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Part. III. Issues and Referentiality: presence(s)

Usable History: High Modernism and the Documentary Form

Stephen Fender

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1I want to begin with two extracts, exact contemporaries. The first, by William Carlos Williams, is called “Invocation and Conclusion,” and is fairly typical of the short poems in his collection, An Early Martyr, published in 1935 :

January !

The beginning of all things !

Sprung from the old burning nest

upward in the flame !

I was married at thirteen

My parents had nine kids

and we were on the street

That’s why the old buggar—

He was twenty-six

and I hadn’t even had

my changes yet. Now look at me !

2The second is an entry made in her notebook by the New Deal -photographer Dorothea Lange on a visit to a farm migrant labourers’ camp in Marysville, California, in May, 1935 :

Are you making a living ?

Oh, we’re getting along

as good as us draggin’

around people can expect

If you call it a livin—

Rag houses

split open garbage cans

ex service man raised decent like I was

raised by my father, No rag

houses then. I can’t make it—

3The similarity is partly coincidental. Lange’s comments line up as they do as much because of the narrow pages of her notebook as from any memory of Williams’s prosody. Yet there is something distinctly modernist in the photographer’s field notes : in their faith in the raw materials of the vernacular ; their assumption that the fragmentary scraps of reported words, bleeding into the (apparently) random selection of imagistic details, can express a whole ambience without explicit comment on the part of the reporter.

4What this paper seeks to establish is not just that modernists like Williams and Pound used elements of the documentary style—we all know that—but that what we now think of as the great decade of the American documentary, associated with the various projects mounted by the New Deal to meet the needs of the Great Depression of the 1930s, was essentially part of the high modernist project.

5But first, what do we mean by “documentary” ? The form usually shares the following identifying features. It is factual, fragmentary and (more surprisingly, perhaps) seeks to instruct through a process of memorialising. The OED gives (1) “of the nature of or consisting in documents…,” quoting Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1831), “Various fragments of Letters and other documentary scraps” ; and (4), “Factual, realistic ; applied esp. to a film or literary work,etc., based on real events or circumstances, and intended primarily for instruction or record purposes.” Webster gives for “to document” : (1) “teach, school, instruct,” and (2) “to evidence by documents, furnishing documentary evidence of… to construct or produce (as a movie or novel) with a high proportion of details closely reproducing authentic situations or events.”

6At first glance, it’s odd that such a “now” medium, urgently addressing contemporary realities, should be so tied up with the past. But on reflection the reason is clear enough. Whereas fiction is supposed to inhabit the timeless, documentary realism must be plotted on a chronological scale, which means that the events portrayed in the form, however recent, must be history before the ink is dry or the contact print emerges from the developing fluid. This use of the fragmented surface of the “now” to memorialise and even retrieve the past is articulated especially clearly in a recent collection of essays on documen-tary film, which the editor introduces with these questions :

Each notable film is an experiment with reality and asks—radically, if we will accept the challenge—what is going on in this film ? What is a fact ? What are these facts ? What is it to reflect on them, or memorialise them in this way ? (Warren 2).

7And Susan Howe the post-modern language poet, accepted the invitation to write in this volume on the French documentary filmmaker Chris Marker, “because of the fact of my husband’s death and my wish to find a way to document his life and work” (295). Now this is highly significant, because in her other work Howe’s use of historical sources can be so impenetrable as positively to mislead any well-intentioned search for the documents she quotes—in “Hope Atherton’s Wanderings” in Singularities (1990), for example. As Peter Nicholls has shown, what looks there like a scramble of excerpts from a history of colonial Hadley, Massachusetts (to which the story of Hope Atherton belongs), comes in reality from the history of another Massachusetts town, Deerfield, and concerns the escape of Jonathan Wells. “It is quite clear,” Nicholls concludes, “that, unlike a writer such as Pound, Howe has no desire to send us back to her sources” (“Unsettling the Wilderness” 596). Unlike Pound—and unlike Howe in this later essay. For here the documents lie quite transparently on the discursive surface : for instance in a transcript made of a letter that her husband sent to his parents from his Air Force training base in World War II, together with a Xerox of the V-Mail blank on which it was sent. This memorialising function is so deeply ingrained within the documentary, apparently, that for Howe to reflect on, and deploy the form she needs to revert to the old-fashioned modernist address to history.

8In the United States the various cultural projects of the New Deal present the best known, most sustained excursion into the documentary form. The life histories of ordinary people undertaken by the Federal Writers’ Project, for example, conformed to all three criteria of the documentary. They were factual, in that they purported to be their subjects’ lives in their own words. They were fragmentary in that their discursive surfaces had no particular beginning or end, no narrative, or even connected discourse, little in the way of -transitions or segues—though they were occasionally framed by an over-explicit interviewer’s preamble. And finally they were memorialising, in that they set out to retrieve an integral vernacular culture before it was lost forever.

