thus diminishing the very value of freedom held to distin¬ guish the first world from the second. Suburbia, in one of the jokes that Whyte quotes, was “a Russia, only with money" (310). Timothy Melley has referred to this ubiquitous, often paranoid anxiety of the era as “agency panic,” precisely because it imagined that powerful yet invisible new struc¬ tures were coming to determine the self’s every action. Exemplary of this postwar “agency panic” was the most influential socio¬ logical treatise of the decade, David Riesman et al.’s The Lonely Crowd, a text which argued that the new consumer society (associated with sub¬ urbs, white-collar workplaces, and other scenes of the Fordist order) was fundamentally redirecting the American character toward compulsory so¬ cial conformity: “from invisible hand to glad hand,” as he succinctly puts IDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 21 it. Where once they were “inner-directed,” by which Riesman and his co¬ authors mean that they behaved in accordance with an internalized set of moral codes, Americans were increasingly becoming “other-directed,” con¬ ditioning their behavior in response to social pressures and communicated directives (13-25).33 At the conclusion of their enormously influential text, the authors close with a grim question: might “other-directed” Americans find themselves increasingly reduced to a miserable choice between “adjustment,” in which larger social needs will simply recalibrate their personalities for a proper “fit,” or “anomie,” a state of disfunctionality or failed dissent? Against these equally dismal alternatives, Riesman and company pinned their hopes on a third possibility, that Americans might develop an “autonomous” form of other-directed personality capable of “conforming to the behav¬ ioral norms of their society—a capacity the anomies usually lack—but are free to choose whether to conform or not” (242). This figure of the “autono¬ mous other-directed personality” fulfilled a widespread cultural wish of the times. Like the writings of Whyte, Wilson, and many others, The Lonely Crowd struggles to imagine how the sovereign American personality might be rejuvenated in the face of a widespread conviction that it had been com¬ promised by Fordism’s cryptototalitarian system of mass consumption. These common attacks upon the suburban ideal, organizational man¬ hood, and the like, suggest that the much-touted “Cold War consensus” never actually existed. Instead, they indicate that postwar American cul¬ ture was deeply troubled by ideological tensions between the norms of Fordist suburbia and the America idealized by the three worlds imaginary. While “agency-panicked” critics like Riesman never doubted that the Ford¬ ist first world remained more conducive to sovereign selfhood than the communist second world, they nevertheless condemned the former as far from ideal. Soviet Russia’s “modern totalitarianism ... must wage total war on autonomy,” Riesman noted, but the “diffuse and anonymous authority of the modem democracies is less favorable to autonomy than one might assume” (251). Like most liberal social critics of the day, David Riesman sought to imag¬ ine an autonomous but still Fordist American character, capable of freely choosing its “other-directed” suburban consumption and white-collar em¬ ployment. One major difficulty with this hope, however, concerned how such an “autonomous” conformity might ever be demonstrated. Fordism, because it articulated mass production with mass consumption, brought into existence an undeniable standardization in the object world of every22 CHAPTER ONE day life for Americans. The advertising system, to be sure, insisted that mass consumption gave Americans the means to achieve individual selfexpression. Nevertheless, the standardization of Fordist assembly line products was often seen instead as eroding the sovereign selfhood of Americans. Moreover, if someone has already chosen to live, like “everyone else,” as an Organization Man or to don the ubiquitous gray flannel suit, how might one show that a choice had been made at all? What might visibly distinguish a chosen conformity premised on one’s autonomy from a co¬ erced one stemming from adjustment? Only in refusing to conform to the Fordist standard, it seems, could the individual’s sovereign independence from the directives of others be ascertained. This dilemma was particularly troubling given its appearance at the precise moment when the Cold War required that the sovereign American character be celebrated. Understood both as the antithesis of second world totalitarian mass soci¬ eties and as the model for third world developing societies, Erikson’s con¬ cept of identity, when understood as a project of self-development for the young, offered a resolution to the ambivalence expressed by critics like Riesman or Whyte. It is here that the immediate and tremendous appeal of the identity concept becomes intelligible, as does its general political utility. The adolescent self-generates his or her identity through a process that must be at least partially agonistic, refusing “roles” and “self-images” offered up by others, and challenging what later critical theorists of iden¬ tity would term “subject positionings.” In Erikson’s model, successful iden¬ tity formation depends upon the legitimate exercise of rebellion. The Eriksonian drama of adolescence, therefore, describes the development of an individual or social character that successfully reconciles “autonomy” and “other-directedness” in Riesman’s sense.34 The patent appeal of the Eriksonian adolescent’s “character” is that she enacts the requisite dramas of rebellion prior to adulthood. Thus, if an adolescent exhibits a properly re¬ bellious spirit before growing into a conforming suburbanite or an Orga¬ nization Man, then she has effectively displayed the American self’s sover¬ eignty without necessarily sacrificing the eventual conformity of the adult. Given that the containment culture of Cold War suburbia was repeat¬ edly plagued by agency panic, the adolescent, as a figure who represented the autonomous character of American identity, on both the national and individual levels, offered an imaginative remedy. The youthful figure of American identity likewise offered a pleasing mirror image with which to reflect back the gaze of the “young Alyoshas” of the third world. For emer¬ gent nations seeking to define themselves as independent of their former IDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 23 colonizers, what could be a better antidote to the geopolitically deleterious image of a “hypnotized consumership” or an “other-directed” mass than a young America, endlessly restaging its own revolutionary moment in a struggle to assert its emergent identity? Within this field of ideological forces, the ideal of the young rebel thus became the nodal point around which a secondary Cold War formation was assembled: an identity culture whose dialectical relationship to containment culture conveyed a celebra¬ tory rather than a panicked relationship to agency. Cold War Youth and the Invention of the Teenager The quickly embraced concept of identity was only one in a cluster of lexi¬ cal terms that articulated the ideologically motivated desire for a youth that could represent Cold War America’s self-determination in a “conform¬ ist” Fordist era. Another key term was the “teenager”; yet another was the “rebel.” By the mid-fifties, as these terms came to orbit around an emerging Fordist youth market, they gave rise to a rebel metanarrative. The typical protagonist of this narrative (but not the only possible one) was a figure 1 shall call the “bad boy” of Cold War American culture. It is through this figure that a definitive political culture of identity first came into exis¬ tence. Before discussing the bad boy, however, I want to trace his sources in the “teenager” and the “rebel,” each of which offers a slightly different genealogy. Like “identity,” “teenager” is a word whose recent coinage has been largely forgotten. Not only did both terms enter the lexicon at the same moment, but they did so under similar ideological pressures and deter¬ minations. According to historian William Manchester, the word “teen¬ ager” made its very first appearance at the close of the Second World War, in an article published by Elliot Cohen in a 1945 issue of the New York Times Magazine. From this very beginning, the word claimed a power¬ ful political connotation, as the article’s title, “A Teen-Age Bill of Rights,” readily suggests.35 In a noteworthy echo of Woodrow Wilson’s fourteenpoint program for national sovereignty, Cohen’s article proposes another postwar bestowal of autonomy: a “ten-point charter” drafting the rights of the teenager. In this case, however, psychopolitical rights define the en¬ dorsed arena of sovereignty. This politicized vocabulary of rights and char¬ ters for teenagers might read today as overblown, pseudopolitical rhetoric, yet for Americans in 1945 it intelligibly responded to an apparent crisis in the historic relations of age inherited by the wartime years. 24 CHAPTER ONE Only in the late nineteenth century had a space of representation opened up between childhood and adulthood, to be occupied by the “adolescent.” The figure of the adolescent condensed together various socioideological developments in the pre-Fordist era of industrial capitalism that lie beyond this study’s scope, but several important determinants deserve at least to be mentioned. In part, the adolescent represented a difficult compromise be¬ tween labor and capital over where to draw the line between child and adult labor within the industrial wage system. Meanwhile, in the emerging sys¬ tem of education, the adolescent also became central to norms of reproduc¬ tion for the professional middle class. Fears of urbanization and overcivi¬ lization were also spoken to by the adolescent, whose stage in life allowed for intervention in such nature and recreation organizations as the Boy Scouts. Finally, the adolescent also functioned as part of the legitimation narrative for Western imperialism, which, as earlier noted, was steeped in the symbolics of age dependency and development. Taken together, these determinants tended to produce the adolescent as a dependent whose physical maturity belied a need for adult supervision and instruction. As Joseph Kett has shown, adolescence became a stressful preparatory stage in life, initiated by puberty, when the instinctual ener¬ gies of young people presumably climaxed even while they lacked the cul¬ tural or psychological maturity needed to master their physical powers. Schooling, broadly understood as subjection to adult pedagogical training, became the central drama of adolescence. This new category of transitional age placed its subjects (who formerly had exited childhood directly into the position of young adulthood), in a formalized state of legal, economic, and intellectual subordination to their elders (Gillis, 98). The very meaning of adolescence, associated as it was with sexual, moral, and intellectual im¬ maturity, precluded youth from the rights of personal autonomy that lib¬ eral enlightenment doctrine granted to the mature individual. Youth, in the emergent professional middle classes, became increasingly administered by “new educational and recreational systems of social control” (Gillis, 98). Meanwhile, as a normative ideal, “adolescence” served to pathologize the lives of working-class and immigrant youth, since their participation in “street-corner societies” only confirmed the neglect shown by lower-class families and communities toward these vital years of their children’s de¬ velopment.36 Far from symbolizing the achievement of sovereignty, then, adolescence represented a condition of— and case for —a lengthening state of dependency. The Second World War brought the category of adolescence into crisis. IDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 25 With so many fathers abroad and mothers at work, the proper supervision of adolescents seemed increasingly unworkable, precipitating tremendous anxiety. A campaign of hysteria ensued in the wartime press, supported by social experts who predicted a coming epidemic of juvenile delinquency. As James Gilbert argues, this “rehearsal for a crime wave” derived from widespread social scientific and psychoanalytic beliefs that “delinquency was a problem rooted in the family structure. When this [normal structure] was disrupted, then crime was one inevitable result. Thus as the war split families apart, first by conscription and then because women entered the labor force, children were more and more subjected to pressures that in theory, at least, would lead them to misbehave” (28). The social disloca¬ tions caused by the Second World War seemed to place middle-class ado¬ lescents, for the first time, on the streets alongside their less privileged peers, whose street culture had long been pathologized by social workers and social scientists as delinquent. The war did not, in fact, throw an entire population of middle-class youth onto the streets. Rather, the war actually led many young people of all social classes to enter the workforce, much as it had for adult women (Gilbert, 19-20). Youth, in short, became part of the wartime proto-Fordist economy. Many adults, however, perceived youth employment as yet an¬ other road to delinquency, since it seemed to provide adolescents with an unacceptable level of independence. “We’ve all heard about teen-age girls who pick up servicemen, and about the easy-come-easy-go way of teen-age boys with newly acquired pay checks,” observed a typical article pleading for recreation facilities for “Teen Ages” (Mackenzie, 27). The war was seen as rushing youth prematurely into adulthood, which was perhaps an anx¬ ious way of acknowledging that the young were regaining some measure of adult economic and social privilege lost to them since the invention of adolescence. It is this politicized context that made possible the “teenager” and such attendant articles as the “Teen-Age Bill of Rights.” In important respects, the new category of the teenager embodied a compromise that became foundational to the postwar regime of age. The young waived any claims on adulthood per se, but they retained certain privileges acquired during the war. These rights, moreover, would be explicitly justified in relation to the wars waged against the Nazis and the Soviets. At a remarkably early date, the “Teen-Age Bill of Rights” framed the liberties it endorsed in terms of the Cold War. The text of the charter begins with the “right to let childhood be forgotten,” drawing an emphatic distinction between the dependency 26 CHAPTER ONE of nonage and the growing capacity for autonomy in the teen years (Cohen, 16). Unlike the “adolescent,” the teenager of the “Bill of Rights” does not require continuous supervision by adults. Indeed, such supervision is pre¬ sented as both a violation of the teenager’s rights and a political pitfall. The article introduces us to “Don,” “a boy on the debating team who only last week took the affirmative of the question, ‘Should the United States pledge its armed forces if necessary to preserve the peace?’ His teacher said he was very convincing. He knows a lot about the Cardinals, Congress, Crosby and communism, and he’s learning fast. But when he gets home, he’s still a kid.... [H]e feels his parents are living in his past, and don’t understand him. There’s nothing quite as infuriating as the tolerant smile —‘After all, you’re still just a child’ ” (Cohen, i6).The article’s language converges strik¬ ingly with an Eriksonian concept of identity. Don’s political intelligence promises an important future as an effective defender of American geo¬ political interests. Yet the satisfyingly autonomous image Don has of him¬ self threatens to lead into an unneeded confrontation with his parents, who mistakenly continue to regard him as a mere child (or perhaps as a pre¬ war “adolescent”). Without recognizing that, as a teenager, their son has already begun his quest for identity, Don’s parents also risk failing to honor his corollary rights as a teenager, including “a ‘say’ about his own life,” “the right to make mistakes, to find out for himself,” “to have rules explained not imposed,” and “to question ideas.” The “Teen-Age Bill of Rights,” in short, petitions its readers to honor and respect youth as the embodiment of emergent identity. The ideologically saturated meaning of the “teenager” is also revealed in two child-rearing advice books written by Dorothy Baruch. In her first book of 1942, You, Your Children, and War, Baruch expresses concern that, as personal freedoms are suspended in wartime, “our children see in the world about them no very true picture of democratic living. They see, in¬ stead, a kind of autocracy in action” (89). Amidst the war on fascism, and on the very eve of decolonization, Baruch calls for a renewal of democratic attitudes toward youth, including respect for their efforts at independence, so as to avoid “either [their] open and extreme revolt, or continuing de¬ pendence. The ones who revolted had to prove their independence blindly and with violence. The ones who continued their dependence were trying to prove to themselves by ‘dutifulness’ that they were not wicked after all. They could still be nice and good and obedient children” (101-102). These dual negative options noticably echo the two pathological extremes of ado¬ lescence asserted in the psychological writings of Erik Erikson. Also like IDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 27 Erikson, Baruch normalizes a middle route between “extreme revolt” or “continuing dependence,” one that leads to the “democratic” formation of an independent identity. By 1953, Baruch had become an active promoter of the new youth lexicon, publishing a follow-up book, How to Live with Your Teen-Ager, whose basic philosophy is suitably captured in the title to her final section, “Toward Growing Independence” (167). The Cold War rationale for teenage autonomy was spelled out in even greater detail by Dorothy Gordon, moderator of the New York Times Youth Forums, as she recalls the “indoctrination of the young” she had witnessed in mid-thirties fascist Germany and communist Russia: Indoctrinated with ideologies utterly opposed to the ideals of democ¬ racy, how much did those youngsters threaten the future of America? . . . Suddenly I knew I had to do something about it! A man does not come by his democratic conscience overnight in his manhood. He is not born into it. Instead it must be instilled into his thinking from his alphabet days on in order to make him fit for liberty. I realized then that the greatest hope for a lasting democracy lay in an awareness of the principles of freedom on the part of our youth in America, and that awareness could best come through participation in one of the strong¬ holds of democracy which is freedom of speech. . . . The danger and threat of the totalitarian ideology could best be met by a reaffirmation of faith in our democracy. With that firm conviction in mind, I brought the idea of youth forum discussion to The New York Times. (173) Gordon illustrates here a complicated slippage in postwar youth dis¬ course between the “is” and the “ought” of the autonomous American teen¬ ager. Though America’s democratic character could sometimes be drama¬ tized by comparing its independent-minded teenagers with the slavish obedience of a Hitler youth or a communist youth group member, at other times it seemed equally evident that autonomy was a fragile value requiring active cultivation and encouragement. In The American Teenager, a “general report” on America’s youth from 1957, culled from detailed social opin¬ ion surveys, Herman Remmers and D. H. Radler concluded that, while America’s teenagers exhibited distinctly democratic ideals, their commit¬ ments were too often driven by “other-directed” motivations in exactly Riesman’s sense. Teenagers, in other words wanted so much to “fit in” that they exhibited a susceptibility to fascist and communist political precepts. Remmers and Radler considered this situation fundamentally unaccept¬ able in a Cold War world: “The internal stability of any democratic society, 28 CHAPTER ONE as well as its effectiveness in meeting the challenge of rival ideologies, is dependent on the constant and active exercise of those freedoms and those responsibilities that epitomize the democratic orientation. Passive accep¬ tance of choices made by others is actively destructive to the American ideal” (230). In the end, therefore, Remmers and Radler prescribed some¬ thing very much like the “Teen-Age Bill of Rights,” as a means of shoring up the agential, sovereign status of American youth: “The capacity of the American teenager is vast. Helping him achieve self-realization is more than mere duty; it can become sublime satisfaction. And the debt will be more than repaid. Aided to ‘come into his own,’ the American teenager will contribute to our society much more than that society could possibly give him. He will be, indeed, an inspiration to his family, his community, and the world” (259). Such endorsements of the teenager as the bearer of youth’s autonomy did not come without struggle. On the contrary, parents and the media would repeatedly bemoan the “scandalous behavior and rebellious nature of the nation’s young people” (Oakley, 268). For conservatives in particular, youth’s increased claims to autonomy signaled a calamitous deterioration in age relations.37 The political concession ultimately made to a sovereign teenhood was deeply fraught and circumscribed by powerful fears and rhe¬ torical turns that were themselves clearly associated with the conservative Cold War culture of containment. The bogey of the juvenile delinquent therefore did not disappear with the end of the Second World War. Public anxiety persisted through the fifties that freedom for middle-class youth might devolve into criminality. In the nineteenth century, the middle-class adolescent and the juvenile delinquent from the “other half” had once func¬ tioned as a normative binary, with clear class and ethnic lines separating them. The teenager, however, could not be so easily distinguished from the juvenile delinquent, for s/he had incorporated a degree of freedom from adult supervision previously associated only with lower-class youth. Middle-class teenagers might, for example, form gangs of their own that — unlike the Boy Scouts of the prewar eras — mirrored those more frightening gangs associated with delinquent culture. The suburbanization process did not help matters. The suburbs were widely seen as a space of assimilation into a white, middle-class consumer ethos that would alleviate social conflict. When it came to the new teenage subculture, however, it was not always clear whether ethnic and workingclass youth would become middle-class teenagers, or whether middle-class teenagers would absorb the taint of delinquency that for nearly a century IDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 29 had been associated with non-middle-class youth cultures. Criminality, in any event, became the widely perceived risk of the teenager’s relative inde¬ pendence. Within the Cold War discourse on youth, then, the easily ruled, always obedient young person susceptible to totalitarianism represented only one pole of political danger, balanced by the image of the young crimi¬ nal. If teenage autonomy led to something other than gradual acceptance of adult standards and values, if it merely seemed to enable amoral behav¬ ior that led to criminality, then the teenager became, not a democrat-in¬ training, but a juvenile delinquent. Popular discourse on teenagers often bitterly attacked consumerist teen culture, precisely because it perceived that culture as taking advantage of the autonomy that adults had tentatively granted teenagers (stepping into the vacuum, so to speak) and filling young people’s heads with sex and violence which they would never have come up with themselves. In part, postwar fears of juvenile delinquency expressed a broader anxiety that parents and children had been divided by a “new peer culture spread by comic books, radio, movies, and television” (Gilbert, 3). Part of this adult frustration, however, stemmed from the feeling that just when parents had initiated a great experiment in democracy by enabling the “teenager” to think for him- or herself, the mass media were exploiting that situation for a petty profit, sending the teen on an ill-deserved fast road to juvenile delinquency. Lurking as a continual risk for the teenager, there¬ fore, was the lure of juvenile delinquency, the Scylla which adults needed to weigh against the Charybdis of incipient authoritarianism resulting from excessive adult control.38 Authorizing the Rebel In all of its complexity, the teenager of postwar U.S. culture represented nothing less than a figure of psychopolitical sovereignty, a Cold War in¬ stantiation of Erikson’s “freeborn American son” as defined against his an¬ tithesis, the compliant youth of totalitarian society. Moreover, whenever a young person exercised his or her autonomy in a way that visibly defied adult wishes, s/he crossed over an important threshold of Cold War cul¬ tural meaning. In defiance, autonomy passed into the even more charged state of rebellion, transfiguring the teenager into the young rebel. If the teenager provided the metanarrative of identity with its character, the rebel provided it with a plot: dissent, defiance, or even insurrection mounted against a social order of conformity. At times, as noted, the rebel represented the threat of juvenile delin30 CHAPTER ONE quency, yet another Cold War menace to the nation that needed containing. At others, however, the rebel served to animate a vital national allegory, not simply for American identity, but for an America in which “identity” itself became the central feature of the nation’s identity. Broadly recapitulating the Eriksonian drama, the rebel conveyed the spirit of a young America in revolutionary action, forging identity through a politically necessary struggle against the forces of undemocratic coercion. Like the concept of identity itself, the rebel figure was popularized by an eminent psychoanalyst, Robert Lindner, whose writings are less well remembered today in their own right than are his inestimable cultural in¬ fluences. In 1944 Lindner published his first book, a case study entitled Rebel without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath, which describes his sessions with a boy named Harold who had suffered early de¬ privation and considerable abuse at the hands of his tyrannical father. Un¬ able and unwilling to internalize the paternal imago, Harold had entered his youth a “pyschopath,” whose “sickly superego” lacked the capacity to inhibit his criminal drives (9). What Lindner found most important about Harold’s case, however, was its relevance to the interpretation of contemporary social systems. Like Erikson and many other Freudian theorists, Lindner believed that psycho¬ analysis offered the most persuasive account of fascism and its mass ap¬ peal. Harold’s psychopathology, he argued, closely resembled the shared personality disorder of German Nazis, whose tyrannical socialization had driven them to the Nazi Party as a venue where they might express their violent urges. In Lindner’s view, therefore, the psychopath represented the personality type best suited to unreservedly serving a charismatic fascist leader: “the psychopath is not only a criminal; he is the embryonic StormTrooper” (16). Despite his chilling description of Harold, however, Lindner actually en¬ dorsed rebellion as a basic human instinct at the heart of our capacity to overcome social obstacles and limitations. In his second book, Prescription for Rebellion, Lindner began to foreground the importance of the rebel for opposing what, with increasing virulence, he condemned as the “lie of ad¬ justment.” For Lindner, “adjustment” was the pseudotherapeutic goal of a modern mass society, its technique for producing a psychologically sub¬ servient line of conformist “mass men” with the same dearth of political agency as David Riesman’s “other-directed” personality: “The propagation of adjustment as a way of life is leading inexorably to the breeding of a weak race of men who will live and die in slavery, the meek and unproIDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 31 testing tools of their self-appointed masters” (Lindner, 23). Psychopathic, negative rebels like Harold offered resistance to the tyrannical demands of conformity. They did so, however, in fundamentally antisocial and politi¬ cally exploitable ways. Against these, Lindner proposed the counterfigure of the “positive rebel,” a type of person who controls the rebellious instinct and who, in the name of universal self-assertion and autonomy, demands “revolution” against the forces of adjustment. Like Erikson’s concept of identity, Lindner’s allied principle of rebel¬ lion cannot be separated from a Cold War imagination. Neither can it be separated from youth as the human figure through which that Cold War imagination was embodied. Stepping back from the individual to discuss larger sociohistorical issues, Lindner compared the youthful moments of the Russian and American revolutions. “Negative rebellion is clearly illus¬ trated in the case of the U.S.S.R.,” claimed Lindner, for the reasons that it embodied “a Mass Man ideal” and was therefore “antibiological and unpro¬ gressive in the widest sense” (222). By contrast, the revolution “made by the [American] colonies against Great Britain” offered a “positive symbol” because its democratic principles protected the human instinct to rebel against social constraints and thereby create social progress (222-223). Hailing the American revolution as one of colonies against empire, Lind¬ ner (like Erikson before him) implicitly affiliated America’s history to that of third world revolutionaries seeking similar national self-governance. Such democratic struggles always constituted positive forms of rebellion because, as Lindner explained, “In the permissive atmosphere of true de¬ mocracy, the horizons are never limited, the boundaries never set. . . . Moreover, inherent in the democratic formula is the acceptance of the prin¬ ciple that a certain amount of positive rebellion and a spirit of vigorous protest are essential to its realization” (“Political Creed” 112-113). Lindner’s writings reiterate endlessly America’s dismaying decline from these sound democratic values into a mass society. When too crushing a level of social conformity was demanded of Americans, Lindner con¬ tended, they reconciled it with their rebellious instinct by what he called “rebelling within the confines of conformity”: becoming obedient mem¬ bers of such socially destructive oppositional groups as delinquent gangs, or fascist and communist parties. It was among youth, of course, that these negative rebellions were most evident, for it was in adolescence that the human instinct to rebel most naturally expressed itself. “It is a common¬ place of folk-wisdom that the state of youth is always and everywhere one of rebellion,” asserts Lindner in the opening line of “The Mutiny of the 32 CHAPTER ONE Young,” the opening essay in his influential collection Must You Conform? “Recalling his own adolescence, each parent resigns himself to a period of distressful concern, ordinarily of predictable length, when his child will pass through a state of active insurrection, when his offspring will fault convention, dispute authority, and vigorously, if at times rather recklessly, oppose the institutions that traditionally regulate society” (3). Today, however, under the overriding pressures of conformity and ad¬ justment in America's mass society, the rebellious instinct has been tragi¬ cally transformed into a psychopathic “mutiny of the young” that en¬ dangers America’s social stability. The solution, however, lies not in a moralistic crackdown on delinquency, for this would merely strengthen the lie of adjustment that had generated the problem in the first place. A genuine and successful rebellion against mass conformity, launched at the level of parenting, was the only possible solution. Borrowing Erikson’s key concept, or perhaps coining it independently, Lindner is quoted as having argued that “from loss of identity has come in¬ security” (Time 64), and he therefore urged adults, in the title words of his 1956 essay in McCall’s, to “Raise Your Child to Be a Rebel.” Of six virtues that Lindner attributes to the positive rebel, the most important two both name versions of psychopolitical self-recognition: “awareness” and, once again, “identity.” A child needs “awareness,” which Lindner defines as a “freedom from unconscious, hidden compulsions” if s/he is to avoid be¬ coming “a slave to the irrational pressures of any authoritarian system” (104). Guiding Lindner’s argument here is the assumption that “hidden compulsions” serve a disavowed master, an “other” who aims to colonize one’s consciousness. Without awareness of the border between the self’s desires and those of the (authoritative) other, one cannot even discrimi¬ nate between acts of rebellion and conformity. Unlike conformists, who generically confuse their own desires and interests with those imposed upon them by mass society and who hence become indistinguishable from other “mass men,” the positive rebel is also an “identified” person who thereby possesses “a sense of his own individuality, his uniqueness as a human being, his assets and potentialities as a person. Because of this he is able to care for his welfare, assert his interests and participate ... as an im¬ portant, distinct and necessary instrument in the great human orchestra” (104). In thus positing the rebel as the guarantor of such future democratic community, Lindner weaves together the various threads of the Cold War imaginary into an incipient master narrative of identity politics: a young person —or in its collective variation, a young people—rebels against the auIDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 33 thoritarian aspect of the social order in a way that simultaneously secures identity and restores the democratic promise of that order. Though Lindner himself never achieved the fame of Erikson, Fromm, or Marcuse, his writings diffused widely and influentially through Cold War American culture. When today the fifties are schizophrenically pre¬ sented both as a “decade of conformity” and as the “age of the rebel,” we are mobilizing constructs indebted to Lindner. It was he who binarized the verbs “rebel” and “conform,” valorized the former term, and thereby bestowed a mythic sanction on images of defiant youth for expressing a needed resistance to the “organized society” and its compliant “organiza¬ tion man.” Like the language of “identity” (and for much the same reasons) the rebel figure quickly multiplied and spread about in a highly receptive postwar culture. His book Rebel without a Cause, inspiring the eponymous film, provided underpinnings for James Dean’s emergence as a young star in American culture. That film’s tremendous success in turn spawned a host of subsidiary “rebels” within youth culture. From a literary point of view, Lindner’s “psychopathic” account of the rebel also became the pri¬ mary source for Norman Mailer’s famed description of the hipster in his influential essay “White Negro.” Lindner’s rebel thereby became a presup¬ posed reference point for the confrontation of the hip with the square, as well as the rationale for understanding the former’s personality type as a living indictment and negation of its adversary. By the close of the 1950s, so deeply ensconced and influential was Lindner’s concept of the young rebel that a radical critic like Paul Goodman could actually title his polemic against the “organized society” Growing Up Absurd: youth’s alleged revolt (“the mutiny of the young”) and the moral vacuity of the organized society would appear as one and the same problem. Rebelling against Fordism from the Inside: the Paradox of the Youth Market Working through the nodal points of these new terms —“identity,” “teen¬ ager,” and “rebel” —a politically potent discursive formation began to emerge out of the gap between a Cold War political imaginary that envi¬ sioned the United States as democratic, self-determining, and agential, and a Fordist economic order whose system of mass consumer standardization posed a threatening contrary national appearance. In effect, this discourse imaginatively split America in two: the America of identity or rebellion. 34 CHAPTER ONE as represented by the subject of youth, and the America of conformity, as embodied in the object world of Fordist mass culture. The irony, of course, is that the emergent culture of youth was itself a vital part of Fordist mass culture, even when it was paradoxically pitted against it at a symbolic level. It is common knowledge that, following the Second World War, the United States experienced not only an economic boom but also a procreative one. The baby boom reversed nearly two con¬ tinuous centuries of declining birthrates in the United States, including especially steep drops during the Great Depression, to bring into existence an astonishing 76,441,000 babies in the years between 1946 and 1964.39 The remarkable duration and intensity of the baby boom derived, in fact, from the central importance of children to the suburban mode of consump¬ tion. The new suburban home was celebrated, not only for the economic benefit it brought to young couples, but also for the ease it offered in the raising of children. Parenthood triggered a vast cycle of consumer needs and purchases in its own right. Landon Jones observes, As early as 1948, Time noted that the U.S. population had just in¬ creased by “2,800,000 more consumers” (not babies) the year before. Economists happily predicted that the new babies would set off a de¬ mand explosion for commodities such as homes, foodstuffs, clothing, furniture, appliances, and schools, to name only a few examples. For¬ tune pronounced the baby boom “exhilarating" and with an almostaudible sigh of relief concluded that the low birthrates of the 1930s were a “freakish interlude, rather than a trend.” “We need not stew too much about a post-armament depression,” the magazine wrote. “A civilian market growing by the size of Iowa every year ought to be able to absorb whatever production the military will eventually turn loose.” (36) Rather than increasing gross sales for suburbia’s domestic market, how¬ ever, much of this added consumption instead came to form the core of an entirely new market, organized around the commercialization of the teenager. From the start, the ideal of teenage autonomy had included an independent relation to leisure time. The fifth entry in the 1945 “TeenAge Bill of Rights,” for example, had declared youth’s “right to have fun and companions” on its own terms, free of family supervision. Historians have universally observed that in the postwar years, well before the baby boomers reached adolescence, teenagers already appeared to have gained IDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 35 control of their own spaces (in cars, at hangouts), to spend more time in unmonitored peer group situations, and most remarkably, to have these forms of autonomy treated tolerantly by adults as a “right.” Over the course of the 1950s, moreover, this particular “right” was rapidly translated into the forms of consumer culture, giving rise to a secondary suburban mar¬ ket that stood definitively apart from the primary family market, and which was characterized by its own array of products, codes of advertising, and cultural imagination. Fordism has been typically analyzed as an economic order premised on a single homogenizing system of mass consumption, which was fragmented only much later when a flexible production process enabled its replace¬ ment by a post-Fordist system of market segmentation. In actuality, Fordist consumption was segmented by age almost from the very beginning. The teenager, who began as a political citizen-subject bearing his/her own rights, rapidly became an economic consumer-subject as well, bearing a peculiar set of goods. Indeed, if Fordist capital growth depended upon per¬ suading wage earners to imagine themselves not as laborers but instead as consumers, then the teenager became a kind of exemplary Fordist subject, a type of person hardly acknowledged to be a producer at all, but identified almost exclusively with consumption.40 As suburbia grew, so did the teen market such that, by 1964, teenagers would account for overall sales of “something like $12 billion a year and, counting the money their parents were spending on them, the total mar¬ ket was heading for a spectacular $25 billion,... 