Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941.

Millen Brand: Embodying tensions within proletarian literature

“…According to Foley, proletarian writers were not prescribed to write in a didactic, formulaic way by the Communist party, but were generally concerned with the working‐class experience and “fidelity to detail, especially with regard to work processes” (Foley, 1993, 111). In Brand's first four novels, Outward Room (1937), The Heroes (1939), Albert Sears (1947), and Some Love, Some Hunger (1955), he devotes ample narrative space to describing his characters at work in factories and in cramped, noisy apartments.…”

“…With the exception of Brand's fifth and last novel, Savage Sleep (1968), which focuses singularly on mental illness, Brand's fiction predominantly strives to represent labor, with often romanticized, detailed renderings of the body at work, along with references to worker exploitation and unionization. Brand's closely detailed renderings of working‐class labor, which will be explored later in this essay, could suggest an anxious desire to align with what Foley calls the “cult of authenticity” in representing working‐class life (Foley, 1993, 144).…”

“…As Foley writes of the potential limitations of the proletarian bildungsroman, if a novel “fetishize[s] individuality,” then a character's growth will only be portrayed as a result of internal struggle rather than a struggle that is both social and psychological (Foley, 1993, 343). Yet Brand's characters are always enmeshed in a network of internal and external circumstances.…”

“…Marching! to show that proletarian writers simultaneously valued and pursued formal experimentation and revolutionary politics (Foley, 1993, 56). Simon Cooper draws on the same novels, among other writers and composers, to contextualize the proletarian avant‐garde with canonical modernist texts to reveal how they practiced modernist techniques as “a form of resistance” (Cooper, 2020, 1).…”

“…Brand thus affirms Foley's argument that the Communist party in America was not a monolithic entity that imposed formulaic plots and themes onto writers. Brand, in fact, contributes to Foley's proposal that the 1930s cultural left was more nuanced, with “complex textual tensions and ambiguities” that reflect conflicts not between writers and the left, but within the cultural left (Foley, 1993, 30). Brand demonstrates a progressive, middle‐class understanding of the need for fairness in the workplace and strives to balance depictions of the exploitative nature of current labor practices in America while also affirming the integrity of hard work.…”