9Another attempt to retrieve a vanishing folk culture was the expedition funded by the Library of Congress to record the music sung and played in the Farm Security Administration migrant camps in California. Though most of the farm workers had come immediately from Oklahoma, Arkansas and Texas, their families were thought to have originated in the Ozark and Appalachian Mountains, and to have retained the folk memory of the songs and fiddle tunes of those regions. Again, the method of retrieval was factual : early portable acoustic recording devices would capture the actuality of word and tune. It was fragmentary, since the corpus would consist of scraps of tunes and songs, their provenance sketchily pieced together from fragmented memories, and with no narrative or argument in their running order. And the project was an attempt to memorialise, in its conscious attempt to retrieve a folk tradition before the chaotic uprooting of the migrant communities led to an irreversible -dispersion of the folk originals into a sea of commercial country and western.

10Perhaps the most popular of the New Deal projects were the documentary films made to promote large scale public works like the dams and hydroelectric plants of the Tennessee Valley Authority. These were certainly factual—in the very authenticity of the medium, the unarguable truth of the photograph. They were fragmentary, in the rapid montage of their surface presentation : superbly achieved, for example, in the way the flood builds from a trickle to a torrent in Pare Lorenz’s The River (1937). And (though this might have been harder to predict) the New Deal documentary films also memorialised : usually a primeval era when the American continent was not de-forested, over-ploughed, over-settled or overpopulated.

11Factual, fragmented and memorialising : the three dictionary descriptors of the documentary style. But don’t they fit the high tide of literary modernism just as well ? We know high modernism best for its fragmentary narrative or discursive surface made up of scraps of contemporary citations and references—all supposedly dramatising the disintegration of modern society and culture. What we often forget is the memorialising mission of the modernist project : that this surface present is usually posed as fallen away from the cultural integrity of a distant past, a long lost, golden age in which social, political and aesthetic sensibilities—if not nature and culture themselves—were all of a piece. And the modernist mission was as often as not an urgent attempt to make the fallen world re-cohere—to retrieve this lost past integrity and somehow re-use it to redeem the present. So the many instances of modern fragmentation in The Waste Land, that classic text of high modernism, gesture toward a mythical past when the sensibility was undissociated.

12The first of Pound’s Cantos is not just the introduction to the whole series but their paradigm, the canto of cantos. Like Circe, it guides the attentive reader on the periplum to follow. “Canto I” is fragmentary in that it begins the epic not only in medias res but in the middle of a sentence (and ends that way too). It then involves its readers in various layers of translations of and analogues to The Odyssey, but only to tease and prodthem toward what Pound himself believed was the narrative kernel—not only of The Odyssey, but of western European literature as a whole—the ur-text of the perilous descent into the underworld.

13And yet for all that, isn’t there something aridly formalistic about this apparent similarity between high modernism and the New Deal documentary project ? What about the politics ? After all, following John Carey and others, wecommonly characterise the Modernism of Eliot, Pound, Williams and Gertrude Stein as something undertaken by an elite, for an elite. Its interests are chiefly those aesthetic topics that concern this rarefied readership. Or if it touches on more “public” issues, these are such as are thought to bear on the aesthetic :

With usura hath no man a house of good stone…

with usura the line grows thick… (XLV 229)

14Whereas the documentary projects of the New Deal were undertaken on behalf of the masses, sometimes even by the masses—or at least (in the case of the Federal Writers’ Project) by ordinary authors not normally involved in aesthetic projects or issues—and they engaged with immediate political and economic issues (and other practical concerns) of great urgency.

15Then there’s the question of history and memory. Typically the high modernists have been criticised for a sense of the past that is fixedly nostalgic, not to say subjective, rather than part of an objective process developing through the dynamic of communal memory. The French historian Pierre Nora has characterised modernity as consisting of a radical dissociation of history from memory. We have moved, he writes :

from a visible past to an invisible one ; from a solid and steady past to our frac-tured past ; from a history sought in the continuity of memory to a memory cast in the discontinuity of history (cited in Nicholls “Pound’s Places” 17).

16Even those (documentary) discontinuities may conceal radically different approaches to history. Contrasting Pound’s fragmentary citations of the past with those of Edwin Rolfe, the radical poet, journalist and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Cary Nelson has written :

Superficially, [Rolfe’s] tactic of including fragmentary historical references in a modern poem seems Poundian. But with Pound we know that every historical reference has been taken up in a synthesis effected by one idiosyncratic ego ; the only real significance of these bits of history lies in what they mean to Pound (105).