55 percent of all soft drink sales, 53 percent of all movie tickets, and 43 percent of all records sold. They owned 10 million phonographs and were spending $100 million a year on records before the industries had their biggest years” (Jones, 73). The striking feature of teen consumption revealed here is how weighted it was toward the products of the entertainment industry. Youth obviously did not buy many appliances or homes, but they had a disproportionate impact on paperback books, films, records, and radio broadcasts. As an increas¬ ing sector of books, film, and records began explicitly to hail its audiences as teenagers with distinct priorities, desires, and attitudes, many products that would be considered exemplary of American culture (works of litera¬ ture, cinema, and music) also became artifacts of youth culture. This broad turn by the Fordist culture industry toward a youth market was partly facili¬ tated by the relative disposability of teenage income. Equally important, however, were an ensemble of new conditions, both social and technical, faced by each branch of the culture industry in the Fordist era. 36 CHAPTER ONE Subsequent chapters will lay out the distinct conditions that shaped the representations of young rebel identity in each industry. In the next chapter, for example, I analyze the conversion of “identity” into a mea¬ sure of American literary value by examining the massive critical endorse¬ ment of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Literary critics quickly as¬ similated Catcher into a Cold War national allegory according to which its young protagonist became emblematic of American identity determin¬ ing itself against the forces of social conformity. This literary valorization of identity, however, was both shaped and abetted by the so-called paper¬ back revolution, which delivered Salinger’s novel (among other texts) to young American readers on a mass scale. During the 1940s and 1950s, a product revolution in the book industry launched the twenty-five-cent dis¬ posable paperback, which allowed the distribution system for books to be extended well beyond the traditional hardcover network of libraries and carriage-trade bookstores, into the traditional magazine market located in newstands and dimestores. In the process, a host of new book companies moved to the head of the industry, including Pocket Books, Bantam, and New American Library.41 Although the paperback revolution created vast new sales opportunities for the book industry, it also pushed publishers into increasingly fierce competition for market share. The resulting struggle for the allegiance of new readers led in turn to the formation of a youth book market. In 1945, the very year the word “teen-ager” was coined, the leading publisher of paperbacks, Pocket Books, toured a “Teen-Age Book Show” that introduced American youth to the concept of disposable books. The following year, on the heels of the show’s success, Pocket Books formed a “Teen-Age Book Club,” while Bantam Books, one of Pocket’s main competitors in the emerging market, formed a new “Scholastic” imprint (Davis, 125). The apparent emergence of a young mass readership was a key determinant for the critical attention that Salinger’s novel began to receive in 1957 on its rapid path to canonization. Catcher thus concretely demonstrates the intimate connection between the identity concept’s growing cultural authority and the emerging power and influence of the youth market. No industry mobilized the motif of young rebel identity more dramati¬ cally than the music industry, which became entirely reoriented toward a teen market. The rise of rock ’n’ roll, as chapter 3 discusses, constituted a new youth imaginary defined against the very suburban world that had led to the music industry’s changes. As radio was dethroned from its na¬ tional network status by the new, suburbanized medium of television, it IDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 37 began to recreate itself as locally based entertainment. Radio therefore be¬ came unique among the postwar media for its special ability to transact cultural relations between urban centers and the suburban belts growing up around them. It is in this general context that radio propelled the rise ofhrock ’n’ roll as a youth genre. The light and affordable 45 rpm disc was also invented at around this time, which allowed radio hits to serve as adver¬ tisements for a growing market in vinyl records. This potent combination not only created a new means to make radio profitable; by the mid-1950s it had also prepared the way for the youth market to overwhelm the pop charts. As the chapter shows, rock ’n’ roll is best understood as a prod¬ uct of the “transcommodification” of both rhythm and blues and country music, a process that assigned each an imaginatively new relationship of identitarian opposition to the world of the Fordist suburbs. Hollywood cinema’s incorporation of the identity concept came, unlike the book or music industries, during a period of decline. With the collapse of the prewar studio system, Hollywood came under increasing pressure to cultivate product lines that would find a reliable audience and therefore predictable box office draw. By the mid-fifties, the film industry had tapped into the lucrative rock ’n’ roll market, developing as one of its product lines the so-called teenpic, a specialty picture for teenagers whose subgenres included delinquency crimes movies, horror, and romantic “clean teen” films.42 Although the teenpic arose somewhat later than the teen novel in the book industry, when it finally arrived, the niche market orientation of an ascending “new Hollywood” would allow the movies to take a leading role in the new youth culture. Chapter 4 explores the special role played by rebel identity in the devel¬ opment of the teenpic by reconstructing the reception of the 1955 Holly¬ wood feature film Blackboard Jungle. A transitional text, Blackboard held together, in complex tension, adult concern and youthful pleasure in the figure of the juvenile delinquent. Though it functioned for adults as a so¬ cial problem film of the sort developed during the thirties and forties, it simultaneously operated as a prototype for young adult audiences of the first rock ’n’ roll film. This second capacity is enabled in the film by its de¬ piction of an imaginary multiracial alliance of city youth, grounded in a masculine vision of defiance against a suburban ideal of parental authority. The split reception of this film, I argue, suggests that the film industry effectively learned how to segment its market into adult and youth sectors by deploying the young rebel as representative of the youth audience itself, conceived as an emergent identity. 38 CHAPTER ONE Together, the first four chapters of this book show that figures of young rebel identity quickly became staple features of American literature, film, and popular music. They remained conspicuously rare, however, on tele¬ vision. The growth of national network television closely paralleled the gen¬ eral expansion of the suburban family market. As the television set be¬ came a standard feature of the new suburban home, its programming came to reflect what the technology itself symbolized: the new leisure forms of family togetherness (Belton, 259). As the music and film industries sought alternative customer bases—local, specialty, and niche markets — they therefore also began to promote desires and pleasures that television had bypassed or excluded from its vision of the close-knit, consuming American family. Even the book industry, though not as directly threatened by the rise of tv, soon learned to profit from the new market opportuni¬ ties of the countersuburban imaginary. Youthful defiance of a suburban mass society, already widely criticized for its “hypnotized consumership,” its other-directedness, or simply its squareness, thus became a powerful advertising tool for the nontelevisual media. In paperback books, at the movies, and on the radio airwaves, the figure of the young rebel promoted “identity” in its narrative of struggle against Fordist conformity. Engendering the Rebel: Bad Boys and the Hegemonic Face of Identity The first four chapters of this book emphasize the broad conjunctions of identity, Cold War culture, and the youth market for rebellion. In the final three chapters, I train my attention on a more focused problematic, namely the significance of the persistently masculine forms taken by these early figures of rebel identity. If one quickly lists the chief icons of the fifties youth rebel—the beats, Elvis, Little Richard, James Dean, Holden Caulfield — one common feature rapidly becomes clear: all were imaged as male. With few exceptions, the rebel of the fifties conventionally took the form of a “bad boy” who agonistically defined his identity along axes of both age and gender. The term “bad boy” is meant to emphasize how postwar identity dis¬ course presided over the reinvention of a certain tradition in representing young American men. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, as Steve Mailloux observes, a so-called bad boy boom took place in American letters, which included among its texts Thomas Aldrich’s Bad Boy and Mark Twain’s Huck Finn. Circulating alongside early “juvenile delinquency” panIDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 39 ics in the United States, these novels tended to challenge the predomi¬ nance of morally didactic fictions about “good boys.” Instead, bad-boy fic¬ tions offered “realistic” depictions of mischievous boys whose antics in no way doomed their moral futures as adults. While these stories promoted a more tolerant perspective on adolescent indiscretions, they also prepared the way, according to Mailloux, for a disciplinary society that is historically related to the age category of adolescence, with its attendant institutions of adult supervision over youth, including public schools, scouting organi¬ zations, and the like.43 The postwar years propelled what might be called the second major “bad-boy boom” in American culture, but by the time this figure resurfaced in the age of identity and the Cold War, he had changed considerably. These changes are already evident in a film release 0U1949 that is actually en¬ titled Bad Boy. Like its nineteenth-century counterparts, the film presents its protagonist as a juvenile delinquent to be redeemed. Where the earlier bad boy needed only to be domesticated and bourgeosified, however, the latter also needed to satisfy concerns about America’s geopolitical chal¬ lenges. Bad Boy starred Audie Murphy, the single most decorated soldier of World War II, whose appearance in a film about juvenile delinquency foregrounded the bad boy’s readiness for combat (McGee and Robertson, 14-15). By casting Murphy, the film sets to rest any doubt as to whether the bad boy is strong, brave, or independent enough to fight for his coun¬ try, qualities that the cooperatively minded figure of the Organization Man was feared to lack. The question raised by the bad boy concerns, rather, his commitment to the public good, and whether the rage, defiance, or alien¬ ation that has prompted him to be “bad” can be rechanneled into patriotic feeling. In the film, the answer is emphatically yes. At a home for delin¬ quent boys, the rebellious Murphy is guided back to national service by the understanding headmistress (played by Jane Wyatt). The film ends with Murphy triumphantly graduating from Texas a&m’s rotc program. The movie Bad Boy anticipated a parade of nationally celebrated bad-boy characters who would soon begin to populate the imaginative landscape of Cold War American culture. In 1951, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye introduced an adulatory American readership to the disaffected teen¬ age character of Holden Caulfield. In 1953 The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando as leader of a gang of bad-boy bikers loose in a small midwestem town, became an instant Hollywood classic. The floodgates opened wider in 1955 as Hollywood simultaneously released Rebel without a Cause, star- 40 CHAPTER ONE ic. straight to the WHO PUT THE GUN ELECTRIC IN HIS HAND? CHAIR! WHAT PUT THAT WILD LOOK IN HIS EYES? , M AUIED artists WHY THE a PAUL SHORT Production MURDER IN HIS LSu""'I UOYO HEART? <E JAMES STANLEY MARTHA msmiMB.imuna ““WW'SREMUni rain cost i. Movie poster for Bad Boy (Allied Artists, 1949)- ring James Dean in his famous role as a troubled middle-class boy from the suburbs of Los Angeles, and Blackboard Jungle, an urban drama featur¬ ing a gang of delinquent boys who dance to the film’s title rock ’n’ roll tune of “Rock around the Clock.” That song in turn became the opening gam¬ bit to a rapid takeover of the popular music hit charts by rock ’n’ roll, an entirely new “youth sound” featuring numerous performers who adopted bad-boy personae. In 1957, a literary wing of the bad-boy phenomenon was launched as the obscenity trial for Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” cata¬ pulted the beat generation writers into sudden, iconoclastic fame. “Bad Boy” also became the title for two rock ’n’ roll songs, one by the Jive Bomb¬ ers in 1957, and another in i960 by Marty Wilde, a performer who coined his stage name by combining the title character of Marty, a film about leaving city life for the suburbs, with a playful conception of wildness, borrowed perhaps from Marlon Brando’s 1953 portrayal of The Wild One. Unlike his nineteenth-century progenitor, then, the 1950s bad boy repre¬ sented a youth spawned in the new suburbs, but refusing its domestica¬ tion (hence the wildness) and thereby ensuring the continuity of American freedom in an age of three worlds. By 1957, these representative figures for the identity of the nation had become so ubiquitous that literary critic Leslie Fiedler would explicitly anoint the bad boy as “America’s vision of itself, crude and unruly in his beginnings, but endowed by this creator with an instinctive sense of what is right” (No! 263)Though Fiedler sometimes simply called this figure the “Bad Boy,” he also sometimes called him the “Good Bad Boy” to spell out his compound moral character. In some respects, this split description echoes the dual moralities traced by Nietzsche in his Genealogy of Morals. Following Nietzsche, who had observed that the word “good” signifies dif¬ ferently depending on whether it is opposed to “bad” or to “evil,” Fiedler distinguishes between two moral ledgers. Like the “blond beast,” the bad boy defies the flaccid moral conventions of his age, thereby displaying his strength of character. The bad boy’s badness demonstrates that he is no slave, no conformist to an external coerced moral code. At the same time, however, he is also “good” in that he only rebels for the higher purpose of serving the public interest (a self-loathing morality of altruism in the Nietzschean perspective). Unlike the “bad bad boy,” he is no self-serving psychopath but instead what Lindner called a “positive rebel.” The bad bad boy is strong but evil, an unambiguous juvenile delinquent. The good good boy, conversely, is conventionally virtuous but materially weak (like Nietz¬ sche’s slave moralist) ,45 It is only the good bad boy who, in combining virtue 42 CHAPTER ONE and strength, can seize historic opportunities to transform social morality, particularly at moments when moral conventions have become overly coer¬ cive, massified, and thus destructive of personal and national identity. The bad boy becomes a figure for the insurrectional citizen, one who challenges the polity precisely in the name of that polity's higher good. Fiedler’s description of the bad boy’s rebellion uses terms that are com¬ plexly gendered. The “Good Bad Boy,” Fiedler explains, though “sexually as pure as any milky maiden ... is a roughneck all the same, at once potent and submissive, made to be reformed by the right woman” (No! 270). This combination of “potency” and “submissiveness” reiterates in dif¬ ferent terms Lindner’s political imperative that young Americans should be “rebels” but “positive” ones, so that their defiance can ultimately enter into the orbit of good citizenship. Here, however, the binary explicitly mas¬ culinizes the bad boy’s potency while feminizing his submissiveness. The former represents the purely masculine “bad” attribute of the “roughneck” American self, while the latter aspect, which makes him ultimately good, anticipates the bad boy’s eventual romantic compromise with women, and thus with femininity, as the other to his American self. Indeed, Fiedler defines his bad boy—technically a “good bad boy” —by his relationship to his mother. Unlike the good good boy, whom Fiedler says, “does what his mother must pretend that she wants him to do: obey, conform; the Good Bad Boy does what she really wants him to do: deceive, break her heart a little, be forgiven” (No! 270). Fiedler’s drama of the bad boy and his mother, and indeed the entire problem of the rebel’s masculinization, gain ideological clarity when placed alongside an article that appeared in a 1948 issue of Parents magazine. Writ¬ ten from a mother’s perspective, this article, in a clear allusion to the 1945 New York Times Magazine’s article, was titled “A Bill of Rights for Teen¬ agers” and captioned “Parents must have the faith and courage to let their adolescent children pursue happiness in their own way, with a minimum of questioning and objection.” Unlike its predecessor, however, the Parents magazine article recounts the story of a girl rather than a boy in its opening parable. The author, Kathleen Doyle, begins by recalling an argument with her daughter over whether she might wear a black satin formal to a dance party (20). Doyle’s quarrel, which her husband later persuades her was ill-advised, clearly involves her daughter’s consumer autonomy, and looks ahead to the future expansion of teenage discretionary spending. It also overtly concerns sexual autonomy, the right of a teenage girl to eroticize her presence among other teenagers. In this respect, the dispute seems IDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 43 to recall the wartime controversy regarding sexually delinquent “Victory Girls.” The content of the conflict between parent and teenager, in other words, appears decisively different here from Don’s, the boy in the New York Times Magazine who had debated whether to pledge American armed forces against communism. Its focus is on the terrain of culture rather than politics, and on acts of consumption rather than those of diplomacy or war. To be sure, Doyle quickly moves to politicize the quarrel’s significance, alluding to the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as she derives a lesson on the necessity for a teenage “bill of rights” guaran¬ teeing youth’s “pursuit of happiness.” As she does so, however, her prose shifts increasingly into a masculine register. The ideal approach to the teen¬ ager, she decides, is “to let a child proclaim his independence, to encourage him to stand alone” (83) so that he can find his own way to “bridge the gap between childhood and maturity” (86). Doyle, moreover, emphatically attributes her insights to men, who intuitively grasp the virtues of youth autonomy. It is her husband who persuades her that she has made a mis¬ take in picking the fight, and it is an anonymous “gentleman” at a dinner party who reminds her that “it’s respect for another’s rights that’s the very stuff of which democracy is made” (83). As early as Philip Whylie’s 1942 polemic Generation of Vipers, the dis¬ courses of anticommunism had begun to feature a rhetoric known as “momism,” a misogynistic attack on American women who smothered their children and henpecked their husbands.46 In the postwar period, with explicit misogyny buried underneath the celebration of domesticity, mom¬ ism was mainstreamed and assimilated into the Cold War discourse on youth. Embracing the assumption that mothers posed a danger to the agen¬ tial (and often the heterosexual) masculinity of their boys, postwar parent¬ ing ideology often stressed, as Elaine May notes, that “fatherhood was im¬ portant ... to counteract the overabundance of maternal care. Although mothers were, of course, expected to devote themselves full-time to their children, excessive mothering posed dangers that children would become too accustomed to and dependent on female attention. The unhappy re¬ sult would be ‘sissies,’ who were allegedly likely to become homosexuals, ‘perverts,’ and dupes of the communists. Fathers had to make sure this would not happen to their sons” (146). Spelled out here are a complex set of sexual and gender norms that guided the points of attachment between Cold War political culture and family arrangements. When fathers encour¬ aged their sons’ rebellious impulses, what they effectively safeguarded was a masculinized public sphere, the same one that Youth Forum modera44 CHAPTER ONE tor Dorothy Gordon had, as quoted earlier, characterized as the realm of “man’s democratic conscience,” and that Erik Erikson associated with the American legacy of “freeborn sons,” the “backbone of the nation” (321). On the one hand, homosexuality often connoted a menacing weakness and vulnerability for the “freeborn sons” who constituted the national public. But on the other, heterosexuality also constituted a potential threat in the form of excessive “female attention” that might domesticate and distract the boy from his pursuit of masculine sovereign selfhood. The Cold War realm of “man’s democratic conscience” projected a long-standing pub¬ lic/private opposition between a homosocial domain of male citizenship and a domestic space of heterofamilial companionship. It was through the former that national agency was posited, like an army or a bourgeois pub¬ lic, in the collective form of a young male fraternity. Yet such fraternity could itself evoke a specter of impending homosexualization, thus signi¬ fying the vulnerability of masculine agency in the very image that should have expressed its triumph. Three consequences resulted from this network of gendered meanings. First, it was boys who became the focus of attention. Identity usually took a male form because it was a masculine conception of the people’s sov¬ ereignty and self-determination that Fordist conformity allegedly jeopar¬ dized. Second, given that it was the suburban man who typically symbol¬ ized this conformity, fatherhood became (like “organizational manhood”) more a subject of criticism than praise. Cold war culture, one might say, be¬ came characterized not only by “momism,” in which the bad boy asserted his badness by defying his mother’s expectations, but also by a related form of “dadism” in which fathers were repeatedly damned for failing to up¬ hold their sons’ struggle for identity. Third, the representation of collective identity often took the form of the fraternal boy gang, though this repre¬ sentation was plagued by sexual doubts. Chapters 5 and 6 each examine the political complexities of the bad boy’s sexual and gender dynamics, on the levels of the family unit and the col¬ lective fraternal public respectively. Chapter 5 considers oedipal dramas of the suburban family, tracking a narrative pattern in which identity emerges through a rebellious son’s struggle against an impotent father who lacks the capacity for autonomous self-assertion. In two films that serve as the occasions for this chapter, Rebel without a Cause and King Creole, the sons as¬ sert a masculinized rebel identity that challenges the father’s suburban do¬ mesticated manhood. Bad-boy masculinity, as this chapter suggests, drew on codes of blackness and working-classness to establish its difference IDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 45 from a father lacking in political agency; it expressed both homo- and heteroeroticism to establish its difference from the father’s lack of sexual agency. In these texts, the father’s erotic deficiency amplifies his distress¬ ing inability to defend himself against characters who would dominate and humiliate him. In the midst of a Cold War, these films declared the son, and not his father, as ready for action. Chapter 6 explores the collectivization of young rebel identity by look¬ ing at the constitutive bonds of the bad-boy gang as celebrated in key texts by the beat generation writers. The very trope of the “beat generation” was productive in its ambiguity, vacillating in meaning between a small group of writers and an entire cohort of postwar Americans. Literary texts such as On the Road, “Howl,” and John Clellon Holmes’s beat manifestos openly claimed to represent in their particular stories a universal young Ameri¬ can identity. The cultural authority of the beats, I argue, derives from this proprietary relation to America’s “tradition” of sovereign identity. By writ¬ ing generational identity in the form of a boy gang, however, the beat texts reenacted and had to variously resolve the paradoxical demands posed by the ideological equation of the democratic public and agential masculinity. Women, predictably, are placed on the outside of the beat fraternity of bad boys, and heterosexual relations with them must be devalued relative to the homosocial bonds that constitute beat identity. Male homosexuality, meanwhile, openly appears in certain beat texts as a face of rebel identity, and as a challenge to sexual conformity, but it is almost always restricted to the boy gang’s external relations with other men, where it cannot threaten the “horizontal comradeship” subtending the beat claim that, as a frater¬ nity of bad boys, they constituted the champions of democratic American identity. Identity: A Modality in Which Racial, Sexual, and Gender Justice Is Demanded The hegemonic status of the bad boy in early identity discourse raises pressing questions regarding his ideological relationship to subsequent identity politics, for not only was he a male figure, he was also usually white and straight (at least nominally, if not latently). Yet “identity politics” as we know it is usually the name we give to the social movements of women, people of color, and gays and lesbians. In what meaningful way, then, can the young rebel of the 1950s be said to have prepared the way for them? This important question must be approached with care. Feminism, anti46 CHAPTER ONE racism, and even gay activisms have long histories that quite obviously pre¬ date the politicocultural formation 1 am tracing in this book. What the rebel figure facilitated, therefore, was not gender, race, or sexual politics per se, but a model for their identitarianization. By casting “woman,” “black,” “Chicano,” “gay” or “queer” as their protagonist in the Cold War metanarrative of identity narrative, postwar social movements embraced and deployed the rebel figure as a new subject of history: an emergent self establishing its psychopolitical autonomy in a struggle against an authoritarian world of “role expectations.” Black liberation, women's liberation, or gay liberation, drawing from the three worlds imaginary of national liberation, asserted psychopolitical emancipation from the compliant subjectivity associated with the coercive expectations of patriarchal, white supremacist, or heteronormative self-definition. Identity, to loosely paraphrase Stuart Hall, be¬ came the modality through which antiracist, antisexist, or antihomophobic struggles could be fought with considerable potency. The fifties rebel, as I have argued, upheld the principle of insurrec¬ tional citizenship against a threat of “conformity” and corresponding loss of agency posed by a Fordist suburban world. Precisely because whiteness and heterosexuality were foundational features of this suburban imagi¬ nary, their norms were often exactly what the rebel narrative of identity for¬ mation symbolically challenged or resisted, even when the rebel remained manifestly white or straight, as was the case with such figures as Elvis or Norman Mailer’s “White Negro” hipster. Consider, for instance, that Leslie Fiedler himself fashioned the bad boy as both a racialized and homoeroticized character. Drawing on Huck Finn as the urtext for his version of the American literary tradition, Fiedler insisted not only on the bad boy’s af¬ finity with blackness but also on the same-sex eroticism of this affinity, which for Fiedler expressed the bad boy’s (and thus America’s) utopian longing to escape a domesticated manhood.47 Given that racial and sexual difference both represented ways of declar¬ ing an identity in righteous rebellion against the conformities of Fordist heteronormativity and whiteness, it hardly seems surprising that black and queer representations of the bad boy did in fact circulate in postwar cul¬ ture: rock ’n’ roll’s black stars such as Chuck Berry and the flamboyantly queer Little Richard, Sidney Poitier as a borderline delinquent in Black¬ board Jungle, the zoot suit hipsters who fascinate the protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Johnny Nash, the black teenage star of the film Take a Giant Step, and the homoerotic rebel biker featured in underground gay filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising are among the most obvious exIDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 47 amples. One cannot divorce the Cold War bad boy from the incipient racial and sexual politics of identity that his rebel narrative promoted. The Girl as Rebel This genealogical link is more complicated when we come to the issue of gender politics. Initially at least, the liberatory promise of identity was often complicit with an insistent masculinization of the insurrectional sov¬ ereign citizen. As the maligning of the Organization Man and the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit demonstrates, it was the white, middle-class man of the suburbs whose inadequate self-determination constituted a national crisis. Nevertheless, the postwar rebel was not as rigidly masculine as one might assume. In many of the central bad boy texts — Rebel without a Cause and On the Road for example —girls play important supporting roles in the rebel drama of identity. Identitarian narratives about rebellious girls, moreover, carried on an important subterranean life in the postwar years. These rebel girl narratives form the subject of this book’s final chapter. Treating examples from both literature and film, I explore the two prin¬ cipal forms in which the female rebel appeared: the sexual bad girl and the tomboy. Both types received considerable cultural attention as roman¬ tic counterparts to the bad boy who shared his desire for something other than a domesticated or organizational future. As attested by the delinquent heroine of the film Girls Town and the black daughter in Douglas Sirk’s ma¬ ternal melodrama Imitation of Life, girls too could embody emergent iden¬ tity by “breaking their mother’s heart,” to use Fiedler’s words, declining a future like their mothers’ in favor of a different life imaginatively shared with the bad boy. In parallel with the bad boy, the bad girl often enacted her rejection of Fordist womanhood by way of racialized and classed selfassertions. The tomboy evinced an even more powerful refusal of maternal domes¬ ticity, embodying a female masculinity potentially suited for participation in the bad-boy gang. As texts such as Hal Elson’s juvenile crime novel Tom¬ boy and the blockbuster teenpic Gidget demonstrate, the tomboy’s charac¬ ter is typically established through her initial denial of sexual desire. Even¬ tually, however, her erotic awakening to the bad boy creates an uneasy but important opportunity for imagining a heterosexual romance compatible with (rather than antithetical to) the fraternal collective identity of the gang. The tomboy, in short, produces the utopian fantasy of having it both ways, getting to be one of the bad boys while also getting to have one of them. 48 CHAPTER ONE Though she bore lesboerotic meanings only covertly in the fifties, the tom¬ boy (like the sexual bad girl) nevertheless signified antisuburban female sexuality as a version of rebellious identity. Because the sexual bad girl and the tomboy were both associated with a longing to be coupled romantically with someone other than a domesti¬ cated male, both afforded the bad boy a partner who might allow him to win over an ambivalent Cold War mainstream. The bad boy’s coupling with a girl suggested that his struggle for identity would yet be redeemed in a future that reconciled sovereign citizenship and Fordist heteromaturity. If, for such mainstream meanings, girls were licensed to rebel primarily because they thereby drew bad boys back into heterosexual romance, and thus back into the wider orbit of potential marital adulthood, their stories nonetheless opened up important spaces of representation. Once female figures also came to represent the youthful quest for identity, they could be (and eventually were) decoupled from heteroromance to embody alter¬ native narratives of emergent identity. It is through the trope of the rebel girl, for instance, that Beneatha in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun could come to represent the assertion of black female identity, or that the heroine of Ann Bannon’s first lesbian pulp novel, Odd Girl Out, came to dra¬ matize the coming out of lesbian identity. These texts offer an early prece¬ dent for the identitarianization of the young woman as a political subject, and hence for a politicized discourse of identity that would become avail¬ able to women’s liberation and lesbian activists by the end of the 1960s. Identity and the Other Fifties According to the containment model of Cold War culture, the fifties were, above all, years of reaction in which political possibilities were closed down. The politics of labor (often class-based, but not exclusively) certainly suf¬ fered a precipitous decline under the aegis of the Cold War regime. Once we reread the decade as the inaugural moment of identity, however, it is not difficult to see that these were also times in which new political potentiali¬ ties were born. The dramatic rise of rock ’n’ roll, with its distinct challenge to the authority of the color line, was a youthful declaration of identity in its symbolic opposition to the suburbs. Similarly, the beat generation writers achieved literary celebrity through their self-presentation as rebels against suburban, domestic America. Further, as Wini Breines has pointed out, young white women developed a distinct sensibility of disaffection along similar lines. And outside the arena of youth culture, it was in the 1950s IDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD 49 that the civil rights movement actually achieved its first high-profile vic¬ tories, beginning with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and then the dramatic populist victory of the Montgomery bus boycott. These victories involved an insistence on the place of blackness in American identity in contradistinction to the suburban presumption of universal whiteness. Finally, although gays endured a distinctly anti¬ communist mode of postwar homophobia, it was in the 1950s, as Robert Corber points out, that gay writers such as Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin became highly visible cultural figures who could assert their alternative sexuality publicly as a form of “oppositional conscious¬ ness” meant to challenge Fordist manhood (Homosexuality 4). Taken collectively, these various phenomena suggest that an “other fifties,” to use Joel Foreman’s useful term, existed alongside the culture of containment, one that made themes of revolt and liberation available to the youth, black, feminist, and gay movements of the 1960s and the 1970s.48 The challenge, today, is to avoid reifying the identitarian terms that the discourses of the “other fifties” initiated. By and large, critics of the 1950s have celebrated the figures in question (civil rights activists, beats, young women, rock ’n’ rollers, gay writers, and so forth) by taking their insurrec¬ tional identities and status as self-professed rebels at face value. Agents of the “other fifties” have been touted as lonely voices in the night who spoke out against the Cold War order, but whose capacity to do so was not in any way itself a product of that order.49 Rather than historicizing the psychopolitical narrative of identity first devised by Erikson and Lindner, this typically hagiographic literature on the “other fifties” has tended to reproduce it. The “rebels” of the 1950s are installed as the urprotagonists in the metanarrative of identity poli¬ tics, the first postwar characters to defend their identity against an indus¬ trial/consumer society’s errant expectations (Erikson), or the first to defy the “conformity” proscribed by a repressive mass society (Lindner). Tac¬ itly, this approach presupposes that postwar radicalism was extrinsic to Cold War culture because it expressed a psychopolitical refusal to be “con¬ tained ^Jf we approach the Cold War as producing something other than just a “containment culture,” however, we can begin to understand the emergence of identity discourse, not as an extrinsic response to Cold War culture based upon the ontological truth of identity, but rather as the pro¬ duction of identity itself as the dialectical antithesis of containment within the cultural matrix of the Cold War world. If “containment” offered a rhet¬ oric of repression, identity^ounterechwith a rhetoric, of “liberation” that 50 CHAPTER ONE was no less imperative in its reference to the three worlds imagination of its time. This argument implies that the various social movements and critiques of race, gender, and sexuality that have come to be associated with the broad term “identity politics,” all appealed, more or less explicitly, to a rhetoric of the Cold War era that represented political agency itself as a struggle with the regulatory norms of postwar suburbia. Racial identity was thus pitted_ against the mass standards, privileges, and exclusions of sub¬ urban whiteness. Feminist identity politics challenged woman’s subjection to the breadwinner/homemaker hierarchy of suburban gender relations. And sexual identity politics, perhaps the most explicitly antisuburban of them all, defied the Fordist heteronorm of the monogamous, procreative couple. By no means are these movements defined or wholly captured by this historic linkage; this was not their raison d’etre. All the same, this genealogy illuminates what they have shared in drawing on the discourse of identity, as well as what made their appeal to identity so politically effec¬ tive for so many decades. In the conclusion, I trace forward the genealogy of identity, exploring the ways in which appeals to identity evolved after the fifties, alongside their grounding condition of possibility in the articulations of Fordism and the Cold War. The changes were perhaps most vivid in the mid-seventies, when Fordism itself