Triptych Time: The Experiential Historiography of Meridel Le Sueur's The Dread Road - Critical Essay

Criticism, Wntr, 2001 by Paula E. Geyh

MERIDEL LE SUEUR'S last novel, The Dread Road (1991), might be considered the capstone of one of America's more remarkable literary careers. Part of a generation of midwestem worker-writers that included Tillie Olsen, Jack Conroy, and Josephine Herbst, Le Sueur created a wide-ranging body of work--essays, histories, short stories, poetry, novellas, and novels--from the 1920s through the mid-1990s.(1) Her literary reputation was established in the '20s and '30s through her short stories, the acclaimed novella The Horse (1934), and her searing reportage of the plight of farmers and the unemployed during the Depression, including the classic "Women on the Breadlines" (1932). Blacklisted during the McCarthy era, Le Sueur disappeared from view. In the late 1970s, however, her poetry and short stories began to reappear in new editions published by small leftist and feminist presses. In 1978, The Girl, an experimental novel based on her experiences at the Workers Alliance and written during the '30s, was finally published; another novel, I Hear Men Talking, appeared in 1984 amid a resurgence of popular and critical interest in her writing. The Dread Road, Le Sueur's most radically experimental novel, was published in 1991, five years before her death.

Throughout her career, Le Sueur saw writing as transformative political Praxis--"art as action," in her words. "I look upon writing as revealment," she explained in a 1976 letter, as a way "to expose and to rouse, awaken."(2) "Le Sueur wanted her words to transform consciousness," critic Blanche Gelfant has observed, a transformation that constitutes "a necessary prelude ... to the restructuring of society."(3) In The Dread Road, Le Sueur uses a triptych structure--the parallel juxtaposition of three texts--to create a novel that enacts this utopian vision of literature and/as politics.(4) In the center column of the novel is the narrative of two unnamed women's overnight bus trip from Albuquerque to Denver, a trip that becomes a journey through the forgotten history of the American Southwest. Functioning as both a commentary and counterpoint to the center text, excerpts from the Gothic short stories of Edgar Allan Poe run along the left side of the page. Along the right side runs a "subjective" text that, while ostensibly the reflections of the narrator (the older of the two women) on the center story, was drawn from Le Sueur's personal journals. The array of texts on the page mirrors the spatialization of history across the American landscape through which the protagonists travel; the characters' journey and their "reading out" of the landscape the history buried there correlates with the reader's own process of traversing the page and forging connections among the three texts. Thus, the novel's structure links form to content, and both form and content to reading practice.

This unusual triptych structure is a manifestation and implementation of Le Sueur's conception of literature, and of the complexity of her aesthetic and political vision. While frequently identifying herself as a Marxist, Le Sueur's ideology (and that of other midwestern worker-writers) was based less on doctrinaire Marxism than on indigenous midwestern socialist populism.(5) As Douglas Wixson argues in Worker-Writer in America, the Marxism of the midwestern literary radicals was "an `Americanized' version adapted to local circumstances rather than any European transplant.... The ideological sources of midwestern literary radicals like Kalar, Le Sueur, Conroy, Lewis, Corey, Kresensky, and Porter derive from indigenous traditions of protest--expressed in earlier manifestations such as the Farmers' Alliance, the People's Party, the Non-Partisan League, the IWW, certain unions, and various infusions of immigrant liberalism such as the free-thinking Forty-Eighters."(6)

In her writing, Le Sueur sought to achieve a synthesis of this midwestem socialist populism (coupled with her more traditional Marxist beliefs--she was at one time a member of the Communist Party) and an equally strong feminism. The problem of how (and whether) Marxism might be reconciled with feminism has, of course, been a concern since at least the 1930s (though one might discern intimations of it even in Friedrich Engels's 1845 The Condition of the Working Class in England), and one can also see it in the writing of other women worker-writers of this era, including Tillie Olsen, Muriel Rukeyser, Josephine Herbst, and Agnes Smedley. Traditional Marxist critiques of capital have never been adequate for explaining the specific oppression of women, in part because they have subsumed it under the larger category of the "oppression of the working class." (Women who have argued the specificity of women's oppression, among them Le Sueur and the other writers just mentioned, have often been criticized by more doctrinaire Marxists for dividing the working class, and so hindering its revolutionary struggle.) Marx and, to a lesser degree, Engels assumed that patriarchy would finally wither away amid the progressive proletarianization of the populace (an assumption that has not been borne out by history), so that they did not ultimately address the issue of women's particular oppression with the attention its complexity deserves.