Modernist Parasites: Bioethics, Dependency, and Literature, Post-1900 (Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures) 9781666921298, 9781666921304, 9781666921311, 1666921297

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Modernist Parasites

Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures Series Editors Peggy Karpouzou and Nikoleta Zampaki, University of Athens Through the innovative interface of Posthumanities and Citizen Humanities, the Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures Series examines the changing status of subject, subjectivity, agency, humanity and citizenship, depending on the complex relationships between nature, technology, science, and culture. Given the rapid and extensive technoscientific developments, we need to conceive new species’ and planetary narratives beyond our anthropocentrism. The Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures Series reflects on the possible future outcomes of humankind and defamiliarizes the mainstream narratives of humanity so it can be better understood in how it is constructed, performed, and protected. The implications of human and nonhuman life forms’ co-existence within our networked world are researched in the theoretical framework of posthumanism and citizenship studies and through various fields and concepts such as literature, art, urban ecology, smart cities, Anthropocene, the future of humans, and Humanities. Proposals are invited by crosscultural and transnational approaches, including but not limited to: environmental posthumanities, citizen humanities, literary theory, cultural studies, philosophy, animal studies, plant studies, religious studies, disability studies, narrative studies, AI and robotics, biotechnology, biopolitics, civil justice, bioethics, medical humanities, gender studies, digital humanities, art, visual studies, media studies, indigenous studies, educational and social studies, psychology and anthropology. The Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures Series seeks to foster an ongoing dialogue between academics and scholars across the globe by featuring monographs and edited collections exploring new narrations, raised by the intersection among biosphere and technosphere in a more-than-human citizenship world. Recent Titles in the Series Modernist Parasites: Bioethics, Dependency, and Literature, Post-1900, by Sebastian Williams Toxicity as a Form of Life in Contemporary India, by Dipali Mathur

Modernist Parasites Bioethics, Dependency, and Literature, Post-1900 Sebastian Williams

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Williams, Sebastian, 1992- author. Title: Modernist parasites : bioethics, dependency, and literature, post-1900 / Sebastian Williams. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2023. | Series: Posthumanities and citizenship futures | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023021642 (print) | LCCN 2023021643 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666921298 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666921304 (epub) | ISBN 9781666921311 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Literature, Modern—20th century—History and criticism. | Dependency (Psychology) in literature. | Literature, Modern—21st century—History and criticism. | Parasitism (Social sciences) in literature. | Outsiders in literature. Classification: LCC PN771 .W525 2023  (print) | LCC PN771  (ebook) | DDC 809/.04—dc23/eng/20230711 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023021642 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023021643 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For Rachel, Nadja, Phoebe, Maybe, and Bonnie

Contents

Acknowledgments ix List of Figures Introduction

xi 1

Chapter One: Contagion, Pests, and Parasites in Trench Poetry Chapter Two: “The Million Enemies of the Earth”: Parasitism and Poverty in Great Depression Literature



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Chapter Three: “Monstrous Vermin”: Becoming the Modernist Parasite 75 Chapter Four: “Parasitism & Prostitution—Or Negation”: The Parasite in Modernist Feminism Chapter Five: The Tramp: Social Parasitism, Vagrancy, and Health Epilogue

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Bibliography Index

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191

About the Author



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Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the help of Dr. Maren Linett, Dr. John Duvall, Dr. Arkady Plotnitsky, Dr. Jeanne Dubino, and Dr. Katherine Osborne. I am grateful for their support and feedback on various elements of this project. For permission to reprint sections of Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” and “Parturition,” I wish to thank Roger Conover and the Estate of Mina Loy. I am also indebted to the National World War I Museum and Memorial for providing special permissions to use images in their collection. I was also assisted with research by the staff at the University of Maryland’s Hornbake Library and Special Collections, Purdue University Libraries and Special Collections, and Mary Jo DeJoice, director of the Booth Library at Davis & Elkins College. I could not have completed this project without the support of friends and family. I wish to thank my parents, Mike and Regina Williams, who instilled in me a sense of curiosity, a love for the humanities, and encouragement to pursue my passions. As a first-generation student from a working-class background, I benefited from their support in ways too complex to put into words. Finally, I owe the deepest debt of gratitude to Rachel, whose love and support made all of this possible.

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Figure 1.1. “7. The Delouser at St-Nazaire—A Veritable Hades for the Cootie!” Black-and-white postcard photograph. Figure 1.2. “Untitled.” Pen-and-ink drawing by Clifford Warner.

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Introduction

Modernism swarms with parasites. The verminous Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis has become an icon of German Expressionism; the titular pests in Faulkner’s Mosquitoes symbolically buzz in the book’s background; and Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee describes a hookworm outbreak in its opening. While the parasite now has a negative connotation, many modernists challenge various uses of the term. For example, social parasitism was a major topic of debate in the early twentieth century. In Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell describes the “tramp” as “a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community.”1 Orwell asserts that, despite popular sentiment, so-called social parasites are rarely lazy spongers; there is little substantive difference between a parasite and an “upstanding” citizen. Aesthetic parasitism also concerns modernists, such as Nathanael West. His novella The Dream Life of Balso Snell follows the titular protagonist as he parasitically burrows through the innards of the mythical Trojan Horse—a symbol for the Western literary canon. For a young, disillusioned West, becoming‑parasite was a productive challenge to the independent, stable Self inherited from humanist traditions. This book interprets the parasite in modernist writing to interrogate the ethics and politics of dependency. The parasite is not simply humanity’s Other; it is often an antagonist in the popular imagination—a threat. To refer to a group of people or nonhuman animals as “parasitic” not only distances them from the category of “human,” but it also encourages their eradication. Hence, studying parasitism can show how language and narrative delimit the boundaries of identity and the moral community. But many modernist writers also challenge the received attitudes toward parasites to critique aspects of liberal humanism. Reversing attitudes, these writers frame the parasite as an ideal of interdependent identity, an ethical model that runs counter to the independent Self reinforced by various humanisms. Kafka, West, Clarice Lispector, David Jones, Nella Larsen, Orwell, and others anticipate contemporary debates within posthumanism by using the inherent dependency of the parasite on its host to exemplify a social actor that can never exist in isolation. Unlike the

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discrete individual privileged within most iterations of traditional humanism, the parasite relies on others by its very nature—it is networked and relational. Today, the word “parasite” tends to conjure images of tapeworms, ticks, and other hangers-on, and it also alludes to a social category of individuals who purportedly “drain the system” without giving back. While “parasite” now carries a negative connotation, the Greek word from which it is derived, parásitos or παράσιτος, merely means “beside the grain,” to “eat at another’s table,” or “one who takes food beside.” The term “parasite” initially referred to a temple officiant in Ancient Greece, and it later became a comedic trope for a witty speaker who would earn their meals through storytelling and servility. The parasite was popular enough to be parodied in Lucian’s De Parasito, a work that satirically suggests parasitism is the greatest of all art forms. Adapting the trope from Greek drama, the Romans were the first to link the parasite to pathology, to the “unhealthy aspects of patronage relationships in their own real world.”2 For example, Cicero decries his opponents by calling them mere “parasites” or flatterers.3 Botanists used “parasite” as a metaphor to describe mistletoe and similar plants, and Lucinda Cole documents a broad discourse of “imperfect creatures” or vermin in the work of early modern authors.4 Among the Romantics, Shelley references the “many-twining stems” of “Parasitic flowers” in Epipsychidion and the “tendrils of the parasite” in Queen Mab.5 And Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse” and “To a Louse” directly challenge anthropocentrism through their playful consideration of vermin. But the term “parasite” also remained a popular descriptor for sycophants and even women. For example, versions of the trope can be seen in Friedrich Schiller’s The Art of the Parasite and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Parasite.6 In short, the parasite has a long literary history. However, parasitism became particularly convoluted by the modernist period (approximately 1890 to 1945). According to the Google Books N-Gram Database, the term “parasite” and its iterations surged from 1850 to 1900, and it reached peak use in 1911 and 1931. Advances in medicine and biological sciences revitalized the subject, as nineteenth-century ecologists and biologists adopted the term “parasite” to refer to a class of interspecies relationships. At the institutional level, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine created new courses in parasitology in the early twentieth century, representing the spreading popularity of the field. This renewed interest in parasitism was reflected culturally as well. For example, Dracula arguably perpetuated anxieties about foreign invaders who drained the vitality of the body politic.7 The famous vampire, unofficially adapted in the modernist film Nosferatu (1922), illustrates a renewed fear of parasites—including the slippery boundaries between biological and social parasites. The conflation of social and biological categories is also evidenced by the rise of eugenics at the fin de siècle. Within eugenic discourses, “parasite”

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could problematically refer to oppressed groups, from the Jewish people to the impoverished. Additionally, several feminist authors resisted the notion that women were parasites on the male head of household. Anti‑parasite laws in the Soviet Union defined parasites as “able-bodied” individuals who worked less than half of the year.8 And, in various debates about unemployment assistance in the U.S. and U.K., the phrase “parasite class” was used to describe both welfare recipients and wealthy elites or landlords.9 The list of examples goes on. Ultimately, parasites were perceived as a threat to the health of the body politic, an idea challenged by a strain of modernist authors who resisted the privileging of the autonomous, independent subject. Modernist Parasites considers parasitism in the popular literary, scientific, and political imagination; the parasite is a socially constructed, relational term that became an increasingly dangerous label. Parasitism is closely connected to discourses of dependency, including anthropocentric and ableist discourses that privilege independence, autonomy, and productivity. Building on posthumanism, I suggest that how people define “human” and “nonhuman” relates to assumptions about agency, intelligence, and bodily “normalcy.” My goal is not to recover a lost sense of “humanity” but instead to challenge humanistic ways of thinking that lead to dehumanization or exploitation in the first instance. The parasite is not simply marginalized but seemingly beyond the boundaries of the social world. As I explore throughout this book, the parasite is the “lowest of the low,” a radical position in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense because it readily deterritorializes and reterritorializes. In other words, the parasite is not a stable ontological position but exists through assemblages.10 Furthermore, as Giorgio Agamben analyzes in the work of Jakob Johann von Uexküll, parasites offer “excursions into unknowable worlds”: “Too often [. . .] we imagine that the relations a certain animal subject has to the things in its environment take place in the same space and in the same time as those which bind us to the objects in our human world.”11 By taking seriously the world of the parasite, critics may better understand a broader ecology of human and nonhuman forces. Modernist Parasites explores how parasites move within, form, reform, write, and rewrite social relationships. Put differently, this book traces the genealogy of the parasite within a particular cultural moment, and I examine how modernist parasites contribute to a wider critique of humanistic identity and the history of thought. PARASITES AND POSTHUMANISM Throughout Modernist Parasites, I combine elements of animal studies, disability studies, and posthumanism. Posthumanism asserts that new theoretical,

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methodological, and ethical approaches are needed to recognize that humans are part of a complex network of nonhuman animals, the environment, and emerging technologies.12 Most forms of humanism tend to return to an imagined “normative” subject—the conceptualization of the human Self as an autonomous, individuated, and agential subject. But posthumanism recognizes that nonhuman animals and objects also have agency and can become social actors; that is, it is sometimes limiting to define the subject as a discrete entity rather than part of a networked ecology. I show how many modernists anticipate such ideas by engaging the concept of parasitism. Posthumanism interrogates humanism as an ideology, not necessarily abandoning it in its entirety but critically investigating its central claims. Philosophical humanism explores many similar questions to posthumanism, yet humanism has a long, complicated legacy through which critics must constantly navigate. Several scholars have studied modernism and posthumanism in recent years. Modernist Parasites contributes to and builds on these conversations by focusing on dependency and its impact on ethics and politics. In particular, parasites are often seen as vulgar, rapidly reproducing organisms (or individuals) that overwhelm their host environments in ways that challenge humanistic categories of analysis, perception, and identity. While my focus on parasitism is distinct, several critics and theorists have laid a strong foundation for posthumanist approaches to modernism. Carrie Rohman’s research on animality in Stalking the Subject shows how modernists responded to the decreasing significance of humans in systems that were not inherently anthropocentric. In other words, as Darwinism displaced the position of the human—framing humans as an ordinary animal evolved through the arbitrary process of natural selection—many authors shored up human privilege as a response. Derek Ryan further demonstrates how theory tends to change in modernity when encountering “the Animal,” whether in zoos or philosophical thought experiments. Additionally, Jeff Wallace’s D. H. Lawrence, Science, and the Posthuman brings together modernist studies, the history of science, and posthumanist ethics. Wallace shows how, in the context of science, Lawrence’s encounters with Darwinism and eugenics radically alter his understanding of what it means to be human. In different ways, Erin Edwards and Ruben Borg explore modernist encounters with the posthuman as the “posthumous,” as corpses that exert social agency, in Edward’s case, or by fantasizing about “surviving” after one’s death, in Borg’s work. Posthumanist modernism is complex and varied, and its theorizing can often be traced to the modernist period (if not earlier). In “A Sketch of the Past,” for example, Virginia Woolf writes that “behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.”13 This interconnectedness extends to her understanding of nature: “the flower

Introduction

5

itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was a flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower.”14 Ryan suggests that such passages present a “conceptual model of a non-hierarchical, intricately interconnected whole is suffused with the vitality and materiality of the ‘dominant’ sensation (over her ‘passive’ self) of the ‘real flower.’”15 In short, Woolf’s writing theorizes a “creative, immanent materiality of human and nonhuman life.”16 Alternatively, the bird topos in Wallace Stevens’s writing evokes, according to Cary Wolfe, an ecological poetics; that is, worlds co-created by the human and nonhuman animals that live there. Sebastian Gardner notes that Stevens tends to strip the everyday world of “all human, anthropocentric features” to imagine a reality unmediated by human perspectives.17 And perhaps more subtly, Kafka’s animal stories gesture toward posthumanism by representing nonhuman animals as “receptacles of the forgotten” (to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin).18 As novelist Jonathan Safran Foer eloquently explains, “animal bodies were, for Kafka, burdened with the forgetting of all those parts of ourselves we want to forget. If we wish to disavow a part of our nature, we call it our ‘animal nature.’ We then repress or conceal that nature, and yet, as Kafka knew better than most, we sometimes wake up and find ourselves, still, only animals.”19 In the following chapters, I build on this variety of writers and scholars, shifting my focus to parasites in literature when discussing social order, disease, greed, reproduction, and independence. Modernist Parasites adds to writing on posthumanist modernism in several ways. For example, some chapters openly avoid a tendency within animal studies to focus on nonhuman animals that are similar to humans or to align automatically with animal welfare movements. I do not necessarily advocate for the rights of lice or hookworms, in other words; I am more interested in critically attending to what otherwise might be “outcasts”—to questions about parasitism within ethical-political and scientific discourses. Elsewhere I have written about animal companions (e.g., dogs and birds) in the work of Virginia Woolf and Eugene O’Neill, but people tend to squirm or resist conversation when I shift topics toward parasitic worms and burrowing ticks—a different type of “companion.”20 Such revulsion informs this study; parasites are viewed as vulgar precisely because they are so distant from the categories used to describe humans. Parasites represent dearth (the draining of energy and resources) while also swarming and spreading contagiously to exert a profound “inhuman” agency. Posthumanism challenges hierarchies that place humans above nonhuman animals and technologies; it is anti-anthropocentric at its core. As Wolfe writes, posthumanism “names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by [their] imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore.”21 Modernist

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representations of the parasite anticipate posthumanism not only when they portray nonhuman animals, but also when they show the parasite’s perpetual relation to a host. The parasite cannot exist outside of a network. This is not to suggest that parasitic organisms have no ontology; rather, para-site describes a relationship that is “alongside” a host. In this sense, parasitism is at odds with humanistic assumptions that the subject is independent or that humans can be separated from their environment. This has arguably led to the perceived danger of the social parasite—of those who rely on others inherently. Literature that asks its readers to adopt the perspective of the parasite conceptualizes ways of becoming that go beyond philosophical humanism. Yet the parasite does not transcend material reality; it is embodied, sometimes grotesque, and earthly. Lispector describes parasitic experience as “thousands of cilia blinking,”22 while for Steinbeck and Orwell, stories about social parasites are best when they emphasize the physical hardships of poverty—pangs of hunger, chronic illness, sore feet, and disease. In addition to posthumanist modernism, this book draws on early iterations of posthumanist theory, particularly the work of philosopher Michel Serres. He asserts that parasites are “interrupters” or catalysts in biological, social, and informational systems. In information theory in the French language, le parasite can refer to an interruption or “break” in a signal, which Serres takes as a starting point to understand how biological and social parasites “disorder” the status quo. In this sense, the parasite is a disruption that forces a signal to change, or it impels information or energy to flow differently. He goes so far as to claim that parasites shape our conception of the world: “We parasite each other and live amidst parasites. Which is more or less a way of saying that they constitute our environment.”23 Parasitic relationships reflect human society, or the relationship between system and environment. But the parasite is not necessarily negative, because it “invents something new. Since he does not eat like everyone else, he builds a new logic.”24 In this sense, the parasite overflows or expands exponentially, and, as a result can productively disorder structured systems. The parasite breaks down clear-cut boundaries between “outside” (environment) and “inside” (host). Serres’s approach helps to make sense of parasites in modernist writing because it resists the presumed primacy of the humanist Self. Instead of human-centric systems of clearly defined subjects and objects, Serres presents a sprawling, decentered network. Instead of concrete persons, Serres is concerned with “positions” or “relations.” Hence, as Cary Wolfe notes, one of the best-known concepts to emerge from Serres’s The Parasite is the “quasi-object”: “For Serres [. . .] sacrifice, expulsion, and scapegoating are rudimentary forms of achieving social cohesion and producing intersubjectivity [. . .] But the quasi-object produces intersubjectivity in a much more subtle and dynamic (and for that reason more powerful) way.”25 The parasite

Introduction

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is a recursively stabilized designation that is neither entirely natural nor social; the parasite is a quasi-object because it defines certain networks and collectives. One common example of such quasi-objects is a basketball: it is a round rubber ball, yet it also takes on new meaning within the game of basketball by defining player positions, scoring, and so forth. It exerts a sort of nonhuman agency as the physics of the ball dictate gameplay. The parasite similarly defines a variety of social and physical arrangements, whether it is a hookworm that drains the energy of a field worker in Steinbeck’s Harvest Gypsies or a tramp in Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London who (supposedly) drains the resources of the British body politic. By emphasizing the quasi-object in shaping social systems and material relations, Serres gestures toward a posthumanist conception of interdependency that reframes the subject-object dichotomy. No longer are human beings the ultimate social actors; instead, social systems are affected by networks of nonhuman actors such as parasites. Deleuze and Guattari similarly describe a form of unified vitalism that “applies equally to the inanimate and the animate, the unnatural and the natural.”26 Rather than conceptualizing a binary between discrete human subjects and the nonhuman world, in which humans act on the world around them (and not vice versa), Deleuzian philosophy foregrounds “subject-less” and “collective” assemblages. Much like the now-famous example of a symbiotic relationship between wasp and orchid in A Thousand Plateaus, the parasite is part of an assemblage; it is a relational collective of parasite and host. Many modernists adopt a similar approach to the parasite, framing it as a complex biosocial actor at the core of inter-relational social systems. For example, Franz Kafka describes Gregor Samsa as “einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer” [“a monstrous vermin”] in The Metamorphosis. The term Ungeziefer is more complex than a bug (Wanze), cockroach (Kakerlake), or insect (Insekt); “vermin” is a liminal category—an unstable signifier for a pestiferous threat. Gregor is a biological and social hybrid, an outcast around whom the family and society define their own identities. His embodied experience changes as he transforms into a verminous creature, and he also becomes the family’s perceived “burden” and an outcast at work. In short, Gregor’s metamorphosis is multifaceted, and the parasite signifies both biological transformation and changing social relations. As I explore in chapter three, Clarice Lispector and Nathanael West build on Kafka’s understanding of verminous transformation, suggesting that the parasite ultimately represents a distinct form of interdependent experience at odds with liberal humanism. Many modernist authors also challenge how biological parasites are understood, suggesting that parasitic organisms change the nature of human social systems. For example, in the trench poetry of the First World War, the lice and rats that permeate the war-torn landscape are closely connected with

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the soldiers’ experiences. On the one hand, parasites or vermin are common subjects in medical reports, which describe the transmission of disease. Such reports concentrate on human health and experience. On the other hand, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, and David Jones represent parasites as an animate, vital force that contrasts the rampant death of the war. In this context, parasites are social actors that do things; they connect the natural world with the human-made landscapes of war. These trench poets adopt a subtle post‑anthropocentric perspective, as humanity does not transcend the natural world; instead, human and nonhuman animals are part of a wider environment. Gregor Samsa’s parasitic transformation and the vermin in trench poetry are just two examples of the parasite in modernist writing. As many modernist authors reveal, however, their representations of parasites are also implicated in the humanistic tradition of writing. Scholar Erin Edwards asks, “[if] writing is itself a human technology, how is it possible to engage with texts without participating in the discourses and semiotic systems that defined the human as an exclusionary category?”27 Even as Modernist Parasites critiques humanist paradigms, this book cannot fully circumvent anthropocentrism. Instead, I adopt what Rosi Braidotti describes as “critical posthumanism,” which “raises issues of power [. . .] and calls for self-reflexivity on the part of the subjects who occupy the former humanist centre, but also those who dwell in one of the many scattered centres of power of advanced post-modernity.”28 The critical posthuman is defined by an ecological, community-centered approach, with a strong emphasis on collectivity rather than the self-interests of the individual. The parasite is therefore part of a broader, pervasive ethical debate that aims to expand the notion of “life.” A posthumanist approach to literature also raises bioethical questions as the category of “human” becomes less stable. For example, Maren Tova Linett writes in Literary Bioethics that posthumanists such as Cary Wolfe draw on Derrida and Bentham to show how “our shared finitude [with all living beings] matters morally and should help delineate our behavior.”29 Linett, Martha Nussbaum, and others take literature as a starting point for debates in bioethics, in part because literature can help readers imagine themselves in the place of another. Some literary texts offer complex “thought experiments” about nonhuman life, eugenics, embodiment, and neurodivergence. The subtitle of this book refers to “bioethics” broadly: in some cases, I directly discuss ethical philosophy, while, at other times, “ethics” refers to moments when authors envision themselves in the position of another animal (human or nonhuman). In this sense, I adopt Linett’s view, who asserts that the creative imagination required for reading literature is much like a thought experiment or a “lab” for community ethics.30 This is not to suggest that literary bioethics or posthumanism is better than philosophical approaches; rather, literature offers alternative perspectives

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to such topics.31 Furthermore, as scholars such as Carol Gilligan note, an “ethics of care” often revolves around a narrative sense of identity; ethical thought experiments revolving around justice have, historically, separated the individual from the complicated realities of lived experience.32 While readers may never fully “transcend” a position of privilege in imagining the life of the parasite, Modernist Parasites suggests that the critical posthumanist approach offers a valuable form of self‑reflexivity to engage ethical questions meaningfully. PARASITES AND THE MODERNIST ERA Studying parasitism and modernism together is especially important because conceptualizations of the parasite changed significantly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While early modern scientists such as Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Francesco Redi paved the way for studying parasites in the modern world, the scientific understanding of life was fundamentally altered in the late nineteenth century. Notably, such advances were not immediately absorbed into the public imagination. For example, figures such as Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel conceptualized life as existing amid temporal and spatial networks, placing human beings as a small part of a vast natural history. In doing so, such advances also raised questions about the status of humans. Reactions to such ideas are incredibly varied, but, in addition to cultural acceptance, Darwinism also led to cultural backlash and had a latent cultural absorption.33 If humans evolve from nonhuman animals, and if the boundary between the “interior” human world and “exterior” environment is blurred, then the social-moral status of humans shifts as well. As Modernist Parasites addresses, many authors and public intellectuals still grappled with the shifting status of human beings during the early twentieth century. Parasites are especially relevant in this context because they are verminous creatures or “base” animals that reinforce notions of human privilege. In other words, the repugnance associated with parasites might justify the notion that nonhuman animals are less “developed” and therefore less “civilized” than humans. Who, after all, would dare to compare human life and parasite life seriously? The reinterpretation of parasitism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drastically impacted the humanities and social sciences as well, including pseudo-sciences such as eugenics. As Rohman suggests, Darwinism led to a “coping mechanism” inherent in the “residual humanism” of the period. Put differently, many thinkers and writers attempted to “mitigate evolution’s challenge to human privilege” by increasingly placing humans back at the center of aesthetic, political, and scientific discourses.34

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Eugenics illustrates this tendency, as it attempts to control the “chaotic” nature of natural selection to breed “better” societies. For example, H. G. Wells’s Anticipations series revolves around a progressivist agenda inflected by eugenics, and in its concluding chapter, Wells discusses the “euthanasia of the weak and sensual.” In another section, Wells specifically condemns parasitism, or those “who attempt to be parasitic upon the social body.”35 While Wells was ambivalent toward certain aspects of eugenics, his writing nevertheless illustrates the cultural backlash against decentering the human. As indicated throughout the Anticipations series, Wells responded to scientific innovations, yet the culminating chapter of Anticipations is permeated with cultural anxieties about the “lost place” of humans in the modern world. As I explore in Chapter 5, the “residual humanism” of Wells’s progressivist vision had a major impact on how Jack London discusses “parasitic behavior” in The People of the Abyss (even London’s title is taken from Wells). While Orwell would later criticize London’s views of social parasitism, such authors nevertheless reveal the interconnected discourses surrounding the biological sciences, social sciences, pseudo-sciences, and cultural production. In the early twentieth century, the parasite was often near the center of these intersecting debates about what it meant to be “human” in social, political, and scientific settings. Throughout this book, I also connect medicine, public health, and literature. Modern parasitology emerged in the mid- to late nineteenth century with figures such as James Paget, Louis Alexis Normand, and Patrick Manson. In 1902, Ronald Ross earned the Nobel Prize for discovering the malaria parasite, garnering worldwide publicity for the emerging field. And scholar John Janovy begins his discussion of modern parasitology in the 1910s, with the development of the American-based Journal of Parasitology. In the preceding decades in Britain, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine offered courses dedicated to the subject, and Parasitology—a supplement to the Journal of Hygiene—was created in 1908.36 In various chapters I show how many of these advances make their way into the popular imagination. For example, I begin this book with vermin in trench poetry because the First World War led to several scientific advances in how parasites and disease transmission are understood—developments that occurred while writers and artists placed rats, lice, and fleas at the center of their work. Additionally, hookworm disease and malnutrition were controversial topics during the Great Depression, because they could at once refer to the material realities of poor families while also evoking broader debates about social welfare. For example, John Steinbeck’s 1936 articles in the San Francisco News (which would inspire The Grapes of Wrath) discuss hookworm disease as evidence that more welfare spending was needed. The parasite became the poster child for socio-political debates in fiction and nonfiction.

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Nevertheless, the parasite was not always perceived negatively during the modernist era. For example, German ecologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll used the tick to complicate how we might understand the semiotics, or “carriers of significance,” within the environment‑world of nonhuman animals. Concisely summarizing Uexküll’s view, Giorgio Agamben writes: this eyeless animal finds the way to her watchpoint with the help of only its skin’s general sensitivity to light. The approach of her prey becomes apparent to this blind and deaf bandit only through her sense of smell. The odor [. . .] works on the tick as a signal that causes her to abandon her post and fall blindly downward toward her prey. If she is fortunate enough to fall on something warm [. . .] then she has attained her prey, the warm-blooded animal, and thereafter needs only the help of her sense of touch to find the least hairy spot possible and embed herself up to her head in the cutaneous tissue of her prey.37

Uexküll is unique from other ecologists of the early twentieth century because he focuses on the tick’s perspective when describing the Umwelt, including the “signifiers” that are meaningful to it. This includes the “odor” of the host mammal (specifically, the detection of butyric acid), the warm temperature of the host, and the tick’s sense of touch. Even while Uexküll at times anthropomorphizes animals, he is also notable for showing how nonhuman animals construct their own environments and how humans struggle to “transcend” their understanding of their environment.38 Such a view is part of a strain within modernism that challenges the notion that parasites are purely negative. Given the radical position of the parasite as the “lowest of the low,” writers such as Kafka and Clarice Lispector, for example, are drawn to vermin. Attempting to inhabit the abject state of the parasite helps one reveal the most marginalized forms of subjecthood. This book begins by focusing on biological parasites in the first three chapters, after which I focus on social parasites in the final two chapters. However, it is important to note that the parasite is a biosocial concept. In discussing hookworms and lice, for example, I show how some texts associate vermin with the marginalized individuals in a community. In short, those most readily impacted by parasitic outbreaks were portrayed as social parasites within the cultural imagination. Alternatively, the use of “social parasite” to describe the impoverished, women, and racial or ethnic groups commonly drew from biological and pseudo-scientific discourses about physical and mental “fitness.” While authors may use “parasite” in a variety of contexts, the term evokes social and biological discourses simultaneously. Additionally, as Serres notes, the parasite constitutes biological, social, and informational relationships, which means virtually any type of affiliation can be categorized as parasitic. As such, I generally focus on parasitic acts or literal vermin, or authors who use the term “parasite.” Rats are not biological parasites in the

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Introductio

same way roundworms are parasitic. However, I include rats in my analysis because they often adopt parasitic behavior. “Parasite” only recently developed a specific meaning in biology (compared to the parasite in literature and rhetoric, which dates back over 2000 years), so I use the term in a general way to organize my analysis of vermin, pests, and dependency more broadly. Chapter one centers on parasites and contagion in the trenches of the First World War, including the work of Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, and David Jones. Despite the common medico-historical narrative about lice and rats as a health threat and little more, there are several literary examples that show how vermin became comrades in the shared space of war. I analyze Rosenberg’s and Owen’s trench poetry as well as Jones’s post-war epic poem In Parenthesis, each of which I contextualize using trench journalism and medical reports from the British Imperial War Museum, the archives of the British Medical Journal, and Arthur Hurst’s Medical Diseases of War. Ultimately, Rosenberg, Owen, and Jones show how gradations of nonhuman life are constructed, including how various pests and parasites are imagined as simultaneously “more” and “less” alive than humans. This impels readers to reconsider the role of nonhuman social actors in cultural contexts, particularly war. Chapter two analyzes parasitism in the work of John Steinbeck and Erskine Caldwell during the Great Depression, exposing how migrants and tenant farmers were commonly framed as parasitically contagious (literally and figuratively). I contrast these two authors to show that Steinbeck, who developed an interest in ecology in the 1930s, and Caldwell, who became increasingly interested in eugenics, responded very differently to the moral justifications for social welfare. While Caldwell tended to dehumanize impoverished tenant farmers and disabled people by comparing them to weeds, boll weevils, and other pests, Steinbeck’s journalism in the 1930s documents disease and hookworm outbreaks to challenge the ways that those most commonly affected by biological parasites were themselves considered social parasites. Steinbeck critiques the centrality of Self-Reliance and independence in American politics and public health policy, ultimately promoting social welfare programs in Harvest Gypsies and The Grapes of Wrath. While Steinbeck’s writing is less overtly influenced by eugenics than Caldwell’s, Steinbeck nevertheless suggests that reviving a “healthful,” middle-class white identity should be the ultimate goal of social welfare. Hence, race plays a subtle role in shaping even Steinbeck’s views. Chapter three discusses parasitic transformation as a modernist trope in the work of Franz Kafka, Clarice Lispector, and Nathanael West. Kafka establishes parasitic metamorphosis as a literary trope, which Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H. and West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell use to undermine anthropocentrism. While in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

Introduction

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the verminous Gregor ultimately resigns to his fate and dies—creating a pessimistic perspective of the parasite in modernity—Lispector and West revive the trope of parasitic transformation to illustrate its radical potential. For Lispector, parasitic transformation allows humans to escape the anthropocentrism of writing and language; as the character G. H. consumes a cockroach, for example, she experiences a near-spiritual epiphany about the interdependency of all forms of life. Alternatively, West uses parasitic transformation to satirize the privileging of autonomous (artistic) creation in Balso Snell, suggesting that the modernist impulse to “Make It New!” failed to recognize the inter-relatedness of all artistry. In both cases, Lispector and West radicalize the Kafkaesque metamorphosis to challenge social hierarchies that cast the parasite or vermin as the “lowest of the low.” Chapter four analyzes how Mina Loy and Nella Larsen responded to the notion that women were so-called parasites or social dependents. These authors subvert the language of social science to stage their feminist critiques, yet such authors also treated parasitism with ambivalence given their complicated attitudes toward eugenics and “blood science.” Loy refers to marriage as a form of “social parasitism” in her “Feminist Manifesto,” yet I suggest that she questions the concept, as evidenced in works such as “Parturition.” In Nella Larsen’s short story “Freedom,” she uses parasitism as a metaphor to satirize the patriarchal privileging of independence. For Larsen, masculinity and femininity are problematically shaped by the notion of parasitism, which reduces or obscures the interdependent relationships between men and women in the early twentieth century. Finally, chapter five studies the tramp as a social parasite in the work of Jack London and George Orwell. I demonstrate H. G. Wells’s influence on London’s The People of the Abyss, in which London goes undercover in the East End of London as a tramp. I pair this with an analysis of London’s “hobo” diaries and The Road, revealing that London’s pro-socialist nonfiction is problematically structured on eugenics. London’s humanistic focus emphasizes perfecting or transcending the human through social engineering. Orwell, by contrast, distances himself from London’s brand of eugenic socialism. In Down and Out in Paris and London and A Clergyman’s Daughter, Orwell writes about the experience of tramps, who were commonly deemed “social parasites” in the 1930s. For Orwell, “parasite” is a problematic label for tramps or vagrants because it reduces major parts of the population to a “burden” on social resources. Instead, Orwell suggests that “parasite” is used by the middle and upper classes to disguise the economic inequalities of 1930s Britain. This book expands literary scholarship by addressing the ethical status of biological and social parasites, particularly the use of “parasitism” to marginalize individuals and organisms. My study of the shifting definitions

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of parasitism in modernist literature and culture reveals how the concept evolved in the popular literary, scientific, and political imagination, as well as how modernist writers challenged potentially dangerous assumptions about Self-Reliance, bodily autonomy, and labor value—assumptions still common in many ethical and political models today. In this way, Modernist Parasites attempts to understand dependency—the interconnectedness of humans, animals, environments, and information—in shaping networks of social actors. As Serres suggests, the parasite pervades systems: “History hides the fact that man is the universal parasite, that everything and everyone around him is a hospitable space [. . .] Always taking, never giving.”39 NOTES 1. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1961), 173. 2. Cynthia Damon, The Mask of the Parasite: A Pathology of Roman Patronage (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 2. 3. For example, in Cicero’s Pro Flaggo he discredits a witness by comparing them to a parasite, whom he claims may be won with bribery: parasitorum in modo . . . possint uentre corrumpi, ad gylae blandimenta uenales [parasites may (by their methods) be corrupted through their bellies; their flattery is for sale]. But as Damon notes about Classical rhetoric and drama, whenever the term “parasite” is used, “an effort of interpretation is underway.” In other words, it is rarely a neutral term. See Damon, “Greek Parasites and Roman Patronage,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 97, no. 1 (1995): 187. 4. Lucinda Cole, Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600–1740 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016). 5. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “From Epipsychidion,” Poetry Foundation, accessed 12 May 2022, https:​//​www​.poetryfoundation​.org​/poems​/45119​/epipsychidion. Also see Queen Mab, Canto 1, line 43. 6. Schiller’s original title is Der Parasit, oder, die Kunst sein Glück zu machen (lit. “The Parasite, or, the Art to Make One’s Fortune”). 7. There are several articles on Dracula and xenophobia. For a more recent perspective, see Christopher Eaton, “Enemies or Allies? Fear, Terror, and Xenophobia in Dracula.” Journal of Dracula Studies 19 (2017): 5–24. While Dracula is perhaps the most famous vampire story, the genre appears earlier in English literature by Romantics such as John Polodori and Lord Byron. 8. For example, in the 1936 Soviet Constitution, the phrase “he who does not work shall not eat” reflected sentiments about parasitism and labor. See Siegelbaum, “Anti-Parasite Laws,” Soviet History, Michigan State University, https:​//​soviethistory​ .msu​.edu​/1961​-2​/anti​-parasite​-law. Accessed 18 June 2022. Also of note is the trial of poet Joseph Brodsky; the writer was convicted of “parasitism” in 1964. When asked by the judge “Who recognized you to be a poet? Who put you in the ranks of poet?,”

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Brodsky replied, “No one. Who put me in the ranks of humanity?” See “Trial of Joseph Brodsky,” Soviet History, Michigan State University, https:​//​soviethistory​.msu​ .edu​/1954​-2​/whats​-a​-woman​-to​-think​/whats​-a​-woman​-to​-think​-texts​/trial​-of​-joseph​ -brodsky. 9. Searching the Hansard shows that the term “parasite” regularly appears in the UK Parliament, referring to both social parasitism and biological parasites. In debates about the Unemployment Assistance Act of 1934, for example, a Mr. McGovern refers to Sir J. Simon as part of the wealthy “parasite class.” Similarly, in the Soviet Union, “parasite” was an insult that could describe both the bourgeoisie or “spongers.” 10. In A Thousand Plateaus, for example, Deleuze and Guattari first explain their concept of “becoming-animal” by analyzing the pack of rats in the film Willard. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 233. 11. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 40. 12. My use of the term “posthuman” or “posthumanism” differs from that of N. Katherine Hayles. In her 1999 book How We Became Posthuman (1999), she describes what many scholars today now define as transhumanism. Hayles shows how computer science and cybernetics have altered our definition of humanity. As information appeared to be disembodied in digital environments, various conceptions of the human mind and human experience appear disembodied as well. But, to reiterate, Hayles uses the term “posthuman” in a now-idiosyncratic way. 13. Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being, edited by Jeanne Schulkind (London: Pimlico, 2002), 85. 14. Ibid., 84. 15. Derek Ryan, Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 3. 16. Ibid., 4. 17. Qtd. in Cary Wolfe, Ecological Poetics; Or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 3. 18. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 132. 19. Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009), 37. 20. See Sebastian Williams, “Anthropocentric Ableism and Virginia Woolf’s Flush,” Mosaic 53, no. 1, 2020: 107–23; “Woolf’s Bioethics: Animals and Dependency in ‘The Widow and the Parrot,’” Woolf Studies Annual 26, no. 1, 2020: 105–20; “Proximity and Animal Ethics in Eugene O’Neill’s ‘The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem O’Neill,” Eugene O’Neill Review 42, no. 1, 2021: 41–53. 21. Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xv. 22. Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G. H., trans. Ronald Sousa (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 53.