entered crisis. But at least until the end of the Cold War, the politics of identity were steadfast. The discourses of identity moved through a series of changes—they became more openly tied to struggles against “stigma,” they were gradually demasculinized, they were pluralized and then multiculturalized. But throughout, they maintained a set of psychopolitical claims that could not be denied their effectivity. Today, however, the widely registered dissatisfaction with identity politics can in fact be traced to the severe erosion of the geopolitical conditions that once propped up their ideological potency. Race, gender, and sexu¬ ality obviously remain indispensable sites in crafting the politics that might combat economic “globalization” or the neoimperial “war on terror.” And yet, “identity” does not provide the articulatory traction that it offered us in the sovereignty-centered “age of three worlds.” I offer this genealogy in the hopes that it can clarify for us our discomfiting political present. IDENTITARIAN THOUGHT AND THE COLD WAR WORLD SI COLD WAR LITERATURE AND THE NATIONAL ALLEGORY: THE IDENTITY CANON OF HOLDEN CAULFIELD The wheel has come full circle, and now America has become the pro¬ tector of Western civilization, at least in a military and economic sense. Obviously, this overwhelming change involves a new image of America. Politically, there is a recognition that the kind of democracy which exists in America has an intrinsic and positive value.... If [however] a reaffir¬ mation and rediscovery of America is under way, can the tradition of critical non-conformism ... be maintained as strongly as ever? — Partisan Review, “Our Country and Our Culture” I n 1952 the prominent liberal intellectual and literary journal Partisan Review published an influential symposium on postwar intellectual life. Entitled “Our Country and Our Culture,” the symposium opened with an editorial statement (quoted above) announcing the rise of a “new image” of America suited to its stature as the “protector of Western civilization.”1 This statement, which served to define the parameters of acceptable de¬ bate regarding the role of America’s writers and thinkers, was followed by a series of responses to it by a virtual "who’s who” of postwar intellectual life. While many respondents disagreed with particular claims made in the editorial, few contested its essential, liberal, anticommunist premises.2 The statement began with the happy observation that U.S. intellectuals were increasingly integrated into national life. No longer a figure of leftwing political alienation, the typical intellectual had grown into a staunch advocate of the American system who grasped the totalitarian nature of its Soviet rival. At the same time, however, the editors expressed their con- cern that this affirmative stance might itself paradoxically jeopardize what they called America’s “tradition of critical non-conformism.” In their es¬ timation, it was incumbent on postwar intellectuals to negotiate between two conflicting priorities. On the one hand, they were called upon to ideo¬ logically defend America’s democratic ideals against the communist threat, and yet the political practice of democracy obliged them just as surely to speak out as the nation’s conscientious critics and dissenters. This latter task the editors closely associated with the arena of culture. Although American political democracy stood unambiguously as a global beacon of hope, the “cultural democracy” of America’s mass arts and letters troubled them. “Cultural democracy,” explained the editors, was a natural “outgrowth of political democracy under conditions of modern industrial development,” and yet in practice the conformity that it imposed could undermine the basic democratic capacity of American citizens to think as free individuals (285). As Partisan Review explained, “We cannot evade the fact that at present America is a nation where at the same time cul¬ tural freedom is promised and mass culture produced” (285). “Critical non¬ conformity” thus served for Partisan Review as a placeholding term for the kind of cultural iconoclasm that might uphold the apparently fragile ideal of cultural freedom. Implicitly for the Partisan Review editors, this dilemma had special con¬ sequences for the state of American literature. Among the symposium contributors, critics and writers of literature outnumbered those of any other intellectual endeavor, and repeatedly America’s “new image” became a question of the nation’s literary self-representation. Partisan Review’s two concerns may be expressed concisely. On the one hand, was American lit¬ erature sufficiently patriotic and affirming of the nation’s political prin¬ ciples in a time of Cold War? On the other, did not a firmly celebratory vision better suit the straitjacketed literary and intellectual culture of the nation’s perennial adversary, a totalitarian society that brooked no dissent? V Could American literature, in other words, reconcile wartime national loy¬ alty with the public spirit of critique and questioning called for by a func¬ tioning democracy? Did it, to use Partisan Review’s words, carry on the democratic tradition of “critical non-conformity”? Beginning in the 1950s, and increasingly in the 1960s and 1970s, crit¬ ics and other readers would begin to interpret works of literature in terms of the “identities” they depicted or explored. This development, I propose, marked not simply one more swing in literary interest, but a far more profound change: the adaptation of “identity,” itself a newly invented con54 CHAPTER TWO cept, into a primary standard for judgments of literary meaning and value whenever the literature of a “people” was in question. As the preceding chapter argues, “identity” first became a word freighted with political meaning during the early years of the Cold War when, beginning with its initial popularization by Erik Erikson, it came to signify the achievement of a self-made and self-governing personality equally vital to individual ^persons as they approached adulthood and to collectivities as they devel¬ oped into sovereign nations or peoples. Indeed, one of the most distinctive aspects of “identitarianism” is that, from the start, the ideal it espoused sought to reconcile the traditional liberal tension between the individual and the collectivity by mediating between their respective claims to sov¬ ereign self-determination. The identity of a collectivity, after all, typically appears as its individual member writ large, just as the political sovereignty of a state is modeled upon the liberal doctrine of the self-determining indi¬ viduals who are its citizens. From a literary perspective, we might say, identity operates through the modality of national or popular allegory in its requirement of two recipro¬ cal conditions of representation. First, the individual’s trials and tribulation must serve to dramatize and instantiate the larger identity struggles of his or her people. At the same time, the politics of identity demand that the sov¬ ereignty of the people remain commensurate with the self-determination of its individual members. The collectivity otherwise becomes a totalitarian mass, formed through a coerced equivalence of its members that denies them identity precisely by robbing them of their right to psychopolitical sovereignty. Rather than pit the individual against society, in short, identity as a pychopolitical ideal works to harmonize them as necessarily reciprocal images of one another in the struggle for sovereign selfhood. / This chapter analyzes the celebration of rebellion as an American ideal by the public arbiters of Cold War culture, a formation usually associated with repressive demands for national loyalty. As suggested by the intellec¬ tual’s dilemma as staged by Partisan Review (to affirm or to criticize?), re¬ bellion was a necessary price exacted by the ideologically potent discourse of identity. For in expressing their dilemma as a problem of the individual writer/intellectual’s ability to represent national culture, Partisan Review had already begun the work of adapting identity discourse to the domain of literature. On the one hand, the editors desired an identity—that is, an allegorical equivalence —between the work of individual writers and their country’s culture (the former no longer “alienated,” as writers presumably had been in the 1930s). Yet paradoxically, they also did not want the work COLD WAR LITERATURE AND THE NATIONAL ALLEGORY 55 of these individuals to espouse unmitigated affirmation, for such a culture of blanket obedience threatened to cast America as an irredeemable mass society whose people’s fading grasp on political agency was spotlighted by the dearth of dissenting voices. The political dilemma posed by rebellious writing resolved itself, however, if writers and intellectuals instantiated in their work, not simply the revolt of an individual or a movement, but rather a great American tradition of “critical non-conformity” that exemplified the innate resistance of American identity to regimented mass mentalities. I shall explicate the identitarianization of American literature by trac¬ ing the extraordinary process of national canonization that J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye underwent during the 1950s. Like few other literary works, Catcher epitpmizeijjjbe tiiumph of the young rebel as a requisite figure for representing the national identity of America. The fifties was the “Decade of Salinger,” asserted Warren French confidently in his intro¬ duction to one of the very first critical anthologies about the era, a claim that was often repeated, even though this brief novel was the only one that Salinger wrote in that decade — or any other. Salinger’s overwhelming asso¬ ciation with fifties America—and the other way round—constitutes a clear example of what Jonathan Arac has called “hypercanonization,” the exces¬ sive investment by criticism in a very small number of texts from a liter¬ ary period or tradition that leaves a multitude of their contemporaries to languish. Catcher’s overwhelming critical acclaim, I argue, grew from the demand for a “new image” of America as Partisan Review had expressed it. It hinged on an ideological reciprocity between literature and politics that could be called the protagonization of the American character; this was a process by which the literary value of American texts, old and new alike, became measured for their hermeneutic capacity to be read as allegories of national identity.3 Allegory has traditionally been defined as the extension of metaphor, and in particular of a “figure” across narrative time, one thing standing for something else through the duration and transmutations of a story.4 Allegorical figuration often takes the form of a personification, and this is especially so in the case of national allegory, in which the nation’s situation is commonly expressed through the story of an individual character. Even when personified, however, a figure is not merely a character, but also, as Erich Auerbach’s etymology of “figura” reminds us, an idea rendered plas¬ tic in form. A figure materializes an abstraction into a shape whose “defi¬ nition” becomes a bordered interior in an inside/outside relationship. In this respect, figuration closely resembles the process of imagination itself. 56 CHAPTER TWO whose etymology suggests a similar tracing of its object within a field of vision. One cannot create an allegorical figure, in short, without also having produced a “ground,” an exterior topos against which the otherwise “illeg¬ ible” image or figure may be distinguished. The visualization of a figure/ground relationship additionally presup¬ poses a discerning eye that brings one shape to the fore, while consigning other possible ones to the back. Although some critics have understood allegory as a sort of genre, determined by the structural properties of the text, this focus on the figure/ground relation favors an alternative under¬ standing of allegory as the outcome of a reading process or critical inter¬ vention, a second-order decoding of the text by the reading subject that was well understood by classical rhetoricians in their use of the term “allegoresis”: the allegorization of a text. In the case of national allegory, this production of an inside/outside re¬ lation between figure and ground by no means requires that the latter be¬ come the “outside” of the nation. On the contrary, both figure and ground often come to represent the nation in what becomes a dialectical imagi¬ nary. Pictorially speaking, one might say that national allegory may func¬ tion simultaneously as both portrait and landscape, a figure against a back¬ ground, each differently representative of the nation, and indeed mutually so. It is precisely in their contradictory signification that national allegories often owe their rich semiotic and ideological effectivity. Catcher was subject to allegoresis in just this doubled sense, at both an immanent and a contextual level. In textual criticism, Holden Caulfield becamejAtnqrica, yet so too did the notoriously phony world against which he railed. As a paperback book, meanwhile, Catcher also came to figure America, but once again only against the distressing backdrop of a mass market for commercialized literature. In each case, it is the figure/ground relationship that established America’s political character as a young and rebellious identity, discernable as such through its adversarial relationship to a no less American landscape of Fordist conformity. The Protagonization of the American Character The canonization of Catcher in the Rye did not take place in isolation but rather alongside the institution of the “classic” canon of American litera¬ ture during the early postwar years. As several literary scholars have dem¬ onstrated, until the 1950s a quite different Americanist canon had reigned, one responsive to the issues of early-twentieth-century progressivism and COLD WAR LITERATURE AND THE NATIONAL ALLEGORY 57 grounded in the ideals of realism and social commentary. A series of lit¬ erary histories ranging from Vernon Parrington’s Main Currents in Ameri¬ can Thought to Alfred Kazin’s On Native Ground assembled an American literary tradition valued for its efforts to represent and address the vari¬ ous ills and blessings, crises and opportunities, that modernity had de¬ livered to American life. Loosely speaking, this canon centered upon the works of the self-described realists and naturalists (Howells, Wharton, and Dreiser, among others), moved from there to the “lost generation” of mod¬ ernist writers, then onward to the proletarian and populist fictions of the 1930s. Yet in the 1950s, just when American literature was consolidating its legitimacy as a topic worthy of academic study, this progressive canon was pushed aside by a different ensemble of works championed by a new generation of Americanist critics. This new edition of the American literary tradition expressed a deci¬ sively different set of literary values that reflected the general political per¬ spective of its principal advocates: the anticommunist liberal New York intellectuals, whose principal organ was none other than Partisan Review. Realism became tainted as a politically naive aesthetic through its associa¬ tion with the left-wing genre of socialist realism. In its place, the newly in¬ vented tradition erected a vision of American literature as inherently antitotalitarian, aesthetically and politically hostile from its very inception to the closed-minded simplifications of both left-wing and right-wing world visions. In this regard, both the new canon and its critical apparatus func¬ tioned, in Geraldine Murphy’s apt words, as an “aesthetic counterpart to the vital-center liberalism of the first Cold War” (738), locating the vision¬ ary character of American freedom somewhere between the opposite ex¬ tremes of fascism and communism. Where the old canon had emphasized the development of American lit¬ erary realism, the new canon placed at its apex the works of the so-called American Renaissance. As Donald Pease has shown, Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain, whose texts had in fact been responding to quite different con¬ ditions in antebellum America, were now redeployed as a coherent tra¬ dition that dramatized the emergence of American freedom as a literary ideal, somehow already waging its heroic struggle against a prefigured totalitarianism. In the process, Pease argues, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and a handful of other texts were as¬ sembled as a hypercanon that would transform American literature itself into an “arena of cultural discussion” completely dominated by the Cold War (Moby-Dick, 112). Pronouncing these novels to be literary monuments 58 CHAPTER TWO to American freedom, postwar criticism transfigured their protagonists into allegorical representatives of an extraliterary “American character.” Moby-Dick, for example, was declared the greatest of American novels through readings in which Ishmael came to stand for a larger America that “proves its freedom by opposing Ahab’s totalitarian will” (113).5 Simi¬ larly, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn secured its reputation as the quintessential^ American novel alongside its eponymous charac¬ ter’s transformation into the archetype of the freedom-loving American, a youth who instinctively refused to conform to the proslavery morality of his day.6 A doubled process of representation operated in these politicizations of American literature. To draw on a distinction employed by Marx in “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” and usefully elaborated by Gayatri Spivak and David Lloyd, fictional characters became representatives of the American national character in the discrete senses of both the German words darstellen and vertreten.7 They served to “represent” America in the sense of an aestheticized “portrayal” or “image” (Darstellung), but in the process they also came to “represent” America by becoming its political “proxies” or “substitutes” (Vertretung), figures that could stand in and speak for the values and interests of the democratically “represented” nation. In this way, the domain of literature was politicized: novels now came to profess the nation’s geopolitical struggle for a free world. It was not simply that literature was politicized, however, but that poli¬ tics were rendered literary through these processes of national representa¬ tion. The literary criticism of the day, through its uses of allegory, worked to protagonize the “American character.” As in the “mirror-relation” of ide¬ ology so famously described by Althusser, the “little” American characters depicted in the new canon, when hailed as figures for a current struggle, rendered the U.S. nation-state imaginable as the general American charac¬ ter, and the Cold War itself as the Great American Novel, the paradigmatic story about the free spirit of the American people battling heroically against History’s most recent incarnation of political tyranny. This deep politicization of the new canon as “antitotalitarian” did not however bear a unitary meaning. It tended rather toward two different meanings related to the conflicting imperatives advanced in the Partisan Review symposium: at times the new canon projected an affirmative image of America as antithetically defined against the likes of Soviet communism. At others, it envisioned the American tradition as one of critical nonconfor¬ mity, whose only antithesis was its own “conformist” (and therefore incipiCOLD WAR LITERATURE AND THE NATIONAL ALLEGORY 59 ently totalitarian) American double, namely the nation’s uncritically affir¬ mative “new image.” Though dialectically linked, these imperatives pulled in opposite ideological directions. The affirmation of America demanded that the canon serve as an unambiguous endorsement of the freedom actu¬ ally embodied in the U.S. social order, thus equating “what is” with “what ought to be.” Critical nonconformity, meanwhile, employed the canon to stage America’s democratic credentials at one level of abstraction, as an im¬ manent critique of an actually existing America, a challenge to the inade¬ quacy of “what is” that paradoxically demonstrated America’s higher-order commitment to “what ought to be” in a genuinely antitotalitarian democ¬ racy.8 The canon, in short, was alternately patriotic and dissenting_in its nationalism, finding its validation in two joined yet distinctive metanarra¬ tives that may respectively be termed the national allegory of development and that of rebellion. The Allegory of Development: Protagonizing Liberal Maturity The development allegory interpreted American literature first and fore¬ most as the dramatization of a maturing political character. This story, which Thomas Schaub has simply described as the “liberal narrative,” often took an autobiographical form, allowing numerous intellectuals — Reinhold Niebuhr, Lionel Trilling, and Leslie Fiedler among them—to explain the rightward shift in their own postwar politics. It also func¬ tioned as a pational allegory, however, for in this story liberalism itself be¬ came the name for America’s political personality as it evolved from the thirties to the fifties. The story begins with an old liberalism, rooted in the early-twentieth-century progressive movement, that was heady, hopeful, and therefore naively sympathetic to communism. From here, Schaub de¬ scribes the trajectory of this “liberal narrative” as “a Blakean journey from innocence to experience, from the myopia of the utopian to the twentytwenty vision of the realist. . . . Their [liberals’] decisions were invariably accompanied by narratives of maturation and realism, of awakening to a more sober and skeptical perception of political reality and human nature” (5-6). Chastened in particular by the disillusioning betrayal of Stalinism, a new liberalism emerges painfully by the end of the story—realistic, re¬ sponsible, and vigilantly wary of manipulation by those to its left. Although Schaub only mentions the word in passing, “maturity” played a crucial part in constituting this liberal narrative as a figural allegory. Re¬ peatedly, intellectuals represented the transition from the “old” to the “new 60 CHAPTER TWO liberalism” (terms Schaub borrows directly from the fifties critic Richard Chase) through an age-coded personification. In this Bildung narrative, the young or adolescent liberalism becomes a protagonist, wide-eyed, naive, and uncompromising. By the story’s end, however, after a series of bitter experiences with political manipulation, an older, more reflective (and thus less infantile) liberalism with a deeper appreciation for human fallibilities has learned how to strike the proper balance between ideals and practical considerations. Seen in hindsight from the “mature” liberal perspective, the “young” liberalism appears above all as infantile. As Newton Arvin put it in his contribution to the Partisan Review symposium, the “negative rela¬ tion to one’s culture,” though valid in certain periods, becomes at moments like the present “simply sterile, even psychopathic, and ought to give way, as it has done here, in the last decade, to the positive relation. Anything else suggests too strongly the continuance into adult life of the negative Oedipal relations of adolescence —and in much of the alienation of the twenties and thirties there was just that quality of immaturity” (Partisan Review, 287). The Rebel Allegory and the Rise of Identity Criticism The allegory of development, however, was not the only “liberal narrative” through which the value of the new canon was established. No less impor¬ tant was an allegory of rebellion that may be understood as a variation of the development allegory, though with a substantively different ideologi¬ cal thrust. In this second allegory too, America had arrived at a new level of maturity, but here its terminus point was the rebelliousness of a youth¬ ful nation rather than the generic wisdom of adulthood. The rebel allegory dramatized the revolutionary moment of national self-declaration, reflec¬ tive of the moment (stressed by Erikson) when a self came to establish itself as a free and sovereign character by repudiating all coerced “role expecta¬ tions” placed upon the conduct of its personality. Like the concept of “criti¬ cal nonconformity,” the rebel allegory safeguarded “cultural freedom” as a core feature of the American character by facing down the same blanket loyalty that was celebrated in the development allegory. It was precisely at the moment when the allegory of development turned into its opposite — a tale of rebellion — that the concept of identity emerged as that story’s protagonist. When literary characters from the “American Renaissance”—Huck Finn, Ishmael, and the like—were transfigured by critics into a young American character declaring cultural independence from old world tradition, they also became figures for the identity concept COLD WAR LITERATURE AND THE NATIONAL ALLEGORY 61 itself in its newly politicized sense as a prescriptive discourse of autono¬ mous selfhood. Although the term “identity” did not become a common word in the American lexicon until approximately 1952, it began to satu¬ rate the discourses of literary criticism—-and in particular the criticism of American literature—very rapidly thereafter. By 1954 Richard Chase would already seize upon the word to establish the central importance of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” to American literature. Whitman’s great poem, he argued, thematizes what he called the “paradox of‘identity’” in American literature, the tension that the poem explores between the value of an American individual’s self-expression, and, granting the democratic values of American art, that individual’s status as synecdoche for the nation (181). Chase’s reading of Whitman’s poetry as a self-reflective allegory of na¬ tional identity also tacitly informs his most famous work of criticism, The American Novel and Its Tradition, in which Chase reconceived the romance as a uniquely American narrative tradition that unlike the realist Euro¬ pean novel, veered “toward mythic, allegorical, and symbolistic forms” (13). Though somewhat coy about the American romance’s literary mer¬ its, Chase, in associating it with the nation’s “ ‘democratic’ quality of mind” j (8), ultimately presented it as a “freer, more daring, more brilliant fiction” (viii) than the comparatively staid realism of the British novel.9 While con¬ fessing that some might find the social texture of the British novel more mature, Chase challenged those who might dismiss the romance as a prod¬ uct of the “unenlightened youth of our culture,” arguing that—whatever its limitations —its originary status had enabled subsequent American litera¬ ture to fuse “realism and romance” in ways that encouraged the “repeated rediscovery” of a young America’s sense of its literary freedom and possi¬ bility (xii). “Identity” is also briefly referenced in R. W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam, yet another influential account of the American renaissance as the foundation of the nation’s literary tradition. In the process of asserting that one can deduce a general account of American culture from the nineteenthcentury debates making up his book’s archive, Lewis argues that “a culture achieves identity not so much through the ascendancy of one particular set of convictions as through the emergence of its peculiar and distinctive dia¬ logue” (2). Even while introducing the word “identity” here to specify the possibility of something “peculiar and distinctive” about American culture, Lewis’s study soon concludes not only that America’s identity is distinct but that what characterizes this distinctiveness is its very passion to be dis¬ tinct. In essence, American Adam argues that the identity of American cul62 CHAPTER TWO ture consists precisely in insisting on its identity, in distinguishing itself as free and independent of the European culture from which it descends. The American character, claimed Lewis, reveals its inner nature through alle¬ gories of the “American Adam” in which the nation appears personified as a new man with a novel personality, somehow simultaneously innocent of and antagonistic toward the constraining codes of the ancestral “old world,” and therefore ever “hopeful” about the prospects of remaking the world outside the traditional norms earlier generations had prescribed (7). For Lewis too, then, the word “identity” served to express, above all, American literature’s essential movement toward the sovereign expression of a free national character, suited for leadership of the “free world.” Like its developmental counterpart, the rebel allegory defined the na¬ tional figure through the binary of young and old. The latter allegory, how¬ ever, reversed its hierarchy of values. Development condemned youth for its idealistic naivete and foolish “moral crusading,” while praising adult¬ hood for its cautionary wisdom. The allegory of rebellion retained youth’s association with idealism, but celebrated it instead as a positive challenge to the stultifying expectations of maturity. Thus for Chase, romance was the vibrant counterliterature of a young America, whose fresh imagina¬ tion flouted the more sober and mature outlook of European fiction. Lewis, meanwhile, in his figure of the American Adam, conjured up the nation as a man who (like liberalism at the start of the development allegory) was young, and eager to liberate himself from the chains of human tradition. Rebellious acts deserved praise, for they had won the nation an important identity marker: an autonomous literature of its own. The tropes of development and rebellion also implicitly imagined dif¬ ferent relationships between America and the third world. Development erected a conservative Bildung in which political moderation and tran¬ scended youthful naivete became signs of a positive maturity. As in the eponymous social science literature, therefore, the literary allegory of de¬ velopment framed the United States as an appropriate guide for aspiring third world countries seeking their own industrial maturity. Like these emerging nations, the United States had once been young, socioeconomi¬ cally ambitious, and morally uncompromising in its quest for social jus¬ tice. It too had been inclined toward dangerous revolutionary ideologies like communism. Through a process of political and economic maturation, however, it had discarded the false promises of utopian politics and come to recognize the complex truth that capitalist democracy provided a sufficient if imperfect state of freedom, prosperity, and social equality. The allegory COLD WAR LITERATURE AND THE NATIONAL ALLEGORY 63 about the movement of American intellectuals from the thirties into the fifties thus also served, paradoxically enough, as an allegory for third world nations as they made their transition from preindustrial to Fordist national economies. It was equally vital to American interests, however, that the first and third worlds not always be hierarchically differentiated by development, but that they also be ideologically aligned against the communist second world in a common creed of each nation’s right to freedom from tyranny. .To this end, the rebel allegory offered something that the development alle¬ gory could not: it enacted a revolutionary ethos in which the American character always already endorsed the efforts of the young (nations) to free themselves from the tyrannies of the old (world). Only in the rebel allegory, then, was identity affirmed as a psychopolitical ideal. The Rise of the Identity Novel Postwar literary critics obviously took an interest in the literary present as well as the past. In addition to cultivating the “American Renaissance” as an origin story for the nation’s literary tradition, they also hypercanonized a handful of contemporary novels using the same pair of allegori¬ cal reading strategies. But while an era of understood national emergence such as the American Renaissance lent itself to the discourse of identity, the older, “developed” America of the present did not, particularly given its widely professed evolution into a mass society. As previously observed, the Fordist conditions of suburban and organizational life were widely al¬ leged to promote the mass —and incipiently totalitarian—values of adjust¬ ment and conformity, presumably at the direct expense of the American individual’s sovereignty. Critics partial to the rebel allegory’s promise of identity, therefore, found the culture of postwar America especially trou¬ bling. As for instance R. W. B. Lewis complained in his epilogue to the American Adam, too many Americans in this “age of containment” took the classic Adamic hopefulness of their nation as an embarrassing symptom of “the culture’s youthful indiscretions and extravagances. We have had to get beyond such simple-minded adolescence confidence, we suppose; .. . and we sometimes congratulate ourselves austerely for having settled, like adults or Europeans, upon a course of prolonged but tolerable hopeless¬ ness” (195). Yet, as Lewis admonished his readers, the current remnants of the nation’s classic adolescent headiness should be deemed vitally impor¬ tant to postwar America because “recalling the moral and artistic adven64 CHAPTER TWO turousness of a century ago may help release us a little from our current rigidity” in this “conformist” era when we pathetically “huddle together and shore up defenses,” both in “our literature and our public conduct” (196). Lewis was hardly alone in his fears and hopes concerning the present lit¬ erary age; he echoes Partisan Review’s anxiety concerning the mass confor¬ mity dictated by “cultural democracy.” Numerous critics feared that Ameri¬ can culture had traveled, per the subtitle of American Moderns, Maxwell Geismar’s 1958 study of contemporary American literature, “From Rebel¬ lion to Conformity.” The American writer’s traditional “rebelliousness,” his commitment to social commentary and criticism, Geismar morosely ex¬ plained, had succumbed to “the historical setting ... of the uneasy ‘peace,’ the tensions of the Cold War, the return to ‘normalcy,’ and the epoch of con¬ formity” (ix). John Aldridge likewise began his book In Search of Heresy: American Literature in an Age of Conformity? with a plea for literary chal¬ lenges to the “conformism” of modern American mass society that might reanimate the “ideal of creative independence and free critical dissent which has come down to us in the central tradition of American thought and letters and which has energized the work, even as it has debilitated more than a few of the lives, of most of the writers whom we now consider to be important” (8). This “search for heresy” led many critics directly to a cluster of rebellious characters who might be deployed as literary avatars of the identity concept. In the closing pages of The American Adam, R. W. B. Lewis singled out three contemporary novels for their praiseworthy fidelity to the idealistic spirit of the Adamic American character: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Written by the three most celebrated authors of the immedi¬ ate postwar years, these novels shared certain noteworthy characteristics. Each is voiced in the first person. In each the narrator takes us along on his picaresque journey through a social environment bent on controlling or manipulating his sense of self. In each, the protagonist’s .resistance to these forces of manipulation may be read as a defense of personal identity. And lastly, the struggle for personal identity may be allegorized in each as a national narrative. All three novels, it must be noted, were also susceptible to conserva¬ tive “development” readings, in which a young protagonist outgrows his ill-considered social naivete, moving into a more mature comprehension of social and moral complexity. These texts, in other words, accrued lit¬ erary merit in part because they could be enlisted to the cause of libCOLD WAR LITERATURE AND THE NATIONAL ALLEGORY 65 eral anticommunist ontology. Nevertheless, as Lewis’s selection of them as “Adamic” texts attests, they were also (if in different degrees) valued for the rebelhousnessqrf their protagonists, who thereby expressed the un¬ flagging struggle for identity that characterized America. Not only did this latter reading strategy create a distinct axiological basis for their literary canonization, but it grounded its concept of literary merit in the aesthetic vindication of what might be called the “antiauthoritarian personality” of their American protagonists, whose defense of their psychopolitical rights point broadly in the direction of identity politics. The anticommunist development allegory is particularly evident in In¬ visible Man. As Thomas Schaub observes, Ellison’s novel touted a “new liberal” vision of ontological complexity and paradox that was explicitly offered as an anticommunist fable: the Invisible Man must learn to reject the dogmatic “laws of history” propagated by the “Brotherhood,” a blatant fictional counterpart to the American Communist Party .in the 1930s. In¬ visible Man’s charm for postwar literary critics derived in no small part from its Trillingesque invocation of an anticommunist “liberal imagination” that rejected all simplifications of sociopolitical reality (91-93). This assessment of the novel’s appeal does not reckon, however, with its pioneering use of the identity concept. Ellison’s nameless protagonist relates to his reader a personal history of naive efforts to please a train of au¬ thority figures who successfully dominate his sense of self. It is in the scene that makes the Invisible Man’s psychopolitical domination most explicit, at the factory hospital when he is strapped to an electroshock device bent on “entirely changing the personality,” that the word “identity” makes its first major appearance. “What was my identity,” he asks himself, realizing that he no longer has any idea. It is at this point that the Invisible Man actively begins his efforts to rebel against the Bledsoes, Nortons, and others whom he has heretofore faithfully obeyed, speaking out against those who would dispossess people like himself of their humanity.10 Identity reappears as the novel’s central theme in a scene that, at first glance, would seem to assert the illusory nature of what we take for granted as social reality. Repeat¬ edly mistaken for the street hipster Rinehart, and recognizing the power of such misrecognition, the Invisible Man asks himself: “If dark glasses and a white hat could blot out my identity so quickly, who actually was who?” (hi). In the end, however, though attracted to Rinehart’s technique of ma¬ nipulating what Erik Erikson would have called the “role expectations” of others, the Invisible Man embraces a more robust concept of identity, one 66 CHAPTER TWO that stems from both self-discovery and a self-assertive refusal to submit blindly to the equally blind demands of those who embody social authority. Andrew Hoberek has astutely noted that the Invisible Man’s others rep¬ resent a world of mass institutions—the black college, the paint company, and the Brotherhood—that mirror almost exactly the mass organizations imperiling the agency of the so-called white-collar Organization Man.11 And if the Invisible Man in fact begins his story as something of a victim of the organization, a “yes-man” served up to mass society, then in Ellison’s novel, as in the culture at large, the cure will be found in a prescriptive category of identity. This is not the nominalistic sense of “identity” ma¬ nipulated by Rinehart, but rather a psychopolitical brand: the emerging, but still unnamed protagonist must achieve self-recognition in order to then declare independence from his tyrants.12 As Jonathan Arac points out, the