17I think this judgement is wrong, but before I try to show why, it’s worth pointing out that recent theorists of the documentary have expressed similar concerns even with that certifiably radical form of expression. Writing in that same collection in which Susan Howe’s essay appeared, Jay Cantor sounds a warning :

Memories, of course, may, on certain remarkable occasions, be vividly reborn as part of as part of one’s current telling ; they enter us reincarnated, rich with anxiety and the demand that we change our lives… But only some films are such inspired narratives ; others are that failed sort of memory called nostalgia… [in which] we watch a history that is simply past, incapable of troubling us in the present… It’s as if the nostalgic film (both fiction and documentary) longs to attain the status of the snapshot… the past not as question but as possession (22).

18In other words both high modernist poetry and fiction (on the one hand) and 1930s documentary in film, still photography, music and recorded life -histories (on the other) can fall either side of this divide between usable history and nostalgia. The critical discrimination can be applied to both forms, which is the reason for bringing them together in this way.

19A closer look at Todd and Sonkin’s quest for the pure folk music of the Ozarks and Appalachians, for example, suggests a vision of the past that is more fanci-fully nostalgic than useably historical. They went in search of the old ballads supposedly handed down by “oral tradition.” To their annoyance the campers tended to want to perform instead the more recent offerings of Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood. Even the more traditional ballads they finally coaxed out of the old ladies in the camps were such as had come down, not so much through oral tradition as the movies, the Victrola and those enormously powerful radio stations that were broadcasting “hillbilly” music from Texas and even Mexico from the early 1920s onwards. Todd and Sonkin went to look for the purity of folk tradition and thought they found it at last. Unaware that, as the leading scholar of the subject has written, “[S]outhern white folk music was neither pure white nor ‘Anglo’ in origin […] neither was it exclusively rural or non-commercial” (Malone 5),1 and that what they actually documented were the early, formative stages of that forever hybrid form known as country and western music : that same debased, mechanically reproduced commodity from which they were trying to rescue the supposedly pure folk art of the mountain -people.

20As for the New Deal documentary films, they too could fall either side of that divide between usable and unusable history. Native Land (Leo Hurwitz, Paul Strand, 1942), commonly described as “the only feature-length Marxist film that America has produced,” invokes history—the popular, publicly -accessible history of America—through repeated flashbacks articulated through the voiceover by Paul Robeson, and iconic shots of statues of the Concord Minute-men, George Washington, Lincoln—not to mention the statue of Liberty herself—to judge the fragmented social order of the present : a series of persecu- tions in which tenant farmers, sharecroppers, union activists, strikers are shot down, clubbed into a stupor, rounded up and arrested. The effect of this juxta-position is not just that our fallen state is measured against the fundamental truths of American identity, but that the most radical of contemporary ideas, teachings and sentiments—the right to join a union, to strike, to be free of company spies and bully boys—are grounded on the oldest, most ingrained traditions. Here then is a past that can be retrieved and re-used—and is.

21But contrast the two Pare Lorenz films, The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River (1936, 1937). Here the past from which we have fallen is not history at all, but a primal continent unpopulated, unploughed, undeforested—in short, unsettled. It never existed quite like that (there was, for example, the small matter of a continent of native peoples using the land in a reasonably productive way), but more to the point it could never be returned to. The result is a geological plot that elides human history.

22What then of Ezra Pound’s sense of the past ? It’s arguable that there is nothing particularly useful about his belief in a European kernel-text underlying all stories about visits to the underworld. Interesting, perhaps, but hardly restorative. But what about his documentary cantos, like the “Eleven New Cantos XXXI-XLI” of 1934 ? Do they deserve Cary Nelson’s dismissal that their “every historical reference has been taken up in a synthesis effected by one idiosyncratic ego” (105) ? It all depends on what history you think Pound is referring to, and how central to the objective communal dialectic you judge it to be. As I have argued elsewhere (and long ago) the right way to read the Jeffer-son-Jackson-Van Buren Cantos is to follow them into their sources,2 not to rest content with their surface level (Fender “Words off the Page” 95-108 ; The American Long Poem 110-148). Read that way the American history of these cantos can be possessed as a revered antique at best (as Pierre Nora would allege, no doubt) as a supposedly unitary—and suspiciously static—culture in which the American Founding Fathers invent and discriminate simultaneously in the fields of statecraft, architecture, diplomacy, historiography, philosophy and religion. But to trace those “various fragments of letters and other documentary scraps” (to quote Carlyle again) back to their original contexts is to uncover and explore a whole network made up of the pivotal moments in American history. Even apparently unconnected, inconsequential scraps of citation can work this way. To take just one typical cluster : “A Tiel leis… en ancien scripture” (XXXI 156), “coram non judice” (XXXII 157), “out of his case, to say what the law in a moot case would be,/Judge Marshall is irregular” (XXXII 159) and “…as Justice Marshall, has gone out of his case…” (XXXVII 183)—all these refer in various ways—and tie up at the level of the sources, as they do not on the poem’s surface—to things done and decided by John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835. Marshall was the tender, forgiving judge of the traitor Aaron Burr, who had raised a private army under the pretext of hiring labour for the construction of the Ohio Canal (hence XXXII 157 : “Witnesses will some of them prove that he [Burr] had/no interest in the Ohio canal…”). Marshall presided over “Marbury vs. Madison” (1803) in which he first took the Court “out of its case” to annul a piece of legislation as unconstitutional. And finally Marshall led judgement in “McCullough vs. Maryland” (1818), in which the Court defended the constitutionality of the Second Bank of the U.S., which Andrew Jackson had already moved to -abolish.

