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

Criticism, Wntr, 2001 by Paula E. Geyh

The arrival of the bus in Trinidad launches a chain of associations across generations for the narrator. She is directly linked to the massacre through her grandparents, who were among those killed. At the sight of the hotel where the union officials received runners bearing news of the Ludlow massacre, she imagines her mother (in the right-hand text) "running across the plains, coming on the dawn light road. Perhaps she has news. I saw her knocking on the window in the dark. She saw us. She never lost sight of us" (13). There appears to be a condensation here, in the Freudian sense, between the runners--those who survived and bore witness--and the figure of the mother. A similar and related condensation occurs later when the narrator connects the survivors who took up field work after the massacre with the young mother beside her, who has also worked in the fields: "I thought I heard her whispering, telling her whole life. I knew it. I saw them stooping in the fields after the men were blacklisted at Ludlow, thrown to the edge of the country.... I saw them on a dark screen thrown on my flesh. I read it from the vast dread road we followed" (30).

The narrator (who is also a mother), the narrator's mother, the young mother beside her, the mothers who died in the Ludlow massacre, and even Le Sueur herself are all part of the same constellation of meaning, as are the dead children of the strikers, the young woman's stillborn baby, and the "buried but not dead" son of the narrator. The series of mothers and children can be seen as different incarnations of one another; their individual identities and experiences are collapsed, and they become personifications (or even icons) of history and redemption. Just as capitalism is itself a monolithic force (and evil) for Le Sueur, so too are its victims rendered into a sort of monolithic unity--the victims of capitalist oppression. Throughout the novel, Le Sueur privileges the communal over the individual by subsuming the latter under the former. The individuals are elevated to the position of subjects of history, but in the process, the historical specificity of their experience is to some extent sacrificed. Yet it is also true that certain forms of generalization bring out concrete elements which otherwise might not appear, including the relation of individual experience to communal experience.

A similar, and in many ways even more problematic, collapse occurs in the representation of the histories evoked throughout The Dread Road. The women and children asphyxiated underground near the mines at Ludlow represent not just that one historical moment of atrocity, but many others as well. In the text they are linked to multiple histories of oppression in America: the subjugation of the Indians ("The Dresden story, the Trail of Tears, Wounded Knee, Black Hawk's crossing, where they shot the grandmothers and the children as they floundered, tried to cross the river and sank into the netherworld, sown like seeds into the dark" 15), of immigrants to America, of inhabitants of nuclear weapons testing grounds in Colorado, of agricultural workers poisoned by pesticides, and of industrial workers here and abroad. Throughout the novel, there is a tension between historical specificity and generality, between the stories of individuals and of classes and even nations. In Le Sueur's view, one cannot shape history without an adequate understanding of it, and this understanding requires the ability to connect one's own experience with that of others throughout time. Once these connections are made, however, all stories tend to merge into one overarching narrative--that of the oppression of the working class by capital.