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23. Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence Schehr (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 10. 24. Ibid., 34. 25. Wolfe, “Bring the Noise: The Parasite and the Multiple Genealogies of Posthumanism,” Introduction to The Parasite (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xxi. 26. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 254. 27. Erin Edwards, The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 11. 28. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 49–50. 29. Maren Tova Linett, Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human (New York: NYU Press, 2020), 23. 30. Ibid. Also see Linett, “Viewing Literature as a Lab for Community Ethics,” LitHub, 17 July 2020, https:​//​lithub​.com​/viewing​-literature​-as​-a​-lab​-for​-community​ -ethics​/. 31. See Linett’s discussion of the “habitus” of academic disciplines and the value of interdisciplinary approaches in addressing issues such as ethics: “While I am certainly not arguing that exploring bioethical problems through literary analysis is superior to exploring them through philosophical argument, doing so does catapult us outside this habitus (and into the habitus of one or another form of literary criticism), making possible alternative perspectives.” Linett, Literary Bioethics, 2. 32. See In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (New Haven, CT: Harvard University Press, 1982). Though Gilligan’s emphasis on gender differences is a point of controversy, her critique of various theories of justice arguably established an entirely new branch of ethics described as “care ethics” or the “ethics of care” (also abbreviated “EoC”). 33. Julian Huxley’s The Modern Synthesis more fully expands this notion; for example, many of the mechanisms by which evolution occurred via heredity were largely unknown until the early twentieth century. Therefore, Huxley argues, evolutionary biology is the result of scientific synthesis over decades. This partly accounts for the “eclipse of Darwin” in the Victorian era, during which time Darwinism was relatively controversial. 34. Carrie Rohman, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 3. 35. H. G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (New York: Harper, 1902), 314. 36. John Janovy, Jr., A Century of Parasitology (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2016). 37. Agamben, The Open, 46. 38. Derek Ryan, “Following Snakes and Moths: Modernist Ethics and Posthumanism,” Twentieth-Century Literature 61, no. 3 (2015): 298 39. Serres, The Parasite, 24.

Chapter One

Contagion, Pests, and Parasites in Trench Poetry

The Imperial War Museum houses multiple photographs of animals in the trenches and on the home front. They include horses, pigeons, camels, and “mascots” such as a lemur and Springbok antelope. Cats and terriers are among the most common animal subjects in these digital archives, some of which can be seen wearing clothes or carefully posed on an artillery piece or aircraft engine. The implied kinship between human and nonhuman animals is well documented here and elsewhere; these animals provided companionship and served a military function. Popular post‑war stories like War Horse reflect an idealized relationship between humans and their nonhuman companions. Horses, cats, pigeons, and dogs were easily incorporated into the machinery of war to haul heavy artillery or purge the trenches of rats, lice, and other parasites. These images perpetuate a seemingly clear-cut boundary between different types of creatures: animal companions and vermin. Lice, fleas, and rats fall into the latter category. They were prevalent in the trenches—despite many efforts to eradicate them—disturbing soldiers and spreading disease. But the animacy of these creatures amid mass death also posed philosophical and aesthetic questions about life in modernity. The trench poets Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, and David Jones analyze the social and material consequences of being reduced to parasitic, pestiferous forms of life. They also investigate how human and nonhuman life were policed and regulated, from body inspections to weaponized chemical agents. As Paul Fussell and John Keegan established in the 1970s, rats could often serve as poetic metaphors for soldierly experience. But the pervasive, spreading form of verminous life in the trenches also anticipates a posthumanist form of animate, networked life. In other words, the parasitic figures in trench poetry reveal the biopower of nonhuman actors and their influence on life and death. In this chapter, I take the First World War as a starting point for understanding how topics such as 17

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Chapter One

animal ethics, biopower, and humanism were repeatedly reevaluated in the twentieth century. This chapter analyzes nonhuman life in trench poetry from a posthumanist point of view. Many discussions of trench poetry are human-centric, focusing on memory, dread, and cynicism. For example, in an article accompanying an exhibit at the British Library, Santanu Das suggests that Rosenberg, Owen, and Jones belong to a “literary history and cultural memory” that have “coalesced [. . .] into a recognisable structure of feeling.”1 Das and others rightly suggest that there is a well-established “war poetry” canon today. Trench poets provide the “lyric testimony of the broken body,” and rats and lice are distressing symbols for what soldiers had become in modernity.2 But I aim to focus on rats as rats and lice as lice—as real creatures and nonhuman social actors. Nonhuman animals disrupt writers, literally and conceptually, and the figure of the parasite complicates notions of subjecthood, including the networked, animate forms of life that exist in our environment. Nonhuman animals can sometimes be symbols, but I also adopt a critical view to consider how war and disease affect creaturely life more broadly. The First World War is a useful starting place for considering the parasite given the many advances in medicine, parasitology, and public health. The trenches were dangerous not simply because of bullets and bombs; they were also ground zero for disease and infestation. “Trench fever,” malnutrition, and other illnesses spread rapidly between soldiers, aided by rats that consumed rations and lice and fleas that vectored disease. But the rat, louse, flea, and fly also had various biosocial meanings that could supersede their interpretation as nuisances. This is not to suggest that soldiers enjoyed living with parasites; instead, this chapter focuses on how war poetry offers avenues for imagining worlds “beyond” the human. In some instances, trench poets portray lice and fleas as an uncontainable and rapidly reproducing zoë—a gradation of life that became particularly palpable amid mass violence and death. Zoë refers to a “raw,” biological form of life that is opposite of bios (or “political” life). In this case, zoë is an organic, nonhuman form of life that spreads quickly.3 However, vermin are also “death-bound”; they are a de-humanized subject that multiplies exponentially while also perpetually subject to the threat of violent death or eradication. This verminous ability to spread and reproduce amid the violence of war is juxtaposed to a humanistic, anthropocentric understanding of life as a controlled and controllable process. In short, parasites emphasize the vitalistic, chaotic energy of nonhuman animacy. Analyzing pests and parasites in the trenches of World War I also reveals how human‑animal relationships have developed over the past century. It contextualizes and complicates the ways irony is often associated with the authors of the First World War—a group of writers sometimes separated from modernism. Therefore, this chapter is less about the ironic poetic reversal

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of describing humans as parasites than showing how trench poets critiqued humanistic understanding by engaging nonhuman points of view. Fussell, for instance, notes that poets such as Rosenberg highlight the “irony in the transposition of human and animal roles that the trench scene has brought about.”4 Parasites can be metaphors and exert a material-social agency. Rosenberg, Owen, and Jones use rats, lice, and microbial life as literary subjects to describe their status as “vermin beings.” Soldiers recognized how many of the values and attitudes traditionally ascribed to vermin also applied to themselves and their enemies. This is especially important given the technologies for mass extermination developed and deployed during the First World War, including chemical warfare agents, machine guns, explosive mines, and tanks. Postcolonial scholars such as Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga describe similar concepts: “the reduction of humans to pests justifies the elimination of pests, sanctions policies of elimination, and blurs the division in weapons required to police people and police nature.”5 While Mavhunga primarily focuses on how colonized peoples are reduced to “vermin” by colonial powers, his perspective is derived from descriptions of soldiers in the trenches of the First World War: “the term pesticide might be innovatively used to encompass not only the substances used to kill pests, but also the theory and practice of killing them.”6 Trench poets recognize that biopower extends beyond human life, as many nonhuman actors thrived in the extreme conditions of the battlefield. Beyond the impact of nonhuman agency, Rosenberg, Owen, and Jones suggest that the war turns people into vermin to be eradicated; it does not simply portray them “like” animals. For example, fumigation techniques for lice and other parasites were similar to the methods used to exterminate humans. Historically, modernist poetry reflects the rapid changes in technology and science that facilitated mass death. Parasitology and its disciplinary forebearers, such as biology and ecology, led to new attitudes toward life. Though evolutionary theory and ecology were discovered in the mid- to the late nineteenth century, many such ideas were not fully developed until the fin de siècle, a period Julian Huxley terms the “eclipse of Darwin.”7 The mechanisms by which evolution occurred (e.g., the transmission of genetic material through chromosomes) were not fully understood until the early twentieth century, and fields such as parasitology did not gain widespread prominence as distinct areas of study until the modernist period. Even then, ambivalence toward the displacement of “the human” led to broad cultural anxieties. As Carrie Rohman notes in Stalking the Subject, animality became a “fundamental locus of identity construction and complication in the modernist period [. . .] the specter of the animal profoundly threatens the sovereignty of the Western subject.”8 Rohman adopts a posthumanist lens to show how the category of the “human” was often shored up by modernist authors by distancing

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the subject from “the Animal.” In trench writing, however, the human and nonhuman are often impelled together. The First World War impacted how various cultures viewed different nonhuman animals and environments. Horses, birds, and dogs gained a renewed place within ethical debates about the value of nonhuman life following their use on and off the battlefield.9 However, rats, lice, fleas, and other pests do not have the perceived use-value of horses, dogs, and carrier pigeons; parasites and pests were simply “there,” in the trenches, living wherever humans gathered. Parasites belonged to a form of life that—unlike horses, dogs, and pigeons—could not be easily controlled with the sounding of a whistle or the pulling of a leash. When humans become so-called vermin, parasites, or pests, they become objects of annihilation and mass extermination. Thus, the machine guns and the gas attacks of the First World War are enabled by the “thingification” of the soldiers; gradations of animacy and life govern them.10 Rosenberg, Owen, and Jones wrote about pests and parasites as an animate contagion, sorting various bodies as more or less “alive.” Yet, they also describe the impact of verminous existence, as soldiers were reduced a similar status—as death-bound subjects who often lived underground. The shifting animacy of parasites in trench poetry as both “more alive” and “less alive” than humans reveals the material-semiotic discourse that shapes our understanding of human and nonhuman animals. Rosenberg’s “queer sardonic rat,” the rats and microbes in Owen’s “A Terre,” and the burrowing rodents in David Jones’s In Parenthesis undermine the historical narrative that pests and parasites were health threats and nothing more. The trench became a shared biopolitical space where life in all its varieties was exposed to death, and the suffering of vermin came to parallel human suffering. No Man’s Land became an inhuman space that was traversed by rats, microbes, and other creatures (sometimes more successfully than humans). The implications of the biosocial, material-semiotic parasite expose the shared space/event of war for human and nonhuman animals alike, especially the ways literary discourse reframes the human‑animal divide. Literature reveals the potential of modernist aesthetics to intervene in contemporary discussions of animal ethics, anthropocentrism, and the cosmopolitical landscapes created by globalized conflict. MEDICINE AND PUBLIC HEALTH DURING THE WAR Parasitic infestation was a major factor in the First World War, from the physical discomfort caused by lice to the spread of typhus, bacterial infections, influenza, and other diseases. Demonstrated by medical documentation, militaries on both sides of the conflict heavily invested in hygienic measures to

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eliminate the spread of disease. As a result, many of the practical advances in parasitology came from war, including treatments for parasitic infection and methods for studying outbreaks (e.g., contact tracing). For example, new soldiers were commonly subjected to delousing and lice inspections throughout the war (see Figure 1). Such inspections exemplify the Foucauldian “docile body,” a disciplined soldier and citizen whose body is “susceptible to specified operations, which have their order, their stages, their internal conditions, their constituent elements.”11 In addition to marching and rifle handling, the soldiers of the Great War were subject to inspections. Their bodies needed to conform to the mechanisms of discipline and control, but in order to do so they also had to be clean and hygienic—parasite‑free. Such inspections, at the hands of doctors and soldiers, represent a disciplinary mechanism of modernity. Lice inspections were common during the war, illustrating the pervasiveness of pests and parasites in the trenches. As a soldier writes on the back of the postcard in Figure 1, “The Delouser is the authorized assassin of the Cootie. Every boy subjected to the bug’s ingratiating influence—and all

Figure 1.1.  “7. The Delouser at St-Nazaire—A Veritable Hades for the Cootie!” Black-and-white postcard photograph of the Delousing Plant at Camp No. 1, St. Nazaire, France. Courtesy of the National World War I Museum and Memorial. Catalog object ID: 2002.3.25.

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Figure 1.2.  “Untitled.” Pen-and-ink drawing by Clifford Warner of an officer inspecting soldiers for lice with a magnifying glass. Image also used as an illustration on page 56 of The Red Guidon (2010.130.32). From the service of Private 1st Class Clifford Warner, Battery A, 328th Field Artillery, 85th Division. Courtesy of the National World War I Museum and Memorial. Catalog object ID: 2014.139.4.

have been—has to take his person as well as his personal property through this place. The experience he never forgets.” The soldier suggests lice are a rite of passage, and the soldiers recognize the highly bureaucratized way in which lice were exterminated and soldiers were inspected. As the soldier describes the delouser as the “authorized assassin” of lice (also called “cooties” and “chats”), he also notes that individuals must go through a careful process, including bringing all of his personal belongings to the delouser to exterminate the vermin. Similarly, in Figure 2, the soldiers stand uniformly, with shirts raised as their bodies are inspected. By covering their faces, the soldiers are anonymized; they lose their status as unique individuals and

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become generic soldiers as the medical officer peers at their bodies through a magnifying glass. The bodies in this image are offered up to authority, erasing their identities as they are trained to be ideal soldiers. In this sense, delousing and lice inspections exemplify a form of biopower that medicalizes the soldierly body, framing it as a physical mechanism for war rather than a distinct identity. In the context of parasitology, contagion illustrated the vulnerability of the soldiers to their environment. The parasite was an external threat to an individual soldier, but how exactly certain diseases were introduced into a soldier’s system were partly unknown. As a result, the start of the twentieth century was an important historical moment when many public health and military officials invested in parasitology to combat wartime casualties. Notably, the British Medical Journal published articles that allude to the rise of parasitology in relation to colonial military campaigns.12 For example, sleeping sickness—caused by the microscopic parasite species Trypanosoma brucei and transmitted by the tsetse fly—was rampant during the Second Boer War. By the First World War, military officials were well aware of the dangers that parasites posed for their soldiers (even if the physiology of contagion was not entirely understood). In a short letter in the British Medical Journal from June 10, 1911, an editor writes about advances in parasitology since the fin de siècle—a field that was quickly becoming an independent area of study. The letter notes the “growing number of universities and colleges which are instituting courses in parasitology,”13 and the author also attributes the growth of the field to “the increased importance, commercially, of tropical countries and peoples.” Though not addressing the highly problematic nature of imperialism in South Africa, the author goes on to write: “It is doubtful [. . .] whether sleeping sickness would have demanded as widespread attention or as strenuous efforts for its suppression had it not been a grave commercial danger to the nations developing colonial possessions of Africa [. . .] The foundation in 1907 of the Liverpool Annals of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology and a year later of Parasitology as a supplement to the Journal of Hygiene, has provided a welcome outlet to workers in this country.”14 Colonial expansion in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as well as advances in biological sciences, led to the burgeoning of parasitology as a field of study by the 1910s. In this sense, Britain’s military and commercial occupation of colonial territories had a key role in shaping medical and biological research on parasites. This expansion of parasitology gained renewed import given the parasites in the trenches of the First World War.15 As early as 1916, researchers from both sides of the conflict were studying the spread of disease in relation to parasitic organisms.16 In the preface to British Medicine in the War, published in 1917 by the British Medical Journal (an arm of the British Medical

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Association), military officials detail various ways to combat parasites, both in warmer climates, such as Gallipoli (now part of modern Turkey), and in France and Germany. The editors write that The Medical Service of the British Army went into this war with the advantage of accumulated experiences of epidemic disease derived in part from military and in part from civil life. The most recent military experience on a large scale was that of the war in South Africa (1899–1902) [. . . . ] As in so many previous wars the army was scourged by typhoid fever, which caused large epidemics [. . .] the menace to any military force created by hale carriers of the infecting microbe.17

In short, British colonialism led to a surge in parasitological studies by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which carried over to military procedures and public health discourse during the First World War. This is reflected in medical journals and medical posters, among other sources. Ultimately, a detailed analysis these documents reveals a broad, intersecting network between topics—imperialism in Africa, military strategy, medical journals, parasitology courses at universities—that may not be immediately apparent at first glance. Furthermore, there were special projects dedicated to pathology and contagious disease in the First World War, most notably the Trench Fever Committee. This committee formed after medical doctors recognized the high number of casualties caused by disease during conflicts of the previous century. Arthur Hurst, a medical officer in World War I, writes that he first noted the connection between lice and trench fever in May 1916: “Almost all patients with trench fever admitted that they were lice infested up to the time of their entry into hospital, so that it appeared possible from the first that the disease might be conveyed by lice.”18 He goes on to write that by 1918, the Trench Fever Committee “proved conclusively that the disease is transmitted by lice. This was believed to be mainly by bites, but it was shown that infection could also be conveyed by contamination of scratches with crushed lice or their excreta.”19 This way of addressing illness and contagion during wartime is significantly different from nineteenth-century fighting. In the Boer War, for example, parasitic infection and disease caused major casualties, but knowledge of epidemiology and pathogenesis was limited. Even if soldiers were still afflicted by disease and infestation in the First World War, medical doctors were better prepared for contagion, going so far as to commission investigations to limit the spread of disease. The Allied and Central Powers both knew that disease could cause more casualties than the fighting itself, which garnered investment in medical research and preventative measures. Newspapers reported that the British shipped in train-loads of terriers to

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control rodent populations in the trenches, and the price of ferrets—also used for rodent control—quintupled in parts of Western Europe. Anti-pest products such as “Vermijelli” and “Vermin Killer” were developed during the war as well, though their efficacy remains a point of contention.20 Despite the renewed focus on parasites in the First World War, medico-historical discourse on pests and parasites is sometimes disconnected from literature. There is a strain of imaginative writing from the war that reframes how parasites and contagion were understood. For writers such as Rosenberg, for example, the louse is “immortal,” becoming the source of annoyance, revelry, and aesthetic production. Furthermore, Rosenberg sees the rat as a comrade in the trenches, building on imagery he had developed before the war to suggest that the parasite is better off than the soldier. Owen follows a similar line of thought in poems such as “A Terre,” in which he portrays the earth as swarming with life. Rachel Murray summarizes the situation well, writing that “bugs—both real and metaphorical—came to shape the way people thought and wrote about the experience of war, and this prompted a surge of popular interest in insects more generally.”21 ROSENBERG IN THE TRENCHES Trench poetry has been the subject of controversy for decades, particularly regarding its relationship to modernism. As Margot Norris writes, modernism’s “suppression of trench poetry” was largely related to the genre’s perceived “aesthetic unintelligibility that [modernists] nonetheless coded politically as ‘the crowd’ or ‘anarchy.’”22 The mass of dead bodies produced by the war, as well as the perceived passivity of many in the trenches, challenged many leading views about what qualified as “aesthetics.” In other words, trench poems were sometimes “unintelligible” as literary texts because they did not have the ideal subject matter for modernist writing. For example, W. B. Yeats declined to include trench poetry in the 1936 edition of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse on the grounds that “passive suffering is not a theme for poetry.”23 He concluded that “it is best to forget its suffering as we do the discomfort of fever.”24 Even if T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922), or Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” (1919) allude to the Great War, the elegiac tone of such writing emphasizes absence or elision, rather than the mass violence and death that Rosenberg and Owen discuss directly. While Yeats sought to exclude Rosenberg and Owen from the canon of modernist verse, trench poetry is key to understanding the socio-historical, aesthetic, and philosophical aims of the modernist movement.

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Rosenberg’s poetry transitions from a Romantic, patriotic tone of the Georgian poets to a distanced, sardonic aesthetics made popular during and after the war. For example, in poems such as “The Dead Heroes” (written before the war in 1914), Rosenberg discusses the “noble part” that individuals must play to ensure “That England stands.”25 However, following Rosenberg’s time in the trenches his imagery shifts to rats, lice, and death. In Rosenberg’s trench poetry, parasites represent the experience of the soldier, the irony of war, and, in some cases, the divine. This aestheticization of the parasite distinguishes Rosenberg’s work from historical accounts of the war, as the rat and louse are not merely public health issues but meaningful biosocial actors. Rosenberg stands apart from many of his comrades in the trenches, which is one reason I include him in this chapter as opposed to arguably more famous trench writers, such as Robert Graves or Siegfried Sassoon. Rosenberg was a working-class Jew from the East End of London; his work dealt openly with Jewish identity, history, and religion (unlike Sassoon, for instance, who was a member of a wealthy Sephardi family but rarely wrote about Jewish identity); and Rosenberg was trained as a painter at Slade after spending time at the Jewish Free School. Most notably, he was also a private—unlike the officer-poets Sassoon, Owen, and Graves. Rosenberg’s treatment of rats and lice further distinguishes his work, which draws on his interest in religion in the way Rosenberg often seeks to complicate our understanding of the “lowliest” of God’s creatures. For example, Rosenberg’s iconic “rat-God” and “queer sardonic rat” raise questions about the nature of the sacred, as well as the cosmopolitan, biopolitical space of the trench. Lice in Rosenberg’s poetry can become aesthetic subjects, and Rosenberg’s writing is highly ambivalent in a way that extends his poetics beyond mere disillusionment. While it can be tempting to read trench poetry as cynical and nothing more, Rosenberg’s experience in the trenches served as a catalyst for more experimental writing. In “Break of Day in the Trenches” (1916), Rosenberg portrays a rat as ironically cosmopolitan, as one of few figures that may pass between the barbed wire and mines that cover No Man’s Land. The hero of this poem is not an English soldier whose death represents a necessary sacrifice for English victory.26 Instead, the poem follows the rat through the desolate French landscape. Rosenberg creates a sense of tension with the expression “Only a live thing leaps my hand,”27 suggesting, in one sense, the rapid movement of the rat as it leaps over the soldier’s hand. But the line might also be read in a way that suggests the hand (and, metonymically, the soldier) is leaping reflexively. Consonance generates rhythm throughout, but Rosenberg also disrupts later lines with dashes, again stressing the anxious mood. The image of an inwardly grinning, “droll” or sardonic rat dominates the poem: “Now you have touched this English hand / You will do the same to a German.”28

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The rat does not take sides, as it touches English and German hands alike, and Rosenberg conflates descriptors to reinforce the blurring of rat and human. The rat passes closely enough to see the soldiers’ “Strong eyes” and “fine limbs,” the ultimate irony of which is that the rat is more “chanced” for life than the soldiers.29 The rat can perform what humans cannot, meandering between trenches and across No Man’s Land, yet Rosenberg also creates an intimate, if not sympathetic, view of the rat. The poetic reversal in this poem, in which the rat takes focus and disrupts the soldier, impels readers to reevaluate the ways war affects and is affected by nonhuman life. Rosenberg is concerned with the vermin that live in the trenches: the rats survive and pervade the trenches more successfully than many of the soldiers. Furthermore, the rat is not necessarily an enemy or a vector of disease that threatens the speaker; instead, rats are collateral victims of human-made violence. Nonhuman life becomes the central point from which Rosenberg situates his aesthetic experimentation, opposing a romanticized view of the earth as a tranquil (and pastorally English) resting place. For Norris, “the reader, invested with the rat’s sophisticated eye, is given penetrating, multiple, and transcendent vision—seeing the trenches simultaneously from below the earth, at the level of roots and soaked blood, from the bowels of the body of the rat-infested earth.”30 “Break of Day” challenges patriotic portrayals of war, yet the rat also represents a rhizomorphic form of life. Though poets such as Rupert Brooke portray the battlefield as lifeless and undisturbed— less the ashes of the English soldier—Rosenberg decenters humanity’s place in the earth and on the battlefield. For Jean Moorcraft Wilson, “Since the narrator is clearly not one of the ‘haughty athletes,’ or the mysterious ‘They’ who make all the decisions,” Rosenberg becomes “identified with the rat, an interpretation that Rosenberg’s own lowly position as a private, possibly also a working-class Jew in a hierarchical and class-conscious army, appears to support.”31 The conflation of rat and human in the poem brings humans in line with the “lowliest” creatures. While the rat is anthropomorphized when the narrator suggests that it is “inwardly grin[ning],” Rosenberg does not entirely conflate human and nonhuman life.32 Notably, the looming, unanswered question asks “What do you see in our eyes”?33 The questions is directed to the rat; this moment is a break or pause during which Rosenberg unsettles what Jacques Derrida refers to as “man’s autobiography”—the characteristics that humans apply to themselves but deny “the Animal.” Humans define themselves as they write (hence “autobiography”), constructing divisions between man and animal, the latter of which cannot always “write itself” in the same way. In this sense, Rosenberg takes up the address of the animal. He centers on moments in which animals are no longer passive receptacles for human meaning, suggesting that humans are linked materially and imaginatively with other animals.

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In other words, Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches” emphasizes the connections between human and nonhuman animals through their intimate encounter as well as the open-ended address to the rat. By posing a question to the rat, the narrator comes face to face with the alterity of animal consciousness. Rosenberg’s poem is not only notable for its central figure— the “queer sardonic rat”—but also because of the way he engages the alterity of animal experience by asking what the rat sees.34 The rat can do what the soldier aims to do: it can traverse the trenches with ease and survive explosions and gunfire. Yet the rat is also the figure against which the soldier’s experience is understood, and the soldier knows this. In asking it what it sees in “our eyes,” the narrator uses the rat’s experience to inform the soldier’s, without reducing the rat to a singular metaphor. Rosenberg foregrounds that a nonhuman animal does indeed look back at the human. This gesturing to the interiority or subjectivity of the rat illustrates how Rosenberg anticipates, however subtly, various debates within posthumanism. Instead of pure irony, it offers an expression of the “lowest of the low,” taking the experience of the parasite or vermin as its focal point. The rat interrupts the human experience of war, yet at the same time Rosenberg also shows how the wartime experience allows the narrator to recognize nonhuman alterity. Rosenberg also refers to rats and other types of pests in his other works, especially in the poems “God” and “Spiritual Isolation,” though vermin are represented in a slightly different way than in “Break of Day.” For example, in “Spiritual Isolation” (1912) the narrator has “pestilent supremacy” in the wake of God’s disavowal,35 much like a modern-day Job. In the poem “God” (included in his 1916 collection Moses: A Play) there is a key association between God and rats: In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned! His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls36

Later in this poem, God is seen “gnaw[ing] a fiber from strange roots,” further conflating divinity with rodents.37 For Jon Silken, Rosenberg’s vision of God vacillates between a “complementary completeness to man’s vulnerability and mortality” and a reversal of this idea, where God is framed as “a diseased or malignant partner.”38 However, the rodent descriptor is not simply used to condemn or disavow God, but also to show that human beings have been forced to live as “vermin beings.” In the poem “God,” the rat imagery shifts over time. While at the start of the poem God is described as a rodent, by the end humans are rat-like: “And when the cats come out the rats are sly. / Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawn.”39 Here, human beings are rats

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who are hunted by God. In most of his religious writing from the 1910s and onward, Rosenberg questions the relationship between humankind and God, and rat imagery is a recurring tool that he uses to do so. Rosenberg tends to frame both humankind and divinity as rat-like, creating an ambivalent relationship between human, natural, and supernatural worlds. Rosenberg’s religious poems spark a broader debate about the materiality and vulnerability of the human body in relation to animality and divinity. The rat is at times described in derogatory terms, while at other times it is a complementary figure to man and God. In trench poems, such as “Break of Day,” Rosenberg builds on the rat imagery found elsewhere in his writing, though often without religious references. While Rosenberg was likely inspired by the rats that were present in the trenches, it is also important to recognize that he was interested in such topics outside of the war because they helped him to challenge the norms of religion and literature. Rosenberg’s interest in the so-called lowliest of creatures also extends to trench poems on lice, including “The Immortals” and “Louse Hunting.” In these poems, lice are, on the surface, portrayed as antagonists to humankind, as organisms whose sole purpose is to torture the soldiers. However, the lice also represent a gradation of life or animacy that is distinct from soldierly life. The poems’ narrators are ambivalent toward lice, as Rosenberg suggests they burden humans, yet at the same time he creates a defamiliarizing atmosphere in which to understand pests. Lice become a pervasive, infinitely reproducing form of life, a variety of animacy that extends beyond the human world in such a way that its sheer volume is made especially intense in a climate of war and devastation. For example, in “The Immortals” Rosenberg’s narrator is in agony and covered in lice. The poem concludes by suggesting that the Devil is not—as various clichés go—hidden in “women’s smiles and wine’s carouse,” but rather, that the “dirty louse” is “Balzebub” himself.40 These lines are fairly traditional in the sense that the soldier-narrator is complaining about the uncomfortable realities of living with lice. However, the complexity of this poem lies in the louse’s association with a pervasive form of biological, animal life; there is an ironic juxtaposition of extreme violence and immortality, suggesting that lice do not merely represent a nuisance to soldiers, but also that they are a different sort of life—an uncontainable zoë. The narrator describes his various attempts to kill the lice: I killed and killed with slaughter mad; I killed till all my strength was gone. And still they rose to torture me.41

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Unlike the “queer sardonic rat” in “Break of Day,” the lice in this poem garner little sympathy. And the irony of this poem is the narrator’s intense violence, the red gore and blood, in the midst of the war. The brutal slaughter of lice mixes human blood and lice blood at one point,42 but the narrator cannot rid himself of the lice. This form of life is unceasing, as the lice “rose more cruel,” “faster than I slew.” The title “The Immortals” alludes to this as well; for Rosenberg, the lice are a distinct form of life. The lice are contagious, extending beyond the human and spreading uncontrollably. Much as the rat is more “chanced” for life than the human soldiers in “Break of Day in the Trenches,” in “The Immortals” nonhuman life is more pervasive than human life. However, unlike the individual rat in “Break of Day,” Rosenberg’s “The Immortals” is about a “contagious” form of life that never ceases to spread. In comparison, the poem “Louse Hunting” reverses the imagery so that humans are more like devils than the lice. “Louse Hunting” is likely derived from an extended revision of “The Immortals,” though the connection is difficult to discern directly. “Louse Hunting” opens by describing naked men “Yelling in lurid glee,”43 which gives the poem a homoerotic charge not uncommon in trench writing. But the poem quickly shifts once lice are introduced. The soldiers’ clothes are “verminously busy,” and soon they begin “To hunt the verminous brood” in a mock unholy ritual.44 Here, Rosenberg’s poetic reversal is rooted in contradictory descriptors and shifting perspectives. The humans are grotesque and spectral figures who hunt their miniscule enemies. At one point, Rosenberg describes “gargantuan hooked fingers” that “Pluck in supreme flesh,”45 shifting to the louse’s point of view. The scale of the figures changes as the soldiers become “gargantuan,” implying readers see what the louse sees before it is squashed. In doing so, Rosenberg again undermines an anthropocentric framework that necessarily vilifies the lice. The aestheticization of the louse raises questions about the “unholy” humans described in “Louse Hunting,” shifting the point of view to that of the nonhuman life that pervades the trenches. Rosenberg’s poetry illustrates what is sometimes omitted in medical histories of the war and literary criticism of trench poets. Pests and parasites were both dangerous disease vectors and could serve as symbols for the harsh realities of trench life. But Rosenberg’s writing offers a more complex view of human-animal relationships and his own shifting attitudes on humanism and ethics. He shows how rats and lice have distinct ways of seeing and being in the world that stands counter to a human-centric point of view. Even as he sometimes personifies lice and rats, he also emphasizes nonhuman alterity, suggesting that rats and lice do indeed look back at humans. Vermin can effectively do what soldiers desire most: survive.

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OWEN AND MICROSCOPIC LIFE IN THE TRENCHES Wilfred Owen’s trench poems share several aspects with Rosenberg’s work, including the representation of vermin as more than just disease vectors. In poems such as “A Terre” (written in 1917 and published in 1919), humans and animals exist in a reciprocal network; humans are viewed as a part of their environment. Owen reimagines the role of human beings in the natural world much as Rosenberg does in his trench poetry, in part because both authors aimed to complicate portrayals of the war, emphasizing disease, disability, and illness. While Owen was an officer enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles—a special regiment that attracted recruits from public schools and major universities—he saw regular combat and became highly disillusioned with fighting by the end of his life. Both Owen and Rosenberg experienced a variety of illnesses, but Owen was particularly traumatized by combat, later receiving treatment at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. There he met Siegfried Sassoon, who had a major impact on Owen’s writing. By 1917, Owen’s work had shifted from pastoral, traditionally Edwardian verse to dark imagery, more experimental versification, and existential themes. Despite being “invalided out” (i.e., medically exempt from service), Owen returned to the Front in 1918, where he was killed in action near the Sambre–Oise Canal a week before the war ended.46 One of the best examples of Owen’s reflections on the nonhuman world is “A Terre,” which details injuries during the war as well as the microscopic life in the dirt around the narrator. As the title indicates, the earth plays a central role in Owen’s imagery; bodies are buried in dirt, yet it is also home to a matrix of nonhuman life. Not only that, but the war displaces the dirt, sifting mites, corpses, and soldiers together. This bringing-together of various forms of life and non-life illustrates how trench poetry and other World War I literature refigures our understanding of animacy and multiple gradations of life. War poetry can reveal the nonhuman life that surrounds the soldiers, redefining the very nature of human existence. Humans are constructed as finite, brittle, and depleted, while other organisms in “A Terre” resist death. Furthermore, pests and parasites are “queered” in Owen’s text; their “subdivision” represents a distinct, “nonnormative” form of biological reproduction. This is not to suggest that queer sexuality and verminousness are synonymous, but rather to indicate that parasitic contagion challenges liberal humanism by the very way pestiferous reproduction is described. Much like the lice in Rosenberg’s poetry, in Owen’s writing creaturely life reproduces rapidly in striking contrast to the sterile, human-made landscape.

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The narrator of Owen’s “A Terre” sits on the bed in a hospital, “blind, and three parts shell,”47 and readers follow his thoughts from the trenches. He pleads with God for more life, but his reflections are interrupted by a rat: O Life, Life, let me breathe,—a dug-out rat! Not worse than ours the lives rats lead— Nosing along at night down some safe rut, They find a shell-proof home before they rot. Dead men may envy living mites in cheese, Or good germs even. Microbes have their joys, And subdivide, and never come to death. Certainly flowers have the easiest time on earth. “I shall be one with nature, herb, and stone,” Shelley would tell me. Shelley would be stunned: The dullest Tommy hugs that fancy now. “Pushing up daisies,” is their creed, you know.48

Nonhuman life is portrayed in two varieties: the invasive rat and the “immortal” microbe. The rat spreads through the trenches, constantly rutting and shattering the soldier’s reprieve. While the soldier askes merely to breathe, the rat, or perhaps “Life” with whom the soldier pleads directly, will not allow it. The soldier’s reaction to the rat is not negative, however. Much as in Rosenberg’s “Break of Day,” this poem compares soldierly experience with that of the rat: “Not worse than ours the lives rats lead.” As the soldiers search for some place to “rot,” so do the rats. Owen’s description of the parasitic, of the “lowliest” of creatures, is comparative, if not sympathetic. Unlike in medical or public health discourse, which frames the rat as a nuisance, the rat and the soldier become comrades who share a similar fate. The second form of nonhuman life is represented by the mites, germs, and microbes that live on the scraps of food left by the soldiers. The microbes “subdivide, and never come to death,” an assertion that frames microbial life as radically different from human life. Owen’s poetry specifically refigures human‑animal relations. In the above passage, Owen communicates the various animacies that exist in the trenches: parasitic microbes spread and never seem to die. It is a gradation of life that extends beyond anything humans can accomplish, and it underscores the limitations of human experience. While the human passively awaits his death, begging for a simple breath, the rats invade, and the microbes persist. Microbes are a vital lifeforce because they divide and reproduce—seemingly without dying—which implicitly raises questions about the narrator’s conceptualization of death. In this sense, death is not described as the mortality of soldiers; rather, death is a transformation perpetuated by nonhuman organisms who consume human bodies in the dirt.