Invisible Man ends his story by declaring it to have been just such an identitarian voyage of self-discovery and self-assertion, both as a personal narrative and as a national allegory (“Toward,” 195-96). The Invisible Man at least understands “who I was and where I was and knowing too that I had no longer to run for or from the Jacks and the Emersons and Bledsoes and Nortons, but only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to rec¬ ognize the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine” (550). In the novel’s closing sentence, “Who knows, but that at lower frequencies I speak for you?,” the Invisible Man incorporates even the reader into this agonistic search for identity. It is hardly surprising that R. W. B. Lewis and other critics fixated on Ellison’s Invisible Man, for above and beyond its par¬ ticipation in the developmental narrative, few other postwar novels were so ripe for inclusion in a canon of allegorical identity novels. Though lacking a similarly direct use of the term “identity,” Saul Bel¬ low’s The Adventures of Augie March was similarly read and valorized through the emerging discourse of identity. Generally speaking, Bellow’s conservative cultural and political temper, his impatience with utopian or romantic simplifications of the world, closely allied his fiction to the para¬ digm of development. As Schaub notes, however, Augie March was an ex¬ ceptional work in Bellow’s oeuvre, widely acclaimed as a break with the careful formalism and modernist despair of his earlier writings. In con¬ trast to them, it was taken as a literary “declaration of individual freedom,” driven by the “cocky American self-reliance” of its narratorial personality, a work that would influence later countercultural fiction writers such as Thomas Pynchon (80-81). COLD WAR LITERATURE AND THE NATIONAL ALLEGORY 67 As Andrew Hoberek has convincingly argued, we can witness through Augie the inauguration of identity as a key feature of what he calls the “socalled Jewish novel.” Stressing the novel’s organization around a “series of submissions to and rebellions from various figures who want to eliminate his personhood by turning him into an instrument in their own plans” (Twilight, 121), Hoberek argues that the Jew became the postwar exem¬ plar of American identity for the reason that, in a mass age, s/he could paradoxically be understood both as an outsider (to the traditional wasp conception of American nativism) and the consummate insider (the most quickly and thoroughly assimilated of people to the Fordist white-collar world). The Jew therefore, like the black in Ellison, becomes an ideal char¬ acter to be pressed into service for a national allegory whose protagonist serves simultaneously as patriot and critic, conformist and rebel. While, in each episode of his life, the chameleonlike Augie March continuously benefits himself by meeting the expectations of his various authority fig¬ ures (thus appearing other-directed in Riesman’s sense, “Rinehartish” in the Ellisonian sense), he also insists upon the inner-directed character of his insurgent national selfhood, most famously expressed in the novel’s opening sentence, “I am an American, Chicago-born ... and go at things ... free-style, and will make the record my own way” (5). One striking feature of the postwar canon, namely the rise of the “out¬ sider” writer to a paradigmatic position in American letters can thus be traced to the ascendance of the identity concept in criticism. This was par¬ ticularly true for Jewish authors, whose writings had been previously per¬ ceived as a minor immigrant or ethnic literature, but black and gay writers were likewise elevated to a position of national prominence as definitively American writers (including Ellison, but also James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and others). The canon¬ ization of both Ellison and Bellow’s fiction, in short, directs our attention to typifications of the young^American self as a “criticaTnonconformist,” "someone who struggles to live and think in his own way, particularly in a present age of “other-directed” conformity. If this list of postwar authors demonstrates a growing deployment of the racial or sexual outsider as the representative rebel against social con¬ formity, it reveals even more consistently that the rise of the “identity” concept in criticism was reflected in dramatic narratives of youthful emer¬ gence from one’s marginality or, more precisely, from one’s minority (a coming into majority both as canonical literature, as allegorical representa¬ tive of the nation, and more literally as a claiming of the right to sovereign 68 CHAPTER TWO self-determination, something denied to “minorities”). Beyond the char¬ acters of the Invisible Man and Augie March, we can add here the oedipal struggles of John Grimes in Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, the in¬ subordinate daughter Beneatha in Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun, and the various sexy young men whose eroticism disrupt their drab surroundings in the plays of Tennessee Williams and William Inge. To the young protago¬ nists of these racial and/or queer literary works, we can further add a cluster of young women: Mick Kelly and Frankie Jasmine from Carson McCuller’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding respectively, Allison MacKenzie and Selena Cross from Grace Metallious’s Peyton Place, the beat heroes of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and, finally, the char¬ acter certified by R. W. B. Lewis as the last of the American Adams, argu¬ ably the single best-known “American character” of fifties fiction, Holden Caulfield of J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield and the Birth of Identity Criticism Holden Caulfield, the protagonist-narrator of J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, is male, white, and a member of the professionally elite upper middle class of New York City. He fails, in other words, to look anything like a representative subject of what we now call identity politics. Nevertheless, Holden occasioned one of the earliest applications of the identity concept to a contemporary novel. David L. Stevenson, arguing in 1958 that Salinger’s novel had brilliantly captured the “crisis” of the individual in America’s “Lonely Crowd,” praised Catcher as a “boy’s comment, half-humorous, halfagonizing, concerning his attempts to recapture his identity.” “Through him,” Stevenson contended, “Salinger has evoked the reader’s conscious¬ ness of indefinable rejections and rebellions that are part of the malaise of our times” (43). While Stevenson’s explicit citation of “identity” came ex¬ ceptionally early, it merely made visible the guiding influence that the new concept had already begun to exert on critical understandings of Catcher in the Rye, and ultimately on postwar literary culture at large. Indeed, the very fact that Catcher’s protagonist lacks the overt racial, ethnic, or sexual casting that we have come to expect of an “identity novel,” yet was read as one all the same, lays bare the ideological work that identity performed in the early years of the Cold War. The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger’s one and only novel, was published in 1951. The story begins with Holden, in convalescence at a sanitarium in California, offering to recount to the reader the events that led to his reCOLD WAR LITERATURE AND THE NATIONAL ALLEGORY 69 cent breakdown. Holden’s recollections begin at the moment when he has flunked out of an East Coast prep school, and extend through a three-day odyssey of feverish wanderings in New York City. Catcher is most famous, of course, for Holden’s critical perspective on most of the people around him, his denunciation of what he calls their “phoniness,” and his repeated efforts to find solace, advice, and ultimately a possible future with others who might escape this phoniness. While it is difficult to pin down the pre¬ cise meaning of “phoniness” for Holden, the word assuredly involves an indictment of American mass culture and all those who submit to its logic. Holden directs his first denunciation at his own elder brother D.B., who once wrote sincere short stories but now composes instead commercial screenplays in Los Angeles. Holden includes on his “phony list” a range of typical culture industry products: Hollywood movies, magazine fiction, Broadway .theater, slick lounge musjc^ and so forthAs a strong-selling Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, Catcher received solid but unremarkable attention from magazine reviewers following its release. Its literary fortunes shifted drastically in 1956 and 1957, however, as critics began casting an increasingly obsessive gaze upon the novel. Short and simply written though it was, Catcher became the subject of dozens of articles and several scholarly books between 1956 and 1963.13 So rapidly did this interest in Catcher overtake the critical establishment that several other novelists, feeling slighted, decried the unjustified burst of articles, essays, and speculations as pandering to Salinger’s work.14 Only a small minority of critics disputed Catcher’s merit, however, while the vast majority celebrated the authenticity of its teenage narrator’s colloquial voice, the steadfastness of its utopian commitments, and —in what proves a combination of these two—its efficacy as contemporary national allegory. Ihab Hassan’s advocacy of Salinger’s work as “seriously engaged by a cur¬ rent and a traditional aspect of American reality” (260) stemmed from his more general views concerning the adolescent’s role in American litera¬ ture: “The life of the adolescent or youth still in his teens mirrors clearly the ambiguities of rejection and affirmation, revolt and conformity, hope and disenchantment observed in the culture at large. In his life as in our history, the fallacies of innocence and the new slate are exemplified. His predicament reflects the predicament of the self in America” It is note¬ worthy that all of the binaries offered by Hassan derive from the cultural dilemmas specifically associated with the Fordist moment/1 The predica¬ ment of Vejection and affirmation” echoes the problem raised in Partisan Review of reconciling the positive anticommunist patriotism of the postwar 70 CHAPTER TWO intelligentsia with their duty_as nonconformist critics of American mass society. The binary of “revolt and conformity” explicitly taps into the figure of the American rebel who spoke to the agency panic that was triggered by Fordist mass regimentation. “Hope and disenchantment,” finally, al¬ ludes to the Adamic figure of a young America (Lewis’s “party of hope”), but also to the inordinately naive hopefulness of Popular Front “old liberal¬ ism,” from which American intellectuals had supposedly now sobered up. Hassan, in short, condenses into the character of the adolescent all of the deeply contradictory judgments associated with both national allegories, development and rebellion, the tension between which implicitly consti¬ tutes for Hassan the nation’s so-called predicament. Subjecting it to this powerful hermeneutic, Hassan, like many other critics, came to interpret Catcher in the Rye not simply as a psychological tale tracing the pitfalls of growing up but rather as a fable in which the adolescent Holden expresses the paradoxical meaning of the nation’s development. Although his vague language remained open to either developmental or identitarian readings of Catcher, like the vast majority of other critics Has¬ san tended to prioritize the latter, endorsing Salinger’s novel about “ado¬ lescence in revolt” for what Robert Lindner’s, the famed psychotherapist of youth, would have called Holden’s “positive rebellion.” In Salinger’s work, claimed Hassan, “the retreat to childhood is not simply an escape; it is also criticism, an affirmation of values which, for better or worse, we still cherish; and the need for adolescent disaffiliation, the refusal of initiation, expresses the need to reconceive American reality” (260-261). In lauding Holden as an allegorical figure for America’s aspirations, Hassan alludes to another study of Salinger that had already become the single most influential assertion of Catcher’s literary importance; Arthur Heiserman and James Miller’s essay “J. D. Salinger: Some Crazy Cliff.” Heiserman and Miller were among the first critics to praise Catcher for its quintessential^ American heroization of “the outcast, the person who defies traditions in order to arrive at some pristine knowledge, some per¬ sonal integrity.” They also designated Holden a Fiedlerian “bad boy” whose personal sense of virtue led him into conflict with various “institutions” (24-25). In adulthood, one must capitulate to a barrage of institutional demands, but childhood in Salinger’s work offers a prelapsarian innocent freedom from those impending demands. Adolescence, in turn, represents the transitional moment when one recognizes the loss of personal integ¬ rity that adulthood entails. Thus adolescence provides a heroic opportunity for defiance: “In childhood he [Holden Caulfield] had what he is now seekCOLD WAR LITERATURE AND THE NATIONAL ALLEGORY 71 ing —nonphoniness, truth, innocence. . . . Still, unlike all of us, Holden refuses to compromise with adulthood and its necessary adulteries: and his heroism drives him berserk” (75-76). Following the spirit of the devel¬ opment allegory, Heiserman and Miller assume a consensus (their “all of us”) that accepts the inevitable “compromise with adulthood” and recog¬ nizes the price of refusal: psychosocial breakdown or what Riesman called “anomie.” Yet Holden’s defiance remains an act of “heroism,” presumably because his uncompromising search for personal integrity also “speaks for us,” just as the Invisible Man claims to do at some lower frequency. In that sense, Holden as the figure of a national allegory represents. America’s better side, its submerged commitment to a sovereign selfhood, which sur¬ vives intact beneath pragmatic compromises made with mass society. Early influences of the identity concept are apparent in the critics’ ubiq¬ uitous references to Catcher’s special relationship to teenagers and in their heroization of Holden as the quintessential^ American rebel. Critics writ¬ ing in the late fifties and early sixties almost invariably noted Catcher’s ap¬ parent popularity among youth, explaining it in terms of an “identity” be¬ tween Holden and his young readers. Dan Wakefield, in his celebratory essay “The Search for Love,” claimed that teenagers find “in Holden Caul¬ field, and to a lesser extent in James Dean, an expression of their own most fundamental attitudes.” In “Everybody’s Favorite,” Alfred Kazin claimed that Salinger writes to young people “in a language that is particularly hon¬ est and their own, with a vision of things that captures their most secret judgments of the world” (48). By the early sixties, the language of identity would become entirely explicit. “What was it about the novel that struck Americans so squarely ten years ago and continues to hit the mark still?” asked Robert Gutwillig. “Primarily it was, I think, the shock of recogni¬ tion. Many of my friends and this writer himself identified completely with Holden” (5). Henry Grunwald’s anthology even included a short essay by an adolescent (and a self-professed “crazy kid”), who explained: I knew at least ten Holden Caulfields at itt_every boy who reads The Catcher thinks he’s just like Holden and I think that’s one of the reasons for its great success; we can all identify ourselves with his plight. . . . It’s also sort of a fad among us to be very critical of everything and everyone, and those who are most critical are the strongest and most independent.... You could say he was trying to find himself, his iden¬ tity, and all that, but that’s a lot of categorical nonsense—who isn’t? (Parker, 254, 257) 72 CHAPTER TWO Being “critical” provided the substance for critics asserting Holden’s “iden¬ tity” with America’s youth. Young people, as the critics saw it, “recognized” themselves in Holden precisely because they too desired to establish a sov¬ ereign identity that resisted the “age of conformity” they inhabited. The beginnings of the “rebel” reading of Catcher trace back to Salinger himself, who in 1945 and 1946, on the heels of both Robert Lindner’s Rebel without a Cause and the New York Times’s “Teen-Age Bill of Rights,” pub¬ lished two early Holden sketches titled “I’m Crazy” and “Slight Rebellion off Madison.” Like the rebel in Robert Lindner’s later works of psychopoliti¬ cal commentary, such as Prescription for Rebellion and Must You Conform?, Holden was a youth mistaken for a madman merely because he had re¬ fused to become a mass man. It is not surprising, then, that one of Catcher’s first reviewers was Ernest Jones, the famous Freudian analyst of childhood and adolescence, who in “Case History of Us All" contended that the novel reflects in Holden’s sense of alienation “what every sensitive sixteen-yearold since Rousseau has felt, and of course, what each one of us is certain he has felt” (8). Maxwell Geismar, in a 1957 essay, made an even more di¬ rect connection to Lindner and James Dean, asserting that “if this hero [Holden] really represents the nonconformist rebellion of the Fifties, he is a rebel without a past, apparently, and without a cause” (96). In “J. D. Salinger: Search for Wisdom,” Granville Hicks would explicitly assert the equivalence of rebellion and identity for young readers. “There are, I am convinced, millions of young Americans who feel closer to Salinger than to any other writer,” wrote Hicks, for the two reasons that “he speaks their language ... a voice we instantly recognize,” but also because “he expresses their rebellion.” Students, Hicks writes, “admired his [Holden’s] intransi¬ gence, too, which he so often refers to as his craziness, and rejoiced in his gestures of defiance,” yet this identification with Holden’s rebelliousness was commendable precisely because of its utopian affirmations (88-89). In a conciliatory gesture toward the priorities of the development allegory, Hicks wrote: “Holden is not rejecting maturity but is looking for a better model than his elders by and large present” (91). The Age of Simple Truth: Huck, Holden, and the Boyhood of America As Alan Nadel has shown, the doubled readings of Catcher corresponded closely to the complex pressures of anticommunism. Holden’s obsession with veracious speech simultaneously satisfied two different demands of COLD WAR LITERATURE AND THE NATIONAL ALLEGORY 73 the era: on the one hand, for testimony that demonstrates one’s “loyalty,” but at the same time for a critique of the “phoniness” or untruthfulness of any such testimony (71-78). In short, Holden paradoxically satisfied both the need for McCarthyite conformity and a rebellion against it. This raises the question, however, as to why it was that critics so tenaciously associated Catcher with the second of these imperatives. Identity after all did not always trump maturity as a value in literary criti¬ cism. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March, as noted, drew praise as novels of the rebelling self in its search for autonomy and internal direction; that is, as novels of identity. Such praise, however, was always more than balanced out by stronger developmental readings, which valorized them as novels of education whose characters (with the readers in tow) advanced from blindness to insight, from inno¬ cence to experience, and from infantilism to maturity. Catcher in the Rye by contrast provoked very few such readings. Although a small handful of critics, most notably John Aldridge and Maxwell Geismar, condemned Salinger’s novel as an adolescent protest that seemed overly “cynical, defi¬ ant, and blind” (Aldridge, 26), even they persisted in interpreting the novel as a (poor) instantiation of the rebel allegory. The only essay to interpret Catcher actively as an allegory of development, Peter Seng’s “The Fallen Idol,” which first appeared in College English, found no allies and was indeed rebuked by a run of letters in the journal challenging his interpretation.16 This absolute primacy of rebelliousness in Salinger criticism derives from the allegorical meaning of age itself with which critics approached both Holden Caulfield and the America that he represented for them. Con¬ sider, for instance, the widely praised kinship of Holden Caulfield and Huckleberry Finn, a lineage that many critics proffered as evidence of Catcher’s literary merit. No critic was firmer about this link than Charles Kaplan, who in “Holden and Huck: The Odysseys of Youth” asserted that “Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield are true blood-brothers.... [TJhese two novels thus deal obliquely and poetically with a major theme in American life, past and present—the right of the nonconformist to assert his non¬ conformity” (80). Kaplan’s nationalist argument for Catcher’s canonization can be crudely expressed by a simple deductive chain of equivalences: The Catcher in the Rye = Huckleberry Finn, Huckleberry Finn - great Ameri¬ can literature. But, as we can also see, identity itself becomes the criterion that sets this equation in motion. America's “national character” here actu¬ ally becomes its “nonconfonnity/’ In literature, this takes the form of the people’s willingness to honor the right of youth to reject the mandates of 74 CHAPTER TWO the adult world. Great American literature is that which endorses the non¬ conformity of the young. The language of “right” is crucial here in discern¬ ing the implied linkage to the discourse of identity. Like the “Teen-Age Bill of Rights” that the New York Times published in 1945, Kaplan imagines the emergence of the young into selfhood as a matter of justice, representable as a right to psychopolitical autonomy. In noting this theme’s relevance to both “past and present,” however, Kaplan points to a temporal complication of identity that deeply concerned the critics of American literature. This complication appears somewhat more explicitly in Heiserman and Miller’s essay, which along with Kaplan’s was among the very first to stress Catcher’s affinity with Huckleberry Finn. Twain and Salinger’s common genius, Heiserman and Miller suggest, lay in their masterful use of a colloquial American adolescent’s voice to con¬ vey their respective “childism,” by which they mean the nostalgic wish to recover our inner Adamic child. “Each of us does indeed carry an Adam inside us,” they argue, a new and innocent self whom we wish we could rescue from “childism’s” opposite: “adultism,” the ideology of compromise with adult corruption (220). Because Huck flees from the adults who would “sivilize,” Twain’s novel became the quintessential antidevelopmental nar¬ rative, rebuking the pedagogical principle of maturity, while Holden, the prep school dropout, became Huck’s twentieth-century counterpart. Both characters, asserted Heiserman and Miller, are “fugitives from education,” adolescents who defiantly seek their own path in life in lieu of the one to which adults would direct them (223). By alluding to R.W. B. Lewis’s “American Adam,” Heiserman and Miller make a subtle but highly consequential move. While they understand child¬ hood as a timeless phase in the human life cycle, the “American Adam” sig¬ nifies for them a literary character type specific to an earlier era of Ameri¬ can literature. Huck Finn, in this sense, is an Adamic American character in a novel that properly belongs to the nation’s Adamic moment of cultural emergence during the American Renaissance. Holden Caulfield, by con¬ trast, is a latecomer, equally Adamic,^yet out of step with his era. It is for this reason, they speculate, that Holden is driven to insanity; there is little room for characters like Huck or Holden in the mid-twentieth century. In this respect, Heiserman and Miller echo Lewis himself, Geismar, Aldridge, and many others, who saw the present age of conformism as deeply inhos¬ pitable to the idealistic individualism of the Adamic American. Nowhere are the political stakes of this assertion clearer than in Lionel Trilling’s essay on Huckleberry Finn, which lurked in the background of COLD WAR LITERATURE AND THE NATIONAL ALLEGORY 75 these numerous comparisons of Twain and Salinger. Trilling’s essay, origi¬ nally published in 1948, one year after the House Un-American Activities Committee began its hearings on Hollywood communists, was reprinted as part of The Liberal Imagination. In the essay Trilling affirms the great¬ ness of Huckleberry Finn as “one of the central documents of American cul¬ ture,” which he locates in its boyish power of telling the truth: “No one, as he [Twain] well knew, sets a higher value on truth than a boy. Truth is the whole of a boy’s conscious demand upon the world of adults. He is likely to believe that the adult world is in a conspiracy to lie to him, and it is this belief, by no means unfounded, that arouses Tom and Huck and all boys to their moral sensitivity, their everlasting concern with justice, what they call fairness” (101). Catcher criticism unmistakably echoed Trilling’s reading of Huckleberry Finn whenever it praised Holden Caulfield for allegorizing a moral and truthful America whose idealism always demands far more of the world than it has inherited from the last generation. Trilling, however, describes such boyishness with considerable ambivalence. On the one hand, he ad¬ mits to a sort of lying conspiracy in the adult world and praises Twain’s novel for offering the “very voice of unpretentious truth” (113). The charac¬ ter Huck Finn possesses a “liberal imagination,” a utopian desire for fair¬ ness, justice, and democracy that leads him to reject compromise with an institution so ethically adulterated as slavery. At the same time, Trilling also suggests that the novel “is a hymn to an older America forever gone,” an age of innocence that was ushered to its close by what Trilling calls “money-capitalism” (no). Indulging here in a sentimental and nostalgic discussion of Huck Finn’s world, Trilling only hints softly that today such “unpretentious truth” may no longer be affordable. By contrast, in the essays that precede it in The Liberal Imagination, such sentimentality is not simply avoided; it is de¬ rided as dangerous. America’s liberal character must be tempered, for pure idealism is easily manipulated by political cynics. In his famous attack on the famous progressive critic Vernon Parrington, Trilling complains that “ideals are different from ideas; in the liberal criticism which descends from Parrington ideals consort happily with reality and they urge us to deal impatiently with ideas —a ‘cherished goal’ forbids that we stop to consider how we reach it, or if we may not destroy it in trying to reach it the wrong way” (19). Trilling decodes this cryptic comment by way of illustration: the errors of Theodore Dreiser, who late in life became affiliated with the Com¬ munist Party. Since communism is, for Trilling, the self-evidently “wrong 76 CHAPTER TWO way” to actualize one’s liberal ideals, Dreiser’s lack of political judgment confirms the lack of literary judgment by progressive critics like Parrington, who foolishly embraced him as “one of the great, significant expressions of [liberalism’s] spirit” (18-19). Trilling’s literary criteria here flatly contradict those he espouses in his essay on Huckleberry Finn. The very qualities that he praises in Twain’s work—its simple expression of America’s democratic desire for human equality and justice, and most of all its idealism —are those he here de¬ nounces in Parrington. In celebrating Theodore Dreiser’s novels, Parring¬ ton reveals the profound naivete of his liberalism, which can be readily exploited and turned against itself by communism, its worst enemy. Trill¬ ing papers over the contradiction between his positive reading of political idealism in Twain and his negative evaluation thereof in Dreiser precisely by manipulating an allegory of age that fixes an appropriate relationship between national development and fictional character. Twain’s novel is a boy’s novel, written from the point of view of a boy, but also written at a time when America was young, when an era prior to “money-capitalism” could still be remembered. For Trilling, therefore, Huck Finn locates ideal¬ ism in the nation’s youth (in both senses), where it belongs. Dreiser’s fic¬ tion, by contrast, neither places idealism in the mouth of a boy, nor does it reserve its democratic impulse for America’s precapitalist past. Where Twain’s democratic spirit can be safely dealt with in nostalgic, bygone terms, Dreiser’s raises the spectre that American democratic idealism, placed in conflict with market values, might yield sympathy for twentiethcentury communism. Like Huckleberry Finn, Catcher embodied Ijberal idealism in the figure of a boy. Like Dreiser’s fiction, however, Catcher had been written in the age of America’s maturity, not its wide-eyed youth, and the sorts of principles mo¬ tivating its protagonist’s rebelliousness, in the view of liberal intellectuals like Trilling, therefore needed to be tempered with a measure of skeptical conservatism. Nevertheless, Catcher’s boyish voice rendered it an appropri¬ ately aged work with which to recall the radical origins of American liber¬ alism, even if those origins were taken to belong to a youthful stage of na¬ tional character development, a crucially valuable, if now completed, phase in America’s identity formation. Catcher, in other words, was not typically held to espouse a viable alternative to the “mature” liberalism of America’s present. Its canonical value lay in its recapitulation of a more principled American past, a resurrection of the spirit of Huck Finn, with which the present could be confronted, criticizedTand literally rejuvenated. Catcher, COLD WAR LITERATURE AND THE NATIONAL ALLEGORY 77 as Heiserman and Miller implied, allowed America to recover its inner Adamic youth, Jo rediscover its sense of hope and assertive self-creation by confronting the conformist pressures of present-day adult America with accusations voiced by the adolescent character of its own past.17 For all that Catcher is set entirely in the present moment, therefore, its promotion to the canon of American literature proceeded through a tem¬ porally displaced national allegory that reconciled the identitarian and the development liberal narratives through a manipulation of national time. At the level of Darstellung or likeness, Holden appeared as an earlier America, the blood brother of Huck Finn, but at the level of Vertretung, as a proxy for the nation, Holden spoke for “all of us” in present-day America, the deeper level at which Americans presumably wished toj^cover that young, Adamic America, and thus implicitly hoped, in Stevenson’s words, to “re¬ capture” identity as the American ideal at a moment of “crisis” brought on by the forces of “conformity.” As Hassan put it in his closing sentence, Salinger’s heroes “play upon our nostalgia for a mythic American past. They also manage to raise nostalgia to the condition of hope” (289). The mainstream of liberal critics thus at least tacitly sided with Mr. Antolini on the point that Holden needed to “mature,” to find a way to live in the present day. In this sense Catcher’s reception remained shaped by the de¬ velopmental liberal paradigm championed by Trilling. Nevertheless, the critics found Holden no less admirable in his “immaturity,” since his con¬ viction for national ideals was sorely needed in the Fordist present. Earlier I suggested that national allegories signify precisely through the contradiction they delineate between the representative figure and the ground of the nation. In the case of Salinger’s novel, this contradiction was projected across a temporal axis. Catcher’s allegorical value was grounded in precisely this “age of conformism,” a present-day America that Holden rightly deemed “phony.” In the ground of this allegory—acknowledged often enough but far more briefly than was its figure—America appears as a “lonely crowd” of “other-directed” people, a landscape of characters who have fully internalized a mass cultural logic of mutual equivalence, com¬ merce, and sign exchange. It is they who allow Holden to stand out as an identity figure, against a nation that has become phony because it caters or prostitutes itself to a system of commerce. Holden did so, however, as a figure for a younger America, like Huck Finn himself, and therefore not yet compliant with its commercial logic. On the allegorical level, Holden’s re¬ sistance issued from a time before the “adulthood” of the nation, a youthful 78 CHAPTER TWO era prior to—yet standing in judgment of—the “age of conformity.” Holden figures the justified recalcitrance of a former (young) America to melt into the topos of its contemporary ground, the “lonely crowd” of characters ar¬ rayed in its background. This temporal strategy played a key part in what might be called the “first worlding” of American literature. While the development allegory confirmed the nation’s mature reconciliation to industrial capitalism and its market values, the rebel allegory foregrounded by Catcher demonstrated the survival of a national passion for freedom and sovereignty that America shared with the new nations liberating themselves from colonialism. In readings of Catcher, Holden’s demand for identity took priority over the theme of maturity, and Salinger’s novel thereby became a far more em¬ phatic icon of American critical nonconformity than most other canoni¬ cal works. Catcher among the Paperbacks: Figuring America in the Mass Marketplace In its standing as national allegory, Catcher operated both at the level of the national individual (the allegory’s “vehicle”), an American teenager bat¬ tling for self-definition in a mass society, but also at the level of the people (its “tenor”). His story became, to paraphrase Ernest Jones, a “case history of us all,” a metonym for America’s “lonely crowd” fighting to retain its collective sovereignty against the disempowering force of its own mass cul¬ ture. Paradoxically, however, Catcher was also often read as a product of the very mass culture that it appeared to criticize. Phenomenally success¬ ful in paperback form, Catcher became a paradigmatic case study of the great shifts in postwar book culture. Here again, Catcher was taken to be representative of American literature, which faced either a fate of degra¬ dation (as it was massified by the marketplace) or else a realization of its deepest promise if the paperback were taken instead as a means to literary democratization. Among the various sectors of the culture industry, the book industry was unique in that its production process underwent a Fordist revolution in lockstep with the industrial core of the postwar American economy.18 The mass-market paperback, whose centrality to print culture we now take for granted, was actually a product innovation of the 1940s and 1950s that dras¬ tically transformed the book industry. Until World War II, the book market COLD WAR LITERATURE AND THE NATIONAL ALLEGORY 79 had been dominated by a handful of small but prestigious hardcover pub¬ lishing houses. In less than ten years, new companies that had begun mod¬ estly enough as softcover reprint houses for the majors —Pocket Books, New American Library, Bantam, and several others—would overwhelm the traditional book companies with tremendous sales figures made pos¬ sible by their innovations in mass production and distribution. As Kenneth Davis writes in his histoire de livre, “Before these inexpensive, widely distrib¬ uted books came along, only the rarest of books sold more than a hundred thousand copies; a million-seller was a real phenomenon. . . . Overnight, the paperback changed that. Suddenly, a book could reach not hundreds or thousands of readers, but millions, many of whom had never owned a book before” (xii). Soft binding and the replacement of hand stitching with machine-applied glue allowed the price of a book to be reduced to as low as twenty-five cents. Now comparable in price to magazines, books began selling for the first time outside of bookstores, at magazine stands, in dime stores, and even in airports. Books in effect became yet another sort of dis¬ posable text affordable even to the casual reader. Because paperbacks circulated outside the traditional network of book distribution, their sales figures appeared relatively immune to the opinions of critics, librarians, or booksellers, the very people who had traditionally guided readership. Instead, paperback companies began to rely heavily on advertising copy to woo their customers, beginning first and foremost with the book’s graphic covers. The vast expansion of book readership enabled by paperback print capitalism thus led to a perceptible decline in cultural authority by the traditional arbiters of literary merit. Literary intellectuals already concerned about their “age of conformity” therefore found them¬ selves particularly anxious over what they perceived as a tendency toward literary conformity, driven by the paperback’s massification of literature. If the majority of Salinger’s critics read his novel as a narrative of na¬ tional identity, running close behind came their interest in how it evi¬ denced the paperback market’s growing influence on American literary culture. Although Little, Brown’s hardcover version had sold respectably well, in 1953 New American Library, the most prestigious of the paperback companies, won the rights to a softcover edition, which they quickly con¬ verted into a commercial success. New American Library’s mass-market edition sold a steady quarter million copies in every year of its publication, often it seems to young readers. It was only after the established success of this paperback edition that literary critics began to take a serious inter- 80 CHAPTER TWO D1667 J. D. SALINGER THE Catcher in the Rye 2. Original cover design for A SIGNET BOOK paperback edition of The Complete and Unabridged Catcher in the Rye (1951). est, and they repeatedly made note of its appeal as a paperback. Typical was Robert Gutwillig’s pronouncement: Many an observer of the manners and mores of American youth con¬ tends that a first novel published ten years ago occupies much the same place in the affection of today’s college generation as F. Scott Fitz¬ gerald’s This Side of Paradise did for their parents in the Nineteen Twen¬ ties. The novel is The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, which since its publication on July 16,1951, has sold a total of 1,500,000 copies in the United States alone —1,250,000 of them, significantly enough, in paperbound form. (1) In such comments as this, youth again played a crucial role, but for the somewhat different purpose of designating who exactly had enabled read¬ ership to be transformed into another site of mass consumption. Not only were adolescents assumed to be the principal purchasers of America’s new mass literary product, but they were also understood to be transforming its COLD WAR LITERATURE AND THE NATIONAL ALLEGORY 8 very substance in the process. In a discussion of the new directions taken by postpaperback American fiction, Leslie Fiedler argued that we have been . . . living through a revolution in taste, a radical trans¬ formation of the widest American literary audience from one in which women predominate to one in which adolescents make up the ma¬ jority And the mode demands, in lieu of the teen-age novelists who somehow refuse to appear, Teen-age Impersonators, among whom one might list, say, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, even William Burroughs —certainly the Salinger who wrote The Catcher in the Rye and invented Holden Caulfield, a figure emulated by the young themselves. (236) Such an argument in fact makes little empirical sense. Teenagers