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

Criticism, Wntr, 2001 by Paula E. Geyh

As the bus moves through the night, a mist rises from the land, whirls before the headlights and takes on the shape of ghosts. "The road seemed to be drawing us into a spectral world," the narrator says, "into a landscape more real than the present ... more remembered. We seemed to part the dark, a turbulent spectral dark on both sides, and then the headlights seemed to be unreal and like a deep sea, dense and clearing and then closing, as if the air through which we penetrated was the body of hundreds of ghosts running alongside us" (20). Embodying the past within the present, they constitute "great shards of memory swimming in the vast sea night" (19). The attempts by the bus driver and the other passengers to explain away these apparitions as fog or mist are paralleled in the text by the narrator of "The Fall of the House of Usher" 's attribution of the appearances of the undead Madeline to "electrical phenomena" or "the rank miasma of the tarn" (19). Though initially unwelcome, the feared specters are finally regarded by the narrator as necessary: "We must have them. We must ask them to our tables, our beds, our festivals. There is a void without them," the narrator muses (21). To be made "whole" (a central aim of Le Sueur's historiography) the present must encompass all the experiences of the past.

These specters must inevitably include Le Sueur herself, emerging from the obscurity and darkness of the McCarthy era. There is the ghostly, yet perceptible, outline of an historical allegory of American intellectual Marxism in the narrative of The Dread Road. In its text one hears echoes of a rich history of leftist writing of the '30s and '40s that was silenced in the '50s. the "disappearance" of Le Sueur and nearly all of the other worker-writers after they were blacklisted--a kind of burial alive--and their recovery and reemergence in subsequent decades are implicitly evoked by the massacres and ghostly returns of victims in the narrative. And like Poe's resurrected heroines, Le Sueur returns accompanied by the specters of a buried past--the dark history haunting the American dream.(25)

In The Dread Road, the recovery of memory is simultaneously personal and communal. "Something was happening, some disaster, all over the earth," the narrator realizes (11). As the bus travels through the landscape of slag heaps and abandoned mines into the town of Trinidad, the narrator moves rapidly from the sudden terrible awareness of her feelings for her son, to a concomitant awareness of the horror of the massacre of striking miners at the neighboring town of Ludlow in 1914. This first awakening of her ability to connect her individual experience to that of others is matched in the text with the return to consciousness of Poe's protagonist in "The Premature Burial," who can only begin to conceive of his situation when his memory--particularly the memory of being "subject to catalepsy"--is restored (11).

The bus's passage through Trinidad and past the turnoff for Ludlow, Colorado, marks the midpoint on its route from Albuquerque to Denver. And like the overdetermined image of a dream, the Ludlow massacre of striking miners, their wives, and children, lies at the conceptual center of The Dread Road's narrative.(26) "If you ever drew into this funeral whirlpool of a communal ceremonial, you would never forget it," the narrator says, "the real history coming from the event ... the opening of this century plant of workers' grief and passion" (17). The memorial to the event literally encompasses the novel: on the book's front cover are close-up photographs of the faces of the mother and child on the commemorative statue erected by the United Mine Workers of America at the site of the massacre, and on the back cover is a photograph of Meridel Le Sueur walking away from the memorial at sunset. In the text itself, the event forms a matrix within which the personal and the communal, the particular and the general, the real and the symbolic converge. The narrator's entry into this matrix and her confrontation of the personal and political implications of the massacre signal the turning point of her progress toward historical consciousness.