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Owen reflects on this pervasive life as the poem continues as well. As his narrator describes the decomposition of his body, new life springs forward: To grain, then, go my fat, to buds my sap, For all the usefulness there is in soap. D’you think the Boche will ever stew man-soup? Some day, no doubt, if . . . Friend, be very sure I shall be better off with plants that share More peaceably the meadow and the shower.49

The images of fat nurturing grain and “sap” springing buds extends the ways we conceptualize the parasitic life that moves throughout the poem. The persistent rats and the immortal microbes are not antagonistic to the human soldier; instead, the narrator of Owen’s poem asks his readers to extend their vision beyond an anthropocentric worldview. While the trenches are a hellscape for the soldier, Owen uses the destabilizing event of war to redefine the human body as materially linked to its environment. For example, earlier in the poem, Owen references Shelley’s assertion from Adonais, that “I shall be one with nature, herb, and stone,”50 and Owen suggests that most soldiers ironically adopt such a view (“Pushing up daisies”). In doing so, he further emphasizes the role that war plays in reshaping our understanding of life. While Shelley draws on religious imagery in Adonais to mourn the death of Keats, Owen’s poetry is not embedded in a transcendent, Romantic philosophy that links all forms of life through God (though Shelley himself was famously ambivalent about religion).51 Instead, the forms of life Owen describes are material and heterogenous; his description is that of a post-anthropocentric world that extends beyond the life of the soldier. And, like Rosenberg, Owen centers on parasitic life to defamiliarize his readers. The soil comes alive as Owen’s narrator changes the scope of his vision, at once narrowing his imagery to microscopic life while at the same time emphasizing the wider, material-semiotic nature of the parasite and pest. The content of the poem not only focuses on nonhuman life, but the poem’s point of view also changes to accommodate the microbes renewed significance. LASTING IMPRESSIONS: PESTS AND PARASITES AFTER THE WAR Writing from their first-hand experiences in the trenches, Rosenberg and Owen demonstrate their ambivalence toward pests and parasites. These poets suggest that vermin were in many cases subject to the same death and

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suffering as soldiers. Furthermore, pests and parasites were a distinct, animate hierarchy of life that pervaded the trenches, reproducing and spreading in ways that contrasted the death of human beings. Writing after the war, David Jones sought to recapture the experience of trench life, using rats and lice as signifiers for the depravity of modern warfare while extending the notion that vermin were important nonhuman social actors. Jones’s In Parenthesis is unique from most trench poetry, however, as it illustrates the legacy of parasites in the post–World War I era, combining his first-hand experiences with poetry and fiction. A private for the duration of the war, Jones served in the Royal Welch Fusiliers as a mapmaker and infantryman from 1915 to 1918, experiencing the war at headquarters as well as in the trenches. Jones began writing In Parenthesis as early as 1928, finishing the first complete draft in 1932, though he had a series of nervous breakdowns that delayed publication until 1937. While many of the images from In Parenthesis and the epic style of the poem (including its references to medieval romance) are similar to The Waste Land, Jones took much of his subject matter from direct experience. He sketched drawings of rats and soldiers as early as 1915, circling back to such images throughout In Parenthesis to structure its themes of devastation and the historiography of war. Rats in particular take on several roles throughout In Parenthesis, serving as symbols of mortality, military emblems, and even redeemers. Notably, however, vermin interrupt the epic, which in turn impacts the poetic form. The parasite is, in this sense, a social and aesthetic catalyst that shapes its environment. Jones’s poetry is part of an important shift in writing about the war after the war itself had ended, a “kind of space between” to which Jones alludes in the title.52 While much of the writing is based on a historical sequence of events, Jones resists historical realism, aiming instead to disorient readers the same way the protagonist of In Parenthesis is overwhelmed by the war. Despite Jones’s claims that “none of the characters in this writing are real persons, nor is any sequence of events historically accurate,” there are only two minor deviations in the historical timeline (i.e., he changed the dates of his training and the Mametz Wood attack).53 The narrative tends to take place in unidentifiable spaces, somewhere during the Battle of the Somme, but rarely named directly, and in fluctuating times, as the story shifts between the folkloric past and modern present. Jones ends the preface with the suggestion that “our curious type of existence here is altogether in parenthesis,”54 but his use of the words “our” and “here” is ambiguous, implying both the soldiers’ experience of war and civilian life after the war. In Parenthesis uses a combination of narrative and lyric modes, onomatopoeia, kinesthesia, and polyphonic narration, interspersed with repeated allusions to Welsh, Celtic, and French folklore. Jones, who was born in London but raised in a Welsh-speaking household,

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relies heavily on intertextuality. For example, the subtitle seinnyessit e gldyf in penn mameu comes from the Welsh Y Gododdin; it translates to “His sword rang in mothers’ heads”—a quote that suggests the enduring impact of the war. Additionally, the recurring character Aneirin Lewis takes his given name from the medieval author of Y Gododdin, while his surname is likely a reference to the Lewis machine gun. These are just two of many examples of the epic poem’s intertextual structure, and Jones also alludes to the King James Bible, the Mabinogion stories, Malory’s Arthurian texts, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Shakespeare’s Henry V, among other works. While the style and date of composition are distinct from Rosenberg’s and Owen’s work, Jones’s text also suggests that our understanding of the natural environment shifts with the war. In the preface, Jones argues that it is difficult for him “to recognise these creatures of chemicals as true extensions of ourselves.”55 He argues that although human perception changes with new technologies (“creatures of chemicals”), the “new sensitivity” of the mind to industrial modernity is not fully developed. For Jones, humankind has inherited a “creaturely world [. . .] from our remote beginnings” that seems at odds with rapid technological development.56 This emphasis on the “creaturely” life throughout In Parenthesis foregrounds vermin and other nonhuman forms of life. In this sense, Jones anticipates a broader, posthumanist debate about the life of human beings amid the technologies of the modern world. And, while Jones alludes to a humanistic, pastoral vision of the pre-war era, his work subtly resists such a perspective. In Parenthesis does not return nostalgically to the past nor does it imagine a utopian future. Instead, as the meta-fictive title implies, Jones and his characters are suspended within a critical view of modernity, bracketed “in parenthesis” after the war. In the original Faber and Faber edition of In Parenthesis, the narrative spans 187 pages and is divided into seven parts. The story loosely follows Private John Ball from training in Britain to service in France. While Ball does experience fighting, a large portion of In Parenthesis describes the quotidian nature of soldierly life, from hours of guard duty to digging trenches. Jones uses first-, second-, and third-person points of view to provide a communal voice. By part 7, the narrative gives way to fragmented, allusive verse, which makes the poem difficult for readers not familiar with Welsh folklore, though Jones did provide annotations in the original edition. While In Parenthesis is not overtly pacifist, such as the poetry of Owen and Sassoon, Jones offers a highly nuanced narrative. He indicts the war, but he also seeks to move beyond purely ironic interpretations of the fighting, which, by the 1930s, had become more common. One of the great contrasts that Jones demonstrates between the folkloric battles of the past and the First World War is the alien landscape, from the

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dug-outs to No Man’s Land (and the forms of life that pervade such areas). For example, Jones notes that vermin disturbed soldiers, yet killing lice was difficult: “the worst of it is, you’re lousy again in a day or so—the stuff they use dont [sic] really touch the eggs.”57 For Jones, war refigures the relationship of Ball to his surroundings. He and others “sit in the wilderness, bent like lousy rodents all the day long; appointed scrape-beasts come to the waste-lands, to grope; to stumble at the margin of familiar things—at the place of separation.”58 The soldiers are compared to “lousy” or lice-infested rats, demonstrating the similarity between rats and soldiers; however, the narrative also stresses the unrecognizable landscape of the trenches as “the place of separation” from the everyday world. The soldiers are literally between France and Germany, but also life and death, human and animal; hence, the soldiers become “scrape-beasts” at “the margin of familiar things.” Ball and others feel suspended in reality and view the battlefield as a liminal space between the familiar and unfamiliar. In a prose section of part 4, Ball details the strange sensations he has when looking out over the gray and cratered earth of No Man’s Land, and the environment is animated in various ways. As Ball observes, “Things seen precisely just now lost exactness [. . .] Your eyes begin to strain after escaping definitions. Whether that picket-iron moved toward or some other fell away, or after all is it an animate thing just there by the sap-head or only the slight frosted-sway of suspended wire.”59 Jones notes the odd color of the land, the white and silver waves (“damascened,” or waved steel) that cover the earth like a film. There are also the unsettling noises of the enemy, so close the soldiers can hear the Germans cough and move. But these descriptions are also eerie because various things seem to come alive. For example, the mist “creeps” back to “regain the hollow places,” a movement that is particularly ominous given the prevalence of mustard gas, but that also emphasizes how Ball is hyperaware of the animated environment. He realizes that even the desolate landscape of No Man’s Land is in fact “alive” in various ways; the natural world—even when devastated by violence—is now a “hollow” or empty place. As some objects lose their definition, “an animate thing” (possibly a wire) catches Ball’s eye. These passages show how Ball’s perspective changes during the war, as the “in-between” space of the battlefield refigures his broader conception of the environment. Additionally, rats appear throughout the story. On the surface, they signify the dire conditions of the trenches, yet they also gesture to the shared qualities between human soldiers and their vermin companions. In one scene, Jones writes that “Sewage feeds the high grasses and bald clay-crop bears tins and braces” near a “swollen rat-body turned-turtle to the clear morning.”60 The landscape in the poem is described as “disintigrat[ing],” a “wasteland,” and an “unnamed discomfort” as the soldiers go to their first fatigue duty, with

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the image of a rat corpse punctuating the paragraph-long description of the battlefield. The rat is “turned-turtle,” or capsized, a phrase indicating the swamp-like condition of the trenches. The scenary is both human-made and natural, “between factory-end and nettle-bed,” and throughout this section of the poem, Jones implies the land has become toxic—one reason the dead rat is particularly ominous. Shortly after Ball sees the dead rat, Jones writes that the battlefield is “all slippery a place for the children of men,”61 alluding to a passage from Psalm 90. The “destruction” of man here is the dissolution of the human body to dust, which reduces the soldier to the same matter as the earth.62 The dead rat interrupts his work, and he reflects on his own mortality as a soldier; both seem trapped in the “wasteland” of clay and sewage that permeate the modern world. At other moments in the narrative, rats become a pervasive form of life that spreads ceaselessly across the battlefield. Unlike the dead rats in other parts of the narrative, the rats in the verse sections of part 3 are animate, moving and scurrying across the landscape. The rats in this section are linked with life and movement, bearing a “redeem[ing]” quality that the soldiers themselves seek. As in Rosenberg’s and Owen’s writing, vermin can represent a distinct type of zöe, an animate life that spreads and reproduces rapidly. In part 3, the horrifying silence between battles is exacerbated by the noise of rats: you can hear the rat of no-man’s-land rut-out intricacies, [. . .] scrut, scrut, sscrut63

The silence of the battlefield is unsettling in Jones’s portrayal, and the rat serves to underscore this tension. Unlike the inactive human, passively waiting for the next explosion or gas attack, the rat moves and spreads constantly, “rut[ting]-out intricacies” and tunneling around the soldiers—not unlike combatants who tunneled between lines. Jones emphasizes this unnerving presence with the onomatopoeia “scrut, scrut, sscrut” (with a double “s” in the last instance), as well as the suggestion that the rat is “cunning.” In each of these instances, Jones juxtaposes human and nonhuman life: the rats are constantly active and invasive—going where humans cannot in No Man’s Land—while the humans passively sit, awaiting their deaths. This juxtaposition illustrates an important contrast between human and nonhuman life, emphasizing the ways the rats actively survive against the passivity of soldiers. Additionally, the narrator suggests that the rat will “redeem the time of our uncharity,” connecting to the poem’s broader concern with redemption (or the lack thereof). Jones creates an affinity between the rats and the soldiers by suggesting they are part of an effort to make sense of the war, despite its

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horrors. And the next clause indicates that the rats “sap” the trenches much like the soldiers themselves. “Sap” here can refer to the digging of saps (i.e., trenches or tunnels), as well as the clearing of mines (e.g., a “sapper” is a soldier responsible for removing land mines and traps, among other duties). The rat therefore digs his own trenches alongside the soldiers (the use of the verb “trowel” is also evidence of this), further cementing the parallel between the two. Though leading up to this line the rat is unsettling, here Jones exposes the underlying ambivalence soldiers often had toward such vermin: rats were part of the battle. They died much like the soldiers, but the rats nevertheless pervade the trenches, spreading and tunneling their way through the earth. Rat imagery allows Jones to make sense of soldierly life, of the reduction of human life to verminousness, in a way that stands apart from noble images of war. Like rats, soldiers become the objects of violence rather than agential subjects who determine the nature and outcome of the war itself. This perspective resists a romantic view of warfare, in which mythic heroes conquer their enemies; instead, humans are anything but brave, and they have little control over the battle. At the end of part 3, the protagonist Ball continues his reflection on the rat, weaving in and out of folklore. The rat is, in this sense, a modern military emblem, an animal that accompanies men into battle (though perhaps out of practicality rather than preference), that is notably distinct from the emblems of medieval wars. These reflections, including allusions to the Battle of Maldon (991 A.D.), appear to be imagined by the protagonist, as the boredom of guard duty leads to daydreaming. However, for Jones they also allow for a comparison between medieval and modern warfare, including its many differences. Though Jones parallels medieval knights and infantrymen (including their sword-like bayonets and steel helmets), he also suggests that the First World War forces soldiers to come to terms with the atrocities of mechanized warfare, reducing soldiers to “vermin beings” that share status with rats. The “white-tailed eagle,” “speckled kite of Maldon,” and the “crow” that dominate the landscapes of medieval battles become “un-winged” and “go on the belly,” transforming into rats. The rats sap sap sap with festered spines, arched under the moon; furrit with whiskered snouts the secret parts of us.64

This parallels the soldiers’ own transformations, as the regal symbols of Welsh folklore are no longer suitable for the twentieth century. Notably, however, Ball also notes that the rats “suffer” or endure the war alongside humans:

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Those broad-pinioned; blue-burnished, or brinded-back; whose proud eyes watched the broken emblems droop and drag dust, suffer with us this metamorphosis. These too have shed their fine feathers; these too have slimed their dark-bright coats; these too have condescended to dig in.65

Here, the rats are “pinioned,” suggesting their arms are tied, yet this is also a term used to refer to the clipping of birds’ wings to prevent flight. The drooping eyes remind readers that, in the paragraphs preceding this passage, the rats are watching the soldiers intently, and the “dust” suggests both the wasteland-like setting and death (the Biblical “dust” out of which humans are made and to which humans return). Perhaps most notably, the rats “suffer” with humans in the trenches, as both are transformed through the process of war. The phrase “these too” is repeated in this passage, which not only demonstrates affinity, but also exposes the lack of agency soldiers have—the men are also pinioned, stripped of agency. This transformation of the rats and soldiers is one of the most significant and sustained reflections on Welsh folklore in the narrative, and vermin become a central focus for Ball’s thoughts. Jones uses religious and folkloric imagery, much like Eliot does with the Fisher King in The Waste Land,66 and Jones “stages the slow unraveling and exhaustion of poetic order and unity in the scene of war.”67 In part 3, as the “kite of Maldon” is replaced by a rat in the trench, Ball does not necessarily use British history to make sense of war in the present; instead, Ball reflects on the stark contrast between the past and present. The rats are not necessarily described in derogatory terms, but they seem to be caught in the mechanisms of modernity that Jones criticizes throughout the poem. The rats “suffer” with the soldiers “this metamorphosis” from the heroics of folklore to the present state of modernity. The rats’ “whiskered snouts” come to “know the secret parts,” implying a horrifying recognition that rats consume human flesh, and an ironic, deeper kinship between species. Ball continues that in the quiet he can hear the rats “scrut scrut scrut,” suggesting that “when it’s as quiet as this is [. . .] Your body fits the crevice of the bay in the most comfortable fashion imaginable.”68 Here Jones returns to the onomatopoeia “scrut” to remind readers of the unsettling sound of rats tunneling, but the soldier also burrows into the ground, much like the rat itself. Using the second-person pronoun “Your,” Ball invites the reader to fit in the “crevice” of the earth with the rats as they both endure the assault. The soldier relieving Ball of his sentry duty nudges Ball awake from his daydreaming, ending the third part of the narrative, but Jones continues

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to contemplate history and vermin throughout the remaining sections from this perspective. The end of part 3 emphasizes the poem’s underlying concerns with historiography. For Neil Corcoran, the rending of the earth through the violence of technology is linked with a desire to preserve the bodies of young men from violence,69 but the poem also presents underlying anxieties about the mixing of organic life and technology. The rats that pervade part 3 of the poem are part of the narrative’s wider concerns with historical shifts, signifying Jones’s deeply ambivalent attitudes toward modern life. The rats are represented as less-appealing figures than kites and eagles, yet Jones is also quick to show that vermin are part of the organic, nonhuman world he is anxious will be lost as technology supersedes the natural world. As the narrative continues, Jones focuses largely on the periods between battles or leading up to an attack. In part 6, Ball and two other soldiers talk politics and poetry (with mention of Rupert Brooke’s writing), and by part 7 the narrative is generally written in verse. As the soldiers prepare for battle, “the world crumbled away,” and Ball becomes close with the natural environment as he lies prone: on daisy-down on warm days cuddled close down kindly close with the mole in down and silky rodent, and if you look more intimately all manner of small creatures, created-dear things creep about quite comfortably yet who travail until now beneath your tin-hat shade.70

In this calm, pastoral passage, Ball contemplates the organic life that surrounds him, including the “silky rodent” and the “created-dear things” that “creep around comfortably.” This scene is a striking disruption, as the narrative gradually builds the tension of the battle to come, yet Ball notices as he lies in position that the earth around him is infused with nonhuman life. The ground is animated with life in this section, which creates a stark contrast with the violent explosions that are to follow once the battle begins. Jones does not focus on horses or dogs—trained military animals—but instead the “small creatures” who “travail” alongside Ball. As the battle continues in part 7, nonhuman animals flee, much like the soldiers: when unicorns break cover and come down and foxes flee, whose warrens know the shock, and birds complain in flight—for their nests fall like stars.71

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Soldiers are left to die in the concluding scenes, as there are not enough medical personnel to bear away the injured men, and the poem ends with the ambiguous suggestion that more attacks are to follow. In the concluding lines of the poem, Jones and Ball become one as author and narrator, implying Ball does indeed survive. The final line is a quote from La Chanson de Roland, which becomes a wider reflection on writing about the war: “The geste says this and the man who was on the field . . . and who wrote the book . . . the man who does not know this has not understood anything.”72 On the one hand, the excerpt appears to align the First World War with the chivalric past, which celebrates the patriotic lineage of Roland and Charlemagne. On the other hand, the text belies the specificity of the battle, emphasizing that “the man who does not know this has not understood anything.” This expresses the inability to communicate the nature of war, on the one hand, and challenges the memory of war, on the other.73 Jones explores the paradox that only the author (and, in this case, the narrator) can know the experience of war in its entirety, and that the poem forecloses clear meaning. In other words, Jones uses the final lines of In Parenthesis to imply a certain incompleteness, to avoid the closure of the narrative and to extend the “parenthesis” of the title to the event of reading itself. While the war is often bracketed between 1914 and 1918, Jones refuses the notion that we may ever be divorced from the event, including the ways it reshapes our understanding of the natural world and its relationship to human culture. Jones’s In Parenthesis reveals the cultural legacy of pests and parasites in writing on the First World War, as the poem shows that natural environments and nonhuman animals cannot be separated from the cultural event of war. The poem is less overtly pacifist than Rosenberg’s and Owen’s writings, in part because Jones aims to use many of the techniques of trench poetry and literary modernism to make sense of the war in the broader context of British history from the distance of the interwar period. The war is ambivalently related to medieval wars, suggesting that Ball (and by extension Jones) are still struggling to make sense of how the war may mark a distinct stage in the twentieth century while also connecting to the past. Jones resists patriotic readings of the First World War as a noble struggle, but he also recognizes that the war will inevitably become part of the fabric of British history, and that it cannot be severed from the past. But I also suggest that Jones uses parasites to relate the complicated attitude he has toward war, recognizing that the rats are unnerving but also that they themselves are caught in the mechanisms of modern warfare. The soldiers embody verminousness and parallel the rats, suggesting that Jones’s image of modern British history is marked by this transition to a different hierarchy of life. No longer can humans clearly distinguish themselves from the rodents they live with, and the war serves to sever the ideology of past wars and historical eras by implying a distinct biopolitics

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of modernity—a management of life and death that blurs the human‑animal divide. In particular, the poetic, almost pastoral reflection on “silky” rodents and the life of the soil in part 7 provides a stark and complex contrast that refuses to reduce all nonhuman life to the grotesque. Much like the other two poets discussed in this chapter, Jones is less interested in animals such as horses, pigeons, and dogs that are readily incorporated into a military industrial machine, instead focusing on the vermin that escape easy categorization—that are excluded from the moral community. In trench poetry as well as in In Parenthesis, the authors reevaluate the many animacies that inform our cultural constructions of nonhuman life, including the material-semiotic discourses that surround rats and lice. Such parasites were living organisms in the trenches, while at the same time part of a larger animate force that pervaded the battlefield. Ultimately, while rats, lice, and other nonhuman animals have been cast as a common cultural signifier for the depravity of warfare, it is also necessary to note the reverse—the ways in which warfare fundamentally shapes our understanding of nonhuman life. Rats and lice were often framed as comrades, and sometimes represented a network of life that extended beyond the anthropocentric limits of medico-historical discourse. The pests and parasites of the trenches therefore raise larger questions about how modernists more broadly relied on parasitism as a central site through which they challenged long-standing notions of the liberal humanistic subject—a subject that is defined as autonomous, agential, and independent from nonhuman life. No longer were humans conceived as individuals segregated from the natural world, but rather as part of a network of human and nonhuman life. NOTES 1. Santanu Das, “Reframing War Poetry.” British Library, 7 Feb. 2014, https:​//​ www​.bl​.uk​/world​-war​-one​/articles​/reframing​-first​-world​-war​-poetry. 2. Ibid. 3. The distinction between Zoe and Bios is discussed by Agamben and others. Here, my definition more closely aligns with that of Rosi Braidotti in The Posthuman: “The relational capacity of the posthuman subject is not confined within our species, but it includes all non-anthropomorphic elements. Living matter—including the flesh—is intelligent and self-organizing, but it is so precisely because it is not disconnected from the rest of organic life. I therefore do not work completely within the social constructivist method but rather emphasize the non-human, vital force of Life, which is what I have coded as zoe.” Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 60. 4. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 274.

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5. Clapperton Chakenetsa Mavhunga, “Vermin Beings: On Pestiferous Animals and Human Game,” Social Text 29, no. 1 (2011): 152. 6. Ibid. 7. Julian Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (London: Allen & Unwin, 1945), 29. 8. Rohman, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 15. 9. See, for example, Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse (adapted into a film by Spielberg in 2011 and made into a play in 2007); Joshua Bernstein’s “Where Beasts’ Sprits Wail”: The Great War and Animal Rights (2014, PhD Diss.); “Animals in the Great War.” MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History 30, no. 1 (2017): 94. 10. See Mel Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 11. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 155. 12. For example, see A. Bascot, “The Fleas Found on Rats and Other Rodents, Living in Association with Man, and Trapped in the Towns, Villages and Nile Boats of Upper Egypt,” Journal of Hygiene 14, no. 9 (1914): 498–508. 13. “Letter,” British Medical Journal, 10 June 1911: 1393. 14. Ibid. 15. See also “Trench Fever. Final Report of the War Office Trench Fever Investigation Committee,” The Journal of Hygiene 20, no. 3 (Nov. 1921): 258–88; “The Association of Rickettsia with Trench Fever,” The Journal of Hygiene 18, no. 1 (Apr. 1919): 76–94. 16. See McNee, J. W., Renshaw, A., and Brunt, “‘Trench Fever,’ A Relapsing Fever occurring with the British Forces in France,” British Medical Journal (1916), 225–37; Noller, W., “Beitrag zur Flecktyphusübertragung durch Lause” [On the Effects of Typhus Transmission by Lice], Berlin. Min. Wochenschr (1916): 778–88; H. Toepfer, “Der Fleckfieber-erreger in der Laus” [The Typhus Pathogen in the Louse], Deutsch med. Wochenschr (1916): 323. 17. British Medicine in the War . . . (London: British Medical Association, 1917), v. 18. Arthur Hurst, Medical Diseases of War (Philadelphia, PA: Williams and Wilkins, 1941), 163. 19. Ibid., 164. 20. John Lewis-Stempel, Where Poppies Blow: The British Soldier, Nature, and the Great War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2016), 169. 21. Rachel Murray, “Why World War I Cultivated an Obsession with Insects,” The Conversation, 17 July 2017, https:​//​theconversation​.com​/why​-world​-war​-i​-cultivated​ -an​-obsession​-with​-insects​-80355. Also see Murray’s book The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021). 22. Margot Norris, Writing War in the Twentieth Century (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 35–36. 23. W. B. Yeats, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 1892–1935 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), xxxiv. 24. Ibid., xxxv.

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25. Isaac Rosenberg, “The Dead Heroes,” First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford, 23 Januay 2023, http:​//​ww1lit​.nsms​.ox​.ac​.uk​/ww1lit​/items​/ show​/4408, lines 3–4. 26. For example, see poems such as “The Soldier” by Rupert Brooke or “In Flanders Fields” by John McRae. 27. Isaac Rosenberg, “Break of Day in the Trenches,” in The Collected Poems of Isaac Rosenberg, edited by Gordon Bottomley and Denys Harding (New York: Schocken Books, 1949), 73, line 3. 28. Rosenberg, “Break of Day,” lines 9–10. 29. Ibid., lines 14–15. 30. Norris, Writing War, 43. 31. Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2007), 322. 32. Rosenberg, “Break of Day,” line 13. 33. Ibid., line 19. 34. Ibid., line 4. 35. Isaac Rosenberg, “Spiritual Isolation,” in The Collected Poems of Isaac Rosenberg, edited by Gordon Bottomley and Denys Harding (New York: Schocken Books, 1949), 26–27, line 3. 36. Isaac Rosenberg, “God,” in The Collected Poems of Isaac Rosenberg, edited by Gordon Bottomley and Denys Harding (New York: Schocken Books, 1949), 63, lines 1–3. 37. Ibid., line 19. 38. Jon Silken, “Isaac Rosenberg’s Rat-God,” European Judaism 1, no. 4 (1970): 38. 39. Rosenberg, “God,” lines 17–18. 40. Isaac Rosenberg, “The Immortals,” in The Collected Poems of Isaac Rosenberg, edited by Gordon Bottomley and Denys Harding (New York: Schocken Books, 1949), 78, lines 14–16. 41. Ibid., lines 9–11. 42. This is suggested implicitly: as the lice consume human blood, crushing them would result in a mixing of human and lice blood. The “red hands” of the narrator represent this (often contagious) mixture. 43. Isaac Rosenberg, “Louse Hunting,” in The Collected Poems of Isaac Rosenberg, edited by Gordon Bottomley and Denys Harding (New York: Schocken Books, 1949), 79, line 2. 44. Ibid., lines 5 and 10. 45. Ibid., lines 16–17. 46. Jon Stallworthy, Wilfred Owen: Poems Selected by Jon Stallworthy (London: Faber, 2004), vii–xix. 47. Wilfred Owen, “A Terre,” In The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (London: New Directions, 1965), 64–67, line 1. 48. Ibid., lines 36–47. 49. Ibid., lines 48–54.

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50. Owen misquotes Shelley. The original lines read, “He is a presence to be felt and known / In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, / Spreading itself where’er that Power may move / Which has withdrawn his being to its own” (XLI: 4–7). Arguably, Owen’s version obscures the elegiac tone that is central to Shelley’s original. 51. Shelley draws on Christian images of “spirit,” “soul,” and “Paradise,” though his own perspectives on religion were more skeptical. See Shelley’s essay on “The Necessity of Atheism.” 52. David Jones, In Parenthesis: seinnyessit e gledyf ym penn mameu (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), xv. When quoting prose from In Parenthesis, I use the page number instead of line number, given the structure of the prose-poem. 53. Ibid., ix. 54. Ibid., xv. 55. Ibid., xiv. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 110. 58. Ibid., 70. 59. Ibid., 98. 60. Ibid., 75. 61. Ibid., 75–76. 62. The “destruction” of man here does not necessarily refer to the violence of warfare, but rather mortality in general. It is a “grinding” of the human to dust; that is, “For dust thou art” (Genesis 3:19). 63. Jones, Parenthesis, 54. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. See, for example, Part V of The Waste Land, “What the Thunder Said”: “I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the arid plain behind me / Shall I at least set my lands in order?” (423–25). Eliot specifically refers to Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance here to elucidate the Fisher King passages. 67. Jack Dudley, “Transcendence and the End of Modernist Aesthetics: David Jones’s In Parenthesis,” Renascence 65, no. 2 (2013): 105. 68. Jones, Parenthesis, 54–55. 69. Neil Corcoran, “Spilled Bitterness: In Parenthesis in History,” in David Jones, Man and Poet, ed. John Matthias (Orono, ME: University of Maine Press, 1989): 209–26. Corcoran writes: “[the term] homosexual will not do . . . and ‘homoerotic’ seems weasel and forensic” (217). Corcoran points to the subtle, queer desire that pervades the poem, from the naked man in the frontispiece to the young bodies “ripped apart” in the fighting; however, the queer desire in the poem is less in line with romantic love (eros) and is perhaps closer to storge, a desire to protect innocent bodies from violence (hence, Corcoran’s hesitance to use “homosexual” or “homoerotic,” as these terms seem too reductive). 70. Jones, Parenthesis, 157. 71. Ibid., 168.

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72. Ibid., 187; ellipses in original. 73. Harro Grabolle, Verdun and the Somme (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 2004), 167.

Chapter Two

“The Million Enemies of the Earth” Parasitism and Poverty in Great Depression Literature

The Great Depression spanned fifty-six months and included two economic recessions. In the first phase of the Depression, the United States lost 47 percent of its industrial output, wholesale prices dropped by nearly one third, and unemployment ballooned to 20 percent.1 While the stock-market crash of 1929 signaled the initial effects of the Depression, John Steinbeck and Erskine Caldwell focus on the everyday, long-term effects of the Depression on the working class. For example, Steinbeck’s Harvest Gypsies, a collection of articles originally written for the San Francisco News, illustrates the harsh living conditions of migrant workers, including rampant public health issues such as typhoid and hookworm disease. He would later adapt many of the scenes in Harvest Gypsies for The Grapes of Wrath. Caldwell documents Southern families in You Have Seen Their Faces, suggesting that poverty was due in large part to “inferior heredity.” This idea is also at the core of his 1932 novel Tobacco Road, which portrays the life of a poor family in rural Georgia. Steinbeck and Caldwell portray the lived experiences of poverty differently, though both authors also depict pests and parasites in their Great Depression writing. On the one hand, Steinbeck emphasizes the impact of biological parasites to advance a social welfare agenda. Parasites are key social actors during the Depression and Dust Bowl, and Steinbeck proposed policies aimed at the “healthfulness” of the (white) working class. On the other hand, Caldwell focuses on the perceived genetic decline of American families. The boll weevils, turnip flies, and parasitic worms in his writing are drawn from real threats to tenet farmers, yet pests and parasites also come to represent the farmers themselves—the families Caldwell suggests 47

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were “parasites” on the American body politic. For example, in the opening of You Have Seen Their Faces, Caldwell engages a growing debate about the effects of infestation: “The coming of the boll-weevil, the army-worm, and the screw-worm brought forth a new generation of bush-beaters and stump-thumpers who were certain they held the secret of the South’s troubles in the palms of their hands. After all these years the sun still rises in the East and sets in the West and the South is still sick.”2 Caldwell implies the South had two types of “pests”: the nonhuman parasites and the “bush-beaters” and “stump-thumpers” who farm the land. He argues that eliminating weevils and worms would not end poverty, in the end. Caldwell’s suggestion that the “South is still sick” implies that it needed to be cured, that there was a social illness—a symbolic parasite—to be eradicated. In what follows, I show how parasitism shapes Steinbeck’s and Caldwell’s socio-political visions, blurring the distinctions between “nature” and “culture.” The parasite has a complex biosocial meaning in Great Depression literature amid debates about dependency and poverty, as parasitism became a key site for disputes over resource distribution. To reference worms, boll weevils, and other parasites was to evoke public health discourse and wider social conversations about the economic hardships of impoverished groups in the 1930s. And, by focusing on pests and parasites in Great Depression literature, I illustrate that nonhuman actors play an important role in shaping social systems; parasites were major health threats, but they also symbolized emerging debates in American politics. Steinbeck and Caldwell are particularly relevant regarding parasitism in Great Depression writing not only because they were both best-selling authors writing about similar topics, but also because they reach very different conclusions about how to address poverty in the 1930s. Steinbeck and Caldwell are ambivalent toward the parasite, framing it as a social actor yet also using parasitic infestation for their arguments. In Steinbeck’s case, parasites are evidence for the need to increase social welfare programs. For example, in Harvest Gypsies, Steinbeck argues for an increase in resources for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), better sanitation, and stronger labor unions. Alternatively, Caldwell’s representation of parasites symbolized the declining heredity of the poor, which could be controlled through eugenic sterilization. Caldwell satirizes rural Georgia in Tobacco Road as part of his engagement with eugenic policies that aimed to prevent poor families (primarily tenant farmers) from propagating. The fictional families in The Grapes of Wrath and Tobacco Road struggle against parasites, yet the families themselves are often seen as earthy, animalistic, and parasitic. Parasitism is part of a wider public health and social welfare debate that impelled many authors to consider the nature of dependency and production. “Parasite” is a biological, ecological, and medical term, but it also has

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its roots in social contexts, as it is used to refer to individuals who live at the expense of others. As noted in Tom Collins’s Weedpatch Reports,3 for example, migrants and others who relied on social welfare programs were frequently referred to as parasites on the “productive” class.4 What is at stake in the work of Steinbeck and Caldwell is an economy of resource distribution that constantly defines who and what deserve social resources. While I discuss hookworms, turnip flies, weeds, and boll weevils alongside social parasitism, biological and social parasitism are not mutually exclusive. Steinbeck and Caldwell destabilize the distinctions between social and natural worlds in order to advance a wider biopolitical perspective, and parasitism is a relational concept that is constantly in flux. A posthumanist approach helps to emphasize that a biological parasite can be an important social actor, and that the phrase “social parasite” is a tool to dehumanize the poor by alluding to the organisms and diseases that plagued them. Erin Edwards writes about posthuman modernism and Southern fiction in a similar vein. In Faulkner’s writing, for example, Edwards notes the literal and figurative impacts of corpses on material environments: “[As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom!] redefine the volatile processes of decomposition and becoming whereby the body (whether living or dead) participates in a larger network of material assemblages.”5 The corpse is fitting for Faulkner, as it can represent the decaying legacy of the South, the abject, the Unheimlich; yet, the corpse is connected with the earth and exerts material agency on its environment. As I note, parasites can serve a similar, symbolic function in literary texts, but Steinbeck and Caldwell also write about very real organisms that exert their nonhuman agency in profound ways. Parasites breed rapidly, they spread disease, reduce food supplies, and cause malnutrition. Imaginative literature intersects with public health, environmental, and political discourses, sustaining these intersections while also serving as a bioethical tool through which we might better understand our own investments in and deployments of the parasite. Steinbeck and Caldwell invite us to consider the relationality of parasitism, which exists amid scientific, political, social, and literary discourses. PARASITES, PUBLIC HEALTH, AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION Steinbeck and Caldwell were well known for documenting rural life and poverty during the Great Depression. In a 1939 review of The Grapes of Wrath for the New York Times, Charles Poore writes that the novel is ultimately about the “courageous will to survive in spite of nature’s elements and man’s inhumanity,”6 emphasizing both the environmental and social hardships the Joad family faces. In a contemporaneous review for the Nation,

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Louis Kronenberger connects Steinbeck’s and Caldwell’s writing, claiming the Joads of Oklahoma bear “certain resemblances to Erskine Caldwell’s Georgia.”7 Both Steinbeck and Caldwell were best-selling authors in the 1930s,8 writing on similar topics with very different tones, and both garnered further attention after John Ford directed film adaptions of their work (The Grapes of Wrath in 1940 and Tobacco Road in 1941). These two authors rely on a combination of fiction and nonfiction to advance their views on parasitism, which allows readers to trace the significance of biopolitical and bioethical concerns across genres. Steinbeck’s Harvest Gypsies is a series of articles he was commissioned to write for the San Francisco News in October 1936, which was collected by the Simon Lubin Society in 1938 as a pamphlet originally titled Their Blood Is Strong. The collection documents migrant life in camps around California, and it was later paired with photographs taken by Dorothea Lange. Caldwell similarly documented the lives of impoverished farmers in You Have Seen Their Faces in 1937, and his narrative-journalistic style was accompanied by the realist photography of Margaret Bourke-White. Steinbeck’s and Caldwell’s works are documentary in nature, yet by exposing the harsh realities of the Great Depression, these authors also advance political arguments about the failures of American society. The parasite and pest become biosocial in this sense, as they were real public health threats, yet they also evoked wider conversations about public policy. An example of the biosocial nature of the parasite is evidenced in a variety of historical materials from the 1930s and 1940s. For example, in a 1940 review, W. Wallace Weaver describes some migrants as “parasites” and others as “productive”: Characteristically [migrant families] have encountered the hostility of the people and the press of communities through which they have passed and in which they have settled. The transient bureaus have been objects of calumny because they facilitated the relocation of families rather than forcing them back onto the communities from which they had escaped. A hodge-podge of state and local “settlement laws,” relics of medieval provincialism, penalize honest migrants and leave “parasites” substantially unhindered.9

Weaver describes the hostility many migrants experienced while they were moving from community to community, yet he also uses the term “parasite” to describe an undesirable group of migrants who were perceived as draining the resources of “host” communities. Suggesting settlement laws were not substantial enough to deal with the shifting, nomadic populations, Weaver argues for new public policies to account for the “Okies” and “Arkies” who were moving to California.10 Weaver never clarifies the distinction between so-called honest migrants and parasites—between symbiosis and parasitism.