have never made up an overwhelming majority of book readership. Paperbacks, which from the start came in an enormous variety of genres and styles, have likewise always been marketed to a highly heterogeneous audience. It was thus the literary critics themselves who, in fixating on a highly selective handful of literary works (by Mailer, Kerouac, Salinger, and so forth), had elevated youthfulness to the status of a paradigm for judging the nature of paperback literature and its mass readership. Fiedler’s conflation of mass culture and youth culture, a commonplace in liberal culture debates of the fifties, grew out of several related ideologi¬ cal issues. On the one hand, a new teenage consumer market was indeed coalescing in the postwar years. Often it was feared that this new market might compromise the ability of adults to raise their own children accord¬ ing to their own values.19 In some ways, this was an assumed risk associated with the new concept of the “teenager,” defined as a young person bearing a certain right to independent social relations with others his or her own age. Neither were these fears that teen culture might lead to an uncontrollable rebellion entirely fanciful, for by promoting among youth a peer culture assertive of its identitarian sovereignty, the new youth market did in fact encourage, over the long run, new forms of cultural and political dissent in American life. The association of paperback culture in general with a young readership, however, was also related to a postwar indictment of kitsch, which lib¬ eral critics construed as a degenerate culture of predigested meaning. In this account, kitsch was akin to children’s culture, designed for people un¬ able or unwilling to perform the cognitive labor of decoding the texts. Like baby food, mass culture infantilized anyone who consumed it, as Dwight Macdonald argued in his influential essay “A Theory of Mass Culture,” 82 CHAPTER TWO making the United States into a nation of “Adultized Children” and “Infan¬ tile Adults,” so that “Peter Pan might be a better symbol of America than Uncle Sam” (66). Here again, America is analogized to a young character, but here that figure takes on a sinister appearance. In the culture industries at least, Mac¬ donald’s comment suggests that industrial development was leading, not to national advancement or maturation, but to characterological regres¬ sion instead. Critics dismayed by Catcher’s mass popularity typically con¬ demned the novel as just such a Peter Pan narrative, a story about a boy who refuses to grow up, and a novel whose mass appeal could be equated with its shameless juvenilization of American literature. As George Steiner made clear in the title of his bitterly polemical essay “The Salinger Indus¬ try,” both Catcher and its intellectual cheerleaders were complicit with the assembly-line Fordization of both American literature and American liter¬ ary criticism. Strenuously insisting on a difference between genuine and commercial literature, Steiner castigated literary critics for pandering to the latter, and argued, of course, that the work of Salinger himself leaned heavily in the direction of commercialization: “Salinger flatters the very ignorance and moral shallowness of his young readers. He suggests to them that formal ignorance, political apathy and a vague tristesse are posi¬ tive virtues” (116). He also “writes briefly,” noted Steiner, “no need to lug home a big book or something, Lord help us, not available in paperback” (116). A faithful lackey of mass-market product guidelines, Salinger was, in Steiner’s estimation, a prostitute to his audiences, giving them what they want to read rather than what is good for them. Critics who lauded Salinger only encouraged this dismal literary conformity driven by the paperback industry’s interest in maximizing book sales.20 The irony of these claims that Catcher promoted the commercializa¬ tion of American literature was, of course, that Holden Caulfield shared Steiner’s distaste for commercialization. Holden consistently condemns anyone at all who produces himself or herself for exchange: the school¬ master who sells himself to the parents of the wealthy students, Ernie the black pianist who panders to his college crowd, the Lunts with their selfinflated acting, and the audience members at their performance who have only come to be seen by one another in the lobby. Holden views these and many other people as phonies, whose self-promotion for the consump¬ tion of others is an index of their inauthenticity. What should ideally be a social world built upon acts of communication, hence communion, has instead become one in which people are instrumentalized as objects of COLD WAR LITERATURE AND THE NATIONAL ALLEGORY 83 one another’s exchange. Holden thus condemns precisely the sorts of lit¬ erary phenomena that Steiner would have represented by someone like J. D. Salinger: a successful, commercial writer of what Holden calls those “dumb stories in a magazine” (52). Holden even attacks the very institu¬ tion that propelled Catcher to its initial successes, the Book-of-the Month Club. Holden’s brother D.B., whose writing now makes “lots of dough” in Hollywood, is thus condemned by Holden as a literary “prostitute” in terms virtually identical to Steiner’s attacks on Salinger himself (1-2). Catcher’s paradoxical relationship to mass culture was not lost on the novel’s many proponents. Fully aware of Catcher’s impressive sales figures, they suggested that Catcher actually illustrated the good that could come of paperback readership. Catcher, precisely through its status as a massmarket hit, had successfully popularized Holden’s compelling denuncia¬ tion of massified literature and of the tendency of all too many Americans to ape its other-directed logic. When combined with a classically American willingness to defend the ideal of identity, mass culture could thus gener¬ ate its own internal challenge to the conformity that it otherwise seemed to encourage. A book like Catcher therefore appeared as the solution to Partisan Review’s problem, offering both cultural democracy ancfcritical nonconformity. The well-known cultural critic David Manning White had championed paperbacks against their critics, arguing that they, like the other mass media, “hold out the greatest promise to the ‘average’ man that a cultural richness no previous age could give him is at hand” (19). For Salinger’s advocates, Catcher realized just this richness, uniting literary quality and quantity, artistic merit and cultural democracy. Celebratory interpretations of Catcher typically pressed ahead with this defense, stressing the novel’s appeal to young paperback readers as a pre¬ lude to their allegorical reading of Holden as an exemplar of America’s youthful idealism. This position found its greatest symbolic force in Dan Wakefield’s contribution to the inaugural issue of New American Library’s mass-market literary journal. New World Writing. The journal, which was candidly created in order to prove that paperbacks could actually usher in a “new world” of literary possibilities, alluded with its title to Lewisonian Adamic American literary tradition that it “hoped” to renew. It offered an ideal forum, therefore, for defending Salinger’s work as both quintessentially American and as an exemplary paperback novel. Wakefield warned that, “it seems to follow in the eyes of some older observers that if Salinger is indeed a myth and mentor of many young people, interest in his work is 84 CHAPTER TWO restricted to young people and that this is symptomatic of the fact that it is really childish, sentimental, adolescent, and irrelevant” (195). In fact, ar¬ gued Wakefield, Salinger’s youthful appeal was not at all restricted to physi¬ cally young people but spoke readily to anyone who remained young in spirit, and who thereby resisted what Wakefield slyly called “moral senility” (197). The “adolescent” character that Salinger promulgated so widely and successfully therefore signaled not literary degradation but rather the per¬ sistence of what Wakefield called the “search for love,” a hunt for connec¬ tion with others based upon mutuality rather than on the lonely pressures exerted by social conformity. And if the American literary character had always been youthful, Adamic, and opposed to moral senility, then the youthful appeal off. D. Salinger’s paperback fiction, far from threatening the American literary tradition, promised to rejuvenate it. For critics like Wakefield, it was not only Holden who represented the best of America but Catcher itself as a popular paperback book, standing conscientiously against the mass book market that surrounded it, pressing forward its de¬ mands for a better world, a better morality, and evidently a better contem¬ porary literature. Identity Canons, Rebel Allegories, and the First World Imaginary In order to answer the question of what “representation in the canon” means within the larger context of American political culture, we must acknowledge at the outset that our concept of “social identity” is a product of that culture, and that only within that cul¬ ture can the category of an author’s racial, ethnic, or gender identity found a politics of curricular revision. Any reconsideration, then, of canon critique in its political context must begin with the notion of “social identity.”—John Guillory, Cultural Capital Judging from recent conversations among third-world intellectuals, there is now an ob¬ sessive return of the national situation itself, the name of the country that returns again and again like a gong, the collective attention to "us” and what we have to do and how we do it, to what we can’t do and what we do better than this or that nationality, our unique characteristics, in short to the level of the "people.” This is not the way American intel¬ lectuals have been discussing “America.”— Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Age of Multinational Capitalism” It is not only the Asian or the African but also the American writer whose private imagi¬ nations must necessarily connect with experiences of the collectivity. One has only to look at black and feminist writing to find countless allegories even within these post¬ modern United States.—Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘Na¬ tional Allegory’ ” COLD WAR LITERATURE AND THE NATIONAL ALLEGORY 85 Normally, when we discuss “identity” as a value constitutive of American literature, we think not of the 1950s but rather of the multicultural Ameri¬ can canon that a new generation of critics began to establish in the 1970 s and 1980s. “Identity,” in this context, names the previously excluded or marginalized cultural voices that deserve to be recognized within a more diverse and representative gathering of American literature. The drama of literary representation, as John Guillory notes, was thus construed by di¬ rect analogy to political representation, with the canon itself serving as a lit¬ erary proxy for the social totality whose political culture needs to be opened up to all those it has historically disenfranchised. Guillory, who favors a materially grounded institutional approach that would locate the political significance of literature in “cultural capital” rather than in “representa¬ tion,” attacks the premise that literary and political representation are in any way analogous. The persuasive force of this analogy, he argues, issues from “our concept of social identity,” a historically bound and problematic product of American culture that we need to contextualize and reconsider. In this chapter, I have offered just such a reconsideration of identity, tracing its origins as a literary value that measures the representation of a collective self. In so doing, however, I have demonstrated that the identity concept entered the literary domain considerably earlier than the moment that Guillory presumes: the point at which postsixties critics began mobi¬ lizing “identity” on behalf of writings by people of color, women, gays, and lesbians. By the 1950s, critics had already begun to demand a “new image” of America suitably representative to the nation’s “democratic” character. Authors, their works, and finally even their protagonists were obliged to af¬ firm and represent “our country and our culture” in terms of its sovereign identity, by expressing its perennial spirit of “critical nonconformity.” In the fifties, this rebel allegory was dramatized by a young American charac¬ ter who refused the depersonalizing expectations of a mass society. During the seventies, in the wake of the black, yellow, and brown power and gay and women’s liberation movements, new versions of the American literary character would continue to represent rebellious identity, but their “criti¬ cal nonconformity” would now directly express acts of racial, gender, or sexual insubordination as offered up by allegorical figures of black, Chicano, Asian American, female, or gay identity. In both moments, then, the critical search for identity would become an act of literary judgment and canon formation. Given this history, it would be inappropriate to blame the positing of identity as literary value on “faulty thinking” by postsixties activist crit86 CHAPTER TWO ics, as Guillory sometimes implies, for this was a criterion they merely inherited and indeed put to important use. If we are to assess the literary politics of identity, we must contend with the fact that it issued from condi¬ tions that, at least twenty years earlier, had already begun to work upon the political imaginary of American critics. It is the “age of three worlds” itself that offers the widest possible political context for considering the “identitarianization” of U.S. literary politics, with its allegories of representative selves. And this process of identitarianization, I submit, was largely syn¬ onymous with what might be called the “first worlding” of the American literary canon. This first worlding of American literature, as I have shown, proceeded through the critical application of two national allegories: that of devel¬ opment and that of rebellion. The allegory of development, as I noted earlier, attested to the “maturity” of the American character in a way that implicitly celebrated American industrial development. America was no longer susceptible to left-wing naivete precisely because its tremendous postwar influence rendered self-evident the notion that the first world’s liberal version of capitalism (with all its imperfections) was preferable to the “return to serfdom” entailed by the communist alternative. The rebel allegory, while also first-worlding American literature, proceeded quite differently. Unlike the allegory of development, it conceded that indus¬ trial mass culture threatened the autonomy of the people, yet it simulta¬ neously insisted on the capacity of a truly democratic people to defy this threat, thereby demonstrating their autonomy anew. The rebel allegory thus showed the American character to be not mature (i.e., industrial, like the second world) but young (i.e., seeking independence, like the third world). It is for this reason that Holden Caulfield was cast as the expres¬ sion of an earlier America, one associated with the identitarian spirit of the nation’s precapitalist past, hearkening back to the anticolonial spirit of V/"revolutionary, democratic America, much like Huck Finn. It is striking that this role of national allegory in the first worlding of American literature mirrors in a curious way the argument once made by Fredric Jameson that it is third world literature that is characterized by the national allegory. Jameson, of course, was taken to task for what many post¬ colonial critics saw as a grotesque homogenization of the literatures and cultural conditions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.21 Yet Jameson’s argu¬ ment makes considerable sense if reformulated so as to conceive the third world, not as an empirically homogenous space, but instead as a loosely knit geopolitical project shared by formerly colonized, nominally indepenCOLD WAR LITERATURE AND THE NATIONAL ALLEGORY 87 dent states who sought national self-sufficiency at multiple levels (eco¬ nomic, political, cultural, psychological). Taken thus, the “national alle¬ gory” of third world literature no longer appears as a universalizing account of the literature produced on three continents but rather as a literary in¬ sight into a narrative structure that often animated and guided the dispa¬ rate strategies of decolonization. As the hypercanonization of The Catcher in the Rye attests, however, na¬ tional allegory was no less crucial to first world literary projects. Contrary to Jameson’s claims, postwar American intellectuals and writers did indeed sound the gong of the “nation” and its “situation” with an obsessiveness rivaling that of any third world country.22 The very basis of the era’s revised canon rested upon national allegory, and many of the new literary works to gain stature alongside Catcher in the Rye—Ellison’s Invisible Man, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, among others —did so by making the story of the first world individual stand in for that of the first world people. This first world individual, when imagined as a rebel identity, typically stood as a psychopolitical outsider, and already in the fifties racial, gender, or sexual difference was affiliated easily enough with this outsider status; writings by and about blacks, Jews, women, and gays began to assume a representative role for American literature. One can see, therefore, the ease with which the rebel allegory would later serve to create a multicultural identity canon. Thisallegorical turn in postwar American literature and criticism is dis¬ avowed by Jameson’s essay, largely because it posits the first and third world relation as that of a Hegelian contradiction. For Jameson, while “third world” names the address of the politicized but embattled national com¬ munity, the “first world” always embodies its lack, as the place where resi¬ dent intellectuals fail to voice the national situation precisely because its systemic privilege within world capitalism manifests itself imaginatively in depoliticized personal-libidinal narratives. The first world, as the “other” of the third world politicized community, maps (as Jameson’s contempora¬ neous work on postmodernism makes explicit) a degraded commodity cul¬ ture in which the very possibility of historical and collective narration has been foreclosed. Paradoxically, however, this means that Jameson’s essay writes its own unacknowledged national allegory for the “industrialized” countries: the libidinally self-oriented first world national, disconnected from the world of political meaning through his or her absorption into pri¬ vatized consumption, becomes emblematic of his or her people’s forfeiture of collective agency to the culture industry. 88 CHAPTER TWO What I would like to stress here is how both of Jameson’s national alle¬ gories can be respectively traced back to the figure and ground that together constituted the national allegory derived from Catcher in the Rye. The social world through which Holden Caulfield moved, composed of phony people subjected to the instrumental rationality of a mass culture, elevated Catcher to the status of a “mirror of crisis” that would be used imaginatively to cor¬ roborate the grim analyses of David Riesman, William Whyte, C. Wright Mills, Paul Goodman, and Herbert Marcuse concerning mass conformity in the new age of American Fordism. This loose tradition of first world self-critical pessimism, more or less tacitly promoted in much of the com¬ mentaries about an age of conformity in Salinger criticism, sketched the first world as an ironic reflection of the completely administered second world, a space of personal and collective subjection to the totality. Jameson drew from this tradition for his theories of first world postmodernism and the loss of political agency it entailed. Holden himself, meanwhile, represented for postwar critics precisely what the third world protagonists meant for Jameson, the contrary image of a national character as political agent who offers hope against the de¬ graded landscape of a mass consumer society. It is important to see this relation as a motivated one, for Holden as an allegorical figure for America (and an earlier one at that) served to mirror the nations of the third world. He too was young and like them struggling to establish his psychopolitical sovereignty in a hostile setting. Where Holden himself figured American identity defending itself in a time of crisis, the “phony” American ground that he inhabits provided the needed tableau of crisis (an organizational society, a lonely crowd, a mass culture, a paperback literature) through and against which his heroic struggle might be discerned. Contrary to what Jameson would have expected, then, there was no sepa¬ ration for American intellectuals between Holden’s personal-libidinal nar¬ rative and the nation’s public affairs. Rather, as a pivotal text in first world U.S. thought and literature, Catcher embodied not a separation of the po¬ litical and the psychological but an emphatic fusing of the two that was expressed nowhere so clearly as in the psychopolitical concept of identity itself. The mobilization of this concept as a right of the young or the emer¬ gent self would have reverberations, both inside and outside of literature, for decades to come. When the multicultural American canon arrived on the scene, it too would feature protagonists mirroring the third world in their assertion of identity: the rightful emergence of an embattled people into the space of representation. COLD WAR LITERATURE AND THE NATIONAL ALLEGORY 89 TRANSCOMMODIFICATION: ROCK N’ ROLL AND THE SUBURBAN COUNTERI MAGI NARY At least part of the motivation for the middle-class white youth adoption of Afro-American and working-class music as their own in the 1950s stemmed from a collective judgment about the demise of the urban industrial city and the rise of the suburb. . . . Visible markers of class and ethnic identity disappeared as the single-family, detached suburban home replaced the multi-family dwellings of ethnic neighborhoods, as network television eclipsed the neighborhood movie theater, and as a culture of consumption and conformity encouraged standardization of dress and behavior as the entrance requirements into the burgeoning, corporate white-collar world. Facing a choice between the sterile and homogenous suburban cultures of their parents or the dynamic street cultures alive among groups excluded from the middle-class consensus, a large body of youths found themselves captivated and persuaded by the voices of difference. Mass consumer culture had become so hege¬ monic that middle-class young people flocked to the cultures of the dying industrial city for connection to the past, for emotional expres¬ sion, and for a set of values that explained and justified rebellion. — George Lipsitz, Time Passages I want to emphasize the way in which this context [of liberal consensus] constrained the political possibilities of the rock formation, rather than romanticizing rock as a radical statement of political resistance or an expression of alienation... . This goes hand in hand with the assumed image of the 1950s rocker as the isolated and agonized rebel and delin¬ quent, antisocial, antidomestic, and anticonsumerist. Apart from the fact that this image is simply an inaccurate portrait of the vast majority of rock fans, there is also little evidence (even in the songs themselves) that rock rejected the dominant liberal consensus or the major ideo¬ logical assumptions (sexism, racism and classism) of that consensus. It is not merely that most rock fans lived somewhere inside the vast cen¬ ter of U.S. society; it is also that they imagined themselves remaining within it. — Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place An interpretation is not authentic unless it culminates in some form of appropriation (Aneignung), if by that term we understand the pro¬ cess by which one makes one’s own (eigen) what was initially other or alien (fremd). — Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences I n this chapter and the one that follows, I shift my attention from the ar¬ biters of American culture (literary critics, journalists, intellectuals) to the young people actually being positioned by the ascendance of identity discourse. Specifically, I will be tracing the imaginary processes through which youth audiences began to identify with “identity,” viewing them¬ selves as emergent personalities entitled to rebel against suburban confor¬ mity in the name of their own sovereign self-definition against adults. This is a historic event that did not happen automatically. It depended, rather, on a series of material and ideological contingencies that brought the vari¬ ous entertainment industries to embrace the new discourses of identity as the marker of a new and sorely needed market. Youth rebellion became a thematic device with which the so-called mass audience could be seg¬ mented along the axis of age. Nowhere was this process more dramatically / evidenced than in the birth of rock ’n' roll, understood as a sector of popu¬ lar music marketed exclusively to and for the young, and in particular to an enormous and highly lucrative suburban teenage market. While it is quite evident that the themes of youth autonomy and even rebellion were integral to fifties rock ’n’ roll, scholars have passionately ar¬ gued as to whether or not the music expressed a genuine shift in the proto¬ political sentiments of young Americans. In so doing, they have also im¬ plicitly made judgments about the ubiquitous class, racial, and geographic claims that so many postwar countercultures since early rock ’n’ roll have made. For celebratory scholars such as George Lipsitz, rock ’n’ roll’s fan base among suburban teenagers demonstrates that white, middle-class youth from the fifties onward willfully chose to reject suburbia and ally 92 CHAPTER THREE themselves with minority and working-class culture. For critics such as Lawrence Grossberg, rock ’n’ roll’s roots in working-class and minority cul¬ ture lose importance in the face of suburban youth culture’s participation in the broader scene of postwar consumption. Whatever rock ’n’ roll’s ori¬ gins, suburban youth’s adoption of the music effectively drew it into the liberal consensus. As the coauthors of Rock over the Edge accurately observe, a tenacious “authenticity myth,” a certain binary of “real” versus “fake” music, has stymied the study of rock, making it exceedingly difficult to “discuss rock music apart from rock’s rhetoric” about itself (Beebe et al., 3). It is no co¬ incidence, however, that this obsession with the authentic is something that the discourses of identity share with those of rock. The birth of rock ’n' roll bears an affiliation with the emergence of identity that, here, I will be tracking in terms of new imaginary relationships that arose in the fifties among suburb, city, and country. For reasons that include changes in so¬ cial geography, mass media, and youth culture itself, it became possible by the mid-fifties to remarket urban and rural musical forms —themselves already commercial products with distinct ideological and historical tra¬ jectories—to suburban teenagers who thereby invested them with identitarian meanings that were new, yet also related to their earlier ones. I call this process “transcommodification” in order to suggest that the advent of rock ’n’ roll can be reduced neither to a transition from authenticity to commerce nor to a solidarity of middle-class youth with the oppressed and exploited. Both positions assume a logic of identitarian authenticity rather than treating it as a historically new value that rock ’n’ roll’s theme of youth¬ ful rebellion actually helped to create. Lipsitz, for instance, presumes the postwar authentic-identity/inauthentic-conformity binary by arguing that because the suburbs aimed to crush identity (implicitly conceived as the self-defining ethnic or working-class personality), youth reclaimed iden¬ tity by finding it elsewhere (in the cities). To refute this argument, Gross¬ berg is compelled to reverse it by flatly denying that the rebel figure for identity carried any “authentic” cultural force. Rock fans, by and large "con¬ forming” to postwar culture, never did truly embrace the avatar of identity (i.e., the “isolated and agonized rebel”). Paradoxically, Lipsitz and Gross¬ berg end up sharing an ontology of identity that aligns it with authenticity against commercialism. For both critics, identity implicitly requires (as Erikson first insisted) a political fidelity to the self. For Lipsitz, rock ’n’ roll expresses youth identity because it expresses a genuine (self-authentic) re¬ volt against the standardized system of suburban commerce, even if it is TRANSCOMMODIFICATION 93 borrowed from elsewhere. For Grossberg, youth is part of the American commercial consensus, so that the only identity it can have is social con¬ formity, which signifies precisely the absence of an authentic identity since mass incorporation precludes the possession of psychopolitical autonomy. I will approach rock ’n’ roll, not as the site of opposition between authen.: ticity and commerce but instead as the marker of a complex ideological and economic shift from one commodity system to another. It is therefore just as misleading for Lipsitz to celebrate rock ’n’ roll as an authentic embrace of black and working-class culture as it is for Grossberg to condemn it as the encroachment of postwar consumerism. In quoting Paul Ricoeur along¬ side Grossberg and Lipsitz, I want to anticipate a quite different analysis of rock ’n’ roll. Using metaphoricity as a hermeneutic model for thinking about transcommodification, I will argue that authenticity and appropria¬ tion should be seen as ,collaborative terms rather than antithetical ones. Although derived from black and working-class culture, the music that be¬ came rock ’n’ roll was suburbanized in ways that changed its meanings sub¬ stantively. Rock ’n’ roll therefore did not align suburban teenagers in any straightforward way with black/working-class culture. But this does not mean that teenagers neutralized black/working-class music in appropriat¬ ing it. Rather, I will suggest, rock ’n’ roll allowed youth culture to consti¬ tute a Fordist counterimaginary, a way of seeing oneself as simultaneously within, yet implicitly critical of, postwar suburbia. The Dual Imaginaries of Suburbia Perhaps the quickest way to index the intimate relationship between rock ’n’ roll and suburbia is to point to their shared codes of spatial hybridity. Rock ’n’ roll, as its critics always note, fused the respective urban and rural traditions of rhythm and blues and country-and-western music.1 As such, rock ’n’ roll’s origin narrative mirrors exactly the suburban ideal itself. As many historians have noted, suburbia maps out a long-standing modern¬ ist project, at least as old as industrialization, that has aimed to fuse the respective benefits of inhabiting the city and country.2 If rural life is wist¬ fully celebrated for its proximity to nature and traditional life rhythms, it has also been commonly disparaged as parochial, boring, and too distant from the socioeconomic activity of the city. And while the vast possibili¬ ties, kineticism, and cosmopolitanism of the city offer a vibrant alternative, urban life is widely faulted for its noise and dirt, its cramped spaces, disrup- 94 CHAPTER THREE tion of tradition, and its intensified occasions for social conflict. Suburbia, then, as a bourgeois ideal for sublating these lifestyles, has always prom¬ ised continued access to the city’s modern opportunities while recreating the peacefulness and pastoral values of the country.3 Particularly in the form it took throughout the building boom of the Fordist era, suburbia was constituted through a series of binary opposi¬ tions derived from the public/private distinction: consumption versus pro¬ duction, leisure versus work, the familial versus the social. By and large, suburbia associated the city with the public terms and itself with the private ones.4 Within the suburban vision, the city remained a place for the col¬ lective enterprises and zones of industry, production, work, public space, and nonfamilial social encounters; by contrast, the suburbs offered, at af¬ fordable prices, a protected private space for the exercise of household con¬ sumption and leisure situated within one’s nuclear family. Urban and rural cultures had traditionally seen themselves as constituted by both sets of terms in these binaries (the city and country for their inhabitants were places for both production and consumption, work and leisure, family and sociality). One of suburbia’s innovations is thus the way that it imagina¬ tively split the terms of these binaries, expelling the public ones from itself and locating them (both imaginatively and materially) at distances transversible, in the postwar period, only by automobile.5 Suburbia became con¬ ceived, therefore, as a locale where people could freely enjoy leisure time, albeit in specifically private and domestic forms.6 Suburbia was also organized according to a vision in which class and race were rendered invisible. To the extent that work defines one’s class position, suburbia aimed to conceal its class differences by literally placing distance between its residents’ jobs and their private lives, as well as by privileging consumption over production as the locus of social activity. Whatever the differences in their work lives, people in a suburban neigh¬ borhood presumably shared a home life that involved the ongoing im¬ provement of domestic space through the purchase of commodities. Racial difference was “vanished” in a very different way, through the infamous practice of redlining, in which mortgages for racially mixed urban neigh¬ borhoods were regularly refused as a financial risk by banks and the Federal Housing Administration even while they rubber-stamped mortgages for mostly white buyers in the new neighborhoods of the expanding suburbs. Developers and homeowner associations meanwhile routinely enforced "restrictive covenants” that adopted property value protection as grounds TRANSCOMMODIFICATION 95 for keeping nonwhites from buying into the new suburban neighborhoods (Jackson, 208-210). Such financial rationalizations of these exclusionary policies nominally disavowed that these new neighborhoods represented a racialist project. Suburbia was presented as a politically neutral place for the building of equity and family, a place whose creation was motivated not by prejudice but by the personal dreams of its residents. Implicitly, how¬ ever, these covenants and redlining practices functioned as codes, in both the legalistic and semiotic senses of the word, that established suburbia— at once imaginatively and demographically—as a zone of protected white¬ ness over and against the racially marked zones of both the country and the city. These various codes initially constituted suburbia for its residents as a utopic form of modern living—an enclave adjacent to the energy and op¬ portunity of the city, yet pastoral like the country, close to nature and free from the risk of class or racial conflict. Yet these same codes have been easily reversible, even for those living there, into a powerfully dystopic image. Roger Silverstone has astutely observed a historically split vision of suburbia in which it has served simultaneously as a “dream for those wish¬ ing to escape the density of the city or the emptiness of the country,” and as a “nightmare for those who regard . .. [it] as a sterile hybrid, the bastard child of unculture” (56). The reason for such a split vision, I propose, rests on the very ambivalences that draw people to suburbia in the first place. Suburbia, after all, proposes a compromise between people's hopes and doubts about both the city and the country. An appreciation and antipathy for both animates the suburban ideal. Suburbia’s founding anxiety, there¬ fore is that it might inadvertently wed, not the best elements of each world, but the worst. To put this uneasiness in the form of a nagging question for the bourgeois imagination: what if suburbia should prove itself to be a sterile hybrid, a third place between city and country which ultimately provides access to neither culture nor nature, which lacks heterogeneity and excitement, yet is also too densely populated, too new, too contrived an environment to be genuinely rustic or traditionalist? If, as Silverstone concisely puts it, suburbia represents “a form of life that modernism has created almost to escape from itself” (171), one might add that, especially in the Fordist era, as it grew increasingly hegemonic, suburbia became a place where the bourgeois experience of modernity repeatedly found itself torn by its own self-ambivalence. It became, in short, a place from which one might also wish to escape. 