23One way or another—sometimes directly and sometimes through a -reference to a keyword that activates a train of thought on the level of the sources alone—the Jefferson and Van Buren Cantos electrify a whole network of fact and analysis connecting the crucial choices in the founding of the American Republic : the emergence of the first political parties ; the debate between Federalists and Anti-Federalists over the relative strengths of an agrarian as against an industrial economy ; the balance of power between the unelected Supreme Court and an Executive that was increasingly (and especially under Jackson) directly elected ; the debate over whether the government should underwrite loans on public works and private investment, the fight over the First and Second Banks of the U.S. Were these concerns “a synthesis effected by one idiosyncratic ego” ? Today they are the staple topics of any course in American history. We take them for granted after the pioneering work of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Robert Remini. But in the mid thirties these issues were indeed ignored—or deliberately hidden, depending on how paranoid your analysis. The Americans had, literally, lost the plot of this crucial formative period in their history.

24As to whether this was live history that could still be usefully retrieved, learned from and re-applied, it is sufficient to remember that America and the world were in the middle of a depression when the poems were written. Reviewing these new cantos when they came out, at least one other documentary modernist—and a radical one at that—had no doubt about their importance :And in this latest of Pound’s cantos he’s come to the administrations of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. In the history courses at colleges did anyone ever hear of them ? Not on your life. They were Presidents of the United States. They had battles on their hands. Oh, is zat so ?.. Well, Jackson fought and won ! for awhile, the same kind of fight that’s been going on in this country and in every country since the days of the Gracchi, that against the illegal use by private interests of the resources of government. What of it ? Nothing, except that it’s the same fight that’s going on today… (Williams 5).

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Bibliographie

Cantor, Jay. “Death and the Image.” Warren 23-49.

Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses. London : Faber and Faber, 1992.

Fender, Stephen. “Ezra Pound and the Words off the Page : Historical Allusions in Some American Long Poems.” Yearbook of English Studies. London : Modern Human-ities Research Association, 1978. 95-108.

—. ed. The American Long Poem : An Annotated Selection. London : Edward Arnold, 1977.

Howe, Susan. “Sorting Facts ; or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker.” Warren 295-343.

Malone, Bill C. Country Music, USA. Revised edition. Austin : University of Texas Press, 1985.

Nelson, Cary. Revolutionary Memory : Recovering the Poetry of the American Left. London : Routledge, 2001.

Nicholls, Peter. “Pound’s Places.” Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins, eds. Locations of Literary Modernism : Region and Nation in British and American Modernist Poetry. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2000. 159-177.

—. “Unsettling the Wilderness : Susan Howe’s American Studies.” Contemporary Literature 37 (1996) 586-601.

Pound, Ezra. The Cantos. London : Faber, 1986.

Remini, Robert V. Andrew Jackson and the Bank War : A Study in the Growth of Presidential Power. New York : W.W. Norton, 1967.

Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. The Age of Jackson. Boston : Little, Brown, 1945.

Warren, Charles, ed. Beyond Document : Essays on Non-fiction Film. Hanover : Wesleyan University Press, 1996.

Williams, William Carlos. “A 1 Pound Stein.” The Rocking Horse 2 (Spring 1935). 3-5.

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Stephen Fender, « Usable History: High Modernism and the Documentary Form »Sillages critiques [En ligne], 5 | 2003, mis en ligne le 01 juillet 2015, consulté le 13 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/4150 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/sillagescritiques.4150

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Stephen Fender

Stephen Fender is Research Professor in the Humanities at the University of Sussex. His books include Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail: and Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature. Currently he is working on a book on the New Deal and the rural poor in the Great Depression, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

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