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Weaver is sympathetic toward the migrant plight, but he also suggests that only certain migrants are valuable. For him, at least some migrants are parasitical, which makes welfare and regulation particularly difficult. Additionally, in a 1941 article in the American Journal of Nursing, R. C. Williams juxtaposes migrants and parasites. Williams aims to draw attention to the harsh living conditions of rural America in the 1930s, but when he describes migrants, he contrasts “unclean” migrants and the (implied) “ordinary” citizen: For the migrants, who register at the clean, sanitary camps set up by the FSA, are used to dirt, and flies and vermin, because they were too worn out, too discouraged to do much about cleaning up their former homes of makeshift tin or their tents. The cleanliness of the FSA camps encourages families to raise their standards and keep their surroundings attractive, but inevitably, children have to have “nits” removed from their hair. In one camp, a nurse reported they were so happy at having them eliminated, they told her of other children who had “bugs.”11

Williams emphasizes the poor living conditions of the migrants, yet this passage also illustrates a semantic connection between migrants and vermin. Migrants are described as “used to dirt, and flies and vermin,” which underscores the growing threat to public health while also suggesting that migrants had themselves become like vermin. The phrase “raise their standards” implies that the “unclean” migrants had grown accustomed to dirt and parasites and thus had a low standard of life. Furthermore, Williams supports the suggestion that it is difficult for migrants to have “high standards” by concluding his discussion with a reference to parasitic lice. In this way, he Others the migrants, framing them as an object of pity while also opposing them to an “ordinary” American identity—an individual with “higher standards” than the migrants. The writings of Weaver and Williams are just two examples of the complex interplay between biological and social parasitism during the Great Depression. Alongside sociologists and public health officials, Steinbeck and Caldwell wrote amid a wider debate about the degree to which government agencies should intervene in the migrant crisis of the 1930s. The Resettlement Administration (RA) was initially created in 1935 as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, with Rexford Tugwell serving as agency executive,12 but it was later incorporated into the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937. In order to justify and promote these social welfare programs, Tugwell developed the “Historical Section” of the RA (also later incorporated into the FSA), which was designed to document the lives of the migrant poor. Later becoming one of the largest documentary photograph projects of people ever undertaken,

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it grew to over eighty thousand images taken between 1935 and 1943.13 Specialists such as Sidney Robertson Cowell also undertook audio recording projects to document folk songs under the RA’s Special Skills Division, and Tom Collins’s Weedpatch Reports were also part of a larger, ongoing project in the 1930s and 1940s to emphasize poverty in rural and agrarian communities. Steinbeck’s Harvest Gypsies and The Grapes of Wrath responded to and expanded these reports and documentary projects (Collins’s in particular), and his film script for The Forgotten Village later took many of his arguments about “healthful” identity and applied them to indigenous Mexican communities. Caldwell worked with Bourke-White, who had been commissioned to photograph the rural South in You Have Seen Their Faces. Parasitism was an important subject in this wider political endeavor: many in the RA and/or FSA sought to combat claims that migrants were mere parasites on the productive class, and, at the same time, nonhuman parasites were presented as evidence that migrant and sharecropper life was particularly difficult. During the Great Depression, hookworms, boll weevils, and locusts often represented a major source of poverty and dysfunction, though the degree to which parasites actually influenced rural life is still debated. Nevertheless, parasitism had an important cultural impact. For example, economic historian Garland Brinkley asserts that hookworm disease led to a measurable decline in agricultural output in the American South at the end of the nineteenth century.14 The hookworm causes a “dulling” of the nervous system, and the disease was “geographically located in the southern United States” until the mid-twentieth century.15 In other words, stereotypes of Southerners as “dull” or “slow-moving” may, per Brinkley, be linked to hookworm infestation. Furthermore, Rachel Nuwer notes that hookworms were a serious threat in agricultural communities until the 1950s, leading to many stereotypes about purportedly lazy Southerners, Mexicans, and African Americans.16 Hookworm disease causes lethargy, which Brinkley and Nuwer suggest was caricatured to create damning portraits of minority groups and poor farmers. The Rockefeller Foundation invested heavily in eradicating the hookworm because curing the disease was seen as a way to make Americans (particularly minorities) harder working and more successful—a view also rooted in racism and classism. Hookworms are absorbed into the body through unclean food or water as well as open wounds that come in contact with the ground, which means that going barefoot—as well as general unsanitary conditions— led to high contraction rates. Rural areas more commonly rely on wells and septic systems than treated municipal water supplies, which means that hookworm disease was—and still is—much more common in impoverished rural areas where sewage can back up or mix with clean water.17 Boll weevils, turnip flies, helminths (army worms, screw worms, tapeworms), and parasitic plants or weeds had a notable impact on agricultural

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communities. Georgia, which was known for its agricultural output of cotton and tobacco, was highly affected by parasitic outbreaks and pestilence. In the context of cotton, for example, boll weevil outbreaks in the final decades of the nineteenth century have been linked to an educational decline in the state. Richard Baker suggests that because cotton was labor intensive, many families were forced to pull their children from schools to work the fields in order to recoup the losses caused by boll weevils. In an article on rural Georgia, Baker writes that “the seasonal demand for child labor in agriculture can have substantial negative impacts on educational outcomes, particularly for the poor.”18 He further suggests that, because many white families were wealthier than black families, boll weevil outbreaks had an especially negative impact on the education of black children.19 Between 1915 and 1920 the boll weevil infestations were particularly harsh, which means that in addition to immediate crop losses, many farmers and their children may have experienced long-term effects (i.e., lack of formal education from missing school to work the fields). So, when Caldwell repeatedly references boll weevils in his writing, he implicitly signals to his readers broader anxieties about economic insecurity. Baker’s economic history also illustrates a major issue in Caldwell’s and Steinbeck’s writing: they privilege white migrants and farmers as opposed to African American, Mexican American, or Asian American workers. Michael Dennig characterizes Steinbeck’s Great Depression writing as more sentimental and conservative than early critics recognized, due in large part to his portrayal of “noble white Americans.”20 Brian Yazell suggests that Steinbeck’s emphasis on economics is part of a larger narrative that separates different populations of people,21 and, writing on the eugenics movement and race, Elizabeth Yukins asserts that “[d]ominant whiteness was threatened by the spectre of inadequacy and fallibility within its own racial borders.”22 For Yukins, this perceived “threat” to whiteness spurred authors such as Caldwell to endorse eugenics. While critics such as Ashley Craig Lancaster suggest that Caldwell’s engagement with eugenics was not always consistent, and that he “blurs the definition of ‘poor-white’” over the course of several novels,23 Caldwell nevertheless perpetuates a range of racist stereotypes and an anxiety about the decline of “white blood.” Focusing on parasitism does not imply that race, gender, or other topics are less important; instead, because critics have narrowed in on those elements in Steinbeck’s and Caldwell’s writing in the past few decades, this chapter contributes to the current critical conversation by centering the complex ecological, biopolitical, and bioethical concepts at play in Great Depression writing.

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STEINBECK: HOOKWORMS, SOCIAL PARASITES, AND PUBLIC POLICY One of the difficulties of analyzing John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is the degree to which Steinbeck mediates his conclusions about the place of humankind in the natural world. For Michael Barry, there are two basic philosophical points of view in Steinbeck’s work: “One is that humanity is valuable because it is like the animal world, and the other is that humanity is especially valuable because it is unlike the animal world.”24 Steinbeck posits a post‑anthropocentric perspective of the environment, yet at the same time his books tend to return to the idea that humans fundamentally transcend the natural world. For example, the Joad family is connected to the earth (Pa dies once he leaves the grounds of the family farm; Tom lives in a “rabbit hole” for a portion of the narrative), yet the natural world is also one of the migrants’ key antagonists. Near the end of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck asserts: “men who experiment with seed, endlessly developing the techniques for greater crops and plants whose roots will resist the million enemies of the earth: the molds, the insects, the rusts, the blights [. . .] doctors of preventative medicine, men at the borders who look for fruit flies, for Japanese beetle [. . .] These are great men.”25 While this passage demonstrates Steinbeck’s advocacy for science, it also suggests a complex link between humans and the “million enemies of the earth.” Pests and parasites comprise these “million enemies”; the Joad family and other migrants are earthy and at times animalistic, but they must also struggle against the parasites that threaten humankind’s “fruitfulness.” This tension extends throughout Steinbeck’s oeuvre, including nonfiction such as Harvest Gypsies and later film scripts such as The Forgotten Village. Steinbeck’s Harvest Gypsies documents the harsh living conditions that many migrant farmers experienced during the Great Depression, particularly in the government camps that developed throughout California. In the articles he wrote for the San Francisco News that later became Harvest Gypsies, Steinbeck calls for the expansion of the federal camp program, the establishment of a state agricultural labor board, and resettlement of “Okies” on small family farms and public lands. In order to do so, he is careful to undermine the boundaries between nature and culture; for Steinbeck, the image of the Self-Reliant subject overcoming incredible adversity to achieve the American Dream is illusory. Notably, Steinbeck challenges the notion of an “American Dream” while simultaneously engaging social theory and ecology, presenting an ambivalent perspective toward humanism. Therefore, one of Steinbeck’s aims is to expose the “million enemies of the earth” that slow the progress of the migrant communities, “enemies” that are both human and nonhuman.

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In several of the articles that later became Harvest Gypsies, Steinbeck describes parasites in the camps to illustrate the interplay between the environment and society. For example, he sardonically notes that one of the few ways migrants received attention for their poor living conditions was through parasitic outbreaks: “Let an epidemic break out, say typhoid or scarlet fever, and the country doctor will come to the camp and hurry the infected cases to the pest house.”26 Typhoid, which commonly spread through infected lice, forced several policy makers to set aside money for county hospitals and sick homes in order to treat the disease. Steinbeck is frustrated by how social workers and government officials—though perhaps well-meaning— simplify the plight of the migrants. Social and survey workers “have taken case histories. They are filed and open for inspection [. . .] The information is taken down and filed. That is that. It has been done so often and so little has come of it.”27 It is absurd, according to Steinbeck, that the migrants may only get attention through sickness, yet he also suggests that infection is one of the few things that brings real change to living conditions. He notes that “malnutrition is not infectious, nor dysentery,”28 emphasizing that it is the parasite that is threatening. Here, Steinbeck implicitly reveals that the fear of contagion plays a more important role in these migrants’ lives than health. And, as human beings can serve as vectors of disease and infection, parasites not only harm the migrants, but parasites also alter their identity. The biometrical methods of the social workers in the period aimed, it suggests, to document the spread of disease to prevent the “ordinary” citizens or “host” communities from getting sick, yet their perspective elides the very suffering of the migrants. In describing the pest houses used to treat typhoid and similar diseases, Steinbeck’s writing illustrates the dual role of parasitism as a biological and social concept. There is the biological parasite, which, although unnamed in the above passage, is implicitly raised with the mention of the “pest house.” This parasite is also connected to the social realities Steinbeck describes, as we learn that the greatest fear the community seems to express is that of contagion; the community necessarily establishes a parasite/host dichotomy, trying to contain the spread of disease (whether real or imagined). Next, these social fears are related to public policy, as the state employs social workers to take account of—literally to count and measure—the parasites and the disease, not necessarily to ease the suffering of the migrants. This is a brief scene in Steinbeck’s Harvest Gypsies, but it illustrates the process by which parasitism refigures human and nonhuman relationships; nonhuman parasites fundamentally alter the social environment and change the identity and relationships of those involved.

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In describing the poor living conditions of the camps, Steinbeck discourages the general population from viewing migrants as parasitical. In the first article, for example, Steinbeck writes that “The migrants are needed, and they are hated. Arriving in a district they find the dislike always meted out by the resident to the foreigner, the outlander.”29 This hatred is not unique to the migrants, Steinbeck notes, as strangers are often met with hostility, yet the methods of documenting parasitic diseases and illnesses illustrate a new way in which xenophobia was seemingly justified. Given the scale of many farms in California, migrants were key to the economic success of agricultural communities, yet they were frequently associated with parasitism. This is precisely the perspective the RA and FSA sought to address through documentary photography, statistical research, and reports, yet their work was subject to various interpretations and biases that often unwittingly Othered the migrants and tenant farmers. Steinbeck also criticizes how parasitic infection was treated after the fact, as few preventative measures were in place to eliminate the disease at its source. For example, when reflecting on one of the families in the camps, Steinbeck writes that “The father is vaguely aware that there is a culture of hookworm in the mud along the river bank. He knows the children will get it on their bare feet.”30 Steinbeck notes that even with the resources set aside to treat and diagnose parasitic infection, many in the camps could do very little to avoid infection in the first place. Officials sought to treat the migrants only when it was too late, which Steinbeck viewed as a waste of resources that elided the cause of the disease in the first instance: “A fine example of this insular stupidity concerns the hookworm situation in Stanislaus County. The mud along water courses where there are [infected] squatters [living] . . . there was no thought of isolating the victims and stopping the hookworm.”31 Parasites play a pivotal role in shaping the social realities of the migrant communities as well as the communities near the camps, yet because the “Okies” were themselves stereotyped as “unclean” and “uncivilized,” few officials aimed to allocate resources to improve camps. Steinbeck’s writing suggests that narratives about Self-Reliance, bodily autonomy, and labor value in the early twentieth century elided the impact of nonhuman social actors. Migrant farmers were hard-working, but there were a multitude of factors (especially ecological ones) that led to poverty. And the hookworm has significant cultural meaning in the American South; it appears in the work of Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and more recent books such as Catherine Coleman Flowers’s Waste (2020).32 Notably, the Rockefeller Foundation created campaigns to eliminate hookworm disease as well. Though writing about California and not the South, Steinbeck illustrates that the hookworm was in fact a very real, material threat to migrant communities. The hookworm became a site of contention, as it was a key topic in

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at least two of the seven articles Steinbeck wrote for the News. Parasites, for Steinbeck, do things in our social systems. Steinbeck, and, as I show later, Caldwell, refigure sociological perspectives to include nonhuman actors in order to advance political arguments and policy suggestions, an idea that is present in these authors’ fiction as well as their journalism. Worms and other parasites also play an important role in The Grapes of Wrath, which was inspired by much of Harvest Gypsies. Uncle John, for example, seems to overreact whenever someone in the Joad family has stomach pains: “Ever’ time one of us kids got worms or a gutache Uncle John brings a doctor out. Pa finally tol’ him he got to stop. Kids all the time getting’ a gutache.”33 In this scene, Uncle John’s seemingly paranoid health concerns show that worms and “gutaches” are a common, almost trivial part of sharecropper life, so much so that the family cannot afford to call a doctor whenever a family member is believed to have worms. Considering Steinbeck’s emphasis on parasitic worms in Harvest Gypsies, such references to infection in The Grapes of Wrath take on greater significance. There is a tension throughout his writing in which he must elevate the status of parasites to emphasize they are a viable threat to health and food security, yet Steinbeck’s ultimate aim is to garner more attention for the hardships the migrants endure. References to parasites also illustrate how children struggle with malnutrition, a major socio-economic concern during the Great Depression. Late in the story, armed deputies claim that the Department of Health has ordered them to break up migrant camps because of the spread of typhoid through lice,34 and several children get worms throughout the narrative: “Them folks thought he got worms. So they give him a blaster, an’ he died.”35 At one point, Winfield—one of the youngest in the Joad family—faints in the orchard after work. As two workers carry the boy to the Joad family, they note, “The little fella’s purty weak. Looks like he got worms.”36 While in many of these instances the illness is vaguely described, Steinbeck implies that parasites are a part of everyday migrant life. He foregrounds the various environmental factors that many families endured, making a stronger case for more FSA funding in a way that was easily accessible to the general public. The role of parasites is also linked to the sanitary conditions of the camps more broadly, underscoring the effect of unclean water on the spread of parasitic infection. While the Joad family’s bemusement at flushing toilets and porcelain sinks adds some comic relief to the dramatic story, the narrative illustrates why the FSA and other organizations needed to invest in sanitary resources like sewage facilities to prevent the spread of parasites at the source: “The toilets lined one side of the large room, and each toilet had its compartment with a door in front of it. The porcelain was gleaming white.”37 This is just one of many scenes that details the sanitary units of the

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Weedpatch Camp—which contrast the open-water sources in the makeshift “Hooverville” camps seen elsewhere in the narrative. When contextualized with Steinbeck’s overt policy recommendations in Harvest Gypsies, infestation and illness come to the foreground. In his concluding remarks in Harvest Gypsies, Steinbeck writes that “medical attention should be made available, and instruction in sanitary measures carried on and enforced.”38 The Weedpatch Camp serves as an ideal after which migrant camps should be designed, which includes better sanitation to prevent the spread of parasites. Additionally, grasshoppers or locusts are symbolic of food insecurity and the threats of the natural world. These insects often represent plague, historically, and they were a purported cause of crop failure in the 1930s and 1940s. For example, Ivan Ray Tannehill reflects in Drought: Its Causes and Effects that “The grasshopper is one of the worst. Dry, warm weather is favorable for hatching grasshoppers, and a continued spell may bring a serious outbreak.”39 Tannehill calculates that from 1934 to 1938 grasshoppers destroyed approximately $315,753,000 in crops. Early in The Grapes of Wrath the ground teems with nonhuman life, including pests and parasites. In an intercalary scene, between the narrative about the Joad family, Steinbeck describes the environment: “under the grass the insects moved, ants and ant lions to set traps for them, grasshoppers to jump into the air and flick their yellow wings for a second, sow bugs like little armadillos, plodding restless on many tender feet.”40 In this moment Steinbeck shifts the narrative from its protagonist Tom Joad to the wider ecology of the natural world. The narrative encourages readers to consider nonhuman and human animals as they live together, rather than solely focusing on humans. This scene comes shortly after another in which Tom Joad kills a grasshopper that had jumped into the cab of a truck: “A grasshopper flipped through the window and lighted on top of the instrument panel, where it sat and began to scrape its wings with its angled jumping legs. Joad reached forward and crushed its hard skull-like head with his fingers, and he let it into the wind stream out the window. Joad chuckled again while he brushed the broken insect from his fingertips.”41 Here, the grasshopper alludes to the devastation of the drought that Tannehill details in his history of the Dust Bowl, yet it also serves to characterize Tom Joad. As Tom has recently been released from prison, this scene is somewhat menacing, but it may also be understood as a sort of domination of the natural world. The grasshopper, which had such a massive impact on crop failure in the South, is a villain, one of the nonhuman antagonists that has forced families like the Joads to move from their land in search of other prospects. The grasshopper is a symbol that would likely be apparent to those who lived through the drought and is seemingly vanquished by Tom. However, just a few pages later, we learn that insects—including the grasshopper—are teeming on the ground.

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Steinbeck does not represent single social actors; instead, he portrays wide networks and sprawling national narratives. His writing often centers on the journey of a family or a pair of friends, but it is important not to ignore the recurring details within his writing, like the complex political dynamics of the New Deal, the poor soil conditions, shifting populations, and the prevalence of parasites. By keeping parasites in the periphery of his writing, Steinbeck necessarily challenges assumptions about how societies are formed and operate. Social systems are affected by networks of human and nonhuman actors, and Steinbeck undercuts the myths of Self-Reliance, autonomy, and independence. In combatting a growing political conservatism that reacted negatively to New Deal legislation, Steinbeck uses parasitism as a site of contention in his writing. As Bryan Yazell notes in an essay on Harvest Gypsies and The Grapes of Wrath, these books are in many ways about the politics of resource management: Steinbeck “introduce[s] a new economic logic in which white nobility figures as a form of labor sufficiently exploitable and durable to be worth the state’s investment . . . for Steinbeck the family on the move is a resource that the state must tap in order to prosper.”42 Steinbeck conceives of the Joad family as a resource, as a key source of labor, and parasites threaten to hinder their prosperity. Furthermore, Yazell suggests that the state needed to see families like the Joads as worthwhile investments, as “durable” and “exploitable,” two qualities that may be undermined if a migrant is especially susceptible to parasites and pestilence. Additionally, Steinbeck’s perspective on parasitism is linked to an attempt to understand the world outside of humanistic philosophies, and critics often link his books Cannery Row and The Log from the Sea of Cortez with the ecological theories of marine biologist Ed Ricketts.43 Steinbeck explains in Sea of Cortez that “Nonteleological thinking concerns itself primarily not with what should be, or could be, or might be, but rather what actually ‘is’— attempting at most to answer the already sufficiently difficult questions what or how, instead of why.”44 Published over a decade after The Grapes of Wrath, Sea of Cortez consolidates some of Steinbeck’s earlier thoughts on the relationship between individuals and ecology. For Steinbeck, human beings too often elide their relationship with the natural world in favor of human-centric perspectives that overlook the role of the environment in shaping social systems. Societies are ecological systems, according to Steinbeck, or biosocial networks that are too often reduced to singular narratives. Marilyn Chandler McEntyre draws a parallel to what Steinbeck’s contemporary John Robinson Jeffers describes as “unhumanism,” “a rejection of the myopic anthropocentrism that distorts our understanding of the functioning of whole systems, communities as organic wholes that transcend the life and purposes of any individual within them.”45 Even the very structure of The Grapes of Wrath may be said to reflect this “unhumanistic” perspective, as it has intercalary

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chapters that switch back and forth between a wide view of the 1930s and a focalized perspective on the Joad family in particular. The intercalary design encourages readers to resist purely human-centric and individual readings. For example, Tom Joad may kill the grasshopper in his truck, but Steinbeck immediately shifts the narrative away from the human characters to provide a richly detailed description of the natural world, the “ants and ant lions,” “grasshoppers” and “sow bugs like little armadillos.”46 Readers follow the Joad family, yet every other chapter returns to a broader portrait of society and the natural environment. This intercalary narrative and Steinbeck’s view of social ecology further contextualize the network of social actors at play. For Peter Valenti, Steinbeck’s “unique ecological rhetoric [. . .] tapped the nation’s need to understand the plight of the poor and dispossessed.”47 Valenti directly relates the narrative structure of The Grapes of Wrath to RA and FSA photographers like Lange and Bourke-White, especially regarding ecological themes. Similarly, Sam McNeilly uses the term “cooperative ecology” to draw a parallel between the principles of global ecosystems and Jim Casy’s view of migrant communities in The Grapes of Wrath. The “superorganism” model of ecology—espoused by William Emerson Ritter in the early twentieth century—was particularly influential on Steinbeck, and McNeilly suggests that Steinbeck “inverts the emphasis of [the superorganism’s] potential use away from competition to cooperation.”48 Success is linked to cooperation in the novel, and Steinbeck’s knowledge of early twentieth-century ecology helped him communicate arguments for social democracy. Steinbeck’s representations of ecology and, subsequently, parasitism, inform his arguments for social welfare, which are structured on the perspective that human societies are connected to a biosocial network. In both Harvest Gypsies and The Grapes of Wrath, ecology becomes an epistemic mode through which society is understood and related. For example, in one scene from Harvest Gypsies, a little boy in a squatter camp notes, “When they [farmers] need us they call us migrants, and when we’ve picked their crop, we’re bums and we got to get out.”49 The term “bum” evokes the social parasitism Steinbeck seeks to combat, but here he documents the ever-tenuous status of the migrant. Moreover, the debates about resource distribution in the 1930s were particularly heated when they concerned government relief, and Steinbeck’s novel reflects this tension. While at the Weedpatch Camp in The Grapes of Wrath, for example, the migrants discuss the ways the California communities view them. At one point a man relates a story he heard from a deputy: “You give them goddamn Okies stuff like that an’ they’ll want ’em.” An’ he says, “They hol’ red meetin’s in them gov’ment camps. All figgerin’ how to git

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on relief,” he says. . . . “I mean relief—what us taxpayers put in an’ you goddamn Okies takes out” . . . You know a vagrant is anybody a cop don’t like. An’ that’s why they hate this here camp. No cops can get in.50

This discussion about how the community views the migrants and the label “vagrant” broach debates on social dependency. The “Okies” are represented as a drain on the community’s resources, as the Californians “put in” taxes while the Okies are viewed as taking them out without giving anything in return. This is a problematic formulation, as the migrant communities were an important labor source for large farms. The communities relied on the migrants for successful harvesting (which required a large, short-term workforce to ensure food did not spoil), yet this same workforce was never seen as contributing to the community. The framing of migrants as vagrants further perpetuates this perspective. As referenced earlier in Weaver’s writing about settlement laws, there is a notable tension between two ideas: migrants are either honest people or dangerous “parasites.” Steinbeck resists these claims by documenting the vermin that threaten the health of the community and the struggles migrants must endure. Steinbeck’s ecological perspective is further complicated by his emphasis on the white working class over non-white communities. Ultimately, many of his claims about the plight of the migrant farmers, the parasites and diseases they must endure, and the need to restore their health, elides the racial politics of the 1930s and 1940s. In short, Steinbeck imagines a vast social ecology of human and nonhuman actors, yet he is notably silent on race. However, he does address disease and non-white identity in his 1941 film script for The Forgotten Village, which follows an isolated Mexican community whose water supply is contaminated. The community clashes with medical officials who aim to introduce chemicals into the communal well, and the story problematically positions the indigenous community as living “in the long moment when the past slips reluctantly into the future.”51 There is little room for the indigenous way of life in modernity, Steinbeck suggests, as he ultimately privileges the perspective of the medical officials who adopt Western medicine. The doctors patronizingly explain the sickness to the villagers: “they describe invisible little animals cause many sicknesses— typhoid, smallpox, and malaria,”52 but the villagers refuse treatment, a serum derived from infected horse blood: “Are we horses or dogs or rats? What is this horses’ blood? What is this new nonsense?”53 The doctors introduce the treatment without the consent of the villagers, and the man who had brought the doctors, Juan Diego, is ostracized. The narrative concludes with the assertion that “change will come, is coming, as surely as there are thousands of Juan Diegos in the villages of Mexico.”54

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The Forgotten Village was initially censored for its portrayal of childbirth and breastfeeding, and it has received little critical attention due to its limited distribution. However, Yazell writes in a note to his article on Harvest Gypsies and The Grapes of Wrath that “the stark diversity of the demographic subjects of” The Grapes of Wrath and The Forgotten Village, “released so closely together, adds further nuance to any discussion of Steinbeck’s overarching racial politics.”55 While in The Grapes of Wrath and Harvest Gypsies Steinbeck’s focus noticeably elides non-white perspectives, The Forgotten Village emphasizes the role of public health in shaping his writing during this period—particularly as it applies to the demographics he overlooks elsewhere. Throughout the film script, the Mexican community in Santiago is Othered by Steinbeck’s representation of them as using “ancient cures” and “magic” to treat disease. Juan Diego struggles to incorporate Western medicine into his “primal” Mexican identity, as the villagers fear the medicine the medical officers bring. In the end the doctors assure him that he will be the catalyst for change in the community once the other recognize the effectiveness of Western medicine, but in doing so, Steinbeck tends to portray indigenous beliefs as backward. Much as in Harvest Gypsies and The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck focuses on public health and the parasites that transmit disease throughout The Forgotten Village. But Steinbeck ultimately seeks to create an idealized form of “healthful” middle-class identity, one dominated by Western ideology. Though a short narrative, The Forgotten Village provides an important context for understanding the elision of non-white voices from Steinbeck’s Harvest Gypsies and The Grapes of Wrath. While Steinbeck fights for the working-class laborers by advancing a progressive perspective, he also tends to erase indigenous and non-white identity from his narratives of public health. The Forgotten Village specifically describes “entero bacilli,” a family of gut bacteria that includes E. coli and salmonella. The narrative creates a dichotomy between the village and the city, the latter being the seat of Enlightenment and medical expertise. For example, as Juan Diego journeys by foot to the city to seek help, the tribal elders try to treat the illness with snakeskins and charms. This is contrasted by Juan Diego’s arrival in the city, where he sees “buildings fantastic and unbelievable. People whose lives he could not imagine.”56 He is at first frightened by the commotion of the city, but the narrative emphasizes that the villagers’ way of life cannot compete with the speed and knowledge of modernity. Doctors listen to Juan Diego’s pleas for help and they quickly help him by returning to the village (this time in a car) with water tests, serums, and books. Within hours they discover the disease and offer a cure. Steinbeck describes the Mexicans as having “great

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dignity and flair and they were poor, unbelievably poor,” arguing that he and his documentary team did not editorialize anything for the story. But the narrative implicitly rejects the indigenous way of life, patronizingly praising the “nobility” of the tribal elders while describing their ineptitude in treating medical illness. The Forgotten Village supplements a critical perspective of Harvest Gypsies and The Grapes of Wrath by showing not only the extent of Steinbeck’s interest in public health, but also the underlying racial politics of these narratives. While I extend this conversation of parasitism in Great Depression writing by turning to another best-selling author in the period—Erskine Caldwell— one of the key differences between Steinbeck and Caldwell is the solution at which they arrive. Steinbeck is ultimately promoting a social welfare system, working with activists such as Collins to argue for progressive policymaking that would especially benefit the white working class. Caldwell, however, is much less interested in portraying impoverished Southerners as dignified, hard-working laborers. He satirizes the South, suggesting that poverty may be eradicated through a form of eugenic sterilization. Nevertheless, both Steinbeck and Caldwell suggest that parasites have a real, material influence in social systems. While Steinbeck in many ways sought to combat the notion that migrants were vagrants, bums, or parasites, Caldwell takes a very different perspective. The parasite in his writing refigures social theories in the early twentieth century by becoming a biosocial metaphor for the “breeding” families of the rural South. Comparing these two authors shows the polysemy of the parasite, as it was very often a stand-in for wider sociopolitical issues. CALDWELL: EUGENICS, WEEVILS, AND WEEDS Similar to Steinbeck, Caldwell documents the effect of parasites on poor farmers. However, Caldwell primarily focuses on Georgia and his social theories revolve around eugenic sterilization rather than social activism and government welfare. In You Have Seen Their Faces, a nonfiction work documenting the life of rural farmers in the South, he notes that many farmers lived under a false sense of optimism, always hoping that conditions would be better next year. He writes that they hoped “there was plenty of rain, but not too much, and the boll-weevils did not inflict as much damage as they had the year before.”57 While Caldwell ultimately concludes that the land is simply “farmed out” because many farmers failed to rotate crops, he does list a number of parasites that blight the American South. Caldwell’s sociological perspective documents a variety of factors that affect rural farmers in an attempt to diagnose the “problems” of the South. In this section I shift focus

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from hookworms and migrant camps to tenant farmers in rural Georgia, as well as a network of parasitic plants and animals throughout Tobacco Road. Though Caldwell’s writing also features parasitism as an important biopolitical and ethical concept, he tends to portray poor white farmers as a group of social parasites to be eradicated. On the one hand, Caldwell uses the weevil as a metaphor for the Lester family at the center of the narrative, dehumanizing the family by comparing them to vermin. Yet Caldwell also shows how literal parasites and pests functioned as important social actors. The weevil in particular was both a pest and a “catalyst for change,”58 an insect about which many Southerners were ambivalent. Blues songs about weevils gave the beetle a paradoxical charm, making it a recognizable symbol of the Deep South. Furthermore, some economists went so far as to claim that without weevils to decimate cotton crops, the peanut industry would have never developed to replace it. Caldwell’s Tobacco Road represents a network of pests and weeds at the surface of the text, including flies, scrub oaks, and broomsedge, that are central to the narrative arc. In this context, parasites shape Caldwell’s narrative about poverty in the South; they are not simply background figures, but they drive the story. Tobacco Road follows the Lesters, a poor family who refuses to give up their life as tenant farmers and move to the city to work in the mills. Jeeter, the family patriarch, is lazy and stubborn, presiding over the “simple-minded” Ellie May, who has a cleft palate, the “slow” sixteen-year-old Dude, and the twelve-year-old Pearl, who has been sold to the neighbor, Lov, for supplies and a week’s pay. Ada, the family matriarch, and Jeeter’s mother, whose name is never revealed, suffer from pellagra due to severe malnutrition. Bessie, a de facto preacher with a “deformed” face (she has no nose), visits the family several times to seduce Dude, and the two are eventually married despite objections from a local courthouse clerk. The narrative revolves around the themes of sterility and futility, as the land will not produce, the family only seems to create “misfits,” and the cycle of poverty continues. After Jeeter and Ada die in a house fire (Jeeter tries to burn the broomsedge in the fields), Dude ponders how he might plow the fields on the Lester lands. Tobacco Road caricatures the lives of poor tenant farmers, illustrating the hunger, poverty, and disease many sharecroppers endured, yet Caldwell relies on gothic and grotesque imagery to suggest there is little room for redemption. It is unclear whether readers should interpret the novel as satire. Janet Holtman argues that one reason Caldwell’s work has generally fallen out of favor in the twenty-first century is because his novels “are read by many critics as failed attempts to produce legitimate social intervention through art, and their failings are typically seen in terms of lack of awareness of stereotyping and the degree to which they constitute a confusing amalgam of genuine social concern and an incommensurate literary style based on gothic

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humor.”59 Holtman is not suggesting that Caldwell’s work is less relevant than other literature of the era, but that critics have overlooked Caldwell because novels such as Tobacco Road correspond to an “earlier discursive format” that must be seriously reexamined if we are to learn the so-called “truth” of “poor southern whites,” or “white trash.” Additionally, Caldwell’s interest in eugenics informs his approach to the rural poor in Georgia. For Caldwell, Tobacco Road is a story about the typical poor Southern family and the combination of biological and social afflictions that ail them. Caldwell uses parasitism to connect the biological and social aspects of the South that he critiques. He alludes to the pests and parasites that rural farmers experience, such as turnip flies and boll weevils, but it is also important to note that these references do not merely provide a “realist” portrayal of life in the South. Caldwell employs parasites to advance his own theories about how to “solve” poverty in the rural South. He also describes the Lester family’s farm equipment and automobiles as broken to suggest that “once a family has hit rock-bottom, perhaps there is nothing to do but turn one’s attention to a family that still has potential.”60 Additionally, the eradication of boll weevils symbolically alludes to the sterilization of the poor. The Lesters’ prodigious “reproduction,” the large family of “misfits,” represents Caldwell’s anxieties about the degradation of Southern (white) identity. Hence, when two of the Lesters die in a fire at the end of a story, Caldwell refuses to represent their death as a tragedy. He suggests their death is a fitting end, that they are “better off” that way. Sterilization was like combating the boll weevil in Caldwell’s view, in that it was a short-term solution for deeper problems. Tobacco Road is a literary counterpart to the genre of the “family study,” a sociological case study that traces the defects and degeneration of families (particularly those living in rural poverty) using interviews, census reports, and so forth. In other words, the novel may be seen as a literary intervention in the study of poverty and genetic inheritance in the South. In the early twentieth century, following the popularity of Henry H. Goddard’s The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness and the 1927 Buck vs. Bell case, which upheld the right of states to practice involuntary eugenic sterilization on citizens,61 Caldwell’s Tobacco Road participates in an extended discourse on sterilization as a viable option for eliminating “undesirables.” Notably, Georgia was among the last states to adopt laws against involuntary sterilization. Moreover, Ira Caldwell (Erskine’s father) published a five-part series in the journal Eugenics from July through October 1930 on “the Bunglers,” a family he studied as part of a social experiment. The name of the family reveals Ira Caldwell’s disdain for poor families, and he concludes that sterilization of the rural poor is necessary. Erskine, publishing Tobacco Road just two years after Ira’s family study, symbolizes parasitism to imply that eugenic sterilization could address the cycle of poverty in Georgia.