96 CHAPTER THREE Mass-Mediating Suburbia: tv, Rock ’n’ Roll, and the Dual Imaginaries Two major events in the history of American mass media occurred in the 1950s. First, television grew into the nation’s dominant medium of enter¬ tainment. Second, rock ’n’ roll became a dominant new force in popular music.7 In ways that need to be better understood, these two developments were mutually linked through the process of suburbanization. Their inter¬ connection, I will suggest, emerged through the alternative ways in which each medium accommodated mass entertainment in suburbia. Broadly speaking, television and rock ’n’ roll came to center themselves on oppo¬ site sides of the split imaginary of suburbia: utopic for the visual medium, a wasteland for the audial. This antonymic mirroring of television and rock ’n’ roll derives, I argue, from their shared prehistory in the prewar institu¬ tion of radio. Rock ’n’ roll critics tend to recall the prewar era of network radio —domi¬ nated by four national broadcast systems —as reflecting the bland homo¬ geneity of the Tin Pan Alley sound. Reebee Garofalo, for example, claims that the radio networks perceived the nation “as one monolithic audience” desirous only of “middle-class, family-oriented fare” (86). From the view¬ point of tv critics, however, network radio seems anything but an era of monolithic broadcasting. While it is true that network radio usually pre¬ sumed a family audience, national domesticity openly cut across various lines of social difference. Presuburban in both the fictional spaces it cre¬ ated and the listeners it interpellated, network radio aired shows set in vari¬ ous ethnic and working-class urban neighborhoods, and presented social interactions (serious and comic) that cut across class, race, and ethnic lines. Musical radio shows were admittedly dominated by live performances of the generic middle-class sound of Tin Pan Alley, but they also often in¬ cluded performances of regional, folk, and ethnic music. Moreover, radio broadcast a wide range of genres, including not only dramas, comedies, and news, but also vaudevillian and variety shows drawn from workingclass traditions of entertainment. In short, while network radio interpel¬ lated a national audience united across the lines of social difference, it ac¬ knowledged—and played with —the existence of these lines. Domesticity, for prewar radio, was imagined as a condition in which private and public situations interpenetrated one another, where family life intersected with forms of urban or rural sociability that might involve class, ethnic, and racial relations of difference. TRANSCOMMODIFICATION 97 In 1948, television began to supplant radio’s status as the preeminent national broadcast medium, cbs and nbc, both previously radio networks, rapidly transferred their programming onto television. As Lynn Spigel has shown, tv took only seven years to become the chief medium for domestic entertainment. Television did not simply replace radio as the preeminent domestic medium, however. It also suburbanized the very meaning of do¬ mestic entertainment. The very apparatus of television seemed to require, in a way radio had not, the spaciousness of a suburban home. Whereas people could be arranged in many ways while listening to a radio, television demanded that they occupy a space organized into a field of vision.8 This often required not only more room, but more sitting furniture than before. tv sets were also tied, for the most part, to a logic of “bigger is better,” in which televisual images stood to improve by increasing their size. As a result, consoles tended to become bulky, space-demanding items of furni¬ ture consonant with the impetus of suburbanization. In practice, television’s commercial availability in the forties and fifties grew alongside the postwar suburban building boom, at times even serving as a built-in feature of new tract homes.9 It took only four years, as Spigel notes, for the tv set to replace the radio as the “central figure in images of the American home,” appearing in magazines, advertisements, and of course on tv itself as the “cultural symbol par excellence of family life” (39). Television became viewed as a means toward suburban forms of domestic togetherness, an entertainment medium that unified husbands and wives, parents and children within a single household space. The suburbanization of domestic entertainment was also effected through tv programming’s new combinations of generic form and per¬ sonal address. From its earliest years, tv interpellated its viewers as family members of a “new suburban unit, which had left most of its extended families and friends behind in the city” (Spigel, 39). This interpellation was manifested, not only in the direct address of commercial messages, but often implicitly in tv’s genres of entertainment. While at first tv simply adapted radio shows to the screen, it soon began to recode genres in marked ways. Several genres, such as the live drama and the variety show, largely disappeared from tv by the late fifties, with the noticeable excep¬ tion of The Ed Sullivan Show, which survived well into the 1960s. Other genres increasingly drawn from Hollywood, particularly the western and the crime show, gained air time (Oakley, 98-103). But the shows most ex¬ plicitly marked by suburbanization were the situation comedies. The earli¬ est of tv sitcoms, such as The Goldbergs, Amos and Andy, The Honeymooners, 98 CHAPTER THREE and I Remember Mama, like the radio shows from which they were adapted, typically featured working-class ethnic families living in city apartments. Yet even in these adaptations, as George Lipsitz notes, tv quickly began to replace extended family casts with nuclear families.10 After 1955, these pro¬ grams were increasingly supplanted by shows unique to television that fea¬ tured class and ethnically unmarked suburban families: Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to Beaver, and Father Knows Best among them. Rarely featuring nonwhite or even ethnically marked characters, and keeping the world of work offscreen, these shows recast the sit-com in the very image that tv broadly ascribed to its viewers: the classless and raceless family consumer unit of the suburbs. Other genres (comedy-variety, drama series, drama anthology, and westerns) remained popular, of course, but the new sub¬ urban sit-coms steadily gained among the very audience that it purported to represent. This transition I have been describing, from radio to television net¬ works, represents one of the crucial preconditions for the rise of rock ’n’ roll. Its determining power concerns both the fate of radio and television during the fifties. Radio, losing possession of its national broadcast audi¬ ence, gradually found its way into a new business of regional musical enter¬ tainment. Even as tv brought an end to network radio by appropriating its national advertising base, nonnetwork (independent) radio, as Reebee Garofalo observes, emerged as an effective medium for local advertisers, and it did so at a time when the number of radio stations in the United States had doubled from about 1,000 in 1946 to about 2,000 in 1948. Eventu¬ ally the most successful independent radio outlets pushed aside the more staid network stations and cemented a reciprocal arrangement with record companies that has defined the music industry ever since: inexpensive programming in return for free promotion. (86) This postwar arrangement between radio and record companies grew not only from the push of television, but also the pull of technological inno¬ vations in recording technology. In 1948, the year of the first full-scale na¬ tional tv broadcasts, record companies developed the 33 and 45 rpm vinyl record formats. Far cheaper than the 78, and possessing much better sound quality, these new technologies made discs the first affordable medium for private ownership of recorded music.11 In even less time than it took tv to supplant radio, the music industry made its own switch to this new com¬ modity form. Whereas in the age of Tin Pan Alley, the music industry had TRANSCOMMODIFICATION 99 sold sheet music, now it began to sell records, which, because of radio's rapidly evolving situation, it could increasingly promote on the air. What I wish to emphasize is that, like network television, the new record/radio media alliance also hitched its fortunes to the suburban boom. Many writers have noted that, during the Second World War, numerous local radio stations opened up in city centers around the country (a fact I will return to in my discussion of rhythm and blues). Like the movie in¬ dustry, whose theaters were also typically located downtown, radio faced a situation after the war in which white middle- and working-class people embarked on a mass exodus from the cities to the suburbs. The financial risk, however, was of a substantially different order for the two media. Movie theaters were directly threatened by the possibility that suburban¬ ites might forego an excursion to town in favor of staying at home to watch “free” family entertainment on tv. As a broadcast medium, though, radio possessed the reach it needed to tap suburban audiences if it could only attract them with the right programming. Radio succeeded in reaching a suburban audience in the fifties largely by pursuing avenues of interest and desire ruled out in the forms of tv entertainment. These avenues might be described in the following way. First, where network television defined its audience as national in scope — but at the same time conceived this nation as suburban from one end to the other —independent radio could profit from its local character, its broadcast radius’s ability to define a differential regional geography that in¬ cluded a city center and outlying rural areas as well as the new suburbs. Radio, therefore, possessed a capacity (less possible on tv’s national net¬ works) to locate suburbs imaginatively in a relational context of geographi¬ cal difference. Speaking broadly, one might say that radio appealed to suburban inter¬ ests that extended beyond dwelling at home or seeing oneself reflected in the suburban American family. If suburbia defined itself as a zone of un¬ marked domesticity that was neither rural nor urban, and that contained neither class nor racial difference, then radio potentially offered suburban¬ ites access to other places that were rural or urban, that did contain class and racial difference, and that, from a suburban point of view, might sound nondomestic. Radio, to put this in other words, became a particularly promising medium for appealing to a dystopic, dissatisfied suburban imaginary that was eager to hear the sounds of places outside itself. This approach to suburbanizing local radio programming was especially easy to realize in musical entertainment for the simple reason that the 100 CHAPTER THREE record companies with which new local radio stations began dealing had become increasingly diverse. The inexpensive sound media of the 33 rpm record and especially the 45 offered strong profits for start-up record com¬ panies while requiring comparatively low level of capitalization. As a result, the 1940s and 1950s saw considerable growth in small-label companies that avoided direct competition with the major labels (Columbia, Victor, and Decca) by recording what was then considered the “specialty music” of country and R & B. These companies grew increasingly eager to publi¬ cize their sounds on the radio just as local radio stations began to explore strategies for tapping suburban audiences (Garofalo, 84-85). Unleashing Leisure: Youth and the Ideology of Free Time As attested by the history of rock ’n’ roll, it was to suburban teenagers that these sounds ultimately made their appeal. I will return shortly to the na¬ ture of these sounds, as well as how (and why) they came to signify for and in suburbia. But first, I want to consider why the dystopic side of suburbia’s split vision, the one I will call the suburban counterimaginary, found its fullest expression within youth culture. The intimate connection between nondomestic visions of leisure and the tropes of youthful rebellion that are the subject of this book was no less important a condition for rock ’n’ roll’s historical possibility than television’s takeover of radio’s national network. In chapter 11 discussed the role of leisure in shaping the politics of post¬ war youth culture. Leisure, I noted, has long served as a means of negoti¬ ating the contradictions between the individual freedom of liberal moder¬ nity and the disciplining of labor under capitalism. The clash between the individual’s right to liberty and capitalism’s tendency to subordinate and discipline wage laborers achieved an ideological accommodation through the binarization of labor and leisure, or work and play. According to the logic of this structure, the workplace became the scene of economic neces¬ sity, of mandated toil and subjection where one must do as others tell you to do. The hours outside the workplace, in compensation, became elevated as the zone of liberated time —of leisure —in which the individual realizes him/herself through a personal pursuit of happiness. This historic resolution, as I have suggested, became increasingly prob¬ lematic with emergence of a Fordist system of mass consumption, which aimed to articulate leisure time with the commodities produced by the Taylorized factory. As Fordism increasingly subordinated leisure to the consumption of these standardized mass products, its viability as a zone of TRANSCOMMODIFICATION 101 freedom diminished. This is not to say that consumerism as an ideology has not had considerable success in presenting shopping and consuming as a modern form of freedom. Rather, the point is that the standardiza¬ tion of Fordist capitalism’s suburban commodities —hence the perception that freedom to buy the same things and live the same way might not be freedom after all —greatly undermined the reconciliation of liberalism and capitalism. The topic of this book is, in an important respect, about the agebased resolution to this postwar ideological dilemma. The Cold War, I have argued, by inciting youth culture to incorporate a thematics of rebellion, exempted teenage consumption from the stigma of deindividualization as¬ sociated with standardized consumption. Presenting itself as an autono¬ mous, and potentially dissenting mode of consumption —even within sub¬ urbia—youth culture gained ideological currency as a freer form of leisure than that found in parental suburban culture. Rock criticism has implicitly concerned itself with this Fordist privi¬ leging of youthful leisure ever since Simon Frith first suggested in his groundbreaking book, Sound Effects, that youths (from the 1920s onward) have come to appear freer than adults. Frith suggested that youth has come to “symbolize leisure, to embody good times” in a way that renders young people as archetypical of the “problems of capitalist freedom and constraint” (201). The specifically Fordist problems of freedom and con¬ straint, I would argue, played out in such a way that constraint became the chief issue surrounding adult consumption (was it not free enough?), while freedom became the concern regarding youthful consumption (did its au¬ tonomy go too far?). As suburbanization proceeded in the 1950s, “adult constraint,” the ideological problem of standardized leisure, fell increas¬ ingly under the sign of domesticity, while youthful freedom, the comple¬ mentary issue of nonstandard or rebellious leisure were conflated with the nondomestic, potentially wild pursuits of happiness —“entertainment” to the culture industry, and “kicks” in hipster lingo. As I will show in the next chapter, this Fordist conflation of standardiza¬ tion and domestication played a major part in the ideological formations of postwar gender arrangements. For now, I want to focus on the point that it allowed youth —as a Cold War figure for dissent—to embody wild¬ ness-individual freedom from the constraints of standardized domestica¬ tion. Adult consumption, located within the Fordist unit of the family and the space of the suburban home, came to be constituted as the domestic opposite of wilder forms of consumption, bonding youth to one another outside of home and family. 102 CHAPTER THREE This binary of domestic versus youthful modes of consumption became an important means through which the split vision of suburbia was articu¬ lated. Familial happiness was closely associated with suburbia as a vision¬ ary hybrid of the city and the country. At the same time, suburbia also threatened to appear not as the achievement of personal happiness but rather as the fatal realization of mass values and consumer standardization. An alternative, youthful vision of happiness, propelled by a desire to be somewhere other than the wasteland of suburbia, both countered and exor¬ cised this feared unfreedom of adult consumption. A young person, living in apparent dissatisfaction with suburban domesticity, fulfilled the desire of Cold War nationalism. Such a youth became the exemplary American individualist who refuses to submit to Fordist standardization. The rebel¬ lious thematics of suburban youth culture, in short, allowed suburbia, pri¬ marily a space of domesticity, to incorporate into itself a desire for the re¬ pudiation of domesticity —thereby creating its split vision—without ever having to dissolve itself. For the same reasons that youth culture became identified with the dystopic side of suburbia’s split vision, I would suggest that it also became identified with radio and its nondomestic possibilities, over and against television. I do not mean by this to say that young people did not watch plenty of television but rather that tv usually counted them as family mem¬ bers sharing the norms of the suburban imaginary. Radio, by contrast, cre¬ ated opportunities for teenagers to create a distinct youth culture. Both mobile and transistorized, radio offered entertainment to suburban youth enjoyable within the context of peer rather than family relations. The one crucial exception to this tendency was found in the tv genre of the music show, itself usually directly adapted from a radio show. In the early to mid-fifties, during the early period of tv programming flux, this genre accommodated several successful regional teen dance and perfor¬ mance programs that would feed into the rock ’n’ roll phenomenon: among them Alan Freed’s Big Beat and Paul Whiteman’s rv-Teen Club.12 With the consolidation of national broadcasting by 1956, however, American Band¬ stand would displace these various local programs, to become perhaps the one remaining tv show where the countersuburban imaginary would reign supreme. American Bandstand, though it proved successful, was marked by the dif¬ ficulties of incorporating rock ’n’ roll into the scene of national television. It was offered as a mainstream substitute for its more openly counter¬ suburban predecessors, most especially the controversial Alan Freed show. TRANSCOMMODIFICATION 103 3. Dori and her friend watch Alan Freed’s tv show Big Beat with Dad in Rock! Rock! Rock! (Vanguard, 1956). To facilitate its acceptability to the entire family, host Dick Clark enforced strict rules of behavior on its teen dancers, including a conservative dress code and closely regulated dance movements.13 In the end, American Band¬ stand would become a “segregated” space in the televisual landscape, the one tolerated locale where the sound of rock ’n’ roll heard on the radio might be visually performed within the suburban home. By contrast, radio facilitated with relative ease the portable, nonfamilial spaces to be impro¬ vised by youth culture outdoors, in cars, garages, parks, at school, and else¬ where. By the mid-fifties then, developments in youth culture, radio, popu¬ lar music, a countersuburban imaginary, and ideologies of undomesticated leisure were all converging on conditions that would make rock ’n’ roll be¬ come possible. Countersuburban Sounds: Rock ’n’ Roll as the Imagined Elsewhere If radio’s reorganization as nondomestic medium was one precondition for rock ’n’ roll, and youth’s ideological claim on freedom yet another, then the final major precondition was the music available on the early fifties radio dial. Radio created opportunities for nonfamilial leisure in the suburbs; it 104 CHAPTER THREE linked undomesticity to youth culture in particular, but it accomplished all this by broadcasting sounds that evoked nonsuburban landscapes — either urban or rural —through which suburban youth might imaginatively displace themselves. Rock ’n’ roll was less a distinct style than a naming process through which post-network radio condensed together different kinds of music, and repackaged them as the sound of suburban youth culture. Earlier, I named rhythm and blues and country as the two most com¬ monly cited musical sources for rock ’n’ roll. I would suggest that these musics derived their potential for appropriation as—their appropriateness for—suburban culture from their relationships to mid-twentieth-century shifts in the labor/leisure binary.14 Both “country” and “rhythm and blues,” as it happens, were relatively new categories in the 1950s for the music in¬ dustry. Rural, white working-class music had been supplied with a range of different names from the 1920s on, including folk, hillbilly, and country and western. Billboard, the music industry’s trade magazine, began track¬ ing this music in the mid-thirties on its disdainfully named “hillbilly chart,” a popularity list added to the older “pop chart” that had always featured commercially mainstream Tin Pan Alley styles. In the forties, Billboard also added a so-called “race chart” for tracking the gamut of African American music. The origins of rock ’n’ roll are often traced to what Philip Ennis has called the aligning of these “three streams” of postwar pop music, which he documents through the outburst of “crossover” songs in the mid¬ fifties, when hits from the two other charts found their way onto Billboard’s pop list.15 By then, Billboard had renamed its two newer charts for reasons reflect¬ ing changed conditions, both musical and extramusical. The term “rhythm and blues” had already begun to circulate during the wartime years, when a generation of blues musicians who had moved from south to north (and west) up-tempoed and even electrified their songs. By 1948, their music had become so popular among urbanizing African American audiences that, when Billboard finally renamed its “race chart,” it chose “rhythm and blues” as the new title. Almost simultaneously, Billboard renamed its “hill¬ billy chart” the “country chart.” Motivations for these two name changes are complex, but broadly speaking they concerned gains in practical and symbolic power that working-class and black people achieved during the war, a moment when the military effort could not take them for granted, leading the state to solicit their patriotism by promoting racial and class pride and self-respect. Too, the charts’ new titles were influenced by the TRANSCOMMODIFICATION 105 fact that both kinds of music were finding an increasingly diverse audience in the wake of rapid wartime population movements. The name changes worked both to acknowledge and accommodate this diversification. The new names, “R & B” and “country,” reflected not only gains in practical power for the black and white working-class people, nor just the broadening of each music’s respective audiences, but also changes in musi¬ cal styles that conveyed a greater confidence in their cultural capital. The event in country music leading up to the 1948 Billboard renaming was the emergence of honky-tonk, a style that led country away from a folk orienta¬ tion and toward an electrified sound associated with roadhouse entertain¬ ment. Richard Peterson traces honky-tonk back to Prohibition-era road¬ houses on county lines, where alcohol was less easily policed than in town. Crowded, noisy venues led bands to experiment with amplified sounds. Entertaining in a rowdy male space, the honky-tonk band also developed a graphic style of first-person narration far more tied to male sexual exploits than earlier modes of country music. Peterson notes that the traditional figures of the geezer and hillbilly, already fading since the 1920s, had been giving way to a more westernized image of the cowboy performer, such as Jimmie Rodgers or even Gene Autry (Peterson, 55-93). Honky-tonk only gained momentum during and after the war years, selling records to “juke joints” and winning larger audiences no longer necessarily restricted to rural regions. Its new cowboy figure, best exemplified by Hank Williams, now played speeded-up electric instruments and plied sexual innuendo in his songs, removing country music from stories of homestead nostalgia— of leisure at the scene of traditional domesticity—and cultivating instead the mobile, playful tales of the ramblin’ man at the roadhouse. A black, urban contemporary of honky-tonk, rhythm and blues simi¬ larly aimed to electrify and upbeat the (rural blues) music out of which it was emerging. Nelson George has even used the term “rhythm and blues” as an epochal label for the wartime and postwar African American condi¬ tion, claiming that the term carried both a musical and a socioeconomic meaning. Regarding the former, George calls R & B “a synthesis of black musical genres —gospel, big-band swing, blues —that, along with a new technology, specifically the popularization of the electric bass, produced a propulsive, spirited brand of popular music” (xiii). In addition to George’s sonal description here, we might also observe that rhythm and blues in¬ tensified the commodification of black popular culture. The new markets for African American pop music in northern and western cities became 106 CHAPTER THREE increasingly profitable during the forties, which in turn led to a prolifera¬ tion of R & B recording labels (including Chess, Modern, and Imperial), record stores (especially following the advent of the 45 and 33), and local radio stations. For George, R & B connoted the opportune wartime migration of Afri¬ can Americans “from the fields of the South for the factories of the North” as well as its aftermath in civil rights. R & B therefore delineates a period in African American history (from the forties till perhaps the seventies) marked by political optimism, energy, and hopefulness (George, xiii). Art¬ ists such as Muddy Waters, B. B. King, and Louis Jordan, but also Fats Domino (who began his career as an R & B musician, and only later be¬ came a rock ’n’ roller), developed a new musical formation that helped to revise the meaning of blackness in a new, post-depression-era, urban com¬ modity culture. R & B reworked a long-standing romantic role of music in African American culture, from slavery onward, as the symbolic expres¬ sion of nighttime’s freedom over and against the bondage of the day. Yet R & B is best understood less as a continuation than as a reappropriation of earlier moments in African American musical culture. Earlier forms of music (blues, shout, swing, and gospel) were made to speak to the new his¬ torical conditions, but only by a process of transformation in which their connotations were reassigned to a context of industrial wage labor and commodified leisure. Developed in industrial centers, in places where money earned could be easily spent for entertainment as well as necessities, and during a world war in which mass unemployment had given way to the mass enlisting of the populace, R & B evoked an optimistic sense of expanding free¬ dom through a specific set of ideologemes: signs with which it consti¬ tuted an imaginative relationship to wartime social conditions. Deploy¬ ing industrial binaries, such as necessary labor versus elective leisure and daily tedium versus nighttime entertainment, R & B generated celebrative stories about spending one’s paycheck, enjoying the town on evenings and weekends, and thrilling to personal romances of love and lovemaking that replayed (as a story within a story) the framing romance of the freedom of leisure time itself. R & B, as I’m describing it here, invoked the context of a factory production system; it also strongly associated leisure with a form of commodity consumption and discretionary spending. However, the informing context for this consumption differed noticeably from the suburban mode that would emerge after the war. Most obviously, R & B TRANSCOMMODIFICATION 107 leisure was not organized around domestic space or family life, but rather upon the entree of the individual (usually but not always a man) “stepping out” into the scene of urban nightlife. Its social network concerns friends and lovers (past, present, or future), rarely husbands, wives, parents, or children. The consumer items with which it is associated are not durable home goods but more transient commodities. The world in which it located itself was not private but public, not stationary but fluid and shifting. The central ideologemes of R & B, in short, worked to imagine an urban (rather than a suburban) arena of industrial leisure. R & B may still be termed a quasi- or proto-Fordist musical form insofar as its social context was indebted to higher wages and employment due to the government’s wartime intervention into the economy. Its entertainment value evoked a fantastic and utopic setting, a sensuous world of after-hour passions made possible by the revved-up economy. Yet, given that much of wartime pro¬ duction was geared toward the war effort, the mode of consumption that R & B celebrated was not (and did not need to be) matched to industrial output. Moreover, the wartime era was one of ongoing shortages for the working-class civilian population. No doubt, most fans of R & B lived ardu¬ ous lives, sharing overpriced city apartments with their extended families. Still, wages did rise during the war in ways that encouraged an R & B imagination of free time as liberating the listener from these sorts of blues. The utopic imagination of R & B led its audience away from daytime wor¬ ries and toward the thrilling joys and sorrows that the nighttime city had to offer. I want to consider Fats Domino’s version of this sound of leisure since, as someone who straddled the divide between R & B and rock ’n’ roll, he produced a music that allows us to consider how the R & B fantasy of free time both facilitated rock ’n’ roll and was in turn reworked by it. Domino was a musician whose style and career were clearly established in R & B. A creole Louisianan whose first name was actually Antoine and whose first language was French, Domino began playing boogie-woogie style piano in mid-forties New Orleans with the David Barthelemew Band. By 1949, Domino had won national success as an R & B artist on the independent Imperial label. In both its playful energy and narrative codes, Fats Domino's music be¬ longs squarely within the formation of R & B as I’ve described it. In songs such as “Blue Monday,” for example, Domino sings about surviving the tedium of the week for the sake of the joys of the weekend. “Blue Monday, 108 CHAPTER THREE how I hate Blue Monday,” Domino starts out, “Got to work like a slave all day” and all week long, until Saturday mornin’, oh Saturday mornin’ All my tiredness has gone away Got my money and my honey And I’m out on the stand to play. Sunday is devoted to recovering from all the fun: “But I’ve got to get my rest / ’Cause Monday is a mess.” In a song like “Blue Monday,” that great time for which one lives might well be called “rhythm and blues,” that stretch of the weekend where one can dance, spend, make love, and en¬ joy life, even if that joy takes the form of the blues, of love pain. Domino’s famous rendition of “Blueberry Hill,” for example, recalls the bittersweet memory of one magic night’s “thrill,” spent with his girl. And though her vows of fidelity were “never to be,” Domino sings, You’re part of me still For you were my thrill On Blueberry Hill. Even in moments of pain or tedium, the singer of R & B carries these memories of thrill, fun, and freedom. More typically though, up-tempo rhythm and blues tended to sing about the actual high or “thrill” itself (and not just its memory), something Domino also took up in such songs as “I’m Ready [to Rock ’n’ Roll All Night]” or “The Big Beat.” Though Domino might seem a quintessential rhythm-and-blues artist, nevertheless, in 1955, his music was reclassified by the musical market¬ place as rock ’n’ roll, about seven years after the suburban boom had begun in earnest. Unlike slightly younger musicians such as Little Richard or Presley, Domino, twenty-seven years old in that year and nicknamed the “Fat Man,” was no obvious teen idol, nor had he obviously altered anything in his musical style to attract a youth audience.16 Suburban teenagers, it seems, were interested in Domino’s “straight-up” style of R & B. Before in¬ quiring what difference the category of rock ’n’ roll made, it is worth consid¬ ering this initial suburban youth desire for the sound of rhythm and blues. Earlier, I spoke of a split vision of suburbia, in which the dystopic vi¬ sion of a sterile wasteland became increasingly aligned with youth cul¬ ture. Whereas the utopic vision endorsed a standardized vision of domestic happiness, its dystopic negation tended to repudiate domestication as en- TRANSCOMMODIFICATION 109 trapment, expressing instead an antidomestic counterdesire for the extra¬ suburban. Within the countersuburban imaginary of a suburban teen audi¬ ence, a song such as Fats Domino’s “Blue Monday” conveyed an alternative to suburban family leisure that, by comparison, sounded like genuinely free time. In “Blue Monday” one finds freedom from work not at home but at the dance hall, “playing on the stand” with one’s money and one’s honey. As a place to rest up from all the fun, home is just fine in Domino’s song. But for the singer, the weekend might be as blue as the workweek if one didn’t leave home to seek out thrills (on Blueberry Hill, on the stand, or somewhere else). In Domino’s song, home is merely a way station between work and the fantasy space of play. To countersuburban ears, however, home became suburbia itself writ large, and Domino’s play world a fantasy of leisure be¬ yond family life. And to the extent that domestication became synonymous with staying at home, Domino intoned for suburbia a zone of freedom be¬ yond domesticity. To put this another way, as R & B, Domino’s music sig¬ nified the energy of the upbeat black city enjoying its free time after work. As rock ’n’ roll, the same music continued to signify the leisure of the black city, but now implicitly entered into a relation of difference from the white suburban home. It is instructive to consider the broad similarities between how Domino’s R & B and Bill Haley’s country sounds were appropriated into rock ’n’ roll. Rock ’n’ roll’s origin is often dated back to Bill Haley’s “Rock around the Clock,” which conquered the pop charts in 1955 only after it appeared in the film Blackboard Jungle. If so, then it is striking that the popularization of rock ’n’ roll was triggered by the film’s association of Haley’s sound with juvenile delinquency (as the next chapter will discuss in detail). Haley, like Domino, was a performer whose career (as a “western swing” country bandleader) predates rock ’n’ roll.17 Like Domino’s “Blue Monday,” Haley’s “Rock around the Clock” reached suburban teenagers by conveying a non¬ domestic, working-class form of leisure that could be appropriated by a countersuburban imaginary.18 As George Lipsitz notes, Haley’s song con¬ verts the clock governing blue-collar labor into an icon of leisure in which it measures out “doses of pleasure instead of units of labor” (ii3).To counter¬ suburban ears, however, Haley’s rocking timepiece might have contrasted with the clock at home, where one is stuck with nowhere to go and noth¬ ing to do. Unlike the slow-ticking, laborious pace of time in either the fac¬ tory or the suburban home, when Haley and his listener rock, clock time whizzes by: HO CHAPTER THREE One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock rock Five, six, seven o’clock, eight o’clock rock Nine, ten, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock rock We’re gonna rock around the clock tonight. Haley expresses a wild-eyed fantasy about a cyclical, never-ending dance party, complete with a snare drum backbeat to punctuate the singer’s rapid announcements. Neither hours at work, at home, nor even in sleep need intrude on the cyclical, self-enclosed universe of emancipated leisure that “Rock around the Clock” projects. Yet by leaving its grinding clock-time counterpart unnamed, “Rock around the Clock” invites the listener to choose their own location for the tedium against which the song poses its liberatory fantasy; the constraints of factory work or of suburban familial leisure function equally well as the opposite of rocking and rolling. Though Haley mixed styles, drawing from R & B and even big band sounds, he was primarily an up-tempo country-and-western artist, evoking not so much the hop of the ethnic city as a western-swing country dance somewhere in Kansas or Texas. Yet, as the next chapter discusses, Black¬ board Jungle linked “Rock around the Clock” to a multiracial cityscape in the Bronx. A considerable amount of slippage, one might say, took place in the early and mid-fifties between city and country as counterimaginary landscapes for suburbia. For all that one might expect popular music to maintain sharp distinctions between city and country sounds, in rock ’n’ roll it seems one could scroll back and forth between them (and within them) as sheer variety of what I might call countersuburban sounds.19 The R & B energy of the upbeat black city, therefore, was blurred in with the energy of other landscapes, such as those associated with the street talkers of black doo-wop, the midwestern and Texan big band sounds favored by Bill Haley, country guitar or honky-tonk piano, and so forth. This fusing of sounds and spaces, especially across lines of race, was especially evident in the country strain of rock ’n’ roll. Just as certain black artists remained largely identified with R & B (Muddy Waters and B. B. King, for instance) while others transitioned into rock 'n’ rollers (Fats Domino, but also Little Richard and Chuck Berry), so too a distinction de¬ veloped between country artists who crossed over into rock ’n’ roll (Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, for instance) and those who did not (Ernest Tubbs, Johnny Cash). Those who did were termed “rockabilly” art¬ ists, a name that expressed the insertion of “hillbilly” sounds and scenarios into an affectively charged topographic relationship with suburbia. Rocka- TRANSCOM MODIFICATION III billy artists also, however, drew heavily on R & B, blackening their music, often through evocations of wild male sexuality, that created tension be¬ tween them and established country music. Jerry Lee Lewis represents a particularly clear example of someone whose status as rock ’n’ roll star was fashioned out of such a sexualized blending of honky-tonk and R & B sounds aimed at a youth audience. Born to a working-class Louisianan family (and nicknamed “the killer”), Lewis played the sound of wildness more vividly than any other early rocker, with the possible exception of Little Richard. Lewis consistently sings about desire as an uncontrollable (hence undomesticatable) force that he can only convey through his frenzied pacing. “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” in its famous couplet, “Well I said come over baby, we got chicken in the barn / Whose barn, what barn, my barn!!” turns the country farm into a place of double-entendres, blurring the idea of a barn party (and alluding perhaps to the nationwide radio barn dances of the 1930s and 1940s) into a sexual escapade: Now let’s get real low one time now, Shake baby shake All you gotta do honey is kinda stand in one spot Wiggle around just a little bit Meanwhile, “Great Balls of Fire” featured the seemingly innocent rural ex¬ clamation “Goodness gracious” only in order to describe the singer’s thrill at being overwhelmed by passion: I chew my nails and I twiddle my thumbs I’m real nervous, but it sure is fun Come on baby, drive me crazy Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire!! Lewis’s songs succeeded in cutting across the various possible audiences — rural, urban, and suburban —perhaps more successfully than any other performer. Both “Whole Lotta Shakin’ ” and “Great Balls of Fire” hit num¬ ber one on all three of the Billboard charts: pop, R & B, and country. Yet Lewis was rarely explicit about his ability to reach out from his base in coun¬ try and R & B audiences to tap a suburban listenership. Only in the song “High School Confidential,” does a Jerry Lee Lewis song fold its youth cul¬ ture value back into itself, by relocating its blurring of sex and dancing into a high school party.20 All the same, Lewis’s sound deploys an erotics hill¬ billy wildness to stand outside and against suburban. In becoming a staple of suburban teen leisure activity, Lewis-style rock ’n’ roll thereby invested 112 CHAPTER THREE (whether the songs acknowledged it or not) teen leisure with the codes of the honky-tonk sexcapade. Little Richard, meanwhile, as an R & B counterpart to Jerry Lee Lewis, evoked a queerer sexual wildness in his exuberant, up-tempo sound, play¬ fully costumed persona, and in his open lyrical celebration of sex. On the one hand, Little Richard’s hits had one foot in the same R & B evocation of wartime leisure as the somewhat older Domino, though at an even greater speed. “Rip It Up,” for example, is a fast-paced dance number premised on the same weekend fantasy as “Blue Monday”: Saturday night and I just got paid I’m a fool about my money, don’t try to save. My heart says “go go, have a time” Saturday night and I’m feelin’ fine. But in the chorus that follows, “Rip It Up” immediately turns toward the conflation of dance and sex for which rock ’n’ roll (beginning with its name) became controversial: I’m gonna rock it up, *whoo* Rip it up I’m gonna shake it up Gonna ball it up. The most flamboyant gender-bender of the early rockers, Little Richard consistently celebrated in his biggest hits (“Tutti-Frutti,” “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” and “Long Tall Sally,” among others) the manic power of the sexual encounter as subversive fun, “rocking” and “balling” as a furtive, exhilarat¬ ing escape from the sober expectations of family life often personified in his songs (by “Mama” in “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” “Aunt Mary” in “Long Tall Sally”). As Glenn Altschuler notes, while Little Richard’s feminized perfor¬ mance style connoted gay personality, it also thereby diffused the poten¬ tial threat posed by a black man’s openly sexual appeal to white girl fans (60-61). Little Richard comically staged sex as resistive play, but in vari¬ ous degrees of indirection. The original refrain “Tutti-Frutti, Good Booty,” for instance, became in the recorded version of Richard’s hit, “Tutti-Frutti, Aw-Rootie,” while the bawdy lines “If it don’t fit / don’t force it. / You can grease it, / make it easy” became “I got a gal named Daisy. / She al¬ most drive me crazy.” The words were perhaps less important than the rawness of Richard’s screaming voice. And if even this version was too forward, one could soon hear a thoroughly sanitized cover by Pat Boone TRANSCOMMODIFICATION 113 (Boone’s recording quickly went gold, but this in turn spurred further sales of Little Richard’s hit).21 Even in its most cleaned-up versions, however, Little Richard’s fantasy of sexual fun as antidomestic escape remained easy enough to discern and enjoy. Little Richard, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley (to be dis¬ cussed in chapter 5), and other performers in the R & B or rockabilly mode provided suburban youth culture with a palette of imaginary tableaus through which it could consolidate a sense of leisure quite distinct from the domestic model of family entertainment exemplified by tv. How exactly these extrasuburban fantasy spaces provided an appropriate structure for suburban teen leisure, however, needs clarification. Let me therefore work through the argument with some care. The fantasies of leisure that made their way into rock ’n’ roll were drawn from musical forms embedded in a variety of historical conditions, but by and large they may all be called pre- or proto-Fordist. They are typically associated with agrarian (country) or industrial (city) landscapes, both of which organize life around manual labor while leaving leisure time open as an arena not fully articulated to the production system.22 Country, R & B, black vocal group, and other styles tended to define the sound of leisure as “free time” and often (in Simon Frith’s words) as an “implicit critique of work.” Unlike the leisure of adult suburbia, the leisure defined by urban and country music’s fantasies of play were not perceptibly driven by an external economic need to articulate mass consumption with mass production. The ideological value of country and R & B sounds to suburban youth culture therefore lay precisely in the fact that their fantasies of leisure (in narratives of entertainment) could be used to sound out an “other” to the Fordist consumption system. If R & B and country music provide, in their feeling for leisure, an implicit critique of work, then their appropriation as rock ’n’ roll allowed youth culture, in an analogous manner, to produce an implicit critique of suburbia expressed by the pleasure of being displaced from it. Through rock ’n’ roll, black city nightlife, but also the country roadhouse, the bam dance, and even the city street corner (the setting favored by vocal harmony groups) now became recoded as fantastic scenes from beyond suburbia that could sonically evoke the emerging space of suburban youth culture itself. The Elsewhere Is Right Here: Countersuburbanizing Rock V Roll For the first few years of its public existence, rock ’n’ roll may be character¬ ized as those sounds, broadcast into the suburbs on the radio that aurally 4 CHAPTER THREE transported suburban teenagers to either urban or rural fantasy spaces of free time. By 1957, however, rock ’n’ roll had begun to develop—like the suburban ideal itself—a third space of leisure’s liberation from suburbia, paradoxically enough in suburban youth culture itself. On the one hand, this youth culture bore a metonymic relation to suburbia as part of and con¬ tiguous with it. Aurally, however, its rock ’n’ roll sound resonated with the decidedly nonsuburban tones of urban or rural playtime. Drawn into sub¬ urbia as a means of expressing a desire to be somewhere else, these sounds came to encode youth culture itself as an “elsewhere,” a space where free time was lived and enjoyed in ways that contradicted the domestic norms of suburbia at large. Richard Aquila, in his detailed reference book on early rock ’n’ roll, pro¬ poses classifying the music into three major styles: “R & B rock, country rock, and pop rock.”23 The last of these, pop rock, combined musical and lyrical elements from R & B and country with Tin Pan Alley sounds, espe¬ cially for its favorite genre, the love ballad. Pop rock, on the one hand, simply extended the centuries-old connection of youth with romantic love. Yet, in invoking the postwar category of the teenager per se, it brought both youth and romantic love into the orbit of suburban consumption, reflected first and foremost in the radio consumption of the songs themselves. Purist rock aficionados, to this day, still malign the pop rock artists of the fifties — Pat Boone, Ricky Nelson, Tab Hunter, Tommy Sand, and the like —for their cleaner-cut images and their commercial Tin Pan Alley sappiness, prais¬ ing instead the more “authentic” sounds of R & B and country rockers. It was these pop rockers, however, who most openly declared youth cul¬ ture a countersuburban space in identitarian terms, as an imagined sover¬ eign territory within which teenage pleasures were emancipated from the tedium and constraint of the suburban quotidian. Pop rock artists (themselves often teenage idols) rarely acknowledged an adult presence in everyday teenage life, but instead serenaded youth culture as a protected space where romance and fun should reign unim¬ peded.24 In Tommy Sand's 1957 hit, “Teenage Crush,” for instance, a boy woos his beloved by begging her not to accept what adults say about young love: They've forgotten when they were young And the way they tried to be free. All they say is “This young generation Is just not the way it used to be.” TRANSCOMMODIFICATION IIS With the exception of his young voice, Sand’s hit, with its slow-dance tempo and full string orchestration, sounds very much like prerock Tin Pan Alley hits. The singer’s appeal, however, reveals something specific to rock ’n’ roll. In a song that is otherwise about a crush, Sand’s digression into gen¬ erational misunderstanding makes explicit an implied alignment within pop rock between teen life, desire, the acting on desire, and freedom itself. These terms are then opposed to an adult world of muted or extinguished desire, where passionate pursuit of romantic happiness and freedom is lacking. The effect in Sand’s ballad is to romanticize not only one particular young love, but a generational unit of young people that —in sharing these songs —creates for itself (in the face of an older generation’s animosity) a universe of feeling and desire. Celebrations of youth culture as a third scene of freedom from subur¬ bia (alongside the rural and urban script) were even more frequent and ex¬ plicit in doo-wop or (as Gillett calls it) black vocal group music (31-34). This strain of rock ’n’ roll drew from a comic, a capella genre of African Ameri¬ can music, often set on the street, that had often concerned a (usually male) protagonist thwarted through a lack of power, money, or opportunity. The vocal group’s protagonist expressed defiance and resentment, often con¬ cerning access to consumer goods, in ways that proved tremendously at¬ tractive to suburban youth. As vocal group music transitioned into the doo-wop strain of rock ’n’ roll, it often became the site for songs explicitly dealing with confrontations between delinquent teenagers and the adults who aimed to “normalize” them. Few early rock ’n’ roll groups narrated these conflicts more directly than the Coasters, a group based in L.A. and New York. In a scenario strongly echoing Blackboard Jungle, the Coasters’ well-known “Charlie Brown” comi¬ cally relates the story of a troublemaker who breaks the rules constraining student behavior. The world that Charlie Brown inhabits is never speci¬ fied. On the one hand, the Coasters sing in a style easily identifiable as urban black English, and about a character whose name might signal his skin color. Yet his name could just as easily identify a delinquent version of the white, middle-class Charlie Brown who figures in Charles Schultz’s Peanuts. Wherever he is, and whatever his color, Charlie Brown smokes in the auditorium, writes on the walls, throws spitballs, and generally goofs around. The song plays on a call and response between a lead singer, who clev¬ erly describes Charlie Brown’s antics, and a chorus that names him to the 116 CHAPTER THREE accompaniment of a brassy band whose sound expresses the rebellious fun. In the final verse, the song even veers into a direct face-off with the teacher: Who walks in the classroom, cool and slow? Who calls the English teacher Daddy-O? Charlie Brown, he’s a clown. What’s funny about Charlie Brown for the singer is presumably the frivolity of his resistance. For all his bravado, the bad boy must inevitably get in trouble, which he will then deny by feigning confusion in his low-pitched, wounded voice: “Why’s everybody always picking on me?” Yet as a clown Charlie Brown adds the only life to what is otherwise a sterile institution devoted to the earnest ethics of work and study. His smoke, spitballs, and out-of-placeness distinguish him from his fellow students, much as the lead singer stands out against the chorus. Itself comedic, “Charlie Brown” draws on a desire to be the individualized clown who playfully declines the regimentation of school. The conflict between a work and a play ethic is made even more explicit in “Yakkety Yak,” another famous hit by the Coasters. This time, genera¬ tional conflict centers not on teacher and student in school, but on parent and child at home: Take out the papers and the trash Or you don’t get no spendin’ cash. If you don’t scrub that kitchen floor You ain’t gonna rock and roll no more. Yakkety yak (don’t talk back). Here household chores become the opposite of rock ’n’ roll, the leisure ac¬ tivity par excellence of a “spendin’ ” teenager with discretionary income. “Yakkety Yak” is sung satirically in the voice of the authoritarian father, who aims to inculcate in his kid a respect for hard work, and a sober sense that money must be earned. Yet the father’s words swing to a fast-paced, playful rockin’ rhythm that evokes the very fun to which his child hopes to escape. So too does the festive response of the sax to the father’s admonitions, itself a stand-in for the teenager’s backtalk. Paternal instruction thus unexpect¬ edly returns one to rock ’n’ roll, the object of the teenager’s desire, the site of release from these chores, which the song moreover explicitly links to delinquent trouble: TRANSCOMMODIFICATION 117 Don’t you give me no dirty looks. Your father’s hip; he knows what cooks. Just tell your hoodlum friend outside You ain’t got time to take a ride. Dad has the lingo down, meaning he knows what his kid does with his free time, what rock ’n’ roll is all about, what this space of teen autonomy really means (defiance of the law, criminality). Since suburban dads were not exactly hipsters, likely to know “what cooks,” “Yakkety Yak” suggests a setting far from suburbia, somewhere on the city street. Nevertheless, the familial home and its attendant chores were hardly unfamiliar to the song’s suburban listeners. Like “Charlie Brown,” “Yakkety Yak” achieved a certain blurring of locations that allowed suburban teenagers to be imaginatively partnered with inner-city youth as escapees from parental mandates. “Yak¬ kety Yak” offers suburban teenagers a chance to be in on a secret, namely the imaginative collaboration of rock ’n’ roll with illicit forms of freedom (the hoodlum friends) that would no doubt horrify their parents. Like the hapless “Charlie Brown,” the kid in “Yakkety Yak” points the listener toward a desire to “talk back” even while humorously implying the foolishness of direct generational confrontation. Compared to the other strains of rock ’n’ roll, relatively few rockabilly artists sang self-consciously about teenage leisure in suburbia (working in¬ stead through their country settings). One significant exception, however, was Eddie Cochran, someone who, like the Coasters, possessed a comic sensibility. As someone whose family came from rural Oklahoma, but who moved to southern California as an adolescent, Cochran began his short career as a suburban teenager, using country music to develop a sound that could be marketed within the milieu of his upbringing. Cochran began his career as part of a “fraternal” duo, performing in the California coun¬ try music circuit (at festivals with such names as Hometown Jamboree or Town Hall Party). Greatly impressed by the look and sound used by Elvis Presley to break out of country into the broad youth market, Cochran soon split up with his (more country-oriented) partner and began gearing his music to a rock ’n’ roll market. Cochran adopted much of Presley’s style, in¬ cluding a good dose of R & B. Far more explicitly than Presley himself, how¬ ever, Cochran set the micronarratives of his songs within teen suburbia. Where the setting of the dancing utopia is left ambiguous in Bill Haley’s “Rock around the Clock,” for instance, in Cochran’s “Teenage Heaven” the space of pure happiness and freedom becomes directly a province of 118 CHAPTER THREE youth-culture imaginative passions. Somewhat self-mockingly, “Teenage Heaven” materializes the fantasy space of unimpeded youthful fun by way of a wish list implicit in much of fifties rock ’n’ roll: I want a house with a pool Shorter hours in school And a room with my own vitaphone I want to stay up all night See the big city lights No more troubles, no more worries at home Just give me some time on my hands I want to make my own other plans Yah, I want my own coup de ville make my dad pay the bill Yah man that’s heaven to me. On first glance, it might not be clear what differentiates “teenage heaven” from the suburban vision of mainstream consumer culture. The singer’s desires (true to Lawrence Grossberg’s admonition) seem very much in line with postwar Fordism, aiming at suburban affluence in the form of a large home and fancy car. Yet there are moments when the song swerves away from these meanings toward a longing for something else. “Teen¬ age Heaven,” to begin with, is sung to a hipped-up version of the tune for “Home on the Range.” Curiously, then, it quotes an old-school mode of country domesticity that poses an ironic contrast to the ostentatious home of “teenage heaven.” Even setting aside Cochran’s evident self-parody, it is important to see that his “teenage heaven” clings to a dual fantasy of escape, from both the suburban restrictions on adult and teen life respectively. To begin with, the heaven in question resembles an R & B world in which the singer is free to stay up all night long, playing in the city. Unlike the sub¬ urban vision of adult happiness, the singer’s desires are not directed toward marriage, maturity, and a life of domestic bliss in his fancy home. Rather, the singer aspires to dodge the “troubles” and “worries” of home life, and pursue instead his “other plans” of playful nightlife. In this respect “teen¬ age heaven” resembles not so much suburban adulthood as it does rocking around the clock with Bill Haley. Moreover, “Teenage Heaven” implies an “actual existing” world of teen restraint that has summoned up this fantasy of heaven in the first place. By reading backward from the singer’s “wants,” it becomes evident how the TRANSCOMMODIFICATION 119 song presumes the experience of teenhood: always fewer goodies than one wants, to be sure, but also too many hours in school, a restrictive bedtime, a general shortage of free time. A teenager also can’t get to town, perhaps being stuck at home, where he or she apparently endures a barrage of fa¬ milial troubles and worries. If youth culture expresses, in Cochran’s song as in so many other songs, a dream of freedom, then it also attests to a con¬ siderable gap between that dream and the reality of its desiring teenager. This posited gap between the dream of youth culture and the realities of teenhood serves the explicit subject of Cochran’s single most famous rock ’n’ roll song, “Summertime Blues.” Sung from the perspective of a teenager who’s “a-workin’ all summer just a-trying to earn a dollar,” “Summertime Blues” comically bemoans the singer’s disappointments at trying to free up time for a date with his baby. Either the boss makes him work late, or his parents deny him the car. Denied time and transportation, the singer never finds what rock ’n’ roll promises, namely his bit of teenage heaven, but is stuck instead with the plain old blues. In typical tongue-in-cheek, Cochran imagines politicizing this injustice: It’s gonna take two weeks for I have my vacation, I’m gonna take my problem to the United Nations. Well I told my congressman and he said, quote: “I’d like to help you son but you’re too young to vote” Sometimes I wonder what I’m a gonna do. But there ain’t no cure for the Summertime Blues. Playful though it is, “Summertime Blues” invests teenage leisure with ideo¬ logical weight. Summertime is the equivalent of the R & B weekend or the country night at the roadhouse, yet this song presents its failure as a time of freely chosen pleasures. Instead, summer exacts extra hours of work, arbitrary parental restriction, and even a rebuff from one’s deep-voiced po¬ litical representative. In the world of this song, the singer’s rights as a teen¬ ager (to enjoy summertime as a utopic space) cannot be secured precisely because a teenager’s rights are not acknowledged. To the extent that these pleasures are thrilled to in other songs —by Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, and so forth—they become, in Cochran’s one big hit, illicit pleasures whose maintenance as right will require generational struggle: “I’m a-gonna raise a fuss I’m a-gonna raise a holler,” advises the singer in the song’s opening line. 120 CHAPTER THREE School Day: The Cultural Work and Play of Rock V Roll For all their stylistic differences, the subgenres I have just described—pop rock, vocal group, and teenified rockabilly—shared a common mode of ad¬ dress. All three named their suburban teen audience, hailing them as the citizens of a utopically free and passionate youth culture. Eddie Cochran, the Coasters, and even Tommy Sand all invested youth culture with the sounds of desire for play and passion, over and against the drudgery of school, of home, of work, and more broadly of suburbia itself. If the setting and subject of this desire are new, its structure should already be familiar, for it reiterates the celebration of leisure time, based upon the proletarian binary of work and play, already found in the R & B and country rock of Fats Domino, Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others. These two sets of binaries are neither identical nor straightforwardly equivalent. They do, however, share a contingent resemblance whose basis needs to be spelled out. I want to approach the question of their connection by way of one final case study, the music of Chuck Berry. Of all the rock ’n’ rollers of the fifties nobody was more self-conscious or effective than Berry in scripting teen leisure according to country and R & B’s dramas of free time. A close look at his work may therefore illuminate the valence of early rock ’n’ roll’s ideo¬ logical work, regarding both its relationship to the musics out of which it was composed, as well as its imaginative position vis-a-vis suburbia. Berry is a performer whose music straddled the three styles of early rock ’n’ roll offered by Aquila: R & B rock, country rock, and pop rock. Raised in a mu¬ sically inclined middle-class black family, Berry had personal contact with both R & B and country music. He also grew up in an outlying neighbor¬ hood of St. Louis that anticipated the suburbs to be built after the war.25 This peculiar confluence of biographical intimacies is reflected in the criti¬ cal confusion that attends descriptions of Berry’s music. Some critics — Richard Aquila, for instance —see Berry as “emerging from the rhythm and blues tradition” (178). Others, such as Reebee Garofalo, argue that Berry had more of a country sound, but that “there was simply no way to mar¬ ket a black man as a country singer” or else “Chuck Berry might well have had a very different career trajectory” (n).26 No critics dispute Berry’s sin¬ gularity as an adult black man who authored the most notable songs of the decade to be written in the voice of suburban teenagers. How Berry actu¬ ally reworked country and R & B music into rock n’ roll, however, requires a closer examination of his music. Of the many song trajectories that could be foregrounded, I have chosen TRANSCOMMODIFICATION 12 to consider one that involves a somewhat unconventional R & B number, Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business,” recorded in 1956. “Too Much Mon¬ key Business” initially appears to be an R & B number emphasizing the tedious day instead of its antidote in the “rockin’ ” evening. Like many R & B songs, “Monkey Business” is sung in the first-person voice of a laborer, complaining about his low-paying job: Runnin’ to-and-fro—hard workin’ at the mill. Never fail in the mail—yeah, come a rotten bill! Unlike most R & B songs, however, “Monkey Business” abandons the fac¬ tory worker after the first verse, turning in each successive stanza to a new character’s resentment of yet another site of entrapment. Many of these sites specifically allude to the milieu of postwar consumer culture. Verse 2, for instance, protests the financial fetters of the install¬ ment plan: Salesman talkin’ to me —tryin’ to run me up a creek. Says you can buy now, gone try—you can pay me next week, ahh! In verse three, a man berates domestication by women: Blond have good looks —tryin’ to get me hooked. Want me to marry —get a home —settle down—write a book. In the fourth stanza, Berry turns to the scenario of rock ’n’ roll, adopting the frustrated voice of the dependent teenager: Same thing every day—gettin’ up, goin’ to school. No need for me to complain —my objection’s overruled, ahh! Played to a slow, repetitive rhythm that itself invokes coercion, “Monkey Business” constructs a chain of equivalencies between its successive char¬ acters and the settings they endure, each time echoing the same frustration (the “ahh!”) with which the song began, namely a compulsory social disci¬ pline. If in the first verse the worker must submit to the boss’s regimenta¬ tion of work, this is substituted for by the salesman’s repayment schedule in the second verse, the marital ties imposed by the blond in the third, and the rules of the school administration in the fourth. In each instance, an alien will pressures the singer into serving a powerful institution: the sys¬ tems of factory, credit, family, and school respectively. Just as the factory produces workers as well as goods, so do the other settings respectively stamp out disciplined subjects: another consumer, another husband, or an122 CHAPTER THREE other student. “Monkey Business” thus spins off from the implicit critique of work in the R & B narrative, using assembly line drudgery as its master analog with which to critique other disciplinary arenas as so much more “monkey business.” Among these equivalent scenarios set up by “Monkey Business,” the fac¬ tory/school tandem stands out as the comparison that drives Berry’s rock ’n’ roll output, and arguably, much of rock ’n’ roll in the fifties. Perhaps the most revealing point of translation from “Monkey Business” to Berry’s rock oeuvre is his anthemic, and arguably his single most famous song, “School Days,” released in the very next year. Like its predecessor, “School Days” begins with a forced march through a scene of grueling discipline: Up in the mornin’ and out to school The teacher is teachin’ the Golden Rule American history and practical math You studyin’ hard and hopin’ to pass Workin’ your fingers right down to the bone And the guy behind you won’t leave you alone. Unlike “Monkey Business,” which shifts from one disciplinary site to the next, “School Days” cleaves to the scenario of the studious teenager. Never¬ theless, the narrative details of the teenager’s day remain organized by the implicit metaphor of the factory, as revealed in the unlikely image of the student “Workin’ your fingers right down to the bone.” This substitu¬ tion of school for factory becomes audible at several other points, if for instance, one juxtaposes the “studyin’ hard” on a “School Days” with the “hard workin’ at the mill” that launches the work day in “Monkey Business.” So heard, “School Days” reveals a series of unremarked transpositions, for one’s labor (in studying), the foreman (in the teacher), and the annoying coworker (in the “guy behind you”).27 This doubling effect is musically reinforced by the electric guitar, which echoes each of Berry’s lines, transposing its words into pure sonic form. Berry was of course famous as the great popularizer of the electric guitar as the great rock ’n’ roll instrument, and for using it as a demonstration of im¬ mersion in the feeling of sound, most famously in his “duck walks.” Here, the guitar functions almost as a second voice, ready to spin the tedium of labor into the joys of leisure. If the guitar begins “School Days” as a mere underscore for the voice, it will have become, by the end of the song, the pure sound of rock ’n’ roll pleasure, which it is the voice’s task to translate into words. TRANSCOMMODIFICATION 123 The song’s second half, then, leaves the place of work far behind for the equivalent of the R & B weekend or the evening, the rhythm and blues of getting to spend one’s paycheck in town. As in an R & B number, “School Days” marks the beginning of emancipation with the end of clock time, “Soon as three o’clock rolls around” when the listener leaves school to head into the nearest juke joint. Drop the coin right into the slot You’re gotta hear somethin’ that’s really hot With the one you love, you’re makin’ romance All day long you been wantin’ to dance Feeling the music from head to toe Round and round and round we go. Just as the earlier verses transposed the work day into the school day, so here does the song carefully revise the worker’s evening into the teenager’s afternoon, and the dance hall into the juke joint. As the electric guitar gathers force, the song begins to deliver on the R & B promise of romance and energy, returning the fatigued, numbed body of the student to sensu¬ ous feeling. R & B songs are often written in the first person, as evidenced by many of the ones I’ve discussed, from Domino’s “Blue Monday, how I hate Blue Monday” or “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill,” to Berry’s own “Too much monkey business for me to be involved in!” Pop rock songs too are frequently sung in the first person, as in Tommy Sand’s “Teenage Crush”: They call it a teen-age crush They don’t know how I feel. By employing a rare second-person voice, “School Days” makes an unusu¬ ally self-conscious address to its listener. The singing “I” of the song re¬ mains unnamed, but through the voice of the adult artist, Berry, he invokes the working-class worlds of both R & B and country. It is not the singer but the implied listener who is the narrative figure of the song, however. This “you” is the suburban teenager whose story is given witness by the singer. The “I” of “School Days,”—as someone who understands the plight of “you,” the listener, at school as well as the pleasures of the juke joint asserts both a gap and a likeness between the respective binaries of fac¬ tory/nightclub and school/juke joint.“School Days” literally dramatizes the invention of rock ’n' roll when it stages its “I,” drawn from the urban world 124 CHAPTER THREE of R & B, as someone who offers the sound with which the suburban “you” can imagine his or her own teenage existence. In its final verse, when “School Days” celebrates its invention of rock ’n’ roll, however, it paradoxically asserts a continuity with the musical past in an almost liturgical incantation: Hail, hail, rock and roll Deliver me from the days of old Long live rock and roll The beat of the drums, loud and bold Rock, rock, rock and roll The feelin’ is there, body and soul. As the song reaches its climactic end, the second-person voice disappears in favor of a simple first person, the “me” who prays to be “delivered from the days of old.” Three possibilities exist for this first person. It might be the teenage “you” of the earlier stanzas who at last achieves an independent voice, taking up the song as his/her anthem of deliverance from school. It might also be the “I” of earlier verses, the singer who only now begins to speak about himself. Or, last, the “me” of this verse could represent a merg¬ ing of the two subjects, a probable reading given that the scene has shifted so decisively away from a definite school day present into a timeless scene of emancipation. In any of these cases, however, this last verse sets in motion a lineage of freedom and constraint. By alluding back to the title of the song, the singer’s plea to be delivered from the “days of old” suggests, in a man¬ ner not unlike that of “Monkey Business” a chain of comparable day/ night, work/play binaries. Now, however, a temporality has been added, for “School Days” names not simply another place of discipline, but the newest of such places, the latest addition to a series of oppressive days. Rock ’n’ roll, in turn, becomes the latest incarnation of the “drums,” the musi¬ cal antidote to these oppressions. The final verse establishes an unending cycle of tension between submission and emancipation, fatigue and feel¬ ing, whose latest embodiment is found in the teenage “you.” At the same time, the ahistorical collapse in this verse of the song’s preceding “I” and the “you” drastically alters its subject of human emancipation, from the “hard-workin’ ” proletarian in the “days of old,” eager to be freed from the workplace, to the “school day” teenager who escapes with friends and love interests into the romantic spaces of youth culture. TRANSCOMMODIFICATION 125 “School Days” establishes its implicit analogy of school to factory through two points of comparison. First, both serve as sites of exhaust¬ ing labor and onerous discipline. Like the factory, Berry’s school is a place for “Workin’ your fingers right down to the bone.” Both furthermore in¬ volve not simply exertion but also subjection, to bosses and teachers re¬ spectively. The student’s chafing against adult authority is expressed even more baldly in “Monkey Business”: “No need for me to complain—my ob¬ jection’s overruled, ahh!” In likening school to factory as subjectifying in¬ stitutions, “School Days” establishes a correlative analogy between the juke joint and the R & B club. In R & B, the factory and the nightclub are inversely related working-class spaces, the respective worlds of constraint through labor and freedom through leisure. Likewise, in the rock ’n’ roll of “School Days,” school and juke joint are opposing teenage spaces. In school, teen¬ agers work off their subjection to adults, while in the juke joint, they play in a realm of joyous autonomy. Through the force of Berry’s analogy, then, school becomes a site of labor, discipline, and bondage, while the juke joint (and by extension youth culture) become an opposing site of leisure, free¬ dom, and passionate pursuits, a respite from the arena of necessity. This structure of comparison, discernible in “School Days,” implicitly undergirds the rock ’n’ roll of the fifties, though the site of labor in rock ’n’ roll music must be broadened from school, its presentation in Berry’s song, to project suburbia itself as a geography of subjection. R & B and country rock songs, like Fats Domino’s, Bill Haley’s, and Jerry Lee Lewis’s, deploy an unreconstructed version of the labor/leisure binary, based upon the pro¬ letarian workday and weekend, that their teenage fans were apparently able to appropriate as a source of pleasurable imagination about their own sub¬ urban conditions. The analogical structure of “School Days” merely makes explicit a process by which teenage listeners of these songs could map labor and leisure directly onto suburbia and youth culture as their own arenas of constraint and freedom. Moreover, once their appropriative mechanism is recognized, rock ’n’ roll songs that located themselves explicitly within youth culture may also be deciphered in terms of a suburban afterlife for the labor/leisure binary. To revisit earlier examples, “Yakkety Yak” invests teenage labor in the chores at home, and leisure in going for a ride with the “hoodlum friends.” In “Summertime Blues,” labor is literally assigned to the summer job, leisure to the date that the singer can never arrange. In “Teenage Crush," explaining oneself to adults (in a moral accounting) becomes labor, while wooing one’s girl without impediment becomes teen¬ age freedom. Over and over, in different ways and using divergent tones, 26 CHAPTER THREE early rock ’n' roll projected onto youth culture a desired realm of autonomy for teenagers, which it counterposed to the laboriousness of submitting as a teenager to the (familial, educational, or miscellaneously) adult disciplines of everyday suburban life. Transcommodification: Pre-Fordist Leisure as Sonic Metaphor To this point, I have suggested that rock ’n’ roll created a popular music market among suburban teenagers by projecting the city, the country, and finally suburban youth culture itself, as fantasy spaces of emancipation from the laboriousness of suburbia. Recontextualized in this way, the rural and urban spaces sonically projected by R & B and country music substan¬ tively changed their meaning when they became adapted to a suburban youth market. Moreover, suburban youth culture, as a fantasy space that was musically elaborated only within rock ’n’ roll itself, evinces a similar process at work. As Chuck Berry’s music suggests, youth-addressed rock ’n’ roll both implicitly depended upon, even as it substantively resignified, the binaries deployed in its musical sources. It is all too easy to present this resignifying process as one that estranged an autochthonous and thus authentic music —of African Americans, of the working class, of city or country folk —from its origins, by commodifying it to the financial and ideological profit of postwar consumer culture. This ap¬ proximates Lawrence Grossberg’s thesis when he soberly links rock ’n’ roll to the liberal consensus and its consumerist values. As a populist alterna¬ tive to such pessimism, one might therefore also be tempted, like George Lipsitz, to defer the issue of commodification, and instead interpret the rise of rock ’n’ roll as signaling suburban youth’s growing identification with the values and worldview of African Americans or the working class. Both are misleading positions, however, and between them, they have promoted a hapless thumbs up/thumbs down debate over rock ’n’ roll’s alternately liberatory or pernicious political significance. In coining the term “transcommodification,” I offer a different analy¬ sis that acknowledges the commercial conditions attending rock ’n’ roll’s emergence, but does not take the music's commerciality to predetermine its ideological valence. It is not commerciality per se but rather its com¬ mercial specificities that distinguished rock ’n’ roll from the other popular musics —R & B, country, and so forth —out of which it was composed. To understand how rock ’n’ roll was differentiated from R & B, for instance, the historical relationship between them must be examined with an ear TRANSCOMMODIFICATION 127 for how (why, when, and for whom) each music functioned as commercial entertainment. I have already broached such an analysis by observing R & B’s imbri¬ cation in an industrial world organized by urban nightlife and the wage laborer’s paycheck. Rock ’n’ roll organized its meaning in accordance with a radically different sort of world, one inhabited by suburban teenagers who used their small but highly discretionary incomes to escape familial domesticity. These vast differences notwithstanding, the core ideologemes supplied by R & B successfully hailed suburban youth, offering them defi¬ nite imaginary relations to the conditions of their existence. The enabling conditions of this unlikely address, and the character of the resignifications it required, are the proper objects of analysis for an effective account of the “politics” of rock ’n’ roll. And such an analysis requires the assistance of a theoretical concept like transcommodification. What might it mean to transcommodify an object? In the simplest terms, it indicates that this object, previously distributed through the chan¬ nels of one market, has become introduced to another market where it now enters into different exchanges with new consumers. Generally speak¬ ing, the success of any market depends upon bringing its goods within the physical and libidinal reach of a body of buyers. To the extent that the buyers in any particular market are therefore bound by some relation of contiguity (their spatial connection as “local market”), of similarity (their equivalence within a regime of taste) or both, the transcommodified object enters into the hands of consumers who are often “identifiable” in some way. Such “identifiability” is vital to the work of advertising in consumer cultures, where to “market” a product has traditionally meant first to “iden¬ tify” and then to “appeal” to its likely consumers. This means, not so sur¬ prisingly, that “marketing” is at once an economic and a semiotic activity. In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Jean Baudrillard proposed what remains a useful model for approaching consumer culture along these lines, as at once an economic system of commodities and an ideological system of signs. Consumer items, Baudrillard argues, embody two forms of value at once. First, in accordance with Marx’s theory of the commodity, they carry a definite (monetary) exchange value that is deter¬ mined by the object's share in the total abstract labor power utilized by the system of production. Second, the commodity also bears what he calls a sign exchange value, which, in accordance with structural semiotics, Bau¬ drillard defines as its systemic relation of difference to the signifieds of other consumer objects. Focusing on this latter form of (sign) value, Bau128 CHAPTER THREE drillard explicitly compares the system of consumer objects to a linguistic system, and thus draws an analogy between the illusory freedom of the consumer and that of a speaker: A consumer is never isolated, any more than a speaker. . . . Language cannot be explained by postulating an individual need to speak... . Before such questions can even be put, there is, simply, language ... a struc¬ ture of exchange contemporaneous with meaning itself, and on which is articulated the individual intention of speech. Similarly consump¬ tion does not arise from an objective need of the consumer, a final intention of the subject towards the object; rather, there is social pro¬ duction, in a system of exchange, of a material of differences, a code of significations and invidious values. (75) Implicit in Baudrillard’s comparison here is the unity and the staticity of both language and object systems as formal systems of signs. Much like a language for Ferdinand de Saussure, consumer capitalism for Baudrillard (at least in this early book) comprises a singular “universe of consump¬ tion,” a univocal code that organizes the entire system of sign/commodities through a web of fixed distinctions. For Baudrillard, these distinctions in the sphere of consumption express the hierarchical demarcations of social class that every