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The boll weevil also had an ambivalent status in the South by the 1930s, which was part of a wider reevaluation of parasitism during the modernist period. On the one hand, the weevil decimated cash crops like cotton. In Tobacco Road, the weevil has a major environmental impact on the agrarian South: “A bale to the acre was the goal of every cotton farmer around Fuller; but the boll-weevil and hard summer rains generally cut the crop in half.”62 Caldwell’s weevils are particularly resilient as well: “Boll-weevils were never killed in any great numbers by the fire; the cotton plants had to be sprayed with poison in the summer, anyway. But everybody had always burned over the land each spring, and they continued if only for the reason that their fathers had done it.”63 The novel reflects on tradition and history in the South by describing the perpetual cycle of crops and spraying for weevils. The farmers struggle every year, but the weevils persist, draining community resources and reducing yields. As a result of its impact, the weevil had an important cultural status, reflected in history, folklore, and songs. For example, the Blues singer Memphis Minnie wrote “Bo-Weevil Blues” about the pest. Emily Rutter argues that the song is about “socioeconomic circumstances (the boll weevil infestation that wreaked havoc on southern crops during the early twentieth century) and sexual frustrations.”64 It emphasizes the limited sexual expression Black women had in marriage, drawing on the boll weevil to represent a recognizable form of frustration for a wider audience. Rutter shows the cultural significance of the boll weevil, particularly in Black and poor white communities. In other words, Blues singers often used their frustrating experiences with the weevil to represent their frustration with society in general. In some cases, however, the weevil was also admired as a symbol of change. In an article about a monument to the boll weevil in Enterprise, Alabama, James Giesen writes that many farmers in the early twentieth century praised the weevil, viewing it as a facilitator for crop diversification: “[the weevil] became a symbol of how something that caused distress could also be a catalyst for change.”65 The Boll Weevil Monument, originally erected in 1919, shows a paradoxical attitude toward parasites, as citizens of Coffee County, Alabama had to shift to a historic, ecological perspective to recognize the role of the weevil in plant diversification. By the time the monument was erected, the farmers of Coffee County had switched to peanuts and other more stable crops, which were believed to bring economic prosperity to this region of Alabama. The monument itself depicts a female figure holding an oversized boll weevil, with an inscription on a nearby plaque: “In profound appreciation of the Boll Weevil and what it has done as the herald of prosperity this monument was erected by the citizens of Enterprise, Coffee County, Alabama.” Had local farmers not switched to more stable crops other than cotton, the statue suggests they would have failed to recognize

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the value of peanuts. The boll weevil interrupted the established agriculturaleconomic system (cotton) and created prosperity by forcing farmers to use different crops. The serendipity of boll-weevil infestations therefore shaped the long-term economic development of many counties in the South, and the monument illustrates that during the modernist period many changed their view of parasites to recognize their significance in social systems. In his study, Giesen is less interested in the real economic impact of the weevil (which may be less significant than most farmers in the area realized) than the culture that surrounds the insect. Whether the boll weevil was really the prime moving force in economic change in the South is debatable; however, the weevil does have an undeniable cultural impact on the South based on perceptions of the insect. The boll weevil is a cultural force, an object of admiration, and a symbol by which farmers, Blues singers, and authors expressed economic hardship and frustration. To reference the boll weevil in songs or novels was to evoke complex social debates and anxieties about food security and economic prosperity. Caldwell’s references to the boll weevil in Tobacco Road react to a broader discourse on parasites as social actors. The resilience of the insect makes it significant, as scholar Karen Keely notes. Caldwell’s suggestion that “weevils were never killed in any great numbers by the fire” shows its durability. Furthermore, Caldwell writes that the farmers continued to burn off parasites because “their fathers had done it,” suggesting that the boll weevil (and the fires and poison) are part of the Southern legacy. Why continue burning fields and spraying poison if it does not work? Because the farmers’ struggle with the weevil is part of the tradition they had inherited. In addition to boll weevils, turnip flies and weeds shape the narrative. For example, broomsedge, scrub oak, blackjack trees, and the turnip fly plague the family and their crops. While the turnip fly (Delia radicum; also called the cabbage fly, cabbage root fly, or root fly) and various weed-like flora do not have the same cultural history as the boll weevil, they are nevertheless social actors in the narrative. A large portion of the novel is set around the Lesters stealing turnips from their neighbor, Lov. Additionally, the burning of broomsedge in a futile attempt to make the soil viable for planting cotton brings about the deaths of Jeeter and Ava and the burning of the homestead. In shifting focus from the biosocial metaphor of the weevil, I show that there is a larger and more prominent network of nonhuman actors at play. Much like in Steinbeck’s Harvest Gypsies, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Forgotten Village, Caldwell’s Tobacco Road uses the parasite (in all its varieties) as a site of contention, as Caldwell portrays rural Georgia as covered in weeds and plagued with pestilence. Turnip fly infestation impacts much of the early story. At one point, the family wrestles Lov to the ground and steals his bag of turnips: “I ain’t had a

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good turnip since a year ago this spring. All the turnips I’ve et has got them damnblasted green-gutted worms in them . . . Wormy ones like mine was ain’t fit for a human.”66 Jeeter’s lack of success with farming in general, including the cultivation of garden crops like turnips, is evidence of the difficulties that many rural Georgians faced. Turnip fly larvae, while less dangerous than hookworms or tapeworms, led to lower yields in terms of both the quantity and nutritional quality of crops. This passage is one of multiple references to turnip flies and larvae that devastated turnip crops in the early twentieth century, especially for families who did not have mules to cultivate large yields. Out of desperation and starvation, the Lesters are forced to prey on Lov as he returns home from the mills with a fresh supply of worm-free turnips. But, as Caldwell shows, the family is frustrated and ashamed that they have been reduced to theft: “the slowly formed realization that he had stolen his son-in-law’s food sickened his body and soul.”67 While Caldwell’s portrayal of the Lesters is less than redemptive, the family struggles with the moral dilemmas that inevitably arise in poverty. In addition to the family’s theft, turnip flies also connect to the issues of malnutrition in the novel. At one point, readers learn that Ada and the unnamed grandmother have pellagra, a niacin deficiency typically caused by a lack of fresh produce—like turnips, cabbages, and other vegetables— and exacerbated by alcohol dependence. When they did have food, many sharecroppers had corn-heavy and fat-rich diets. But corn contains a type of niacin that cannot be easily absorbed into the body. Nixtamalization (a process popular in Latin America) prevents this problem, but poor Southerners failed to use it. Without a diverse diet and fresh produce, endemic pellagra outbreaks were common.68 Infestation spreads throughout the narrative in this sense, as diseases can be traced back to pestilence. Given the time period, Caldwell was likely unaware of the direct cause of pellagra.69 Nevertheless, contemporary critics can recognize that two seemingly separate causes of poverty (pestilence and disease) are closely connected. The sterile landscape of the novel is also punctuated by broomsedge, scrub oaks, and blackjack trees. While broomsedge is itself a harmless grass, it causes damage by invading crop plots. It is less nutritious than most other types of grass, and many farmers burn their fields to stop the broomsedge from propagating. Blackjack and scrub oak are also less desirable than pine, which is evidenced when the Lesters try to sell blackjack as firewood: “The blackjack [. . .] was a stunted variety of oak that used its sap in toughening the fibres instead of growing new layers and expanding the old, as other trees did.”70 Much like the Lesters, the blackjack represents a stubborn repetition of the old, of the cycle of poverty that Caldwell foregrounds throughout the novel. People refuse to buy the blackjack because it does not burn—it was

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virtually useless compared to other wood and symbolizes the futile lifestyle the Lesters live. Jeeter’s failure to clear the land in time for the harvest season shows the impact of weeds. Poor white families would certainly deal with real weeds, but the Lesters are an extreme example. Nevertheless, Jeeter persists in thinking that he will be successful: “He knew the time for burning and plowing had ended the day before, but there still lingered in the warm March air something of the new season. . . . Jeeter firmly believed that something would happen so he would be able to keep his body and soul alive.”71 He holds out that he may be able to plant cotton, despite not having any credit for fertilizer or other supplies, yet the broomsedge is so extensive that it burns for three or four days. Like the boll weevil, the charred scrub oaks are left standing while the young pine dies. The fire spreads as the novel draws to a close, reducing everything on the land except the weeds. As it spreads, the family homestead catches fire as well. Shortly after the house is reduced to ash, the nearby farmers find Jeeter and Ada’s bodies. One of the local farmers remarks that “Jeeter is better off now than he was [. . .] He was near about starved to death half the time and he couldn’t raise no crops.”72 Caldwell suggests that the sterilization of the Lesters, much like the burning of the weeds, will leave the community better off than before: Jeeter is better off dead than alive. Eugenics is foregrounded in these scenes, suggesting the best way to end the cycle of poverty is by “burning off” the pests and weeds that populate the landscape. Later, Ada and Jeeter are buried in the blackjack grove, on blackjack poles. Even in death Ada and Jeeter parallel the pests and weeds that plagued their existence. Like weeds, the Lesters seem to take up room without giving anything in return. For Caldwell, dying is the greatest thing they can do for the community. CONCLUSION Throughout Tobacco Road, Caldwell subtly advances his arguments about class and eugenics with parasites and pests at the backdrop. While Steinbeck and Caldwell promote different solutions to similar issues, both writers recognize the complex dynamics between the natural environment and society. Steinbeck’s embrace of an ecological perspective leads to an interdependent ethics at the root of his politics, in which a complex network of actors is responsible for the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. Caldwell resists the notion that public health officials had the single answer to economic decline in rural Georgia. But he includes a wide variety of pests and parasites in his work, blurring the social and biological. The Joads and the Lesters are perceived as parasitical by others in the community, and nonhuman organisms

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like the boll weevil and hookworm symbolize the ambivalent status of pestilence in the modernist period. For Steinbeck, parasites are a health threat to the working poor, yet these same individuals were themselves conceptualized as parasites on the productive class. For Caldwell, the “parasitic” poor white families of the South are better off “burned” or sterilized than alive and reproducing. Both Steinbeck’s and Caldwell’s fiction and nonfiction illustrate the vast polysemy of the parasite. For example, even as Caldwell resists the narrative that public health officials develop about the cause of poverty in the South in You Have Seen Their Faces, he engages in an important sociopolitical conversation. In other words, he recognizes that to reference the army worm, screw worm, and boll weevil is to frame poverty in a particular fashion. Similarly, Steinbeck’s insistence on sanitary measures in Harvest Gypsies shows how public policy is crafted in response to infestation and outbreak, and the derogatory use of “parasite” to refer to migrants reveals the power of language to shape social realities. Focusing on parasites in Great Depression writing complements much of the existing discourse on class, race, and ecocriticism in the field. Hookworms, turnip flies, and boll weevils recur in Steinbeck’s and Caldwell’s books, becoming key facets of their arguments. Steinbeck worked with Tom Collins and other FSA workers to make an argument for more resources for migrant communities, and Caldwell aims to get at the core of poverty in the South, problematically suggesting the issues may best be addressed through sterilization. While these writers are very clearly proposing drastically different solutions to poverty, they ground major aspects of their arguments in infestation and nonhuman social actors. The ambivalence toward parasitism in Great Depression writing is part of the wider engagement with the modernist parasite. Steinbeck and Caldwell were writing near the end of the modernist era, but each author provides an important perspective of rural America that is sometimes elided in the context of modernism more broadly. Though less experimental than authors like Faulkner, Woolf, or Joyce, Caldwell and Steinbeck were prominent literary figures during the late modernist period, making key interventions in aesthetics, politics, ethics, and philosophy, among other fields. NOTES 1. These estimates are taken from Brian Duignan’s The Great Depression (New York: Rosen, 2013) and Eric Rauchway’s The Great Depression and New Deal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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2. Erskine Caldwell, You Have Seen Their Faces (New York: Modern Age Books, 1937), 2. 3. The Grapes of Wrath is dedicated to Collins: “To Tom, who lived it.” 4. See Collins’s reports from February and April 1936, for example. Also see Daniel Nealand, “Archival Vintages for The Grapes of Wrath,” Prologue 40, no. 2 (2008). For other examples of similar language used to describe migrants, see Walter Stein,  California and the Dust Bowl Migration (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1973), 59–63; Jerry Stanley, Children of the Dust Bowl: The True Story of the School at Weedpatch Camp (New York: Yearling Books, 1992), 34–39. Benson also quotes a September 14, 1938, article in the Fresno Bee in which Dr. Lee Alexander Stone, “a health officer for Madera County,” characterizes the migrants as “unmoral, lazy,” and “incapable of being absorbed into our civilization” (337). 5. Erin Edwards, The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 36. 6. Charles Poore, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, 14 April 1939, 27. 7. Louis Kronenberger, “Hungry Caravan,” The Nation, 15 April 1939, 440. 8. Furthermore, Steinbeck’s and Caldwell’s work in the 1930s represents an agrarian or rural modernism. Jess Gilbert refers to the agrarian New Deal philosophy as in line with a “low modernism.” It includes an interest in “modern institutions and activities,” but also a special focus on “local knowledge, history and tradition, and ‘illegible’ activities like family farming.” See Jess Gilbert, “Low Modernism and the Agrarian New Deal: A Different Kind of State,” in Fighting for the Farm: Rural America Transformed, ed. Jane Adams (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 129. 9. W. Wallace Weaver, “Review of Migrant Families by John Nye Webb and Malcolm Johnston Brown,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 207 (1940), 251. 10. Historically, “Okie” and “Arkie” are derogatory terms for those displaced by the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, many of whom were poor white farmers from Oklahoma and Arkansas. (African Americans generally traveled to the North.) In 1937 California passed an Anti-Okie Law that made it a misdemeanor to bring indigent persons into the state. It was later ruled unconstitutional in 1941 in Edwards v. People of California. 11. R. C. Williams, “Nursing Care for Migrant Families,” The American Journal of Nursing 41, no. 9 (1941): 1031–32. 12. See “Executive Order 7027 Establishing the Resettlement Administration,” The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, http:​//​www​ .presidency​.ucsb​.edu​/ws​/​?pid​=15048. 13. See “Overview of Farm Security Administration,” https:​//​www​.archives​.gov​/ files​/atlanta​/education​/depression​-curriculum​/section​-2​.pdf. 14. Garland Brinkley, “The Decline in Southern Agricultural Output, 1860–1880,” The Journal of Economic History 57, no. 1 (1997): 116. 15. Ibid., 119–20. S. A. Larson argues that Faulkner’s references to mental disability, including, Benjy’s mental disability in The Sound and the Fury, are linked to this wider history of the hookworm in the South. See S. A. Larson, “Printing Parasites:

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Hookworm and Public Health Narratives in Southern Fiction,” Literature and Medicine 36, no. 1 (2018): 208–29. 16. Rachel Nuwer, “How a Worm Gave the South a Bad Name,” NOVA, 27 April 2016, https:​//​www​.pbs​.org​/wgbh​/nova​/article​/how​-a​-worm​-gave​-the​-south​-a​ -bad​-name. 17. In recent years, hookworm disease has again become a major issue in the rural South. Catherine Coleman Flowers’s 2020 book Waste asserts the rise in hookworm disease has to do with the unavailability of municipal water and sewage in poor rural areas with extremely high water tables. Because poor (often black) families cannot afford septic systems yet live in areas without municipal water, the hookworm larvae thrive in damp conditions. 18. Richard Baker, “From the Field to the Classroom: The Boll Weevil’s Impact on Education in Rural Georgia,” Journal of Economic History 75, no. 4 (2015): 1130. 19. Ibid. 20. Michael Dennig, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 2010), 237. 21. Bryan Yazell, “Steinbeck’s Migrants: Families on the Move and the Politics of Resource Management,” Modern Fiction Studies 63, no. 3 (2017): 503. 22. Elizabeth Yukins, “‘Feeble-Minded’ White Women and the Spectre of Proliferating Perversity in American Eugenics Narratives,” in Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature and Culture, 1880–1940: Essays on Ideological Conflict and Complicity, eds. Lois Cuddy and Claire Roche (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003), 167. 23. Ashely Craig Lancaster, “Weeding Out the Recessive Gene: Representations of the Evolving Eugenics Movement in Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre,” The Southern Literary Journal 39, no. 2 (2007): 78. 24. Michael G. Barry, “Degrees of Mediation and Their Political Value in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath,” in The Steinbeck Question: New Essays and Criticism, ed. Donald R. Noble (Albany, NY: Whitston Publishing, 1993), 108. 25. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Viking, 1939), 47. 26. Steinbeck, Harvest Gypsies (Berkley, CA: Heydey, 1988), 31. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 20. 30. Ibid., 30. 31. Ibid., 48. 32. S. A. Larson is among critics to write about the “figurative hookworm” that haunts Faulkner’s work and the Southern writing more broadly, including outbreaks of hookworm disease that led to severe lethargy and malnutrition. Larson suggests that “authors disposed of the material, real-world threat of the hookworm parasite while retaining the widely known signs and symptoms exhibited by infected individuals who, thanks to public health campaigns, could never be uncoupled from the backwardness they had come to symbolize.” 33. Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, 92. 34. Ibid., 324.

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35. Ibid., 325. 36. Ibid., 541. Ruthie and some other family members suggest Winfield’s illness may be due to his eating too much fruit, though it is significant that only Winfield gets sick from this when many others are seen doing the same. Hence, the diagnosis of worms may be more accurate than the family initially believed it to be. 37. Ibid., 409. 38. Steinbeck, Harvest Gypsies, 59. 39. Ivan Ray Tannehill, Drought: Its Causes and Effects (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948), 50–51. 40. Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, 20. 41. Ibid., 17–18. 42. Yazell, “Steinbeck’s Migrants,” 21. 43. See Richard Astro, John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1973). Astro suggests that, because Ricketts was a close friend of Steinbeck for two decades, that Steinbeck’s view of ecology must necessarily be understood through Rickett’s perspective. In particular, this includes novels like Cannery Row, The Grapes of Wrath, and Sea of Cortez. 44. Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez (New York: Penguin, 1995), 135. 45. Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, “Natural Wisdom: Steinbeck’s Men of Nature as Prophets and Peacemakers,” in Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches, eds. Susan F. Beegel, Susan Shillingslaw, and Wesley N. Tiffney, Jr. (Montgomery, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 115. 46. Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, 20. 47. Paul Valenti, “Steinbeck’s Ecological Polemic: Human Sympathy and Visual Documentary in the Intercalary Chapters of The Grapes of Wrath,” in Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches, eds. Susan F. Beegel, Susan Shillingslaw, and Wesley N. Tiffney, Jr. (Montgomery, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 93. 48. Sam McNeilly, “Visions from the Tide Pool: John Steinbeck’s Independent Migrant Community,” Steinbeck Review 15, no. 1 (2018): 39. 49. Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, 23–24. 50. Ibid., 456. 51. Steinbeck, The Forgotten Village (New York: Viking, 1941), 9. 52. Ibid., 85. 53. Ibid., 87. 54. Ibid., 142. 55. Yazell, “Steinbeck’s Migrants,” 521n12. 56. Steinbeck, Forgotten Village, 102. 57. Caldwell, You Have Seen, 30. 58. James Giesen, “‘The Herald of Prosperity’: Tracing the Boll Weevil Myth in Alabama,” Agricultural History 85, no. 1 (2011): 25. 59. Janet Holtman, “‘White Trash’ in Literary History: The Social Interventions of Erskine Caldwell and James Agee,” American Studies 53, no. 2 (2014): 32.

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60. Karen Keely, “Poverty, Sterilization, and Eugenics in Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road,” Journal of American Studies 36, no. 1 (2002): 40. 61. The 1907 Eugenic Sterilization law in Indiana was among the first to legalize involuntary sterilization of mentally disabled citizens; however, the Buck vs. Bell case in Virginia extended this right based on a rule by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Another example of the family study is Richard Dugdale’s research on the Jukes family. 62. Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 174. 63. Ibid., 124. 64. Emily Rutter, “The Blues Tribute Poem and the Legacies of ‘Ma’ Rainey and Bessie Smith,” MELUS 39, no. 4 (2014): 77. 65. Giesen, “Herald of Prosperity,” 25. 66. Caldwell, Tobacco Road, 14. 67. Ibid., 40. 68. Michael Latham, Human Nutrition in the Developing World (Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization, 1997), 183. 69. Caldwell would not have known about the niacin content of turnips (approximately 411 mcg per 100 g), as it was not discovered by the 1930s. However, he does make a basic connection between the lack of fresh produce and malnutrition. 70. Caldwell, Tobacco Road, 133. 71. Ibid., 175–76. 72. Ibid., 179.

Chapter Three

“Monstrous Vermin” Becoming the Modernist Parasite

Many modernist authors metaphorize parasitic transformation in their writing. In works by Franz Kafka, Clarice Lispector, and Nathanael West, parasitic transformation relates to issues of dependency, politics, and literary form. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis [Die Verwandlung] is one of the best-known examples of this type of transformation in the modernist period, as the protagonist Gregor Samsa changes into a “monstrous vermin” at the start of the story.1 Though The Metamorphosis ends with the death of the verminous Gregor, Lispector and West build on the trope to imagine an affirmative form of parasitism. In Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H. [A paixão segundo G. H.], an unnamed woman becomes part of the “anonymous matter” of the universe after ingesting a cockroach. And in West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell, readers follow the titular poet as he parasitically burrows through the innards of the Trojan Horse, contemplates the limits of modernist experimentation, and learns the narrative of Saint Puce, a fictional flea who lived on Christ’s body. The parasite is central to these authors’ works, yet they use parasitic transformation to different ends. For Kafka, Gregor is dehumanized as he transforms into a verminous creature and becomes increasingly dependent on those around him. In this way, Kafka critiques the independent and autonomous sense of Self. For Lispector, the cockroach represents a vitalistic, animate form of life within the natural environment. The Passion According to G. H. includes the protagonist’s meditations on the cockroach as G. H. shifts her perspective from repugnance to intense admiration for the “lowest of the low.” And for West, the modernist poet is less an “autonomous” artist than a coy parasite who recycles the literary material of the past—much as the flea in the Parable of St. Puce drains the blood from Christ’s body. West imagines a form of parasitic modernism at odds with Pound’s famous mantra to “Make it New.” 75

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In the first section, I explore the ethical implications of verminousness in the context of care, communication, and embodiment. Gregor is not merely transformed into a literal and social parasite, but the ambiguity of the text also raises questions about how shifting notions of the Self may call for alternative ethical models. Put differently, Gregor’s parasitic existence and the “undecidedness” of the story’s central metaphor raise questions about the bioethics of “non-being,” or forms of subjecthood that do not conform to humanistic ideals. This chapter takes Kafka as a starting point to better understand Lispector and West, whose work reacts to the Kafkaesque vermin. While Gregor’s death may seem like a failure of the parasitic mode of existence (or a critique of a society that disregards dependence), in the writings of Lispector and West, parasitic transformation is generative rather than a death sentence. It offers post-anthropocentric, aesthetic critiques of modernism. In the second section, I analyze how Lispector repurposes Kafka’s The Metamorphosis to radicalize the parasite, as The Passion moves from the “failed” liberation of the vermin in Kafka’s writing to a mystical philosophy that frames the cockroach as the key to freedom. Lispector’s novel is a philosophical investigation of the limits of the humanistic, individualized subject, and she engages the impact of modernist writing during the postwar era. Finally, West’s novel raises questions about modernist authorship and aesthetics as Balso finds only writers in the intestines of the Trojan Horse. In the final section of this chapter, I argue that Balso Snell attempts to “highjack” the genre of the novel to elucidate the intertextuality of literary representation.2 In asking readers to view modernist aesthetics as parasitic, West satirizes the modernist assertion to “Make it New” by relying on established literary forms to raise questions about the value and originality of art in Western culture. This aesthetic critique is undergirded by West’s parody of the Trojan Horse and the fictional allegory of St. Puce—a flea who draws artistic, spiritual, and physical sustenance from Christ’s body—to suggest that parasitism epitomizes the modernist subject. Like Lispector, West borrows from the genre of mystical writing to stage his literary critique, and the vermin becomes an idealized figure who challenges conventional artistic and social hierarchies. My central argument in this chapter is that Kafka, Lispector, and West use parasitic transformation as a literary trope through which they advance ethical, sociopolitical, and aesthetic models grounded in multiplicity or becoming. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe becoming as a relation of terms or objects; it is an ontology of change. For Deleuze and Guattari, “[One] does not live nature as nature, but as a process of production. There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces one within the other and couples the machines together.”3 Parasitic or symbiotic relationships represent this concept of becoming because the parasite is relational. The parasite acquires its status through its relationship with its

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host. Such a view informs what Rosi Braidotti describes as “multiple ecologies of belonging”: “a moveable assemblage within a common life-space that the subject never masters nor possesses, but merely inhabits, crosses, always in a community, a pack, a group or cluster.”4 Braidotti describes an “affirmative ethics” based on the generative elements of zoë (“animal” life or “natural” life) to understand how humans are fully immersed in a network of nonhuman and non‑humanist relations.5 Zoë is dynamic and self-organizing (autopoietic), and it refers to the structure of life itself—to a generative vitality. Building on Deleuze, Braidotti’s sense of posthumanist becoming emphasizes “non-being” by challenging dualisms such as human/nonhuman. Difference-in-itself is reimagined positively, as the posthuman inhabits multiple spheres or identities at once. In the context of modernist writing, the parasite similarly challenges the notion of an “independent Self” through its inherent interdependency. Gregor occupies a space between human and nonhuman; G. H. transcends the human-made world to become part of the “universal matter”; and Balso challenges the idea of artistic agency and invention. In the work of Kafka, Lispector, and West, the parasite is neither sentimentalized as a pet nor part of a determined series, structure, or archetypal pattern. It represents a node on a network or assemblage. Part of my argument is that the modernist parasite theorizes becoming precisely because the parasite is by definition always part of a multiplicity. In other words, its relationship to others is not based on filiation or heredity but contagion and symbiosis.6 This conceptualization of becoming structures the work of Kafka, Lispector, and West. Dependency shifts as Gregor transforms, the anonymous narrator of The Passion sheds her individual identity, and West comically sanctifies the parasitic way of life. In these texts, becoming-parasite resists the sentimental family structure and institutional classification systems that are idealized within humanistic models. Scholars of posthuman modernism have traced these ideas elsewhere, though in different ways. For example, Ruben Borg writes on becoming-inorganic—modernist machines, robots, and “cyborgs” that respond to the age of mechanical reproduction. This brand of modernism resonates with the “second industrial revolution,” while the posthuman becomes “the cultural paradigm of the third industrial revolution.”7 Conversely, however, many modernists focus on the organic as a reaction to the increasing mechanization of modernity. As Borg continues: “Eminently modernist is the call for a new understanding of materiality, or the investment in vitalist metaphors as a way of short-circuiting the opposition between technology and organic life.”8 The pestiferous “pack” or assemblage reimagines subjectivity as dispersed, proliferated, and multiplied. The parasite is inhuman but not necessarily machine-like or neatly ordered; it is bodily in the writings of Kafka, Lispector, and West. The parasite feels with its body,

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its cilia; it lives in and around the abject (in West’s case, the bowels of the Trojan Horse). In this sense, parasitic transformation catalyzes change and challenges the humanistic sense of Self. These three writers reveal different facets of modernist parasites, especially given the different contexts in which they lived. Kafka was a Czech-born, Jewish German author writing in the early twentieth century, and his defamiliarizing fiction often reflects his liminal identity. Writing in the late modernist and postwar eras, Lispector was a Ukrainian Jewish author who primarily lived in Brazil, writing in Portuguese, French, and English. Lispector engages the modernist tradition of experimentation, and existentialism strongly impacted her work. Born Chaya Pinkhasovna Lispector in a shtetl near Chechylnyk, Lispector moved to South America with her family to escape persecution and war. She attended law school and worked as a journalist, though she also spent time in Europe and the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. Finally, Nathanael West’s writing was largely unnoticed by the public until after his death, when later critics praised his bleak satires. West—who changed his name from Nathan Weinstein to hide his Jewish identity—is now frequently categorized as a Leftist, and his best-known works include The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts. West was indirectly influenced by Kafka’s writing, especially after his brief time in Europe. For example, West met Max Ernst in 1926, shortly after Ernst had illustrated posthumous publications of Kafka’s work.9 These three writers—all Jewish in a time when antisemitism framed them as a “parasitic” race—represent an important strain of modernism invested in rethinking the parasite in its many varieties. The literary device of parasitic transformation allows them to explore the “lowest of the low” beyond the conventions of early twentieth-century writing. BECOMING-PARASITE: DEPENDENCY AND THE METAMORPHOSIS The Metamorphosis was one of the few works Kafka published during his lifetime. As Stanley Corngold asserts, the text is a “commentator’s nightmare,”10 not simply because of the complexity and ambiguity of Kafka’s original German but also because of its many interpretations. There are several literary, dramatic, and film adaptations of The Metamorphosis, as well as a slew of graphic novels published in various languages.11 What interests me about The Metamorphosis is its literal and figurative attention to the parasite, including Kafka’s challenge to narratives of dependency. I focus on a bioethical reading of Kafka’s story as it navigates questions about what it is like to be the “lowest of the low.” Gregor’s physical transformation into a verminous parasite enacts a second, broader form of parasitism as he comes to rely on his

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others for his well-being. His dependency raises questions about the nature of multiplicity or becoming, especially as Gregor’s transformation undermines restrictive familial and professional structures. The novella begins as Gregor awakens to find that he has been transformed into “einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer,” which Corngold translates as “a monstrous vermin.”12 The phrase is notoriously ambiguous, as it could also be “a gigantic insect” or “huge bug.” As Susan Bernofsky notes, the term has a complex etymology: “Both the adjective ungeheuer (meaning ‘monstrous’ or ‘huge’) and the noun Ungeziefer are negations—virtual nonentities—prefixed by un. Ungeziefer comes from the Middle High German ungezibere, a negation of the Old High German zebar (related to the Old English ti’ber), meaning ‘sacrifice’ or ‘sacrificial animal.’ An ungezibere, then, is an unclean animal unfit for sacrifice, and Ungeziefer describes the class of nasty creepy-crawly things.”13 Kafka’s Ungeziefer or “vermin” evokes many meanings without necessarily providing a concrete image of Gregor. The book physically describes Gregor later, though: he has an armored plate, many legs, and a vaulted “brown belly.”14 The vermin is insect-like, but the initial description of the Ungeziefer makes it difficult to assert that Gregor is a clearly defined species. “Vermin” is an effective translation because it is indefinite. The term may refer to human or nonhuman animals and its meaning is rarely consistent. Given the ambiguous nature of Ungeziefer, the story’s opening is often interpreted as a critique of linguistic stability. For Corngold, the narrative “consists of Kafka’s attempt to come to terms with its beginning [i.e., the metamorphosis],”15 or how the story grapples with the elusive nature of metaphor itself, as “the figure of the nameless vermin remains principally opaque.”16 The novella questions the limits of representation, which conforms to a disruptive modernist tradition that challenges the stability of language and metaphor. In the context of vermin, Walter Sokel suggests that the “German usage applies the term Ungeziefer (vermin) to persons considered low and contemptible [. . . . ] With this metamorphosis, Kafka reverses the original act of metamorphosis carried out by thought when it forms metaphor; for metaphor is always ‘metamorphosis.’”17 Sokel points to the transformation of the individual through metaphor; he is less interested in the ambiguous species status of Gregor than the ways “vermin” or Ungeziefer is applied to humans. While Sokel and Corngold are ultimately more concerned with the psycho-linguistic elements of Kafka, their readings foreground how humans can become so-called vermin. There are at least two meanings at work simultaneously, as Ungeziefer represents nonhuman animals and “persons considered low and contemptible.” The etymology of “vermin” also illustrates the connection between ziefer and zebar (or ti’ber), the latter of which is a figure in ritual sacrifice.

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Historically, what can serve as a suitable “sacrifice” in rituals establishes a hierarchy of human/inhuman life—between what Giorgio Agamben calls bios and zoë. These terms distinguish between “political” life and “animal” life. With the rising interest in biopolitics in recent years, The Metamorphosis has taken on renewed significance, as Gregor arguably loses his political identity through his transformation. Agamben uses the term homo sacer to refer this type of figure, which is a Classical concept for one who is unfit for sacrifice. The homo sacer is an individual deprived of rights who may no longer participate in rituals. The Ungeziefer and homo sacer are “nonentities,” neither political humans nor animals, embodying a way of living that Agamben calls bare life: “[I]n Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusions found the city of men.”18 Agamben undercuts the Aristotelean distinction between “natural,” biological animals (zoë) and “political” animals (bios) by describing bare life as a politicized form of “natural life” that emerges in relation to the sovereign. Bare life is “life exposed to death,”19 a biopolitical framework that deprivileges how life is lived or the quality of life. As a verminous creature, Gregor exists between categories. As I show, this difficulty in “pinning down” the vermin in The Metamorphosis also raises bioethical questions (in addition to biopolitical ones) about the moral status of the “lowest of the low.” The ambiguous status of Gregor makes Kafka’s story all the more complex, as he does not neatly fit into categories such as “human” or “nonhuman.” For example, Gregor’s human consciousness remains, though it arguably shifts as he continues to transform. At other points, Kafka describes him as monstrous. For example, after Gregor scares three lodgers who had been renting from the family, his sister Grete remarks that she will “not pronounce the name of my brother in front of this monster [Untier].”20 Grete dissociates Gregor-as-vermin from her brother, and she uses the term Untier. This term means “beast” or “monster,” and it is formed by adding the prefix “un-” to the word for “animal” [Tier]. Like Ungeziefer, the term Untier places Gregor outside “human” and “animal”; he is an “un-animal,” a negated, “non-being” whose identity shifts over time. Gregor’s metamorphosis also impacts the social reality around him, as his transformation spurs a variety of changes. In this sense, the figure of the vermin or parasite might represent a paradoxical sense of liberty, as the verminous Gregor functions as a social actor (though his degree of agency or autonomy is certainly limited). One of Braidotti’s major criticisms against Agamben is his tendency to stigmatize the nonhuman world. Agamben often elides the generative potential of zoë, the notion of becoming that is so central to Deleuze and Guattari.21 Gregor’s experience of bare life shapes the narrative and catalyzes change, both within himself and through others. Gregor finds pleasure in his “vermin” body during various brief moments in the story,

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as he clings to the ceiling and hangs upside down. Grete flourishes at the end of the story, though at the expense of her brother.22 The mother and father also change as they consider their new prospects at the novel’s end, and Gregor is arguably freed from his responsibilities to his work and family. This is not to suggest Gregor is treated well, especially when considering the story as a whole. Rather, it is important to recognize that “animal life” or dependency have value at different points within the narrative. At the story’s opening, Gregor is primarily concerned with economic production as a source of value, though this changes over time. He supports his family as a traveling salesman, and, while he dislikes his work, he does it to pay off his family’s debts. Despite this, Gregor is “proud that he had been able to provide such a life in so nice an apartment for his parents and his sister.”23 Gregor is the primary earner in his household; his father and mother are retired, and his sister—an aspiring violinist—is still a student. He believes that providing and caring for others is a mark of dignity, though the truth of such a sentiment is tested by the narrative’s end. Kafka challenges the idea that dignity should be tied to providers alone, and that the model of “independent” producers and “dependent” consumers becomes limiting. For example, early in the narrative Gregor suggests that “staying in bed” makes one “useless [unnütz]”24 And, as his transformation continues, he feels a deep shame about his inability to support his family: “Whenever the conversation turned to the necessity of earning money, Gregor would let go of the door and throw himself down on the cool leather sofa which stood beside it, for he felt hot with shame and grief.”25 Gregor’s alienation stands out in these scenes, yet Kafka remains ambiguous about how readers are to interpret the text. The Metamorphosis is not just an allegory for the alienation of modern capitalism, as Kafka leaves the text “open” and resists a totalizing interpretation. As Walter Benjamin notes, Kafka “could understand things only in the form of a gestus, and the gestus which he did not understand constitutes the cloudy part of the parables. Kafka’s writings [Dichtung] emanate from it.”26 Here, gestus is a “gesture,” a manner of carrying oneself (literally, carrying the body); Dichtung is “writing,” but also poetics or creativity. Kafka’s writing is permeated with the “gesture” or sense of undecidability or unfinishedness (in the case of The Trial and The Castle, this is much more literal). This idea is also central to Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Kafka’s writing is not a “major” literature, as his work resists categorization within the literary “institution.” As Réda Bensmaïa writes, this is because Kafka avoided creating an art “to ‘express’ (a meaning), to ‘represent’ (a thing, a being), or to ‘imitate’ (a nature).”27 The difficulty in describing the vermin in The Metamorphosis is indicative of Kafka’s writing more broadly. Building on the work of Todorov and Deleuze and Guattari, Naama Harel notes that this “anti-metaphorical” or “anti-allegorical” approach allows “the

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animalized figure to break through the threshold.”28 In other words, it is difficult to reduce “the Animal” to a mere symbol for something human (i.e., a singular reading as allegory) given the wide variety of interpretations. For Deleuze and Guattari, “we believe only in a Kafka politics that is neither imaginary nor symbolic [. . .] We believe only in a Kafka experimentation that is without interpretation or significance and rests only on tests of experience.”29 The Metamorphosis emphasizes the process of transformation, a movement between levels of “intensities,” an attempted escape from his present condition. This view focuses less on individualism than Gregor as part of a wider network of relationships—linguistic, conceptual, social—that are deeply interconnected. As the novella progresses, the structured systems of the family and his work become increasingly absurd in their attempts to impose order on the verminous Gregor. The professional world in which Gregor works has little tolerance for those who cannot or will not work, especially in the context of sickness or disability: “What if he were to say he was sick? But that would be extremely embarrassing and suspicious because during his five years with the firm Gregor had not been sick even once. The boss would be sure to come with the health insurance doctor [dem Krankenkassenarzt], blame his parents for their lazy son, and cut off all excuses by quoting the health insurance doctor, for whom the world consisted of people who were completely healthy but afraid to work.”30 It seems ridiculous that Gregor hesitates to call in sick, as he has undergone a significant physical change. However, the social drive toward production (including a general skepticism toward those who do not work) significantly influences the social world described in the book. The idea that, for the health insurance doctor, the world consists of people who are “afraid to work” indicates how capitalism and ableism are so deeply intertwined. Gregor’s anxieties also shape this critique: “Why was only Gregor condemned to work for a firm where at the slightest omission they immediately suspected the worst? Were all employees louts without exception, wasn’t there a single loyal, dedicated worker among them who, when he had not fully utilized a few hours of the morning for the firm, was driven half-mad by pangs of conscience and was actually unable to get out of bed?”31 Gregor initially appears to be the single “loyal, dedicated worker,” as he does have “pangs of conscience” as he is “unable to get out of bed.” But his loyalty to work no longer matters as he transforms, neither to his employers (who now ostracize him) nor to himself as he changes. In shifting from a purely allegorical interpretation of The Metamorphosis to the process of transformation, readers must reimagine concepts such as independence and relationality, production and consumption. Kafka resists the one-to-one correlation of allegory or mythology; the emergent systems or “assemblages” that form through becoming require a different type of

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interpretation or worldview that instead addresses multiplicities of identity. In this context, Kafka’s writings allow readers to consider how ethics and politics might be imagined outside of liberalist notions of “being” or independence. If Gregor is not viewed as a single being but instead through the notion of becoming, there are a range of possible readings. For Braidotti, the ethics of becoming shifts “from unitary to nomadic subjectivity, thus running against the grain of high humanism and its contemporary variations. This view rejects individualism, but also asserts an equally strong distance from relativism or nihilistic defeatism. It promotes an ethical bond of an altogether different sort from the self-interests of an individual subject, as defined along the canonical lines of classical Humanism. A posthuman ethics for a non-unitary subject proposes an enlarged sense of inter‑connection between self and others.”32 Dependency (or interdependency) takes on a greater significance in systems and stories that focus on becoming, on transformation and relationality, more so than the stable notion of the Self. In other words, the style of The Metamorphosis—the opaque “vermin,” the story of transformation, its resistance to anthropocentric allegory—enables readings that focus on shifting relationships and identities. As a parasite or vermin, Gregor depends on those around him; he cannot “produce” or work as a salesman, and the conceptual category of vermin is also relational or dependent (in the sense that it is defined through alterity). For Amelia DeFalco, imaginative literature is especially useful for considering ethical models based on vulnerability and interconnectedness.33 In the context of Gregor, he goes from caregiver/provider to caree in an extreme way, as he is not simply unable to work and physically altered, but he is also in a liminal state between human/inhuman. As DeFalco writes, literature often exposes how “care relations can be at once positive and negative, progressive and regressive.”34 The contextual focus of literary studies has much to provide the complicated dynamics of care—the experience of the caregiver, the caree, and their reliance on one another. For Eva Feder Kittay, for example, most ethical systems overlook the ways “dignity is coupled with the capacity for autonomy. A person’s well‐being or welfare is usually a prerequisite to autonomy, but when individuals find themselves dependent on others (as many people with disabilities do) for self‐care, economic security, and safety, the dignity which comes with autonomy appears threatened.”35 Kittay is most often associated with the ethics of care (or “care ethics”), but here she illustrates the limitations of liberal humanistic models that always consider the subject as an independent, agential Self. Similar to Braidotti’s critique of humanism, DeFalco and Kittay show the value of analyzing inter-connectedness as a starting point. Gregor’s verminous identity, his transforming Self or “nomadic subjectivity,” reveals how quickly individuals can become dependent on others and a potential social consequence: dehumanization.

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Gregor’s progressive and ambiguous physical transformation underscores the identity of non-being. Jay Geller, an expert in Jewish studies, describes this “taxonomic undecidability” as a type of representation that seeks to transcend taxonomic reduction (animal, racial, or otherwise). Furthermore, as David Herman points out, Kafka was adamant in his letters to his early editors that there be no image of a beetle or cockroach on the book’s cover when it was published, as this would implicitly suggest a specific species to readers.36 Kafka writes: “It occurred to me that [the artist] might want to draw the insect itself. Please, not that—anything but that! [. . .] The insect cannot be drawn here. It cannot even be shown in the distance.”37 Such a firm commitment to keeping the verminous Gregor unidentifiable underscores Kafka’s concern with the process of transformation and the relationships with others rather than any specific animal morphology. Kafka’s ambiguous bodily descriptions shift focus from the purely physical to the biosocial. As Corngold suggests, “the concept of vermin is not a natural thing, it has no predictable visual identity, it is not really a thing: ‘vermin’ is a shifting social construction.”38 While such a definition applies to nonhuman animals, as a polysemic shifter—a term that relies on the context of utterance39—the word “vermin” can also apply to human relationships. Gregor’s transformation changes how others understand him, especially when his family concludes that he can no longer communicate with them and will not get “better.” Ethics and dependence are linked to language as Gregor loses his ability to communicate verbally. At the start of the story, for example, Gregor’s voice takes on an “animal-like” quality: “Gregor was surprised to hear his own voice answering, unmistakably his own voice, true, but in which, as if from below, an insistent distressed chirping intruded, which left the clarity of his words intact only for a moment really, before so badly garbling them as they carried that no one could be sure if he had heard right.”40 At another point, his boss suggests that Gregor’s speech is the “voice of an animal.”41 Language is, historically, a boundary for entry into the moral community, and the association between Gregor’s voice and the “voice of an animal” is more than just a description—it is a value judgement. If Gregor speaks with the “voice of an animal,” he is increasingly distanced from the humanistic ideals of rational communication and, subsequently, moral consideration. However, Gregor can understand those around him and communicate through body language and other methods. He moves under the bed when his sister enters the room to communicate that he understands his appearance frightens her. Gregor positions his food around the room to show his sister what he likes and dislikes, and he also covers the portrait of a woman that the others try to remove from the room to communicate that he wants it to stay. Kafka suggests that, although Gregor’s voice may be that of an “animal,” he can still comprehend others. In reality, others are unwilling to accept that he

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can continue to communicate. Near the end of the story, Grete concludes: “If he could understand us [. . .] then maybe we could come to an agreement with him. But the way things are—.”42 Readers know Gregor can hear her at this point in the narrative. Still, his ethical status diminishes by the end of the story, and the family no longer recognizes his communication, nor does he “provide” for them. As Gregor grows more dependent on others, they see him as less-than-human. As Deleuze and Guattari note, Gregor’s love for the vibrations or “movements” that draw him from the room (i.e., the music from Grete’s violin) are part of the broader transformation: “In the becoming-insect, it is a mournful whining that carries along the voice and blurs the resonance of words.”43 Gregor’s language transcends human language in some ways, yet this is also what leads others to sever their relationships with him. The dichotomy between human and nonhuman communication blurs in these moments, challenging the very definition of language. The descriptions of Gregor as chronically ill or disabled also contextualize the bioethical debates aroused throughout The Metamorphosis. As his sister begins to care for him, he takes notice of the way she treats him differently: “But, as if she felt sorry for her behavior, she immediately opened the door again and came in on tiptoe, as if she were visiting someone seriously ill or perhaps even a stranger.”44 Kafka links Gregor’s condition with that of the invalid (Schwerkranken or “someone seriously ill”), and, interestingly, Grete shows her awareness that her actions will affect Gregor’s impression of himself. The family discusses “how they should cope” for several days after the metamorphosis.45 Their language revolves around what disability theorists refer to as the “curative imaginary,” or the idea that Gregor’s value is rooted in the belief that he will return to “normalcy”—to a stable state of being. The family cannot accept Gregor as he is but hopes to return him to some previous state: “[D]oesn’t it look as if by removing his furniture we were showing him that we have given up all hope of his getting better and are leaving him to his own devices without any consideration?”46 Conversations about Gregor revolve around the “ideology of cure,” the insistence on able-bodiedness (and, in this case, anthropomorphic bodies) over disability and deformity.47 Gregor’s family views him as a burden, as something to be “fixed.” Furthermore, Grete’s role as Gregor’s de facto caregiver illustrates the gendering of caretaking and receiving care. On the one hand, the family must care for Gregor after his body transforms. On the other hand, however, they also struggle to accommodate him. For example, the narrator notes that “at least two members of the family were always home, since no one probably wanted to stay home alone and it was impossible to leave the apartment completely empty.”48 His sister “had to do the cooking too” after the family dismisses the maid, and later the sister cleans and rearranges the room to make Gregor more comfortable.49 Near the end, the family is so “overworked and

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exhausted” by other jobs that they have no time to “worry about Gregor any more than was absolutely necessary.”50 As Kittay notes, “dependency labor has never occupied a clear place in our economic order and paid labor competes with a vast unpaid workforce.”51 Historically, women have occupied the role of caregivers, yet such work is rarely associated with independence or production. Grete, the youngest sibling, performs her duty to Gregor out of necessity. She is not praised for her work, nor is it seen as particularly valuable.52 The family tolerates Gregor and his dependency for a time, but, ultimately, they see him as a terrible burden—one reason Gregor starves himself at the end of the narrative. Kittay emphasizes the gendered aspects of caregiving more broadly, which is illustrated by Grete’s role as the primary caregiver in the story. But Kittay also suggests a more pervasive problem with how Western society treats dependency within the liberal humanistic tradition: “[O]nce we accept dependency as a normal feature of a human life, all caring services that arise from inevitable dependencies including, but beyond medical needs, have no less a claim on the social sharing of burdens.”53 For Kittay, caregiving is a primary good because all humans are interconnected. They will be dependent, whether in infancy, disability, or old age. In Kafka’s novella, this is extended to the vermin as well, to the most vulnerable, wholly marginalized thing within society. Ultimately, Kafka’s narrative ends bleakly. The family ceases to care for Gregor beyond absolute necessity, and Grete insists, “We’ve done everything humanly possible to take care of it and to put up with it; I don’t think anyone can blame us in the least.” By the end of the story, she concludes that “If it were Gregor, he would have realized long ago that it isn’t possible for human beings to live with such a creature.”54 Noticeably, Grete begins to use the pronoun “it” (or es in German) at the end of the narrative as Gregor is increasingly distanced from his “human” Self. In this sense, the family restricts or overlooks Gregor’s immanent, transforming identity. For Grete, because Gregor’s body and communication change and he becomes entirely dependent on others, he no longer deserves to live. Kafka presents a complex but somewhat pessimistic representation of transformation and dependency in this way. The narrative’s tone is essential: Kafka does not praise the family’s treatment of Gregor at the end, nor is his suicide necessarily an “honorable” act. Instead, Kafka primarily focuses on Gregor’s perspective, including his intense frustration, shame, and anger. Kafka asks readers to imagine the “lowest of the low” and to see how the liberal humanistic tradition fails to account for the multiplicity of identity. The parasitic transformation in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis laid the groundwork for Lispector and West, both of whom build on the figure of the parasite to complicate conceptualizations of dependent subjectivity. While Kafka’s narrative ends with the demise of its central character, Lispector’s

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The Passion According to G. H. suggests that the “parasite” or the “lowest of the low” is the radical antithesis of the masculine, independent sense of Self. The Passion is an aesthetic and philosophical experiment in which the unnamed central character seeks to undergo a transformation, to lose her “human constitution,” and it is through the figure of the cockroach that she does so. ANONYMOUS MATTER, COCKROACHES: LISPECTOR AND G. H. In The Passion According to G. H., Lispector reflects on “impure” creatures in society, from Biblical stories to the contemporary revulsion often harbored toward cockroaches, bed bugs, and other pests and parasites. While Lispector focuses less on caregiving and more on mystical experience in her writing, parasitic transformation is a literary technique she uses to advance a theory of becoming-parasite. The Passion is described by its narrator as a type of literary “reproduction” and not “expression,” and she makes frequent allusions to modernism to imply that the novel is a reflection on aesthetic creativity as well as a philosophical investigation. Hélène Cixous and Benjamin Moser have documented the connection between Kafka and Lispector in the context of experimental writing and Jewish identity. But few critics have yet to discuss the thematic and theoretical relationships between Lispector’s and Kafka’s work more fully: parasitic transformation is at the core of these authors’ most iconic works. I suggest that throughout The Passion the narrator’s journey for mystical experience is an attempt to radicalize parasitism. Instead of being associated with death and alienation (as in Kafka’s writing), the parasite becomes life-giving. Put differently, while in The Metamorphosis Gregor is ultimately killed, in The Passion the vermin transforms the narrator into the “anonymous matter” that constitutes the universe. The Passion According to G. H. was published in 1964 as A paixão segundo G. H., and it quickly gained popularity in Brazil. Ronald Sousa’s English translation appeared in 1988, around the same time it was included in the Arquivos Collection (a UNESCO series) as one of the most significant Latin American novels of all time. In 1989, Cixous published Reading with Clarice Lispector, which framed the novel as an exemplar of écriture féminine,55 and more recently, Moser’s Why This World (2009) has revived interest in Lispector in the United States. Marta Peixoto’s Passionate Fictions (1994) was the first collection of critical essays on Lispector in English, though The Passion According to G. H. is only briefly mentioned throughout this critical collection.

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While Lispector is not typically considered part of the Modernismo movement that flourished in the literary scene in Brazil in the early twentieth century, her work is frequently included among “canonical” Latin American writers of the era, such as Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Júlia Lopes de Almeida, and João Guimarães Rosa. For Saulo Gouveia, Lispector’s inclusion in the canon is largely based on her technical innovation—a standard that is sometimes problematically linked to U.S. and European conventions.56 Lispector is frequently compared to Woolf and Joyce, though Lispector’s stream-of-consciousness style and her focus on interiority had manifested in her early works, such as Near to the Wild Heart, before she claimed to have ever read these modernists.57 In short, Lispector shares similarities with Anglo-European modernists, but not all of her work is indebted to U.S. or European influences.58 The Passion follows a figure known only as G. H. as she cleans the room left unoccupied by her recently departed maid. When G. H. enters the maid’s room, she discovers a black charcoal sketch that outlines a man, woman, and dog. The maid, named Janair, must have hated her, she now realizes, as the sketch serves as a disturbing, enigmatic castigation. It is at this point that G. H. notices a seemingly ancient cockroach emerging from the wardrobe in the room. She is at first terrified, and she is overwhelmed with the desire to kill the creature. However, in slamming the door on the cockroach she only manages to sever the animal into two parts without killing it. She develops a fascination with the dying animal, and the room transforms into a desert landscape. (Indeed, a majority of the novel is a surreal meditation on the cockroach—a section that spans over one hundred pages.) At the end of the story, she puts the oozing matter from the cockroach’s entrails in her mouth, and in doing so G. H. transcends the localized nature of her human body through a mystical transformation. The story is composed of short chapters and fragments, interspersed with philosophical aphorisms. The narrator sometimes refers to herself in the third person as “G. H.” or in the first person as “I,” and she frequently beckons to the reader as a lover, asking them to hold her hand; however, readers are provided few details about her life. The novel suggests that she was raised in poverty but now lives as a well-to-do resident in a penthouse in Rio de Janeiro. She is unmarried and without children, and she likely had an abortion at one point in her life, though it is difficult to confirm such statements given the dreamlike quality of the text. Many passages in the story parallel the desert in Camus’s “L’Hôte” (which may be translated as either “The Guest” or “The Host”) and the vermin in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and there are direct allusions to T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The title of the novel may reference either the

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Passion of Christ or, as Sousa points out, “passion” may also be translated as “love” or “infatuation.” The Passion According to G. H. revolves around the central transformation of the writer, from her initial revulsion of “impure” animals to her embrace of them. Early in the narrative G. H. performs a sort of mystical meditation, and the story begins by recounting the experience she hopes to acquire again by the end of the text: “Yesterday, however, I lost my human constitution for hours and hours.”59 She dreams of having “infinite flesh,”60 suggesting that her reduction to a human body, to one identity, is cause for her unhappiness. The existential themes and tone of her writing can be gleaned from such passages, when we learn that G. H. resists the fatalistic, essentialist assertion that she is a complete individual, that the boundaries of her being are clearly delimited: “My question, if I had one, wasn’t ‘what am I?’ but rather ‘among whom am I?’”61 Here, G. H. emphasizes intersubjectivity, or the relational contexts in which her sense of Self develops, by focusing on those among whom she lives rather than any essential identity. Additionally, her drive toward “infinite flesh” is part of G. H.’s parasitic transformation, a change that is at once terrifying and enlightening: “That terror will be my responsibility until the metamorphosis is complete and the terror is transformed into clarity.”62 G. H. strives to break free of the social bonds that relegate her to a hapless existence without direction, and such philosophical investigations situate the narrative within a radical critique and active revolt: unlike Gregor, whose metamorphosis is inexplicable, G. H. enacts the metamorphosis. Lispector writes about cockroaches in other works, such as “A quinta história” [“The Fifth Story”], but there are some notable distinctions between these representations. “The Fifth Story” was originally published in the 1964 collection A legião estrangiera [The Foreign Legion], and it begins with the narrator’s assertion that its alternative title might be “How to Kill Cockroaches.” It is a series of narratives (and in one case, a recipe list) about how to attract, kill, poison, and even seduce cockroaches, moving from various perspectives until readers reach the titular “fifth story,” which ends abruptly. As Nádia Battella Gotlib writes, this process of “lur[ing] in order to kill, transfigure or transform” is reflected in Lispector’s treatment of the cockroaches as well as in the reader. In this sense, “The Fifth Story” conflates the two.63 The luring and seducing in the story reflect what the writer herself is trying to do to readers, who are figuratively ensnared and transformed. In “The Fifth Story,” Lispector’s meta-fictive approach represents the dual process of writing and reading, and the cockroach becomes an important signal for what she characterizes as the writer’s desperate attempts to transfix their audience. Alternatively, The Passion According to G. H. rethinks the vermin as a desirable way of existing in the world. Unlike a type of “trans-humanism”

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that might seek to transcend embodiment, the becoming-parasite is an attempt to “go beyond” the individual human subjectivity without losing sight of the body. This is why the parasite or cockroach is so important: it is an organism whose “revulsive” nature evokes bodily reactions and whose sensory experience is a major part of its Umwelt (“life-world”). The Passion is more developed than “The Fifth Story,” as G. H. goes from an overwhelming urge to kill the cockroach to wanting to ingest it. There is also a notable difference in tone: “The Fifth Story” is told much like a joke, with a rote formula that lists the five stories (sometimes a few sentences at most). The Passion is dense, meandering, and quite serious—even if ultimately joyous—and it is preceded by a note to readers claiming that we should read “gradually and laboriously,” noting that we must “traverse even the very opposite of what is being approached.” Lispector struggled with many of the ideas in the novel, and the struggle and labor of writing (and reading) is what offers creative insights: “G. H. came to give me, for example, a very difficult pleasure; but it is called pleasure.”64 The cockroach or vermin was a fascination for Lispector throughout her career, but The Passion According to G. H. is her most sustained engagement with the figure. Part of the novel’s experimentation revolves around the notion that G. H. cannot quite communicate to her readers what she is experiencing, as language cannot grasp the mystical experience of the protagonist. For Cixous, the novel epitomizes écriture feminine, as Lispector seeks to get past the embedded language of patriarchal tradition: “The femininity of this text is inscribed in the scenes of risk. It is a text that leaps, lets go, loses, lets things be lost, does not hang on, does not hold back [. . .] The goal is the movement toward, not the arrival.”65 In emphasizing how Lispector is “writing (as) woman,” Cixous also evokes the language of becoming (“the movement toward”). The text is organized in brief chapters, but Cixous rightly notes that the textual flow of the writing—such as the novel’s repetition of the last line of each chapter in the first of the next—creates an impression of unsevered communication. The stream-of-consciousness style further invests in this smooth movement between philosophical ideas: The Passion According to G. H. is endued with the energy alluded to in the title and the body of the text itself condenses G. H’s mentality.66 Yet the experimental technique also facilitates the novel’s posthumanist perspective at the level of content and form. Much as the novel moves “leap by leap” in stream-of-consciousness fashion, Lispector begins to introduce increasingly radical perspectives. As the novel challenges both traditional literary style and content, it also challenges ideological assumptions about the stability of the humanist subject. For example, G. H. does not want to relegate her existence to what she views as a traditionally “human” scope:

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“Only in an unexpected rippling of lines, only in an anomaly in the uninterrupted continuity of my culture, did I for an instant experience life-giving death.”67 In another moment, she argues that “Life is so continuous that we divide it into stages and call one of them death.”68 G. H. aims to decenter human life entirely, to frame human life as part of a continuous process or spectrum rather than at the top of a hierarchy. The anonymity of G. H. is also part of her dissolution of identity. She struggles to communicate these ideas through writing, referencing Eliot at one point: “I’ll have to add: ‘That isn’t it, that isn’t it at all!’”69 The narrative revolves around the inability of its narrator to capture the scope of the “life-giving death” or “infinite flesh” she desires, sometimes echoing Christian imagery and language, but never truly affirming that juxtaposition. G. H.’s vision is that of a “madman’s,” one that is reduced to “humanized life” when she is forced to describe it in detail. William Paulson writes that The Passion rejects “a modern world in which the natural and the cultural have been successfully separated, and in which humans become free by progressively replacing natural givens by a humanly constructed environment.”70 For Paulson, Lispector criticizes the vast differentiations humans make in the modern world, a perspective that is not “postmodern” but “non-modern.”71 Though Paulson primarily suggests that Lispector’s The Passion anticipates many of the scientific and historical discoveries of the twenty-first century,72 he points to the ways in which Lispector’s experimental writing creates an epistemological shift. It is amid this philosophical backdrop that G. H. encounters the cockroach. Again, the parasitic vermin is arguably what separates Lispector’s approach from transhumanism, as the cockroach becomes closely linked with embodiment. While Kafka never specifically names his vermin a cockroach, Lispector’s engagement with Kafka’s writing is evidenced by this figure. For Benjamin Moser, “like Kafka, [Lispector] despaired; but unlike Kafka she eventually, and excruciatingly, stuck out in search of the God that had abandoned her.”73 Moser emphasizes Lispector’s Jewishness—a facet of her identity (along with her real name) that was largely unknown until after her death in 1977. Lispector’s mystical language describes her transformation throughout the story, which may indeed be linked to Jewish mysticism, per Moser. Making a slightly different connection between the two authors, Cixous notes, “the vital message of Clarice and Kafka is that there are two laws [. . .] The question is raised by Clarice and Kafka in different ways. Kafka is on the side of despair, of defeat.”74 The Metamorphosis gestures toward the nonhuman or “inhuman” world of the vermin, outside the familial and professional relations that restrict his very being, but in the end the vermin is punished for exceeding the boundaries of social limits. In Lispector’s writing, there is a greater sense of felicity or liberation. The “life-giving death” and “infinite flesh” toward which G. H. strives and ultimately achieves

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is invested in a joyous embrace of parasitism. The cockroach represents the ultimate “impure” being, but by ingesting it, G. H. achieves the revolutionary experience Gregor never realizes. The cockroach that G. H. encounters represents both a spiritual and crude or bodily reality. The cockroach’s “attentiveness to living, inseparable from its body” is its only sense, according to G. H., which is precisely why she aims to become like it.75 At various moments the narrator is conflated with the cockroach, as the vague writing style obfuscates any differences between the two. For example, G. H. claims, “I, too, was gradually reducing myself to what was irreducible in me, I too had thousands of cilia blinking, and with my cilia I advance, I protozoic, pure protein.”76 In part, the narrator finds the cockroach appealing because of its deep history, its “protozoic” existence. Yet her interest in the creature also resides in its embeddedness in the environment around it, its “thousands of cilia” that act as an army of sensory organs. Furthermore, its “pure protein” body seems uncomplicated to G. H., and for that reason she admires it. She seeks to “become the world,” and it is the “living cockroach” that seems closest to that reality: “The cockroach and I are Hellishly free because our living matter is greater than we are, we are Hellishly free because my own life is so little containable within my body that I can’t even use it. My life is used more by the earth than it is by me, I am so much greater than what I have called ‘me’ that just by having a life in the world I would have myself.”77 This passage emphasizes her posthumanist perspective by challenging the idea that any one individual will achieve more than their “living matter,” which implies that the earth has a greater agency than humans. The cockroach initially represents “impurity” to G. H., yet its primordial history seems to supersede such labels. In discussing her past, G. H. claims that “I felt impure, as the Bible speaks of impure. Why did the Bible spend so much time on the impure, even making a list of impure and forbidden animals? Why, if, like all the rest, they too had been created? And why was the impure forbidden? I had committed the forbidden act of touching something impure.”78 Here, she begins to question the cultural construction of verminousness, particularly as it relates to religion. For G. H., religious purity laws do not fit with the reality of life: “Life had the force of a titanic indifference. A titanic indifference that is interested in moving.”79 The cockroach represents this force because it is, for G. H., the lowest of the low, the ultimate Other. The narrator’s own initial revulsion is rooted in her past life, her upbringing, and a culture that rigidly distinguishes between “pure” and “impure.” The narrative concludes with the reversal of its main character: G. H. is no longer an individual, but rather part of matter of the universe, and—perhaps more importantly—she is no longer disgusted by the cockroach. “I knew that

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the basic error in living was finding cockroaches disgusting,” she claims.80 In this moment, G. H. ingests the insect: I had put the cockroach matter into my mouth; I had finally performed the lowest of all acts. Not the greatest of all acts as I had thought before, not heroism or sainthood. But in the final analysis, the lowest of all acts was what I had always needed [. . .] The world interdepended with me—that was the confidence I had reached: the world interdepended with me, and I am not understanding what I say, never! never again shall I understand what I say. For how will I be able to speak without the words lying for me?81

Lispector’s emphasis on interdependence at the conclusion of the novel portrays the philosophy of becoming. The parasitic transformation, the becoming-cockroach, at the end of The Passion gestures toward a postanthropocentric, generative perspective of zoë—what Braidotti defines as posthuman. In what is perhaps the most important scene in the novel, G. H. reverses expectations: she needs to commit the lowest of all acts, not the highest; she is not a hero, she is not a saint, and she is not independent from but interdependent with her environment. The text ruptures in this moment, as G. H. admits that language (“words lying for me”) merely restricts the very idea she is advancing. While in Kafka’s text Gregor is dehumanized as the story progresses, in Lispector’s writing there is a different sort of dehumanization—a liberation achieved by forgoing the cultural constructions of man/woman, human/nonhuman. Though writing on Lispector’s Stream of Life, a slightly later novel, Jutta Ittner argues that the seemingly religious or mystical moments in Lispector’s writing allow her to move beyond merely objectifying animals, beyond anthropomorphizing. For Ittner “Such a moment of grace only occurs when the perceiver moves towards the field of the ‘Other.’ The result is unpredictable.”82 Lispector is “entering into the animal’s realm where silence and the lack of a common language safeguard the animal’s distance and its distinctness, where the human is fully exposed to the impact of alterity.”83 This form of becoming-animal manifests itself at the end of The Passion According to G. H. as well, particularly the way in which G. H. not only ingests the cockroach, but also because the end of the narrative resists closure by pointing to the limitations of language. Lispector’s experimental style is deeply linked with her philosophical investment in becoming; to enact her version of becoming-animal or becoming-parasite is necessarily to go beyond taxonomic and literary representations. The novel ends with ellipses, just after she suggests that the words would be “lying” for her. This de-humanization is not an objectification of the cockroach; it repels closure, both narratively and

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hermeneutically, and the ellipses at the end of the book reinforce the notion that the narrative resists an ending. In this way, Lispector’s literary investment in parasitism, in the vermin of Kafka’s writing, becomes the foundation for her surreal novel. While it is tempting to suggest that Lispector is merely arguing for the well-worn assertion to “be one with Nature,” her writing has an inherently socio-political element that challenges humanist philosophy and writing. Scholars such as Cixous, Moser, and Paulson have revived interest in Lispector in recent years because of her feminist and Jewish identities. Yet her posthumanist approach also complicates how readers might interpret The Passion. Lispector adapts the Kafkaesque vermin or the trope of parasitic transformation to challenge the tradition of reviling the “lowest of the low.” The novel exposes how the so-called vermin can be reduced to bare life; yet in Lispector’s writing, the parasite is generative. The figure of the parasite is the epitome of interdependency, and the novel closes by moving past anthropocentric assertions about who or what has value in our culture. It is important to note that G. H.’s “de-humanizing” philosophy has been the subject of controversy in the past, which is one reason I aim to contextualize her work with regard to parasitic modernism and Kafka. For Daphne Patei, for example, G. H. “rejects her fellow human beings [. . .] she struggles to find a fixed position for herself via her own idiosyncratic definitions of what life in the world is like.” Patei suggest the novel is problematic because it is a rejection of the “specifically human.”84 Additionally, Carol Armbruster writes that “depersonalizing and dehumanizing oneself in order to enter Otherness, take it on, and then speak for it is nothing short of self-deification.”85 Both perspectives raise important issues about how readers should approach an author such as Lispector, especially considering her racial and class privilege. But posthumanism complicates Lispector’s work as well. To criticize Lispector for abandoning what is “specifically human” about G. H. is ultimately rooted in unspoken assumptions about what exactly makes one “human.” My reading challenges such a view because I show that Lispector’s de-humanization of G. H. is a rejection of the humanist assertion that there is such a thing as the quintessentially “human.” And G. H.’s egoism deserves attention, especially when a person of privilege aims to “enter Otherness.” The novel leaves open the possibly of “entering Otherness,” but as Cixous and others note, it tends to resist closure. Lispector does not fully describe a position of absolute alterity, as the writing arguably “breaks down” at the end of the novel. Rather, her posthumanist approach foregrounds the limits of humanism by performing the “lowest of all acts” as a means of creating a distinct epistemology. While scholars may interpret G. H. as “speaking for” the Other, the notable gaps in the narrative are part of a rhetorical technique that the novel tends to fall back on. For

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example, the novel opens with G. H. telling readers she had lost her “human constitution” days earlier, but it is never described in detail. And the ellipsis at the end of the story indicate that more is occurring than readers are told. By reading Lispector’s writing alongside that of Kafka’s, I show that the literary parasite can be a meaningful site through which aesthetic, political, and philosophical debates are carried out. In this sense, G. H. is not rejecting what is human about herself, as this assertion carries an inherent cultural baggage about what it means to be human. She is instead participating in a much wider theoretical investment in becoming as a revolutionary ideology. Lispector argues that although parasitism has been framed as the “lowest of the low,” as “impure,” it represents a radical subject position through which we might reimagine the Self not as a single, gendered individual, but as part of an affirmative multiplicity. Kafka’s critique of dependency relations in The Metamorphosis informs the ways we as readers might conceptualize the metaphorization of the parasite throughout the novella, an idea that has important implications in the context of caretaking. Lispector is also interested in dependency and interdependency, but in a slightly different way than Kafka. Her novel reworks modernist aesthetics, especially the figure of the vermin or parasite, and it adds to this literary mode or figure a deeper philosophical or epistemic theory of becoming. It is in this vein of thought that I now turn to Nathanael West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell to consider the various ways parasitism undermines common assumptions about modernism more broadly, including the myth of autonomous art. West’s 1931 novel Balso Snell works along a similar trajectory to Lispector’s in that it uses parasitic transformation to elucidate aesthetic and philosophical issues. Furthermore, much like Lispector, West makes the parasite desirous, at one point sanctifying it. Just as Kafka and Lispector use parasitism as a site of contention in their writing, as an idea through which their central ethical, political, and literary concerns are investigated, West similarly puts the parasite at the center of his writing. NATHANAEL WEST: “ANUS MIRABILIS!” AND THE HOLY FLEA Nathanael West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell is a story of “parasitic” art that questions the nature of modernist aesthetics. West uses parasitic transformation to critique the state of literature in the early twentieth century, undergirding the ultimate dissolution of the authorial Self through becoming-parasite. West’s experimental writing is not alone in its portrayal of parasitism in the context of aesthetics, as illustrated throughout this chapter. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis relies on an uncanny transformation into the

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monstrous vermin, or what Chris Danta and others interpret as a subverted fable—an experiment with the “mythic permeability of animal and human identity.”86 Kafka’s animal stories are not ahistorical and universal, as they are sometimes described, but rather indebted to modernist thinking. For example, Kafka read Darwin, Huxley, and Haeckel, and his expressionistic writing parallels the writing and visual art from that era.87 Lispector also became a literary celebrity after writing The Passion. As Ronald Sousa notes, she was “viewed in France [. . .] as an important contemporary philosopher dealing with the relationships between language and human (especially female) subjecthood.”88 The Passion reworks Kafka’s parasitic vermin, yet it is also an experiment with the art of writing. Similarly, West’s Balso Snell juxtaposes parasitism and modernist aesthetics, creating a bizarre novella that Alan Ross aptly refers to as “a sneer in the bathroom mirror at Art—cocksure, contemptuous, well-informed and rejecting openly the object of its search.”89 Unlike the bodily transformation of Gregor in The Metamorphosis, the protagonist of The Dream Life of Balso Snell never becomes a verminous creature literally. Instead, he burrows like a parasite, and his story parallels the fictional allegory of the Holy Flea. In other words, West tells Balso’s story as he burrows through the Trojan Horse, later telling readers the fictional story of a flea who burrows into Christ’s body. Balso Snell begins as the titular poet wanders through a field at some undisclosed time in history. There he stumbles across the Trojan Horse, which is described as a decomposing body rather than a wooden machine. He decides to go into the Horse’s body, and along the way, he discusses the nature of art and creativity with various guides and passersby (all of whom, he later realizes, are writers). Though many critics describe the novel as a juvenile experiment, I argue this novella is an integral part of West’s oeuvre and the broader modernist investment in parasitic transformation.90 Balso Snell is a vital part of West’s collected writings. It was written when the author was twenty-two years old, and he would also return to its themes throughout his career. Critic Victor Comerchero similarly sees value in this early book: “This novel is key to all his later works, for, in a sense, Balso Snell is an unconscious proclamation of influences and interests and, because so unsubtle, it is invaluable in understanding West’s origins, thought, and style.”91 As James Light suggests, Balso Snell corresponds to the Dadaist tendency to undermine art, especially the pretentiousness of “high” literature: “Disgust, anti-intellectualism, and glorification of the physical man are important aspects of Dada, and all are central to Balso Snell.”92 In my interpretation, parasitism is the staging ground of West’s critique, but it is not harmful or undesirable. Instead, the parasite describes the modern writer, and this association between writing and parasitism generates the satirical thrust of the story. By the time West began to write Miss Lonelyhearts and

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Day of the Locust, he had created disillusioned portraits of modern America. But Balso Snell represents the early part of West’s career when parasitism remains desirable, even joyous. Despite West’s signature cynicism—what W. H. Auden would later refer to as “West’s disease”—Balso Snell uses parasitic transformation to create a meaningful critique of art and literature.93 West’s novel also creatively imagines a generative zoë or becoming rooted in the parasitic. In particular, the sanctification of Puce (the flea that lived on Christ’s body) serves as a satire of Christianity while also allegorizing West’s aesthetic experimentation within the novel. The flea is holy, redeeming, and desirous—it frames the parasite not as a burden to be disposed of but as the source of aesthetic generation. And West returns to the “mystical” language used to describe the flea at the novel’s end. Puce is the ultimate “desiring-machine,” and Christ epitomizes the Deleuzean body-withoutorgans as the flea maps his body and records a fictional book titled the Geography of Our Lord and Savior. West’s novel begins by evoking the Trojan Horse of Greek myth, but readers are immediately met with scatological humor that undermines the elevated position of the epic in the canon. He writes, “The mouth was beyond reach, the navel proved a cul-de-sac, and so, forgetting his dignity, he approached the last. O Anus Mirabilis!”94 Balso begins his parasitic journey through the horse’s bowels, where his first meeting is with a man with “Tours” embroidered on his hat. Balso proves himself a poet by quoting his work, but he is ignored. The tour guide—a Dante-esque figure evocative of Virgil—instead simply remarks that Balso hails from the era of the automatic water closet. The opening of the novel cuts down the status of the literary and artistic tradition in these moments; rather than a traditional, picaresque novel or Künstlerroman, Balso’s poetry is ignored and the tour guide ridicules the value of modern art. Not only are the scenarios that Balso finds himself in crude or “lowly,” but West is also making fun of the Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, and all Western art. For David Galloway, this is the start of the satire to follow: “[Balso] begins his journey by entering the anus of the Trojan Horse, but unlike Odysseus, Dante and Ishmael, there is no discovery of ultimate truth awaiting him at the end of his voyage.”95 Balso complains to the tour guide that his world is filled with art, such as Grand Central Station, the Yale Bowl, Holland Tunnel, and Madison Square Garden, all of which are more beautiful than the “atrophied pile” of the Trojan Horse.96 But the guide continues to criticize modern consumer culture. West subverts the genres of the epic, picaresque novel, and Künstlerroman, and he establishes the framework for his critique. Much as the tour guide dismisses Balso’s defense of modern art, West also implicitly asserts that modern art is parasitic.