commodity ultimately articulates. The limitations of such a structuralist orthodoxy are fairly evident. While its explanatory power is considerable, as a model it must deny all dynamic processes or transformations within consumer codes. One can¬ not acknowledge change, slippage, or contradiction of any sort within the semiotics of consumer culture, including the sorts of movements that I am terming transcommodification. In place of Baudrillard’s rigid struc¬ ture, a more elastic understanding of consumer culture would analyze it instead as a historically shifting and semiotically incoherent formation, whose class distinctions are, at any moment, shot through and complicated by the only partial articulation of many commodity/sign subsystems that are themselves in continuously mutating relationships with one another. If reconceived along such lines, Baudrillard’s semiologization of the com¬ modity system has the potential to illuminate many of the key implications of “transcommodification.” First, just as a change in a product’s (monetary) exchange value may occur when it is transcommodified, one might also expect a shift in its sign exchange value. When remarketed, a commodity is effectively drawn from one codified subsystem of objects and reinserted into another. A transTRANSCOMMODIFICATION 129 commodified object, in other words, most likely undergoes a process of transcoding. Its significance or sign value within consumer culture will be reassigned as it enters into fresh relations of difference with the objects of its new market. Moreover, these fresh relations lead not merely the object, but the entire subsystem of objects (the new market) to undergo at least some degree of reformulation. As an “alien” sign that must be incorporated into a preexisting code, the transcommodified object enacts a mutation that will rewrite the signifying relations among all the other objects. At this level, a transcommodity such as rock ’n’ roll functions much like a metaphor, a word that has been substituted from one category of discourse into another, thereby infusing it with new significance. In Paul Ricoeur’s influential account, a metaphor results when a word is inserted into an unexpected linguistic context, one that seemingly contradicts its possible “literal” meanings. Under the hermeneutic pressure placed by this context, the reader momentarily invests the word with new signification. As Ricoeur notes, a more lasting “lexical” change can sometimes result from such a local “contextual” change (169). A successful enough meta¬ phor, in other words, may eventually succeed in elevating itself into a new “literal” meaning of the word. I have been placing the word “literal” in quotation marks here because the line between the “literal” and “figurative,” as Derrida famously showed, is ultimately an untenable one.28 As the very prospect of lexical change via metaphor demonstrates, a “literal” meaning of a word may represent nothing more than the fading of its “figurative” character. Generalizing from such instances to a broadly antireferential theory of language, Derrida presents the literal as an effect of the figurative by means of a wearing-away process he calls “usure” (210). This term, itself a numenistic metaphor for language, presents the “literalization” of words as akin to the gradual rub¬ bing out of a coin face such that those who transact with it can no longer dis¬ cern the figures to which its value was once attached. Derrida’s monetary metaphor for the ineradicable (yet delible) figurative of language is an espe¬ cially apt figure for the “transcommodity.” Like a coin, the transcommodity is an object that carries both monetary and semiotic value through its trans¬ figuration of an “elsewhere,” another place in which it was minted and first exchanged. If the transcommodity, for a time, features its own transfigu¬ ration, over time this visage may become worn away. The “usure” of the transcommodity entails no necessary loss of its monetary value, yet it may be that the figure with which it began was once crucial in establishing its 130 CHAPTER THREE value, connoting as it does some place, time, or scenario into which its buyers had invested. Rock 'n' roll, I propose, may be conceived a musical transcommodity in just this way. The medium through which the transposition of pop musical sound objects occurred would of course be radio. As I also noted, radio was no neutral medium of transposition, but one already structured in a rela¬ tion of complementary alternativity to the domestic medium of television. As such, radio already worked to revise the meaning of the music it im¬ ported, from the commercial markets of the city for example, by aligning it with a non- or even antidomestic imagining of suburbia. Heard against the suburban consumer culture of domesticity with which it was now sur¬ rounded, the sounds of R & B or country tended, in Ricoeur’s terms, to make no “literal” sense within its new contexts. What, after all, could a song about breaking from factory work to hit the town possibly mean in relation to the consumer objects of the new housing tracts: the automo¬ bile, refrigerator, tv? As Ricoeur would surely suggest, such a song would take on fleeting metaphorical meanings, though here it must be consid¬ ered how and why these meanings were highly potent for a youth culture that was consolidating itself as both within and yet alternative to the sub¬ urban norm.29 In a song such as “School Days,” what begins as overt metaphor can be witnessed wearing itself away through what Ricoeur might call the “literalization” of rock ’n’ roll. The generic sign of rock ’n’ roll, in other words, at first a metaphor supplied by other musical lexicons, developed quickly into a new suburban musical lexicon that could no longer be treated as some “fleeting” generation of meaning. “School Days” therefore exemplifies the Derridean notion of “usure,” for the figure of R & B (the scenario of the worker in/out of the factory) has faded in the process of rock ’n’ roll’s “literalization,” until it is hardly visible at all. Nonetheless, the literality of a narrative about a suburban teenager only achieves its seeming transpar¬ ency by relying upon the figurative elements that R & B provided. Only the transfigures of the tired worker, the oppressive factory, the emancipating nightclub, and the joyous sounds of R & B, in other words, made possible a certain literal imagining of youth culture within the confines of subur¬ bia. Rock ’n’ roll as a transcommodity appropriated R & B, country, and other sounds as metaphor, transforming them into the countersuburban currency of the new youth culture. More needs to be said, however, regarding why R & B and the other TRANSCOMMODIFICATION 13 sounds on the suburban radio proved themselves such potent metaphors for teen life. Standard R & B binaries, such as the factory versus the club, or clock time versus free time, after all, described a working-class organi¬ zation of space and time that hardly reflected the situation of teenagers. Indeed, as the “literal” complement of labor, leisure, understood as one’s freely chosen pursuits of pleasure outside of the workplace, does not even apply to the lives of teenagers as teenagers.30 Such contradictions between context and literal meaning, however, are the very stuff of metaphor. The question at hand is how to explain the aptness of this contradiction, what unexpected resemblances rock ’n’ roll revealed in the shock of its inappro¬ priateness. Clearly, what survived the translation of these other musics into rock ’n’ roll was an underlying binary relation of freedom and unfreedom, though now dispersed onto a variety of different sites. Freedom continued to be linked to leisure, but “leisure” now became a figurative term broadly at¬ tached to a passionate engagement with suburban youth culture itself, in juke joints and dance parties, but also in automobile chases, romantic dates, and so forth. Unfreedom too migrated to new tableaus, still to in¬ clude the workplace, but with school and home now taking precedence as that which counts as labor. In the crudest sense, then, we might say that the binaries of freedom/unfreedom in R & B became core metaphors for a similar relation felt to structure suburban teenage life. Early in this chapter I cited Roger Silverstone’s claim that suburbia figures alternately as dream and nightmare, as paradise and as wasteland. Rock ’n’ roll, it would seem, drew upon the “unfree” side of R & B’s binaries to constitute the latter imaginary. Rock ’n’ roll mapped suburbia as a sterile wasteland by associa¬ tion with the factory or the deadening job of its musical predecessors. In turn, the “free” side of those same binaries allowed rock ’n’ roll to present itself— and youth culture in general —as the respite, the escape, the zone of leisure within suburbia that young people might flee to as an escape from its dreary counterpart. In what respect, however, might the working-class job possibly have served as an appropriate metaphor for suburbia, a place after all associated with home rather than workplace, and with leisure rather than labor? It is this paradox that drives the suburban counterimaginary, so it is impor¬ tant to trace its logic. Rock ’n’ roll’s analogy between work and suburbia depended for its intelligibility precisely on the standardization of the sub¬ urban home world. The obligatory nature of participating in a consumerized version of domestic leisure allowed rock ’n’ roll to compare personal 132 CHAPTER THREE life in suburbia with the logic of the assembly line. Rock ’n’ roll, in this re¬ spect, iterated a view of suburbia akin to the Frankfurt school analysis of mass culture, as well as a range of widely discussed liberal self-criticism in which the “conformity” of suburbia was critiqued as subordinating the individual to the imperatives of a production system. Unlike either liberal or Frankfurt school texts, however, rock ’n’ roll also offered, in opposition to the labor of suburbia, a compensatory utopic arena constructed through the transfiguration of working-class leisure. Its logic, in short, was rather like that discussed in the preceding chapter between figure and ground in American “identity” criticism, only here rock ’n’ roll expressed the spirit of, or became the “soundtrack” for, the free persona, set against the stultifying landscape of conformist necessity. It is vital to see that, by appropriating working-class leisure as a meta¬ phor for its “identity” as the sound of suburban youth, rock 'n’ roll stood on its head the utopic suburban imaginary with which I began this chap¬ ter. The suburban imaginary, I suggested, established suburbia as an arena of leisure, separated off from the laborious worlds of work and public life in the city. The consumer culture out of which suburbia was constituted, therefore (the homes, automobiles, refrigerators, televisions, barbecues, and what have you) worked to signify suburbia as a realm of private free¬ dom and leisure against the city. Rock ’n’ roll, however, reversed their signi¬ fication. Like suburban consumer culture, it operated through binaries of constraint and freedom. But its metaphorical usage of working-class sce¬ narios mapped suburbia onto the side of labor rather than leisure. In turn, leisure became the purview of all that was not suburbia. Leisure was pro¬ jected back onto the city, or onto the country, onto black or hillbilly culture, as well as onto youth culture itself, which became an internal “outside” to suburbia. In short, rock ’n’ roll, as transcommodity, transvalued suburbia, constituting in the process the aural center of what I earlier termed the sub¬ urban counterimaginary, the view of suburbia as a nightmare, a place as sterile to human happiness as a factory floor, and just as in need of eman¬ cipatory alternatives. In the rock ’n’ roll imagination, a teenager in the new world of postwar suburbia lived two parallel lives, ones that could be compared to the labor¬ ing and the leisuring existences of the factory worker. In the first of these, the teenager lived at home, worked small jobs, and went to school, always under the tutelage and guidance of adults, who aimed in the process to bring youth into a sense of adult maturity and responsibility. This, for rock ’n’ roll, was the necessary labor of growing up. In the second life, however, TRANSCOMMODIFICATION 133 teenagers played among themselves, hanging out, enjoying their music, dancing and romancing while adults were kept at bay. These two lives cor¬ relate precisely with the two historically distinct categories of youth that I considered in chapter i. The first of these lives approximated the idea of adolescence, a transitional category between childhood and adulthood tied to a pedagogical narrative, a social bildungsroman that emplotted one’s maturation into national responsibility. In the fifties, however, this domain of “adolescence” subjection itself became transcoded as the drab domain of “conformity,” in which a youth needed to meet the expectations of adults in an “organizational” setting. By contrast, the second life corresponded closely to the new, politicized category of the teenager, a subject occupying a space of autonomous identity, in which free play became an alternative pedagogy, a means of achieving self-determination for a democratic future through a transitional period of independence. This realm of freedom was the space of identity’s emergence, the place allotted to youth where they could imaginatively refuse conformity. In establishing the former, adoles¬ cent conformity, as the labor of one’s youth, and the latter, teen life, as its leisure, the freedom of identity, rock ’n’ roll established itself, in a broadly though diffused sense, as oppositional anthem of identity. It projected the utopic sound of youth as they imagined their psychopolitical liberation from a Fordist matrix, the very matrix that (paradoxically enough) had given rise to the teenager and his/her music in the first place. 134 CHAPTER THREE IDENTITY HITS THE SCREEN: TEENPICS AND THE BOYING OF REBELLION Any juvenile seeing it would have to have a feeling of disgust for the bad boy. — Ronald Reagan, in defense of Blackboard Jungle When the titles flashed, Bill Haley and His Comets started lurching, “One . . . Two . . . Three O’clock . . . Four O’clock Rock . .it was the loudest sound kids had ever heard at that time... . Bill Haley was play¬ ing the teenage national anthem and he was loud. I was jumping up and down. Blackboard Jungle, not even considering that it had the old people winning in the end, represented a strange act of “endorsement" of the teenage cause. — Frank Zappa, quoted in Richard Aquila, That Old Time Rock L Roll ike radio, the film industry had thrived in the 1930s and 1940s, only to experience the postwar years as a period of severe crisis. In effect, the prewar film industry had already long been organized along Ford- ist lines. The “dream factory” of the classical studio system possessed not only a finely tuned “assembly line” process but also direct ownership of movie theaters, where its products found ready mass exhibition. In 1948, however, an antitrust court ruling known as the Paramount Decision closed the door on the so-called studio system. Declaring the industry’s successful alignment of mass production and consumption to be an illegal vertical monopoly, the courts ordered studios to sell off their movie houses. Compounding this major blow, the Paramount decision also forbade the movie industry from competing with national radio for control over the developing medium of television, whose programming needs might have provided an alternative forum for exhibition (Schatz, 432-435). As if this were not enough bad news for the industry, the rise of the post¬ war suburbs intensified the ongoing impact of the Paramount decision. Box office receipts began to dwindle as many of Hollywood’s traditional moviegoers —city-dwelling working- and middle-class families —relocated far from the urban movie theaters. Unlike radio, which could still transmit its signals from downtown stations to the new suburbs, the movie palaces stood helpless while their audiences thinned. With ticket sales shrinking, the newly independent theater chains grew increasingly selective about what films to exhibit, creating the dismal prospect of a Hollywood “bomb.” Hollywood’s cultivation of the teen market, as Thomas Doherty shows in his lucid history Teenagers and Teenpics, derives from this postwar crisis. In its search for new means to a reliable box office, the industry developed two very different sorts of movies: the blockbuster and the exploitation film (29-37). The blockbuster, defined by its state-of-the-art production values, wide-screen technologies, a cast of Hollywood’s most luminous stars, and maximal advertising, aimed by dint of sheer market force to reconstitute the prewar mass audience on a highly lucrative one-time basis. The exploi¬ tation film took exactly the opposite approach. Characterized by its com¬ bination of special interest topics and low production costs, it aimed for a narrow but steadfast audience that could bring a modest but reliable profit. The drive-in theater promised another partial solution to the industry’s problems. Cheaper to construct than a brick-and-mortar theater, built on affordable land adjacent to the new suburban developments, drive-in the¬ aters exploited the new automobile culture to draw at least some suburban¬ ites back to the movies. Finally, Hollywood also began to analyze the profile of its core moviegoers, and discovered it to be composed largely of ado¬ lescents, seeking forms of entertainment that (as in the case of rock ’n’ roll radio) drew them outside and away from the family-centered entertain¬ ment increasingly dominated by television (Doherty, 61-66). By the late 1950s, the youth audience, the exploitation film, and the drive-in venue would be brought together into the coherent marketing strategy of the “teenpic,” a specialty picture for teenagers that came in a range of genres and styles. In the ensuing effort to discover the images, stories, sounds, or themes that might actually “exploit” youth’s potential as a new market, moreover, Hollywood found two early answers: the figure of the rebel and the countersuburban imaginary of rock ’n’ roll. The rebel 136 CHAPTER FOUR offered a character whose oppositional narrative helped to establish a dif¬ ference between the teen and adult markets. Often the teen rebel appeared as a juvenile version of the Hollywood gangster, casting the antagonism of cop and robber in specifically generational terms.1 Rock ’n’ roll’s counterimaginary, meanwhile, expressed the exuberance of youth autonomy, offer¬ ing an emotional justification for a distinct teen film culture that operated outside the traditional codes of Hollywood scoring. The first film to unite these two motifs was Blackboard Jungle of 1955, which tells the story of a white teacher named Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford) — just out of the navy and newly recruited by all-male, inner-city North Manual Trades High School—as he struggles to wrest the allegiance of a black student, Gregory Miller (Sidney Poitier), away from an interracial gang of juvenile delinquents led by an Irish boy, Artie West (Vic Morrow). Blackboard is most famous for having helped to launch the rock ’n’ roll “revolution.” The song often celebrated as the first rock hit, Bill Haley’s “Rock around the Clock,” climbed the charts only after it appeared as the movie’s title song. Strictly speaking, however, Blackboard was not a teenpic, for it was marketed primarily to adults as a “social problem film” about the scourge of juvenile delinquency and the heroism required of teachers who would overcome it. The film succeeded with this audience, but it was unexpectedly embraced by teenagers as well, and in ways that adults found deeply troubling. The concern with young viewers began even before the film’s release, when a New York City teacher was stabbed to death by a stu¬ dent (McGee and Robertson, 31). This incident immediately foregrounded the basic question that would consume adult debates over the film. Would Blackboard Jungle help the public to tackle juvenile delinquency by telling the truth about it, as mgm claimed, or would the depiction of youth vio¬ lence on screen simply exacerbate the problem? Even though the murderer could not yet have seen the film, his crime’s uncanny parallel to Black¬ board’s final scene, in which Artie slashes and threatens to kill Mr. Dadier in their Bronx high school classroom, provided ammunition for those crit¬ ics of the film who believed in the deleterious effects of screening such subject matter. As James Gilbert notes, the makers of the film were quite pleased to dis¬ cover that their feature had found an unanticipated, secondary audience: “Attending a preview of the film, producer Brooks was surprised, and obvi¬ ously delighted, when young members of the audience began dancing in the aisles to the rock and roll music. This occurred repeatedly in showings after the film opened” (Gilbert, 184-185). Other adults, however, were less IDENTITY HITS THE SCREEN 137 than thrilled to learn that teenagers were erupting wildly as soon as the film’s prefatory comments on the “social problem” of juvenile delinquency gave way to “Rock around the Clock.” Their suspicions were further con¬ firmed by “other reactions [that] were more threatening. For example in Rochester, New York, there were reports that ‘young hoodlums cheered the beatings and methods of terror inflicted upon a teacher by a gang of boys’ pictured in the film” (Gilbert, 184-185).2 One Toronto alderman, upon wit¬ nessing local teenagers’ response to a showing of Blackboard Jungle, told a local newspaper that “Hollywood has succeeded, as usual, in glorifying in the minds of teenagers just the things it claims to attack. [Alderman] Dennison claimed he would lead in the ban efforts. ... He said the great applause in the film came when a ‘tough guy’ pupil told a teacher to ‘go to hell’ and then drew a knife and stabbed the teacher” (Variety, ‘Toronto Hubbub”). In the weeks following the film’s release, the press also reported several scattered incidents of juvenile delinquency allegedly linked to the film. In a column titled “Police Seek to Finger ‘Blackboard Jungle’ as Root of Hooliganism,” for example, Variety reported that the film “was blamed by Schenectady police for prompting several teen-agers last week to form a gang, which proposed to wage a battle with an Albany group. Other juve¬ nile outbreaks were [also] attributed to the motion picture. . . . Sergeants Joseph Monaco and Patricia Wellman of the Youth Aid bureau said that sev¬ eral teenagers, picked up by police for questioning, ‘admitted’ they banded together after seeing Blackboard Jungle.” Even in Memphis, where the film was licensed on an “adults only” basis, teenage girls gathered after the movie to burn down a local barn. According to the Motion Picture Daily, a local juvenile court judge had determined that “the leader of the group, organized just a few hours before the fire, is a 14-year-old who said she got the idea after seeing Blackboard Jungle which finished a three-week run at Loews state here on Thursday. She [Judge McCain] said the girls said, ‘We wanted to be tough like those kids in that picture.’ The leader said, al¬ though the picture was labeled ‘for adults only,’ she and her date had no difficulty gaining admittance and that there were others there even younger than she.” Incidents such as these only deepened public concern that young people were seeking out Blackboard Jungle because it encouraged misread¬ ings that glorified teenage violence and terrorism.3 Nevertheless, mgm, the studio responsible for Blackboard, could hardly afford to pull the film from distribution, since the box office receipts quickly revealed it to be a smash hit by any measurement (Gilbert, 185). Within one year of its release, Blackboard Jungle had grossed nearly $7 million, “hold138 CHAPTER FOUR ing over for a third week in some areas where a one-week run is normal” and becoming “the company’s top money-making new film of nearly the past couple of years” (Variety, “Blackboard Jungle”). mgm was further reassured by the fact that, though the film was under attack in some publications and even banned in certain cities, it also had well respected defenders who were satisfied by the film’s professed inten¬ tions, and by what they believed to be the moral force of its message. Most notable of the film’s proponents was then Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan, who at the Kefauver hearings on delinquency, lauded the positive role model presented by Mr. Dadier, and the indisputable villainy of Artie West: “Any juvenile seeing it would have to have a feeling of dis¬ gust for the bad boy,” Reagan told the committee. “And I got something else out of it. 1 found in it a great tribute to a group of persons who sel¬ dom get much credit—the schoolteachers of this country” (McGee, 47). For the most part, adult institutional voices agreed with Reagan. As Variety reported, “Nine of the twelve civic, religioso and parents-teachers groups which appraise films in the so-called green sheet praised Jungle, rating it ‘outstanding’ for a pic of its type” (Variety, “Blackboard Jungle”). In the end. Blackboard Jungle survived the onslaught of criticism to be¬ come a smashing commercial success and eventually the model for an en¬ tire subgenre of delinquent teenpics. Within a year, in fact, the first genu¬ ine teenpic, Rock around the Clock, would flagrantly try to pull in the same teen audience by recycling the Bill Haley song used to such success in Blackboard Jungle, and this effort was quickly followed by dozens of other low-budget teen-oriented films featuring rock artists and rebel dramas of teen life. How to Read Oppositionally Precisely because Blackboard succeeded as a traditional Hollywood social problem film, but also as a prototeenpic, it illuminates key points of con¬ tact between mainstream motifs of culture and the “subcultural” themes that would become the mainstay of the new youth market. It is in the ten¬ sion between these two receptions, as we shall see, that identity discourse and the bad boy as its attendant figure made their way into the codes of Hollywood cinema. Stuart Hall’s foundational essay “Encoding/Decoding” offers a powerful vocabulary that, ever since its publication, has guided cul¬ tural studies critics in their basic approach to the polyvalence of popular reception, and especially so in acutely contested instances such as BlackIDENTITY HITS THE SCREEN 139 board’s. In invoking Hall’s terms, however, I will also be commenting on cultural studies’ own unacknowledged relationship to the history of iden¬ tity discourse provided here. Cultural studies terms apply so very well to Blackboard Jungle because it was this precise sort of text, with its trope of the masculine youth rebel, that made cultural studies possible in the first place. In its founding theories of audience agency—resistance through ritual — cultural studies celebrated resistive identity through the very figure of the bad boy that Blackboard offers up for analysis. In rereading Blackboard as the moment of transition into the teenpic, therefore, I will be revisiting at a theoretical level the tacit origins of cultural studies itself in the notion of identity. Both the reception of Blackboard and the cultural studies theory of resistance, as we shall see, bring into focus the problematic role of mas¬ culinity in early identity discourse, and particularly in its conflation with the ideal of rebellious agency. Reading Like an Adult: From Delinquency to Development In “Encoding/Decoding,” Stuart Hall first made the immensely influential argument that power differentials within or between audiences will fissure a popular text’s meanings along political lines. Mapping a Marxist under¬ standing of ideology onto reader response criticism, Hall proposed a work¬ ing analytic distinction between three types of popular reading: dominant, oppositional, and negotiated.4 A dominant reading will identify and decode a popular text’s preferred meanings, by which Hall means those interpre¬ tive results that both “have the institutional/political/ideological order im¬ printed in them” and “have themselves become institutionalized” (134). By contrast, an oppositional reading of a popular text occurs only when a viewer systematically “refuses” the meanings preferred by dominant ideol¬ ogy and instead “decode(s) the message in a globally contrary way. He/she detotalizes the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the mes¬ sage within some alternative framework of reference. This is the case of the viewer who listens to a debate on the need to limit wages but ‘reads’ every mention of the ‘national interest’ as ‘class interest’” (137-138). Between these two extremes lies the negotiated reading. Typically per¬ formed by viewers or readers who are ambiguously situated within power relations, negotiated readings accept a popular text’s preferred meanings at the general level, but modify them “at a more restricted situational (situated) level,” often by positing exceptions and local alternatives (137).5 Today, the dominant/oppositional polarity deployed in Hall’s 1979 essay 140 CHAPTER FOUR may seem somewhat mechanical. Nevertheless, as a corrective to Screen’s “ideological apparatus” approach to pop culture as well as to the Frankfurt school’s “culture industry” model, the reception-directed argument of “En¬ coding/Decoding” became a guide for much of subsequent popular culture studies.6 Insofar as Blackboard possesses a “dominant reading” in Hall’s sense, it was one that reflected the generic codes of the “social problem” film, re¬ fracted through the ideological pressures of the early moment. As previ¬ ously noted, Blackboard tells the story of a white teacher, Mr. Dadier, pitting his authority against the delinquent solidarity of an interracial gang led by the Irish boy, Artie Shaw. Triangulated between them is Gregory Miller, a smart black boy. While Dadier wields his status in the classroom, Artie employs various covert forms of attack: avenging his friend by beating up Dadier (and another teacher) in a dark alley, anonymously accusing him of using racist epithets in class, and even sending unsigned notes to his preg¬ nant wife, Anne, accusing her husband of cheating on her with another teacher, Miss Hammond. In the end Dadier wins Gregory over from the gang, though before he does, the teacher must himself be taught a lesson in the racial politics of liberal democracy. Dadier had overhastily assumed that the black stu¬ dent, Gregory, was his anonymous accuser and learns to regret this mis¬ take. When he apologizes to Gregory, Dadier proves his commitment to the democratic principle of racial justice. Only near the end of the film does Dadier (along with the viewer) learn for certain that Artie was the real cul¬ prit. In the climactic scene, as Artie pulls a switchblade on Dadier during class, Gregory finally sides with the teacher, towing all but one of the other boys along with him. In narrating a white man’s effort to shoulder the burden of civilizing a denizen of the “blackboard jungle,” the film depicts a cross-racial identifica¬ tion (of a black boy with a white man) that serves ideological interests very much along the lines of what, in chapter 2, I termed the developmental narrative. Gregory here stands in for the majority of Dadier's ethnically and racially diverse students, who will “grow up” to join Gregory in finally rally¬ ing to his side against Artie and his one remaining crony, Belazi. As Peter Biskind has argued, this ending sacrifices the two genuine “bad apples” so that the film’s other boys can be redeemed into a liberal intergenerational consensus on the need for students to cooperate with an understanding school system (216). Implicitly too, then, this cooperation concerns “devel¬ opment” in the sense of class mobility, for it will embark the students upon IDENTITY HITS THE SCREEN Ml the road to occupational self-improvement. The developmental lesson that Dadier teaches Gregory and the other boys, however, also has to be under¬ stood through the motif of masculinity: when a boy abandons his infantile loyalty to the gang and learns to side with the adult values of the educa¬ tional system, he becomes a man worthy of respect —and employment— by other men. Much like the “new image” of America demanded of intellectuals by Partisan Review, Blackboard appears to express a patriotic loyalty to the American way of life. A recent veteran of the Second World War, Dadier must now fight a new war in the trenches of the inner city that seems no less important to the country’s future. His moments of doubt are overcome by reiterations of national duty: a chanting of the Pledge of Allegiance that he witnesses at another, more middle-class school, or an American flag with which the bad apple Artie Shaw will be pinned helplessly toward the end of the film. Delinquency will be vanquished, in the end, when Dadier and the students unite as dutiful Americans. The developmental reading of Blackboard, in which delinquency is a “so¬ cial problem” to be solved, is strongly encouraged by certain structures in the text itself, which take great pains to provide normative guidelines for reception. Perhaps the most explicit and powerful of these guidelines is the bombastic, discursive preface that rolls up the screen before the film begins, declaring Blackboard Jungle’s socially responsible and patriotic pur¬ pose of informing citizens. As this preface reminds the viewer, “We, in the United States, are fortunate to have a school system that is a tribute to our communities and to our faith in American youth.” It then continues, “today we are concerned with juvenile delinquency—its causes —and its effects.” This concern justifies the film’s content, according to this preface because, “we believe that public awareness is a first step toward a remedy for any problem.” Not private profit then but public welfare, not exploitation but education, motivates the graphic depiction of teen criminality. The preface’s clever slide in the subject position of the personal pro¬ noun, from its explicit “We-the-citizens-of-the-United-States” to its im¬ plicit “We-who-have-produced-this-film” rhetorically align, the film’s pro¬ ducers and viewers as equally responsible Cold War citizen-subjects: both take seriously their public duty to inform and become informed about po¬ litical questions of the day. Within this preface at least, the implied pro¬ ducers and viewers are also unmistakably adults. The film is not for youth, but only about them. In this respect, the film claims for itself the same pedagogical value as 142 CHAPTER FOUR does the Evan Hunter novel upon which it is based; both texts aim to pro¬ vide adults with the social knowledge they require in order to tackle the problem of juvenile delinquency effectively. However, Hunter’s naturalis¬ tic novel actually sticks far more closely than the film to its professed infor¬ mational function. Depicting teacher Rick Dadier’s harrowing first semes¬ ter on the job at Manual High in the Bronx, the novel documents for its reader an urban ecology of the blackboard jungle. It methodically analyzes the desperate situation of those who live in the “trash can of the school sys¬ tem,” explains why they behave as they do, and demonstrates the naivete of middle-class faith in the public educational system as an engine for social mobility. In so doing, the sensationalism of Hunter’s novel actually sub¬ verts comfortable American assumptions about prospects for economic uplift among the urban underclass. By contrast, the film might appear to serve Cold War ideological inter¬ ests far more loyally than the novel, whose grim thematics of political economy it replaces with a moral economy, in which the reformable delin¬ quents are actually saved in the end while the unredeemable are treated to their just deserts. Unlike the novel’s more ambiguous ending, in which Dadier wins only a limited victory against the worst of the delinquents, the film version concludes with Dadier’s triumphant transformation of Manual High, showing its viewer how the integrity and dedication of a single good teacher can save the educational system. The film reveals its ideological divergence from the novel with particu¬ lar clarity in one of the few scenes appended to Hunter’s original narra¬ tive. After enduring a series of setbacks, the downcast Rick Dadier finds new inspiration by visiting Professor A. R. Kraal, the man who had once trained him to teach. Professor Kraal, now a high school principal, takes Dadier on a tour of his shiny, suburban school, an image of the educational norm from which Manual High so strikingly deviates. On this campus, a lily-white student body obediently studies Latin, practices chemistry, and proudly sings the national anthem. Reinspired by this vision, Mr. Dadier returns to Manual High, puts his shoulder back to the wheel, and singlehandedly succeeds in steering his kids onto the right track. Brown versus the Blackboard of Education The contrast sketched between Kraal’s school and Manual High is only a brief addition to Hunter’s narrative of 1954, but it indicates a sharpening of the story’s engagement with perhaps the most unavoidable of all politiIDENTITY HITS THE SCREEN 143 4. Professor Kraal’s all-white, coed school is a vision of suburban order in Blackboard Jungle (mgm, 1955). cal contexts of its day: racial desegregation. The film’s release in March of 1955 came some ten months after the Supreme Court’s first ruling in its landmark Brown v. Board of Education case on the unconstitutionality of segregated schools, and only two months prior to a widely anticipated sec¬ ond decision in which the Court determined that desegregation must be implemented “with all deliberate speed” (Oakley, 191-193). Brown v. Board of Education can be usefully contextualized within the geopolitical model of the “age of three worlds.” The Supreme Court’s ver¬ dict favoring desegregation made vital sense in the competition with the Soviet Union for the “hearts and minds” of Africa and Asia’s new nations, who were all too aware of the United State’s white supremacist racial order. Yet, even for white moderates and liberals building this evolving hege¬ mony, the legal decision offered an acceptable political goal only under very specific terms and conditions. By and large, even the most liberal whites could only affirm racial integration by imagining interracial school¬ ing taking place through the piecemeal admission and assimilation of non¬ whites to primarily white and white-staffed schools. A “minority majority” or nonassimilationist integrated education seemed tantamount to accept144 CHAPTER FOUR 5. Integrated, all-boy Manual High is in utter chaos in Blackboard Jungle (mgm, 1955). ing the collapse of the racial order. “It’s all very well to talk about school integration —if you remember that you may also be talking about social disintegration,” President Eisenhower himself remarked privately in 1956, one year before reluctantly ordering the use of federal troops to escort nine black students to all-white Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas (Oakley, 194). The portrayal of a “wild,” fully integrated high school student body in both the film and book versions of Blackboard engaged these racial fears directly, collapsing juvenile delinquency and desegregation into the rep¬ resentation of a singular “social problem.” The him version of Blackboard Jungle, however, marks its racial position even more explicitly by stressing the contrast between Kraal’s school and Manual High. The former becomes a model institution that Manual High must emulate if Dadier is to make integrated schooling a positive success rather than a debacle. In Kraal