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Balso refers to a wide variety of modernist authors and artists in working through questions about aesthetics. For example, West quotes Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, and William James, allusions that ground West’s aesthetic theory. He is working out the relationship between art and nature and questions fundamental to parasitism, such as the distributive or collective nature of reality. Here, the figure of the parasite takes on renewed significance because it emphasizes the intertextual nature of literature. For example, by journeying through the “foyer” or lower intestine and reaching a hernia protruding into the Horse’s stomach, Balso questions the poet’s relationship to the Horse through which he is traversing. Balso becomes a “bowel movement” as he worms his way through the innards of the Horse, yet as a poet, he is also indebted to the epic tradition. Put differently, West literalizes the literary tradition, forcing his protagonist to encounter his predecessors in the flesh. To further support this notion, West develops his approach to art and literature in “Through the Hole in the Mundane Millstone,” an advertisement for Balso Snell published by Moss and Kamin in 1931. In this ad, which West wrote anonymously, he claims: “In his use of the violently dissociated, the dehumanized marvelous, the deliberately criminal and imbecilic, he is much like Guillaume Apollinaire, Jarry, Ribemont Dessaignes, Raymond Roussel, and certain of the surrealists.”97 Here, West links himself to the surrealist tradition of the early twentieth century, and he also categorizes his writing as “the dehumanized marvelous,” emphasizing his focus on the nonhuman and the non-humanist bent of his work. “For much too long,” the ad reads, “the whimsical, family-joke (tongue in cheek, hand over heart, good-fellows all) dominated our literature.” West places Balso Snell among anti-art movements, which challenged established literary traditions. He ends the advertisement by suggesting that the book “make[s] Kurt Schwitters’ definition ‘Tout ce’que l’artist crache, c’est l’art’ [‘Anything the artist spits out is art’] seem like an understatement.”98 This supplement to Balso Snell elaborates on the book’s challenge to generic conventions and emphasizes the radical significance of West’s work.99 For example, Deborah Wyrick connects West to the tradition of ready-mades in earlier, unpublished work, especially the influence of Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst.100 In this context, West’s interest in parasitism, including the allegory of the flea and Balso’s tendency to burrow into the Trojan Horse, explains his aesthetics. West’s interest in the bodily— in expectorant and excrement—is part of the novel’s attempt to refigure the “lowest of the low.” West’s somatic, intertextual mapping of the Horse foregrounds his investment in interdependency without seeking to transcend the bodily. Even while West illustrates the cultural processes by which society is organized and established into hierarchies, he challenges the formations of such frameworks. For example, one of the major stories that Balso learns is of the Holy

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Flea, Saint Puce. Balso’s burrowing is allegorized throughout the novella by the figure of Puce, a flea who, as I suggest, “sanctifies” the parasitic mode of becoming. The parasitic burrowing of Balso and the figure of the Holy Flea explode the authorial Self and the myth of autonomous, “natural” art. Puce (the name comes from the French for “flea”) is a fictional character created by West, who is said to have been born in the armpit of Jesus. One passerby, Maloney the Areopagite (who is trying, unsuccessfully, to crucify himself with thumb tacks when Balso meets him), begins by describing the religious affinity for the “lowest” creatures. What follows is an apocryphal story from Saint Benedict Labre: I spend the rest of my time marveling at the love shown by all the great saints for even the lowliest of God’s creatures. Have you ever heard of Benedict Labre? It was he who picked up the vermin that fell out of his hat and placed them piously back into his sleeve. Before calling a laundress, another very holy man removed the vermin from his clothes in order not to drown the jewels of sanctity infesting them. Inspired by these thoughts I have decided to write the biography of saint puce, a great martyred member of the vermin family.101

West writes tongue-in-cheek, but there is a certain ambivalence in such passages contained in the idea that West is similarly questioning whether the human being or writer is any different from the “lowliest of God’s creatures.” The story of the flea informs West’s philosophical ideas as they develop. In some sense, he may mock Saint Benedict’s deference for vermin, but there is a contradictory embrace of such attitudes throughout the novella. West is critical of the hierarchical distinctions that human beings (and artists in particular) make between human and vermin, the high and low. And the scatological humor at the start of this novel is precisely in line with this thinking: Virgil’s Aeneid is turned on its head as Balso enters the Trojan Horse from the rear, and the ensuing narrative is in many ways mirrored by the act of elevating the verminous—the low, the contemptible. West is asking readers to rethink art as a “low” form of expression, including placing the writer on the same level as the vermin. The narrative of Saint Puce illustrates the novella’s investment in becoming, as Christ’s body becomes the world on which the flea derives its spiritual and physical sustenance. The irony of the story is rooted in its reversal of the Eucharistic sacrament: it is not human beings, those who are “made in God’s image,” who devour Christ’s body. Instead, the vermin—the epitome of impurity—gets closest to Christ: Saint Puce was a flea [. . .] a flea who was born, lived, and died, beneath the arm of our Lord. Saint Puce was born from an egg that was laid in the flesh of Christ while as a babe He played on the floor of the stable in Bethlehem [. . .] Saint

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Puce had two mothers: the winged creature that laid the egg, and the God that hatched it in His flesh. Like most of us, he had two fathers: our Father Who art in Heaven, and he who in the cocksureness of our youth we called “pop” [. . .] O happy, happy childhood! Playing in the curled brown silk, sheltered from all harm by Christ’s arm. Eating the sweet flesh of our Savior; drinking His blood; bathing in His sweat; partaking, oh how fully! of His Godhead.102

While the allegory may be read as pure satire on one level, this passage also reframes the relationship between parasite and host, compelling readers to see through the lens of the parasite. Puce is, to a degree, anthropomorphized, but this passage transforms how one might understand the flea as desirous instead of repulsive. Puce “partak[es] fully” in the bodily, which constitutes his entire world. Later we learn that “[Saint Puce] explored and charted every crevasse, ridge, and cavern of Christ’s body. From notes taken during his travels he later wrote his great work, A Geography of Our Lord.”103 Here, the parasite’s lifestyle leads to aesthetic production; the flea becomes an artist at work on the vast topography of the Lord’s body. Balso’s reaction to the story of Puce is curt and dismissive, though the scene is a defining moment in the narrative. Balso at first responds by saying, “Don’t be morbid. Take your eyes off your navel. Take your head from under your armpit. Stop sniffing mortality. Play games. Don’t read so many books. Take cold showers. Eat more meat.”104 He references the story of Saint Puce by imploring Maloney to take “your head from under your armpit,” where Puce was born and lived. Balso lists clichéd advice by providing cynical, practical advice rather than considering the figure who allegorizes his own experience (Puce travels across the body, much as Balso is wandering through the Horse). Furthermore, Balso’s assertion to “Eat more meat” mirrors the consumption of “flesh” that Puce performs. While West is certainly dismissive of Christian mysticism, the story of Puce is the one that, ironically, best parallels that of the poet himself. Shortly after the allegory, Balso Snell pursues a side narrative, but West returns to this mystical Christian imagery at the end of the novella. Balso Snell ends with the sexual climax of its protagonist and a woman he had encountered, Mary, after reading a young man’s journal. There is a clumsy pursuit and seduction, but as readers near the end of the narrative, West returns to the mystical genre seen in the story of St. Puce: “The miracle was made manifest. The Two became One. The One that is all things and yet not one of them: the priest and the god, the immolation, the sacrificial rite, the egg, the altar, the ego, and the alter ego, as well as the father, the child, and the grandfather of the universe, the mystic doctrine, the purification, the syllable ‘Om,’ the path, the master, the witness, the receptacle, the Spirit of School 186, the last ferry that leaves for Weehawken at seven.”105 West

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evokes the allegory of Puce, juxtaposing sex, religion, art, and parasitism. He challenges religion through satire in almost every work he wrote. Here, though, he relies on the genre of religious writing to advance the notions of aesthetic and philosophical parasitism. Within West’s novel, Puce advances a type of joyous parasitism, a desirous flea that revels in the body of its divine host and produces literature. At the novel’s end, Balso’s sexual relationship connects to “the mystic doctrine” described in the passage above. Balso may scoff at Marley the Areopagite for his narrative, telling him not to “read so many books.” Still, readers can recognize the playful irony as they read Balso Snell—a collage of Western literature, from Greek epics to modernism. West’s Balso Snell may initially seem to lack sincerity. This is perhaps one reason the story has remained one of the author’s more obscure literary works; critics see it, at best, as a supplement to West’s more popular novels. In focusing on parasitism, however, I suggest that Balso Snell is not incomplete or insincere. Instead, West uses the “mystical” genre to refigure the “lowest of the low.” The flea becomes holy in this novella, the scatological supersedes the highbrow, and desire becomes paramount. Balso’s body becomes a multiplicity in the final lines: “An army moved in his body, an eager army of hurrying sensations.”106 Much like The Passion According to G. H., West’s novella ends with this “mystical” transformation that recalls the allegorical parasite at the start of the book. Puce is perhaps the holiest figure in the book, and Balso questions the “sanctity” of artists like Picasso, Cezanne, Shakespeare, and Virgil. Transformation manifests in three different ways for Kafka, Lispector, and West, but each nevertheless imagines the parasite as a radical subject position. For Kafka, the parasite critiques dependency, foregrounding the social parasite through the main character’s metamorphosis into a literal verminous creature. While Gregor cannot survive within the limitations of his society, Lispector revolutionizes this idea by exploring the truly radical nature of the parasite. The verminous cockroach becomes the most desired figure, and G. H. advances her philosophical discourse by consuming its essence. The parasite is part of a non-hierarchical reality that challenges the human/nonhuman divide. West similarly privileges the “lowest of the low” to advance his Dada-esque critique of the art world and consumer culture. Balso Snell revolves around the parasite, whether through the burrowing of the protagonist, the story of Saint Puce, or the citational, intertextual nature of writing. In these moments, West gestures toward multiplicity, as Puce maps the body of Christ as the ultimate body-without-organs, or at the novel’s close when Balso’s body comes alive as an “army” of sensations. As Balso’s body becomes an “army,” the poet’s identity dissolves and is replaced by “the miracle made manifest,” “the One,” “the syllable ‘Om,’” and the “mystic doctrine.”107

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Parasitic transformation exposes the biosocial metaphor of parasitism, a radical concept that links to various modernists. The parasite is often literalized in the work of Kafka, Lispector, and West, yet it also has an important connection to social concepts such as dependency. In Lispector’s and West’s work in particular, they show how transcending the “human” does not necessarily require one to “get past” the body; instead, they embrace the “low” and bodily vermin as part of an embodied collective subjectivity. In the next chapter, I consider more fully the notion of social parasitism in the early twentieth century, focusing on women writers. I analyze the use of the term “parasite” in the work of Mina Loy and Nella Larsen. While Loy suggests that women should avoid being “parasites” on men by transforming the way we understand marriage and sexual relations, she represents parasites positively in her poetry. Hence, she is ambivalent about the role of social parasitism in the early twentieth century, using it both to describe “unfit” women and to promote parasitism as a new form of (feminine) interdependency. Next, I turn to Larsen’s short story “Freedom,” which is told from the perspective of a male misogynist who refers to his former lover as a “parasite.” Larsen engages issues of health (especially in the context of Black femininity) while also addressing the problematic use of the label “parasite” to describe dependency. For Larsen, those who use the term “parasite” often project their fears and failures on others. NOTES 1. Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (New York: Bantam, 1972), 3. 2. Détournement is literally translated as “rerouting” or “high jacking.” Here, I borrow from the Situationist International definition: “[t]he integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist use of those means. In a more elementary sense, détournement within the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method which reveals the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres.” See Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, “A User’s Guide to Détournement,” In Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), n. p. 3. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Penguin, 2009), 2. 4. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 193. 5. Ibid., 132. 6. This is one reason Deleuze and Guattari title their chapter on becoming-animal in A Thousand Plateaus “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, BecomingImperceptible . . . ,” as it alludes to the period [ca. 1730] in which vampires—quintessential parasites—supposedly became popular in storytelling. See Gilles Deleuze

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and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 237. “We believe in a very special becomings-animal traversing human beings and sweeping them away, affecting the animal no less than the human.” Becoming with an “-ing” is important for Deleuze and Guattari as it articulates the concept of moving from the major (“molar,” constant) to the minor (“molecular,” variable). This movement, this fluidity, is quite appealing to them, as it is necessarily radical; it goes against the grain. If one is variable, fluid, molecular, then they do not neatly fit into any structure or series, such as the State or scientific classification. 7. Ruben Borg, “Modernism and the Posthuman,” Genealogy of the Posthuman, Nov. 2017, https:​//​criticalposthumanism​.net​/literary​-modernism​-and​-the​-posthuman​ -2​/. 8. Ibid. 9. Ernst did illustrations for some of Kafka’s works. See https:​//​www​.washingtonpost​ .com​/express​/wp​/2008​/07​/02​/surrealist​_collage​_max​_ernst​_the​_illustr​/​?noredirect​ =on​&utm​_term​=​.c0512a85c40d. Accessed 9 July 2019. For more on West’s relationship with European artists and poets, the short story “The Imposter,” written in the early 1930s but not published until 1997 in the New Yorker, offers insights into West’s attitudes toward his own development as a young author visiting Europe. See Cerasulo, “The Dream Life,” for more details on how West’s Balso Snell might also be read through the lens of authorial anxiety. 10. Qtd. in David Herman, Narratology Beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 127. 11. See for example Berkoloff’s Meditations on Metamorphosis, which documents various actors, directors, and so forth as they work to adapt The Metamorphosis for the stage. Also see Peter Kuper’s graphic novel adaption of The Metamorphosis; Crumb and Markowitz’s Metamorphosis; and Sikoryak’s “Good Ol’ Gregor Brown.” 12. Kafka, Metamorphosis, 3. 13. Bernofsky, “On Translating Kafka’s The Metamorphosis,” New Yorker, 14 June 2014, https:​//​www​.newyorker​.com​/books​/page​-turner​/on​-translating​-kafkas​-the​ -metamorphosis. 14. Kafka, Metamorphosis, 3. The original German provides a clearer description of his body, and it therefore slightly less controversial than the initial description of “einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer”: “Er lag auf seinem panzerartig harten Rücken und sah, wenn er den Kopf ein wenig hob, seinen gewölbten, braunen, von bogenförmigen Versteifungen geteilten Bauch, auf dessen Höhe sich die Bettdecke, zum gänzlichen Niedergleiten bereit, kaum noch erhalten konnte. Seine vielen, im Vergleich zu seinem sonstigen Umfang kläglich dünnen Beine flimmerten ihm hilflos vor den Augen.” German passages reference The Metamorphosis: Die Verwandlung (Schocken Books, 1968). 15. Corngold, “Metamorphosis of the Metaphor,” in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, ed. Harold Bloom (Broomall, PA: Chelsea House, 1988), 38. 16. Ibid., 51. 17. Sokel, Franz Kafka (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 19, 22.

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18. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 7. 19. Ibid., 88. 20. Kafka, Metamorphosis, 48. 21. Braidotti, Posthuman, 121. 22. Nina Pelikan Straus, “Transforming Kafka’s Metamorphosis,” Signs 14, no. 3 (1989): 657–58. 23. Ibid., 21. 24. Ibid., 7. In the original German: “‘Nur sich nicht im Bett unnütz aufhalten,’ sagte sich Gregor.” Here unnütz literally means “useless” or “un-useable,” which implicitly suggests that invalidism makes one useless (the term “invalid” in English also carries this connotation, as, for example, soldiers were often “in-valid” to work in the military). 25. Ibid., 27. The translation from German is fairly literal: “Wenn die Rede auf diese Notwendigkeit des Geldverdienens kam, ließ zuerst immer Gregor die Türe los und warf sich auf das neben der Tür befindliche kühle Ledersofa, denn ihm war ganz heiß vor Beschämung und Trauer.” 26. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” in Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, edited and introduced by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 129. 27. Réda Bensmaïa, “Foreword: The Kafka Effect,” in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, translated by Dana Polan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xvii. 28. Naama Harel, Kafka’s Zoopoetics: Beyond the Human-Animal Barrier (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2020), 22. 29. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, translated by Dana Polan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 7. 30. Kafka, Metamorphosis, 5. 31. Ibid., 9. 32. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 49. 33. Amelia DeFalco, Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency, and Canadian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 14. 34. Ibid., 15. 35. Eva F. Kittay, “The Ethics of Care, Dependence, and Disability,” Ratio Juris 24, no. 1 (2011): 50. 36. Herman, Narratology, 127. 37. Ibid., 127. 38. Stanley Corngold, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Vermin,” Literary Research 21, no. 41/42 (2004): 60. 39. See Roman Jakobson’s “Shifters and Verbal Categories,” in On Language, eds. Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 40. Kafka, Metamorphosis, 5. 41. Ibid., 12. 42. Ibid., 49. 43. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 13.

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44. Kafka, Metamorphosis, 22. In the original, “Schwerkranken” (literally a “critically ill person”) is used to refer to serious illness: “Aber als bereue sie ihr Benehmen, öffnete sie die Tür sofort wieder und trat, als sei sie bei einem Schwerkranken oder gar bei einem Fremden, auf den Fußspitzen herein.” 45. Ibid., 24. 46. Ibid., 31. 47. See Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection for more on the “ideology of cure.” Section 1 of this book deals with “the restoration of health” that is so central to discourses on disability, including the violence of eradication: “[A]s a widespread ideology centered on eradication, cure always operates in relationship to violence.” Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 28. 48. Ibid., 24–25. 49. Ibid., 25; 28–29. 50. Ibid., 40. 51. Kittay, Love’s Labor, 238. 52. Grete’s development parallels that of Gregor, thus making her a kind of protagonist. As Gregor physically transforms, Grete blossoms socially. 53. Kittay, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (London: Routledge, 1999), 244. 54. Kafka, Metamorphosis, 48; 49. 55. See “The Laugh of the Medusa” by Cixous. L’ecriture feminine literally means “feminine writing,” and it refers to genres of writing that deviate from “masculine” styles of writing (often via experimentation). It does not necessarily refer to writing literally done by women, but instead builds on psychoanalytic theory to theorize modes of inscribing the female Self via language and text. 56. Saulo Gouveia, The Triumph of Brazilian Modernism: The Metanarrative of Emancipation and Counter-Narratives (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 105. 57. For instance, after meeting Lispector in Texas in the 1960s, translator Gregory Rabassa noted that the author “wrote like Virginia Woolf.” See Salamon, Julie, “An Enigmatic Author Who Can Be Addictive,” New York Times, 11 March 2005. The title of this novel was suggested to her by a friend, as it is taken from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. However, Lispector claims to have never read the book, using the title without knowing the reference. See Lispector, “Correspondências—Clarice Lispector,” edited by Teresa de Monteiro. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2002. 58. Nevertheless, European existentialist philosophy permeates Lispector’s work, and many critics use existentialism as a starting point in their interpretations. For example, Judith Rosenberg suggests Lispector has been located in the tradition of Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Camus, and Sartre. Tace Hedrick suggests that critics also cannot ignore Lispector’s “appropriations of European philosophical thought,” many of which include overt references to thinkers such as Sartre.” Hedrick and Rosenberg represent an important debate within Lispector scholarship about the degree to which discussing her influences either elevates her status or merely subordinates her writing to (mostly male) European writers.

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59. Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G. H., trans. Ronald Sousa (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 4. 60. Ibid., 6. 61. Ibid., 20. 62. Ibid., 10. 63. Gotlib, Nádia Battella, “Readers of Clarice, Who Are You?” In Closer to the Wild Heart: Essays on Clarice Lispector, eds. Cláudia Pazos Alonso and Claire Williams (Oxford: Legenda/European Humanities Research Centre, 2002), 192. 64. Lispector, Passion, v. 65. Hélène Cixous, Reading with Clarice Lispector, ed. and trans. Verna Andermatt Conley (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990): 76–77. 66. Ibid., 77. As Cixous writes, “Clarice continually links the human and nonhuman and nonhuman matter and through that matter that fluid circulates. How does fluid circulate? In a certain way, it would be an intimate, internal, and liquid metaphor of the telephone: how is life being communicated? Imagine a telephone that lets fluid pass rather than words.” 67. Lispector, Passion, 7. 68. Ibid., 57. 69. Ibid., 12. 70. William Paulson, “The Invention of a Non-Modern World,” in Closer to the Wild Heart: Essays on Clarice Lispector, ed. C. Pazos Alonso and Claire Williams (Oxford: Legenda/European Humanities research Centre, 2002), 200. 71. Ibid., 208. 72. Though Paulson’s essay pre-dates the popular use of the term “Anthropocene,” his essay on Stenger’s cosmopolitics in Lispector’s work is quite similar to this idea. Paulson is also building on Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, partly to suggest that Lispector’s work is not “post” modern but rather “non” or “anti” modern. It is an example of “modernism” in the sense that it reacts to the “modern” condition of constructing the world around the human (c.f., Linda Hutcheon’s distinction between postmodern/postmodernism in A Poetics of Postmodernism). 73. Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5. 74. Cixous, Reading, 116. 75. Lispector, Passion, 43. 76. Ibid., 53. 77. Ibid., 83; 115. 78. Ibid., 63. 79. Ibid., 120. 80. Ibid., 156. 81. Ibid., 172–73. 82. Jutta Ittner, “Becoming Animal? Zoo Encounters in Rilke, Lispector, and Kronauer,” KulturPoetik 3, no. 1 (2003): 30. 83. Ibid., 31. 84. Daphne Patei, “Clarice Lispector and the Clamor of the Ineffable,” Kentucky Romance Quarterly 27 (1980): 134.

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85. Carol Armbruster, “Hélène-Clarice: Nouvelle Voix.” Contemporary Literature 24, no. 2 (1983): 157. 86. Chris Danta, Animal Fables After Darwin: Literature, Speciesism, and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 154. 87. Marianne DeKoven, “Kafka’s Animal Stories: Modernist Form and Interspecies Narrative,” In Creatural Fictions: Human-Animal Relations in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature (London: Palgrave, 2016), 20. 88. See Lispector, The Passion, vii. 89. See Nathanael West, The Complete Works of Nathanael West, ed. Alan Ross (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971), xii. 90. For Tom Cerasulo, the novel represents West’s personal anxiety toward authorship. See Cerasulo, “The Dream Life of Balso Snell and the Vocation of Nathanael West,” Arizona Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2006). Even West’s mother, Anna Weinstein, remarked that Balso Snell should never have been published, as she argues that “all it says is ‘stink, stink, stink.’” Quoted in Jay Martin, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1984), 222. 91. Victor Comerchero, Nathanael West: The Ironic Prophet (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1964), 51. 92. James Light, Nathanael West: An Interpretive Study (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1961), 53. Similarly for Jonathan Veitch, the novel is “a dadaesque geste at the expense of art [. . .] West undertakes not just a disavowal of high modernism and the idealism of its art-of-art’s-sake aestheticism, but a critique of nothing less than the grand tradition of Western culture upon which it depends.” See Jonathan Veitch, American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 27. 93. See W. H. Auden, “Interlude: West’s Disease,” in The Dyer’s Hand and the Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1962), 241, 245. Auden writes: “All [West’s] main characters suffer from the same spiritual disease which, in honor of the man who devoted his life to studying it, we may call West’s Disease. This is a disease of consciousness which renders it incapable of converting wishes into desires [. . . . ] He may easily come to believe that wishes can come true. This is the first symptom of West’s Disease; the later symptoms are less pleasant, but nobody who has read Nathanael West can say that he wasn’t warned.” 94. West, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, In The Complete Works of Nathanael West, ed. Alan Ross (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971), 3. 95. David D. Galloway, “A Picaresque Apprenticeship: Nathanael West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell and A Cool Million,” in Nathanael West: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Jay Martin (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 33. 96. West, Balso, 6. 97. West, “Through the Hole in the Mundane Millstone,” in Nathanael West: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Jay Martin (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 29. 98. Ibid., 30. 99. Jason Marley, for instance, reads the book as “a means to examine the limits of genre,” as a literary form that not simply relies on but also foregrounds “citation”—its reliance on other literary works as a basis for West’s aesthetics. See Jason R. Marley,

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“Recreating Genre: Structure, Language, and Citation in Nathanael West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell,” Studies in the Novel 46, no. 2 (2014): 160. 100. Deborah Wyrick, “Dadaist Collage Structure and Nathanael West’s Dream Life of Balso Snell,” Studies in the Novel 11, no. 3 (1979): 349–50. 101. West, Balso, 10. 102. Ibid., 11. 103. Ibid., 12. 104. Ibid., 13. 105. Ibid., 61. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid.

Chapter Four

“Parasitism & Prostitution— Or Negation” The Parasite in Modernist Feminism

Social parasitism is often discussed in the context of women during the modernist period, as their independence and equality became central debates amid the burgeoning feminisms of the early twentieth century. Women were commonly characterized as social parasites—individuals who had few options other than depending on others for income, social status, and identity. For example, Edith Wharton writes in House of Mirth (1905) that “Gerty had always been a parasite in the moral order, living on the crumbs of other tables.”1 Dorothy Richardson writes in “The Reality of Feminism” (1917) that women were forced to be “either an industrial pawn or a social parasite.”2 Alternatively, feminists used the term “parasitism” to critique gender constructs in modernity. For example, Mina Loy decries social parasitism in her “Feminist Manifesto” as a metaphor for the limitations of marriage. And in Nella Larsen’s “Freedom,” the unreliable male narrator accuses his former mistress of living parasitically on his income and sapping him of his vitality. In this chapter, I analyze social “parasitism” in the writings of Loy and Larsen because the parasite is a central idea in each of their works. Some women writers used the term “parasite” in passing (as Wharton does in House of Mirth); however, for Loy and Larsen, parasitism informs their understanding of dependency and gender more broadly. For example, the male narrator in Larsen’s short story seeks “freedom” from dependence; therefore, when he calls his mistress a “parasite,” it reflects the story’s central theme. Additionally, “parasite” is polysemic and often evokes eugenics and biofuturity in the modernist period. Part of my analysis in this chapter engages anxieties about reproduction and feminism from two very different writers. By comparing their approaches, I show that parasitism is important within transnational modernism, yet geographical and social particularities also shape it. 109

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In the next section, I analyze Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” and her poem “Parturition” to suggest that her reliance on eugenics and her critique of social parasitism are much more ambivalent than critics have traditionally understood. In her letters and poetry from her time in Florence, Loy discusses eugenics and misogyny. On the one hand, her work initially seems to support eugenic notions of “racial degeneration.” Yet, on the other hand, she also subtly suggests that the Futurist fascination with eugenics is absurd, and that the drive toward independence or individuality is a patriarchal concept inherited from Classical humanism. In the second section, I turn to Larsen’s “Freedom,” which is written from the perspective of a male misogynist. He imagines his mistress as a social “parasite” who “saps” him of his “spiritual vitality.”3 For Larsen, the term “parasite” projects the man’s own failings onto his mistress. Rather than a singular and cohesive discourse, feminism in these authors’ works tends to fluctuate between a privileging of independence and a critical skepticism toward the notion of independent subjecthood. This tenuous construction of feminism helps to explain works such as Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto.” While the manifesto as a genre implies a solid statement of beliefs, the views expressed by Loy are ambivalent—as evidenced in letters to friends and her decision not to publish the piece during her lifetime. While Loy and others may initially decry social parasitism and argue for independent agency, elsewhere they question the patriarchal ideal of an autonomous individual. Similarly, Larsen challenges the idea that women are naturally more dependent than men; instead, these authors destabilize the dichotomy of dependence and independence. Additionally, parasitism connects eugenics and gender identity, as “parasite” is both a biological and social term. Eugenics is a future-oriented ideology—a teleological model aimed at the “perfection” of humans and the extermination of so-called parasites. As such, women were portrayed as having an essential role in “race responsibility” to avoid “degeneration.” To name someone a “parasite” in the context of eugenics, gender, and reproduction was to mark an them for eradication. For example, Margaret Sanger’s advocacy for birth control was politically significant for gender equality. But, her ideology—delineated in works such as The Pivot of Civilization (1922)—was arguably derived from eugenic theories that aimed to limit the number of children produced by “inferior” individuals, or by those deemed parasites on the so-called productive classes.4 In The Pivot of Civilization, “inferior” humans are juxtaposed with boll weevils and other pests as justification for sterilization programs. This is not to downplay the importance of reproductive rights but rather to address the convoluted history of gender and social parasitism within modernism.

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The term “parasite” was particularly fraught in the early twentieth century because the word has a long history as a social concept and renewed meaning given the rise of Darwinism, ecology, and parasitology. By the twentieth century, parasitism simultaneously entailed a set of social relations (as implied by the Greek term parasitos) and biological relations, a conjunction that foregrounds the connections between advances in life sciences and the aesthetic and political aims of the modernist movement. Race science, sexology, and eugenics impacted Loy’s and Larsen’s work in various ways, whether they responded directly to these discourses or they indirectly shaped attitudes toward marriage, miscegenation, and maternity. While this chapter primarily focuses on the parasite as a biosocial concept within modernist feminism, parasitism also offers a valuable heuristic for understanding how scientific, aesthetic, and political discourses intersected more broadly. Given the general derision for parasites, it is important to adopt a nuanced approach that views parasitism more neutrally. In the context of gender, this may involve differentiating categories of belonging and identity, or recognizing the roles of people in their environment or social systems without disregarding their individual, embodied experience. For Michel Serres, the parasite is not a “drain” but a “thermal exciter,” a catalyst that represents neither production nor reproduction but something altogether unique. This is a valuable point of view in that it takes the seemingly undesirable—the dependent, the “inferior”—and reveals that it is a fundamental structure in social systems. In other words, Serres would not necessarily challenge the notion that women are parasites; instead, he would assert that all humans are parasites, and that the pejorative use of “parasite” is a mask—a projection of the fear that one cannot live up to the idealized version of “the Human” inherited from Classical humanism. In an essay titled “Science and the Humanities,” Serres writes about the category confusions that typically lead to oppression: “You are yourself; thou art thou; we cannot be reduced to a gender, nor to a sex, nor to a language, nor to a culture. The confusion between belonging and identity leads to more than logical and formal errors; it leads to moral wrongs.”5 Storytelling and language are so powerful within Serres’s view precisely because of their capacity to shape politics, to create moral rights and wrongs, and to categorize (and un-categorize). A philosophical soulmate to Deleuze, Serres studies interdependency, illustrating how political minorities operate in systems of power and the interrelationship of language and thought.6 Though not commonly described as a feminist thinker, Serres offers ways “to think both women and ‘woman,’” according to Mary Poovey; his poststructural approach provides ways to consider both the materiality of the body and the social construction of gender simultaneously.7 An analysis of parasitism in this sense builds on longstanding feminist scholarship to trace pathways for a better understanding of the complex concept of dependency.

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My analysis of parasitism in the work of feminist modernists does not simply consider surface-level allusions to parasitism but also the underlying issues of dependence and relationality. In The Parasite, Serres shows how a parasite disrupts energy flows within a system and initiates an autopoietic, or self-reorganizational, process. Some parasites appear one-directional (taking without giving), but he writes about the intersubjective, positional/relational reality of the parasite/producer relationship. For Serres, “one is never without the parasite for the parasite is the embodiment of difference and therefore the source of all identity, of all change, of life itself.”8 In this sense, humans are “embedded within an environment, [and they are] an instantiation of a series of information exchanges, transfers of data and feedback mechanisms.”9 The questioning of the autonomous, independent subject is key to understanding dependency within modernist feminism. Rosi Braidotti writes that “feminism is not a humanism,” as previously asserted by others. Writing on posthuman feminism, Braidotti argues the “Man of reason” privileged in many iterations of humanism “is a he,” a “dominant subject [. . .] implicitly assumed to be masculine, white, urbanized, speaking a standard language, heterosexually inscribed in a reproductive unit, and a full citizen of a recognized polity.”10 Loy’s and Larsen’s work, in particular, parallel Braidotti’s critique. Loy criticizes the male-dominated Futurist movement, and Larsen criticizes the male-dominated Harlem Renaissance. Both writers question whether there is a universal human uniting all identities when such a universal human is so often coded as independent and masculine. Furthermore, a wide range of critics and cultural historians have written about modernist feminism and the history of science, eugenics, and bioethics. While in the body of this chapter I will refer to critics who discuss Loy and Larsen directly, writers such as Rita Felski and Eva F. Kittay have laid the groundwork for an analysis of parasitism and dependency within feminism, offering cultural histories and philosophical critiques of independence and equality (respectively). For Felski, “the intersection of femininity and modernity plays itself out differentially across the specifics of sociohistorical context.”11 She argues that feminist writers around the fin de siècle deployed the fluctuating concepts of revolution and evolution to create “their own historical identity.”12 Scientific language saturated discussions of “the Woman Question,” as, for example, anti-feminists skewed Darwinism to suggest domestic life and maternity were the “natural destiny” of women. Alternatively, many feminists resisted such views by arguing that this “natural” perspective was at odds with evolutionary theory’s emphasis on contingency (i.e., the nonteleological or “random” thrust of natural selection).13 Though Felski is careful to note that many women did turn to eugenics or “Social Darwinism” to quell anxieties of racial and national degeneration, a key conclusion of her study is that feminist circles deployed scientific and

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political discourses in the modernist period to emphasize the socio-historical construction of gender. Additionally, Kittay’s work reveals how the negative perception of dependency has led to various forms of oppression. In Love’s Labor, she argues that a feminist approach to the theory of justice must consider the role of “care” and reciprocity. While Felski offers a cultural history of gender, Kittay provides a critique of Western moral philosophy, illustrating the value of feminism in recasting the traditional concepts of equality and independence. Because caretakers (who are often women, historically) do not have “self-originating” and “self-authenticating” qualities (as they ultimately “depend” on those they care for and vice versa), John Rawls and others elide such individuals from their liberalist theories of justice. She argues there is a public responsibility to support caregivers so that they can support others without exhausting their resources. Kittay’s moral theory of dependency builds on the notion of reciprocal offering (doulia). In this sense, equality is not the absence of dependence but rather the recognition that care is a primary good and that all people, whether in infancy, disability, or old age, will depend on others. Given Loy’s and Larsen’s varying critiques of equality and dependency, Kittay’s work shows the promise and the potential limitations of a modernist feminism embedded in Western politics and ethics. Generally, I use “dependency” in this chapter to refer to social or material dependence, which often has an underlying political connotation (e.g., economic independence is closely tied to education and suffrage). However, it is important to note that various types of dependency are interwoven: for example, an infant or child might be financially, physically, legally, and emotionally dependent on a parent, which often makes differentiating between various types of dependency especially complicated. Literature reveals these complex realities and intersections, providing nuanced analysis and commentary sometimes elided in broader political and ethical discourses. MINA LOY: PARASITIC WOMEN Mina Loy first earned a reputation through her association with other authors—such as T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams—and later as a radically experimental poet and artist in her own right.14 Though Loy was associated with Dadaism, Surrealism, Imagism, and other movements, her involvement with Futurism sparked some of the most openly political writing of her career. Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto,” written in 1914 but unpublished until 1982, is a subversion of the Futurist aesthetic—particularly of the movement’s emphasis on masculinity and its latent fascism. The manifesto also draws on parasitism to ground its goals. In

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this work, the parasite represents the limitations of marriage, and Loy argues women are made too dependent on men. While the “Feminist Manifesto” was not widely read until the 1980s, it offers insights into Loy’s critique of social parasitism during the modernist era. A close analysis of letters and other paratextual matter from the same period conveys her ambivalence toward the notion of the autonomous, independent subject, particularly regarding feminism. For example, at the end of this section, I show that in “Parturition” (a poem written the same year as the manifesto), Loy undermines the notion of independent subjectivity through a reflection on pests and parasites. Especially following the publication of Loy’s short prose in recent decades, there has been what Janet Lyon describes as a “Loy boom,”15 a surge in critical work about Loy’s writing as well as her visual art, various inventions, and designs. This boom also includes digital and online resources, such as the “Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde” multimedia project.16 Nevertheless, Jessica Burstein notes in Cold Modernism that Loy is quite difficult to analyze holistically, given her acute awareness of authorial performance. Loy went by “Mina Lloyd,” “Doose,” “Miovanni,” and “Imna Oly,” among other names, and her continual attempts at originality or experimentation often precluded her from being categorized as part of any one group in the modernist period.17 When analyzing her conceptualizations of parasitism, I focus largely on Loy’s time in Florence—as her Futurist writing most overtly explores issues of social parasitism—providing a cross-section of the life and views of an author about whom it is notoriously difficult to make generalizations. This analysis offers a critical view of the Futurist movement from the perspective of an Anglo-American author, including debates about dependency and gender. Loy’s work in Florence is closely linked with the Futurist movement. Marinetti’s Manifesto del Futurismo (1909) epitomizes the style and aims of the Futurists, arguing for all things modern, speedy, violent, young, and revolutionary. He writes that war is “the world’s only hygiene,” representing “beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women,” adding that Futurism will be fueled by “fire, hatred, and speed.”18 Umbro Apollonio notes that Futurist manifestos (of which he documents over thirty in his edited collection) were “complex and composite,” but also that they tended to be “arrogantly imperialist and autocratic.”19 The harsh rhetoric of the 1909 manifesto foreshadows Marinetti’s co-authorship of the Fascist Manifesto in 1919, but Italian Futurism also appealed to writers and artists such as Loy because it emphasized “universal dynamism,” or the potential for political change. In her “Aphorisms on Futurism,” published in Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work magazine in 1914, Loy asks her readers to “LOVE the hideous in order to find the sublime core of it,” to “OPEN your arms to the dilapidated; rehabilitate them.”20 On the surface, her emphasis on the future could be perceived as a way of eliminating prejudice. However, the terms such as “rehabilitation”

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and “fullest capacity” implicitly gesture to the inherent ethical and political issues of Futurism. Disability, age, and gender sometimes precluded individuals from being Futurists; if people cannot be “strong,” “independent,” or “violent” (coded words for “able-bodied” and “masculine”) then they are not fit for the “velocity” of modernity. In the “Feminist Manifesto,” Loy shifts her focus to marriage and sexuality. She concludes that “there is nothing impure in sex . . . [a recognition that] will constitute an incalculable & wider social regeneration than it is possible for our generation to imagine.”21 For Loy, constructions of femininity suppress women’s sexuality, and feminine desire is equated to impurity, yet sexuality is also central to a woman’s role in marriage: “for under modern conditions a woman can accept preposterously luxurious support from a man (with-out return of any sort—even offspring)—as a thank offering for her virginity.”22 The logic Loy critiques in the manifesto is that of economy or exchange; she suggests in a key line that the exchange of sex for financial stability or “luxurious support” is tantamount to “Parasitism, & Prostitution.”23 The manifesto is, on its surface, a rejection of social parasitism, which Loy sees as a product of traditional marriage. The Futurist ideology, per Loy, seeks women’s independence by destroying the ideology of sexual exchange embedded in marriage. But, as I go on to show in this section, Loy was uncertain about condemning parasitism in her manifesto, as illustrated by her poetry and correspondence from her time in Florence. While Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” is an important counterpoint to Marinetti’s ideas, she was much more ambivalent about social parasitism and dependency than the manifesto at first implies. Her manifesto critiques patriarchal economies and constructs an exclusionary model of femininity, and parasitism becomes a filter through which only certain women are deemed truly valuable. In other words, Loy imagines a “new” type of womanhood, encouraging “strong” women to abandon traditional roles within marriage, particularly their status as social parasites who are financially dependent on men in exchange for sex. However, Loy chose not to publish the “Feminist Manifesto” during her lifetime, and letters to her friends reveal that Loy was critical of her own ideas. Loy was well aware of the performative aspects of authorship and her status as a feminist Futurist. Writing in 1914 to Mabel Dodge Luhan (whom Loy affectionately calls “my dearest Moose”), Loy claims that “I am a sort of pseudo Futurist—But very good for advertisement,” later noting that “Futurism is dead.”24 Loy performs the role of avant-garde author and translator, especially by introducing Futurism to an American readership with her publication of “Aphorisms on Futurism” in 1914. Loy knew it was significant that she, a woman, was advocating a brand of Marinetti’s philosophy, but she also remained skeptical of the movement. In another letter to Luhan, Loy

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laments that Futurism is really “Marinetti’s philosophy,”25 implying there is little room for its growth as an aesthetic movement. In the margins of an early draft, Loy jokes that the “Feminist Manifesto” is an “absolute resubstantiation of the feminist question,” which is “easily to be proved fallacious—There is no truth anywhere.” And in a 1915 letter to Luhan, Loy describes the manifesto as a “feminist tirade.”26 Her letters illustrate that her theories on female independence are much more tenuous than her manifesto initially suggests. There is a disjunction between how the “Feminist Manifesto” is often read and the reality that modernist feminism was much less homogenous than sometimes assumed—even within individual texts. Christina Walter notes this problem with regard to Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto,” writing that the piece is a “complex set of dialogues and collisions [that] allows Loy to insist on women’s selfhood as opposed to their relative impersonality, even as it also gestures at her unease with many of these discourses.”27 Though Walter focuses on a comparison between Insel, Loy’s Künstlerroman, and the manifesto to illustrate Loy’s engagement with body politics, she nevertheless points out that critics have historically failed to recognize the complex publication history of the “Feminist Manifesto” and the context in which it was produced. When Loy describes herself as a “pseudo Futurist” or an “advertisement,” she implies she was highly aware of the reception of her work and her role as a so-called Futurist. Though Loy specifically uses the language of social parasitism to develop a hierarchy of “strong women” in her manifesto, her thinking moved between various poles, including advocacy for women’s independence and a critique of the very notion of independent selfhood. Loy recognizes some of the inherent problems with the Futurist agenda, one reason her “Feminist Manifesto” is an important counterpoint to Marinetti’s vision. Like her “Aphorisms on Futurism,” the manifesto is written in curt language and commands; its tone is polemical, and it relies heavily on imperatives. In the “Feminist Manifesto,” Loy challenges the perceived conservatism of the contemporary suffrage movement: The feminist movement at present instituted is Inadequate. Women if you want to realise yourselves—you are on the eve of a devastating psychological upheaval—all your pet illusions must be unmasked—the lies of centuries have got to go—are you prepared for the Wrench—?28

The radical content and style of the “Feminist Manifesto” led Loy to conclude that she would not be able to publish it,29 but she also later revised many of her assertions, suggesting her stance was less than firm. Loy criticizes equal-rights feminism because she sees it as too deeply embedded in

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antiquated notions of gender, making it a far-too-conservative foundation for emancipatory politics. She uses Futurist language, including phrases such as “at present,” “upheaval,” and “the lies of centuries,” rhetoric that implies a revolutionary, anti-parliamentarian ideology that wholly breaks from the past. Words are bolded and underlined in an early draft that Loy sent to Luhan (now at Yale University’s Beinecke Library), a version in which Loy writes “Inadequate,” “Women,” and “Wrench” in a larger script with strong emphasis. The sheets are littered with em-dashes as well, which add to the impression of urgency within the text. The aesthetics of the manifesto therefore meld with the ideology of Futurism, as the prose imparts a sense of forceful, speedy composition. Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” does not merely reproduce the stridency of Marinetti’s Futurism, however, as this piece ultimately subverts the Futurist aesthetic to stage its critique of the male-dominated movement. Natalya Lusty argues that the piece reveals a “dynamic of resistance and complicity in terms of [Loy’s] relationship to Futurism,”30 which explicitly targets Marinetti’s notorious “scorn for woman” while also idiosyncratically combining “maternalist philosophy, New Woman ideology, radical sexual politics, and quasi-eugenic moralism.”31 According to Lucia Re, despite Loy’s tenuous sympathy for Marinetti’s views throughout her career, Marinetti’s “anti-woman prejudice, from Loy’s perspective, also had to go, for it was a remnant of the past.”32 As evidenced by other Futurist feminists such as Valentine de Saint-Point,33 the manifesto style became a genre through which Futurist women created new models of femininity and masculinity, but their association with Futurism also led to problematic associations with eugenics, particularly the convoluted notion of the social parasite. Parasitism signifies the traditional “exchange” of marriage as imagined in the early twentieth century, according to Loy. Addressing women, she writes that As conditions are at present constituted—you have the choice between Parasitism, & Prostitution—or Negation Men & women are enemies, with the enmity of the exploited for the parasite, the parasite for the exploited—at present they are at the mercy of the advantage that each can take of the others sexual dependence—. The only point at which the interests of the sexes merge—is the sexual embrace.34

Loy’s argument that women are overdetermined to become social parasites challenges equal-rights feminism and its reliance on gradual political reform. For Loy, socio-historical conditions necessitate “Absolute Demolition” instead of the “scratching on the surface” that is “Reform.”35 As Re notes,

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“Loy’s allusion to parasitism and to marriage as a kind of legalized and glorified prostitution is thus entirely in tune with the Futurist vocabulary, as is her advocacy of a free and spontaneous sexuality.”36 Loy’s interest in “free” sexuality is part of a political agenda, as she argues that by rethinking gender roles, women must necessarily revolutionize their understanding of sexuality to combat the notion of sexual exchange. That is, Loy suggests that “sexual dependence” within (monogamous) marriage limits opportunities for women, who must also rely on men for economic security. “Parasitism” is coded as a Victorian standard of marriage, as Loy suggests women “prostitute” their bodies in marriage in exchange for economic security. At stake in her claims is the very notion of political and financial independence, which she argues is impossible in traditional male-female relationships. Hence, men and women exploit each other in marriage, according to Loy’s manifesto, and an unequal exchange of dependencies comes to define marriage in general. Loy’s descriptions of social parasitism and sexuality are also a response to the growing popularity of eugenics. For example, while Loy critiques the limitations of traditional marriage, she also suggests that women have a responsibility to avoid reproducing “degenerate” members of society: “Every woman of superior intelligence should realize her race-responsibility, in producing children in adequate proportion to the unfit or degenerate members of her sex.”37 Aimee Pozorski rightly notes that “Loy’s own [allusions], her rhetoric of liberation appears as paradoxically entangled with the discourse of racial purification that informs her radical experimentation as a poet.”38 While Pozorski focuses on Loy’s own anxieties about her Jewish identity (her father was a Hungarian Jew named Löwy, and she later changed her name to Loy), eugenic theory had a broader impact on Loy’s conceptualization of social parasitism (and, by extension, feminism). Because much of Loy’s writing from her time in Florence remained untranslated, it has only recently become clear through the work of Laura Scuriatti (see Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism) and others the extent to which theories of social degeneration had an impact on Futurism and Loy’s thought. This is especially true following her close association with Giovanni Papini in 1914 and her ties to Lacerba magazine.39 For Scuriatti, Loy’s Florentine writings “rehearse the ideas and concepts debated in the first issues of Lacerba—especially its radical antimorality— and present them as failures.”40 Loy seeks to undermine what she views as the parasitic relationship of marriage, but she also suggests that women have a responsibility to produce children who are more “fit” for the future. In this sense, parasitism in the manifesto represents the limitations of patriarchal culture, yet it is also coded language for social degeneration. On the one hand, Loy argues against the idea that women must be either a “mistress” or “mother” and nothing more, challenging the parasitic relationships that have developed in the twentieth century. On the other hand, her use of terms

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such as “complete woman” suggests that there are “incomplete women” who are not “endowed” by nature with full faculties. Given her emphasis on women of “superior intelligence” with a responsibility to their “race” to reproduce, Loy subtly implies that the “incomplete” woman refers to “feebleminded” individuals. The parasite to which Loy alludes in the manifesto is in this sense biological and social; Loy writes that only the “complete” woman is capable of breaking the bonds of parasitism. Her juxtaposition of “parasitism” and “prostitution” reveals one of the primary frameworks through which she understood “social degeneration”: it was a limitation imposed by the traditional understanding of marriage in the early twentieth century. In this way, Loy suggests that “complete” women were not “naturally” parasitic. However, as illustrated by the letters to Luhan and Loy’s decision not to publish the work, her perspective of parasitism was much more tentative than the language of the manifesto implies at its surface. To better understand Loy’s use of “parasite,” it is also necessary to consider other work published in 1914, including her poem “Parturition.” While in the manifesto Loy argues that parasitism should be avoided, in “Parturition” she uses parasitism to challenge the notion of independence. “Parturition” questions the ideal of independent selfhood, undermining some of the claims Loy makes in the “Feminist Manifesto” and revealing that her feminist ideology is often ambivalent. The poem revolves around the act of childbirth, an uncommon topic in poetry of the preceding decades, in which Loy employs natural imagery to describe the “metamorphosis” of pregnancy and birth. For example, as the mother gives birth to the child in the poem, Loy imagines “subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes,” and she describes the universe as an “infinite Maternity / Indivisible.”41 Here, Loy frames the birth of a child as part of a deep evolutionary process, using scientific language to imagine the world as interconnected and “Indivisible.” Femininity is not linked to an independent Self; instead, the mother is interdependent with the world. First published in The Trend magazine, “Parturition” uses insects and vermin imagery to gesture toward a feminism that abandons independent subjecthood. While the mother ultimately dies or “sacrifices” herself in the process of childbirth, the poem contains several references to metamorphosis. The poem is also highly significant in Loy’s oeuvre and within modernism more broadly for several reasons: as Roger Conover explains, it was the “putative first poem ever written about the physical experience of childbirth from the parturient woman’s point of view, and the first poem in English to use collage as a texturing device.”42 Stylistically, the poem plays with white space and line length to imply contractions during labor—as noted by Carolyn Burke43—and for Paul Peppis, the “woman poet births herself as mother superior even as she births a new maternalist free verse.”44

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The poem revolves around the body, including pain, nerve endings, and even sexual climax, but Loy also uses scientific and mystical language to communicate an interdependency that pervades the world and the human body. The woman’s body is deconstructed and deterritorialized, becoming a disjointed and immeasurable force rather than a concrete, singular thing: I am the centre Of a circle of pain Exceeding its boundaries in every direction The business of the bland sun Has no affair with me In my congested cosmos of agony From which there is no escape On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations Or in contraction To the pinpoint nucleus of being45

Loy describes a “circle of pain,” “nerve-vibrations,” and “contractions” to emphasize the physical experience of childbirth. In doing so, Loy also refigures the woman’s body, as well as the relationship between the mother, child, and environment. A “circle of pain” that “exceed[s] its boundaries” frames the body as spread across a huge distance and time, as do “infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations” and “congested cosmos.” This is especially true in the lines that follow, in which the narrator describes herself as “the false quantity,” in which measurement is impossible and the pain of the contractions is “within” and “without” the body.46 Such a “false quantity” also alludes to the fallacy of independent or autonomous subjectivity, as the poem frequently reminds us that the mother-giving-birth is both singular and multiple (one person yet also two). The topic of parturition and the moment of birth allow Loy’s poem to challenge the ways in which subjectivity is conceptualized, especially when compared to the “Feminist Manifesto.” Unlike the manifesto, in which Loy advocates for the autonomous female subject, “Parturition” undermines the notion of independence by deconstructing the female body. Loy’s focus on liminal identity and the decentered body exposes the limitations of early twentieth-century notions of dependency, including her own formulations of social parasitism in the manifesto. Tara Prescott asserts that Loy’s fascination with the female body in “Parturition” is a response to the platitudes of Victorian England, in which “the entire process of pregnancy, from conception to delivery, was carefully managed and hidden.”47 Loy’s Futurist ideology impelled her to undermine the Victorian discourses, and “Parturition” therefore goes into detail about the physical experience of

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childbirth. As Prescott also notes, though, “the poem never promises or provides the ‘payoff’ of a newborn child.”48 The omission of the child centers the act of parturition as an event worthy in itself, and it also allows Loy to focus on a transitional, liminal form of identity. Her identity is “liminal” in the sense that birth is arguably a social rite, as the poem’s narrator is about to become a mother,49 but also in terms of the “splitting” of the subject, in which mother and child are part of an exchange of dependencies. The concept of “mother” is differentially defined by the “child” (and vice versa), and the child also depends on the mother in a physical sense. Notably, the poem also references a deep history of evolution and uses animal imagery, taking insects and vermin as metaphors for interdependency. Unlike the “Feminist Manifesto,” in which parasitism describes marriage, “Parturition” describes a “dead white feathered moth / Laying eggs,” which signifies a “Vitalized [. . .] cosmic initiation” that Furnish[es] an adequate apology For the objective Agglomeration of activities Of a life LIFE A leap with nature Into the essence Of Unpredicted Maternity50

Here, nonhuman life signifies a cosmic vitality or lifeforce; life is not conceptualized as individualized, but as an “agglomeration.” Furthermore, the life that Loy describes is “A leap,” and “unpredicted,” challenging the notion that an individual might control life through eugenics. For Peppis, this poem “rewrites eugenics by displacing male science’s strategic manipulations of natural reproductive processes with the independent supermother whose creativity overwhelms male power, science, and poetics.”51 The mother becomes an “infinite Maternity,” later describing herself as a cat “With blind kittens,” and her looming death is foreshadowed by the image of a “small animal carcass” surrounded by “blue bottles” (also known as carrion flies).52 As the narrator asserts, it is through the insects that life persists: through the insects Waves [of] that same undulation of living Death Life53

The verminous flies and the moth (which persists in laying eggs even after death) form part of the metamorphosis at the poem’s center, and Loy

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recontextualizes childbirth not as a mere social process or medical procedure, but also as a potentially spiritual or philosophical event. The connection made between undulating flies and parturition emphasizes the metamorphic nature of dependence for Loy. While traditionally understood as repulsive, the insects described in Loy’s poem challenge the ways some might see parasitism, pestilence, and birth as grotesque. Loy privileges the transformative nature of birth through the creation of life, yet she also recognizes life’s relationship to death; the carrion flies imply that even as the child is born, the mother will likely die. The vital, universal force of life is part of a network of dependency, which privileges neither human life nor nonhuman life. Instead, the poem uses the language of evolution to suggest that life is a network of dependence, connecting woman, child, and animal. “Parturition” extends interpretations of the “Feminist Manifesto,” especially around the context of dependency and parasitism, revealing what Serres describes as the parasitic “source of all change.” By putting these two texts in conversation with one another, I aim to add to the shifting interpretations of Loy in recent years, in particular, and modernist feminism more broadly. The parturient mother is linked with an undulation of flies, implying that feminine creativity is not a mastery over life nor a conquering of masculinity. Instead, the poem connects biological life with aesthetic production: the mother in the poem will birth a child and a new form of feminist verse. But it is also necessary to note that this poem challenges the independent subject within Loy’s vision of feminine creativity.54 The poem’s narrator is immeasurable in time and space: “The was—is—ever—shall—be / Of cosmic reproductivity.”55 “Parturition” imagines the female subject as decentralized, undermining the ways independent agency is described in the “Feminist Manifesto” to measure the successes and failures of women in the early twentieth century. Comparing these two works reveals an underlying tension in Loy’s writing, where on the one hand she privileges independence and female empowerment, but on the other hand imagines alternative forms of subjectivity in “Parturition”—an interdependent form of femininity. This is especially important in the twenty-first century when describing the complex relationship between eugenics and feminism. It is too reductive to dismiss early feminism because of its potentially problematic relationship with Marinetti’s Futurism. Loy’s work shows that her understanding of eugenics is ambivalent, and her work does in fact criticize such ideas quite often. When discussing Loy from a contemporary vantage point, readers must remember that Loy was working out how to be a radical poet and thinker in her own time, as history unfolded. That Loy could arguably write from seemingly opposite positions at roughly the same time in her letters, the “Feminist Manifesto,” and “Parturition” attests to how convoluted modernist feminism could be. In the next section, I turn to Nella Larsen’s writing to analyze the shifting ways

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in which social parasitism and gender were described. While Larsen’s work in some ways reflects Loy’s critique of parasitism, Larsen worked in a vastly different context using different techniques. LARSEN’S “FREEDOM”: SUBVERSIVE PARASITISM While Nella Larsen is today a well-known modernist author—described by Charles Larson as “the major novelist of that coalescence of African American aesthetic expression during the 1920s”56—she published relatively few works during her lifetime. Her first novel, Quicksand (1928), explores the difficulties experienced by educated Black women, especially those from mixed-race backgrounds. Larsen critiques the “tragic mulatto” stereotype, offering a complex portrait of Black womanhood that indicts racism in America. This is much the same way her 1929 novel Passing reveals the various ways in which “people are driven to such drastic measures [i.e., racial passing] because of American racism and the need for economic survival.”57 For Laura Doyle, Larsen is also a “sort of riptide Atlantic modernist [. . .] she is all at once [a] Scandinavian, Anglo-American, and Harlem Renaissance writer.”58 Larsen’s work extends beyond the Harlem Renaissance, offering a nuanced portrait of Black experience in the United States and abroad.59 In this section, I analyze her 1926 short story “Freedom,” which is charged with gender politics and populated with women who often feel alienated from their communities. As Doyle continues, Larsen “understood the terms offered by a contractual yet racialized society especially to a woman without ‘people’ (and also married to an ‘unfaithful’ man, as she herself was).”60 In each of her works, Larsen discusses marital instability and gender dynamics, ideas that are also central to her story “Freedom.” Published in Young’s Magazine under the pseudonym Allen Semi, “Freedom” was described by Larsen years later as “hack writing,”61 though it offers many critical insights into her perspectives on social parasitism and dependency. While critics have previously discounted “Freedom,” the short story foregrounds an important figure in Larsen’s later work: a voiceless, sexualized woman whom the men in her life dismiss. Furthermore, I analyze the subtle references to eugenics and heterofuturity, which are evoked when using language like “parasite” or “dependent.” I suggest that Larsen’s short story reveals how others problematically use the figure of the parasite to describe women. In particular, she does this by telling the story from the perspective of a chauvinistic man. The literary style compels readers to question the male narrator’s understanding of social “freedom” (which is framed as the antithesis of “parasitism”) by using an unreliable narrator. “Freedom” is not only overlooked because it was written

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for a pulp publication but also because the short story does not explicitly address racial politics—a topic Larsen explores in more detail in other works. Because “Freedom” is often viewed as idiosyncratic or as one of Larsen’s less prominent works, it offers valuable insights for refiguring her feminist thinking over time, including her critical perspective of social parasitism and gender politics. “Freedom” follows an anonymous man and woman whose relationship falls apart. The man tires of his mistress, feeling tied down, and eventually leaves her for “adventure” to “lose himself in India, China, the South Seas.”62 The narrative jumps to years later as the man reflects on his relationship with the woman. While he is surprised and irritated that she never responds to his telegram explaining that he is leaving her, he later learns she has died giving birth to his child, who also dies. The man’s reflections on the woman shift from nostalgia to desire and hatred, though we ultimately learn he feels unbearable guilt for abandoning the woman and child. At the end of the story, he jumps from the top of a building to his death. The story opens as the man contemplates his life without his mistress and how she will adjust to her life without him. He believes it will be “peaceful” not to have a “woman in one’s life,” that it will be “a temporary recess from a hateful existence in which he lived in intimacy with someone he did not know and would not now have chosen.”63 He continues: “Her unanimated beauty seemed now only a thin disguise for an inert mind.”64 The woman becomes an object of scorn, a symbol of deceit that has robbed his life of any sense of freedom. “In his present new hatred,” the man continues, “she became a creature irresistibly given to pleasure no matter what the cost. A sybarite! A parasite too!”65 In the early part of the narrative, the term “parasite” describes women as socially dependent on men, “sapp[ing] from him all physical and spiritual vitality.”66 It is also linked with hedonism, as the term “sybarite” suggests the woman is given to excessive consumption. Larsen is careful to qualify her language, though, to show that the man’s thoughts come from his anger and narcissism, as he is gripped by “feverish impatience,” “new hatred,” and “disgust.”67 While on the surface, his description of the woman as a “parasite” seems justified, it is borne of his ego. In Larsen’s short story, parasitism is a problematic idea derived from social science, yet it is also connected to identity formation. On the one hand, Larsen shows that using the label “parasite” is a rhetorical tool to oppress women in the early twentieth century. On the other hand, she thematizes this issue: Larsen shows how the man’s freedom relies on framing women as social parasites. Though the man accuses his mistress of draining his energy as a parasite does, she and her memory are a painful reminder of the man’s failures. “Freedom” limits the reader’s perspective to interspersed and fragmented ruminations over a long time as the man slowly realizes that he has

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not only broken up with the woman but also abandoned her and her child. Larsen’s story offers a reversal, as the criticisms against the woman—that she is self-indulgent and entirely dependent on the man—are undermined. By the end of the story, the man realizes he is the sybarite, and his existence is parasitically linked to his mistress’s memory: he creates meaning in his life based on his image of her, whether he frames himself as her gracious patron or the cause of her death. Larsen subverts the concept of social parasitism in “Freedom,” illustrating the problematic use of the term and undermining the seemingly clear dividing lines between freedom and dependence. In part, the story might be read as a reflection of Larsen’s anxieties about her disintegrating relationship with her husband in the 1920s. Within two years of writing the story, her husband Elmer Imes would regard her as a “selfish little beast,”68 which parallels the man’s language about his mistress in “Freedom.” Larsen married Imes in 1919, and he was at the time a “noted physicist” who “introduced her to some of the most celebrated figures of the Harlem Renaissance.” However, they divorced in the 1930s following Imes’s infidelity.69 Indeed, Charles Larson notes that this story was “probably thrown up as [a] warning sig[n] for Elmer, who was a notorious womanizer, and, by 1926, well on his way to contributing to the demise of their relationship.”70 Larsen also creates a commentary on gender that is much more general: the characters are anonymized, and neither seems to be married. Larsen’s complex identity intersects with class and gender expectations in the early twentieth century, in addition to racial politics. She was not from a wealthy background, did not have a college degree (though she did study at Fisk University and the University of Copenhagen), and was generally alienated from the Black middle class.71 As Darryl Pickney notes, it was really only “by virtue of her marriage [that] she was a member of Harlem’s black professional class.”72 In other words, Larsen would have been acutely aware of how others perceived her relationship to her husband and other prominent members of the Harlem Renaissance. Pickney asserts she was “self-conscious among the Talented Tenth,”73 which adds context to the emotional energy throughout “Freedom.” The narrator insists that the unnamed woman attaches to him, drags him down, and robs him of independence—an attitude the story ultimately proves wrong. In other words, Larsen’s own relationships shed light on her early stories, especially issues such as gender dynamics, class, and feelings of belonging and alienation. But Larsen’s biography is not the only means of interpretation; it is also important to consider the socio-historical context of the piece to understand the social dynamics of Larsen’s feminism. Unlike Loy, Larsen fictionalizes parasitism from the point of view of a man who uses the term. In this way, her short story situates itself within the center of patriarchal culture as a means of critique; by showing how the term is applied to women in problematic ways,

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Larsen asks her readers to reconsider the notion that the woman is indeed “sapping” the man of his vitality. Larsen emphasizes that the story is a onesided account of the relationship, and, as the story continues, readers become increasingly aware of the narrator’s bias. In this sense, literary standpoint is a key aspect of this story, a narrative technique that scholars have identified elsewhere in Larsen’s work. Caresse John writes that this technique argues “against the positivist belief that an objective reality exists independent from one’s own perspective [. . .] that knowledge is socially constructed and, therefore, our positions in society produce understandings of the world similar to and different from the understandings of others.”74 Such a technique urges readers to consider narratives from limited points of view. John suggests Larsen’s protagonists in Quicksand and Passing are, in this way, made outsiders on the inside. White authors historically dominated American literature, and Harlem Renaissance writing was dominated by men, which forced Larsen and her protagonists to expose their position as mixed-race women in the 1920s. For context, the other story Larsen published in 1926, “The Wrong Man,” also uses a limited point of view, but in this case to create narrative tension. “The Wrong Man” follows the perspective of Julia Romney at a late-night party as she attempts to hide from her husband the fact that she was previously married to his school friend. The story builds as she believes she sees the ex-husband at the party: “She had been so happy, so secure, and now this: Ralph Tyler, risen from the past to shatter the happiness which she had grasped for herself. Must she begin all over again?”75 Julia frets the loss of her current husband, her wealth and social standing. At the end of the story, Julia confronts who she believes to be her ex-husband, but readers discover that she has made a mistake and told the wrong man. Before realizing her mistake, she admits to the stranger that “when a girl has been sick and starving on the streets, anything can happen to her; that she’s grateful for food and shelter at any price [. . .] I was so young, so foolish, and so hungry; but Jim wouldn’t understand.”76 Race is never mentioned directly in the story, yet “The Wrong Man” parallels much of Larsen’s other work. The protagonist’s past threatens her current life, and gender politics inform her decisions and how other people will view her. The limited narration is a device to build tension and the final twist, much like in “Freedom,” but in “The Wrong Man,” Julia’s mistake belies her anxiety. This character carries with her the paranoia that her husband will find out that she was poor and arguably forced into marriage, and that her past will ruin her present happiness, however fleeting it is. Where “Freedom” departs from this story is informative. The point of view in “Freedom” is the most unique in Larsen’s oeuvre, and her use of the term “parasite” also evokes eugenic theories, which I have discussed in other contexts throughout this chapter. For Larsen in particular, male-female

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relationships are especially convoluted given the influence of heterofuturity, an ideology that views sexuality with regard to the future and relates reproduction to a massified society—to populations and their futures. For Thadious M. Davis, “dialogue between the past and the present as a way of approaching futurity was especially significant for black women artists.”77 But within Black women’s writing, futurity also entailed a biological bent vis-à-vis nativism, a privileging of individuals born within the nation to create a more cohesive identity. Heterofuturity operates on various levels in “Freedom,” as the woman is described as “depraved,” she gives birth to a child who dies, and the man abandons both. For Keguro Macharia, this ideology plays out elsewhere, in Larsen’s Quicksand, for example, as a privileging of “specific class configurations based on nativist genealogies and eugenic potential.”78 Macharia notes that the protagonist of Quicksand, Helga, “fails” to become a “normative subject as defined through nativist guidelines,”79 calling into question a eugenics-based discourse that views Black women and reproduction as a means to secure a nativist future for African Americans. While “Freedom” does not necessarily represent the same overtly racial politics Macharia discusses in Quicksand, Larsen nevertheless reflects on male-female relations through a similar framework. The woman in “Freedom” is described as having a “touch of depravity, perhaps only physical, but also more likely mental as well.”80 The man describes this to justify leaving her, as she will not be a “suitable” partner in the future. The point of view through which the man discusses the woman is medicalized: she is framed as “deprav[ed]” and parasitic, not well-suited for his (or his child’s) future. Larsen pushes back against such discourse, implying that the man’s moral failings lead to the tragic demise of the woman and child. But the tragedy nevertheless revolves around the “failure” of the family unit in the story; patriarchal ideology seems fatal for women in “Freedom,” and it also forecloses the possibility of the heteronormative family. Jess Waggoner notes that by the “1930s and 1940s, the black body’s symbolic weight as always-already deviant, medicalized, and both psychologically and physiologically other only intensified.”81 Uplift-based approaches to health—which assumed that Black individuals could earn a “higher reputation” through eugenic practices—complicated the ways Black female bodies were marked in American culture. Waggoner writes that “the influence of eugenic thought” is apparent in the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright.82 Still, Larsen takes a highly critical approach to various Black movements in the United States. Not only was eugenics a significant topic with which Black authors such as Larsen would be familiar, but Macharia also shows that Larsen overtly addresses eugenics in other work shortly after publishing “Freedom” in 1926. The male character’s assertion that the woman in the

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story is a “parasite” and “depraved” reflects the underlying medicalization of dependency in the early twentieth century. Furthermore, the language of parasitism and depravity relates to how women, especially women of color, were often discussed in the context of disability and dependency. George Hutchinson emphasizes Larsen’s intersecting identities, her migrancy, biracial background, and gender to more fully appreciate the ambivalence of many of her characters: “[Larsen is] an individual of strong identity, someone in a certain relation to the age in which she lived, someone often identified with a powerful group presence.”83 And as Macharia notes, Larsen’s background—her mother was Danish, her father had West Indian heritage, and her husband was a Danish immigrant— charges her writing with an acute awareness of anti-immigrant sentiment and race-based eugenics.84 Even if the race of the characters in “Freedom” is never revealed, Hutchinson and Macharia recognize that throughout Larsen’s other work, it is necessary to pay close attention to representations of heterofuturity in framing the dependence and independence of female characters. In writing on disability and immigration in the United States at the fin de siècle, Douglas Baynton illustrates how women were discussed through the language of disability and dependency. For example, “One of the central rhetorical tactics of opponents of women’s equality [. . .] was to point to the physical, intellectual, and psychological flaws of women, their frailty, irrationality, and emotional excesses. Women either had disabilities that precluded participation in the public sphere, or they became disabled when exposed to the rigors that characterized men’s lives.”85 Baynton demonstrates not only the rhetorical ways in which women were dismissed in the early twentieth century but also how disability is socially constructed. By suggesting that women were labeled “disabled” in patriarchal cultures, Baynton shows that medicalized language was used to oppress women and feminize disability. The claim that the woman in the story has a “touch of depravity” and is a “parasite” reinforces Baynton’s assertions about women and disability. The man in the story uses disabling language to disqualify her existence, dismissing her as entirely dependent on others for her survival. Additionally, however, Baynton observes that in many cases, advocates for women’s equality often left unchallenged the assertion that disability should bar individuals from voting or receiving a full education. In other words, many women questioned the medical discourses that framed women as disabled and therefore unable to vote, but the same advocates for women’s suffrage left the assumption that “weakness, nervousness, or proneness to fainting might constitute a legitimate disqualification for suffrage.”86 While Larsen does not directly discuss suffrage in “Freedom,” the short story challenges how disability (or dependence more broadly) is socially constructed via gender. Larsen undermines the notion that “depravity” and dependence

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are stable categories by illustrating how the man uses his image of the woman to shore up his own identity. Baynton suggests that, in many ways, latenineteenth and early twentieth-century historians have failed to critique the ableist logic that prevented disabled and dependent individuals from voting or immigrating to the United States. But Larsen indirectly challenges this same ableist logic in her short story. Larsen arguably anticipates Serres’s postmodern assertions that the parasite shapes our own understanding of identity, agency, and individuality, as parasitism becomes linked to the story’s title. The concept of “freedom” is ironically charged with the underlying notion of independence, as Larsen illustrates how such independence is a product of an ableist, patriarchal culture that operates at the expense of women and socalled social dependents. The man “had persuaded himself to believe what he wanted to believe—that she had not cared [. . .] He pitied her.”87 The woman becomes a repository of his desires and structures the image of himself, as he imagines she did not care about his well-being in the end. Her failure to reply to his telegram makes her an object of pity in his eyes. When he realizes that she has died, he is “resentful and angry at her influence in his life,” suggesting that even in death she was trying to make him miserable. He believes “he had reached out toward freedom—to find only a mirage; for he saw quite plainly that now he would never be free.”88 The man’s emotions in the story revolve around a deeper desire for “freedom,” for independence, but as the narrative progresses, he becomes even more entangled with his dead mistress. According to his logic, she continues to become a parasite and drain his vitality: “She had spoiled his life; first by living and then by dying.”89 In this regard, parasitism in Larsen’s short story is a form of difference; it is a way of undermining the belief that independence or “freedom” are linked to masculinity and able‑bodiedness. Similarly, Beverly Haviland identifies a certain paranoid “narcissism” at the core of other characters throughout Larsen’s oeuvre, such as Irene in Passing.90 While Haviland details Freudian narcissism, the “narcissistic confusion of subject and object,”91 narcissism represents the complex relationships between hate and desire throughout Larsen’s work. According to Haviland’s reading, Irene has a queer desire toward Clare in Passing, but it is fetishistic, jealous, self-oriented, and self-destructive. In “Freedom,” Larsen writes about such narcissism from a male perspective, as the man “longs for her again,” remembers how she “talked and laughed with him,” and “by some mysterious process, the glory of first love flamed again in him.”92 Much as Haviland discusses in Passing, in “Freedom” the man’s desire is oriented toward himself and ultimately self-destructive, physically and mentally. His narcissistic desire for freedom and independence is founded on his ambivalent love/hate relationship with the woman. Larsen foregrounds the instability of his identity in this way, suggesting that his accusations

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toward her at the story’s beginning, as a “sybarite! A parasite,” are a more accurate reflection of himself. Larsen’s use of parasitism in this way reevaluates how women in the early twentieth century are figured in relation to men. Hutchinson notes that Larsen’s “prevailing suspicion that illegitimate mulattos were marked by organic depravity” makes its way into “Freedom,” a reaction to a broader, eugenics-inflected discourse in the 1920s. But for Hutchinson, the story also “inspires a profound concern with the dependence of women and the centrality of sexual subjection in their lives—sexual allure being a chief tool for achieving some fleeting comfort in a male-dominated universe.”93 The limited third-person narration of the story provides readers not with the man’s innermost thoughts but what he thinks he wants—what he imagines about his past: “He had forgotten all but the past, and that was brightly distorted.” As the story draws to a close, the man is described as having a “disintegrating brain,”94 which obscures the veracity of the rest of the story. The woman’s purported “depravity” reflects the man’s mental life, and his love and hate for the woman are called into question. Compared to Loy’s reflections on social parasitism, Larsen’s writing is distinct given the narrative’s male point of view and Larsen’s understanding of racialized eugenic discourse. Loy’s Florentine writings communicate an underlying ambivalence about dependency relations, especially amid wider debates about women’s rights. Like Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto,” Larsen’s “Freedom” reacts to eugenics, which frames certain individuals as parasites. However, Larsen is much more critical of eugenics than Loy, and Larsen’s reflections are informed by her race, including an underlying suspicion toward aspects of Black nativism and racial uplift. My aim in this chapter has been to illustrate the pervasiveness of parasitism as a social concept in the early twentieth century, especially concerning feminism. The subtle distinctions between Loy’s and Larsen’s writings show that while many modernist women writers critique social parasitism on some level, they do so from different contexts and in different ways. Modernist feminism is anything but cohesive, which is not to suggest it loses value; rather, this shows that it is richly complex. Parasitism provides a way to consider such complexity within modernist feminism because parasitism relates to the underlying issues of dependency and independence at the core of many feminist debates in the early twentieth century. Loy’s feminist ideology is deeply ambivalent, and her suggestions that married women are social parasites in the “Feminist Manifesto” is not an entirely accurate reflection of her political views, especially those expressed in her poetry of the same period. Alternatively, Larsen’s “Freedom” presents a creative reflection on social parasitism, as this often-overlooked short story destabilizes the concept of social parasitism and reveals how the notion of male independence is

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often rooted in women’s oppression. Larsen transforms parasitism to reflect and invert the very title of the short story, challenging the notion of male “freedom.” In the following chapter, I analyze social parasitism in the context of tramp stories, showing that “freedom” and independence were also central concerns in 1930s Britain. Social welfare debates led authors such as Jack London and George Orwell to criticize the use of “social parasitism” to describe the impoverished, though Orwell critiques London’s use of eugenics as a foundation for his socialist ideology. NOTES Special acknowledgements: For permission to reprint parts of Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” and “Parturition,” I wish to thank Roger Conover and the Estate of Mina Loy. 1. Edith Wharton, House of Mirth, ed. Shari Benstock (Boston: Bedford, 1994), 152. 2. Richardson, “The Reality of Feminism,” in The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 402. 3. Larsen, “Freedom,” In An Intimation of Things Distant: The Collected Fiction of Nella Larsen (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), 14. 4. Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization (New York: Brentano’s, 1922), 83. She quotes Walter Fernald to juxtapose biological parasites or pests and disabled people in an attempt to promote a eugenics program: “We now have state commissions for controlling the gipsy-moth and the boll weevil, the foot-and-mouth disease, and for protecting the shell-fish and wild game, but we have no commission which even attempts to modify or to control the vast moral and economic forces represented by the feeble-minded persons at large in the community.” 5. Michel Serres, “Science and the Humanities: The Case of Turner,” Substance 26, no. 2 (1997): 18. 6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 16. “Minoritarian” refers to the Deleuzean concept of “becoming minoritarian” in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. For Deleuze and Guattari, “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. But the first characteristic of minor literature in any case is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization.” 7. Mary Poovey, “Feminism and Deconstruction,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (1988): 53. 8. Serres, Parasite, 128. 9. Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 35. 10. Braidotti, Rosi. “Four Thesis on Posthuman Feminism,” in Anthropocene Feminism, edited by Richard Grusin (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 23.

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11. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (New Haven, CT: Harvard University Press, 1995), 9. 12. Ibid., 149. Felski’s use of “revolution” (break from the past) and “evolution” (continuum) alludes to Marxism and Darwinism, but she is also engaging the work of Adorno and Horkheimer. See, for example, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and his dialectic approach to art, which considers a work’s internal dynamics as well as its sociohistorical context. 13. Ibid., 155. 14. She sometimes insisted on the British pronunciation “mi-ner,” not “mee-na” (see YCAL MSS 1050). She also went by “Mina Lloyd” at various points, according to Carolyn Burke, and she commonly signed her name “Dusie” or “Doose” (the former of which is a combination of the German “du” and “sie”). See Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996), 62. 15. Janet Lyon, “Mina Loy’s Pregnant Pauses: The Space of Possibility in the Florence Writings,” in Mina Loy: Poet and Person, eds. Maeera Schreiber and Keith Tuma (National Poetry Foundation, 1989), 400. 16. See “Mina Loy,” 28 March 2020, https:​//​mina​-loy​.com​/about​-us​/project​ .ccessed. This digital open-resource project was created by faculty from Davidson College, Duquesne University, and the University of Georgia. 17. Jessica Burstein, Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art (College Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2012), 152. 18. F. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and the Manifesto of Futurism,” in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (New York: Viking, 1970), 22, 24. 19. Umbro Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos (New York: Viking, 1970), 8. 20. Mina Loy, “Aphorisms on Futurism,” in The Lost Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger Conover (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996), 149. 21. Loy, “Feminist Manifesto,” in The Lost Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger Conover (New Yok: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996), 156. 22. Ibid., 155. 23. Ibid., 154. 24. Loy, “Letter to ML,” 1914, 9999034. 25. Loy, “Letter to ML,” 1914, 999031. In a 1915 letter to van Vechten, Loy describes a certain “Marinettian vulgarity,” illustrating she was already souring on Marinetti’s thought. [1915; YCAL MSS 1050]. 26. Loy, “Letter to ML,” 1915. 27. Christina Walter, “Getting Impersonal: Mina Loy’s Body Politics from ‘Feminist Manifesto’ to Insel,” Modern Fiction Studies 55, no. 4 (2009): 666. 28. Loy, “Feminist,” 153. 29. Natalya Lusty, “Sexing the Manifesto: Mina Loy, Feminism, and Futurism,” Women: A Cultural Review 19, no. 3 (2008): 251. 30. Ibid., 256. 31. Ibid., 254, 256. 32. Lucia Re, “Mina Loy and the Quest for a Futurist Feminist Woman,” European Legacy 14, no. 7 (2009): 814.

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33. See de Saint-Point’s “Futurist Manifesto of Lust” (1913), which argues against sexual moralism and foregrounds women’s sexuality. However, she also argues that “lust is a force in that it kills the weak and exalts the strong, aiding natural selection,” illustrating the eugenic bent at the core of her writing. Valentine de Saint-Point, “Futurist Manifesto of Lust,” in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbo Apollonio (New York: Viking, 1970), 73. 34. Loy, “Feminist,” 154. 35. Ibid., 153. 36. Re, “Mina Loy,” 813. 37. Loy, “Feminist,” 155. 38. Aimee L. Pozorski, “Eugenicist Mistress & Ethnic Mother: Mina Loy and Futurism,” MELUS 30, no. 3 (2005): 41. 39. Laura Scuriatti, Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2019), 30. 40. Scuriatti, Mina Loy’s, (35). 41. Mina Loy, “Parturition,” in The Lost Lunar Baedeker, edited by Roger Conover (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996), 4–8, line 72 and lines 100–101. 42. Roger Conover, ed., The Lost Lunar Baedeker (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996), 177. 43. Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996), 153. 44. Paul Peppis, “Rewriting Sex: Mina Loy, Marie Stopes, and Sexology,” Modernism/modernity 9, no. 4 (2002): 35. 45. Loy, “Parturition,” lines 1–10. 46. Ibid., line 18 and lines 11–12. 47. Tara Prescott, “Moths and Mother’s: Mina Loy’s ‘Parturition,’” Women’s Studies 39, no. 3 (2010): 195. 48. Ibid. 49. See for example “liminality” as a concept in the work of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner (i.e., The Ritual Process), in which liminality represents a transitional period or “rite of passage” in various cultures. Also see, Maria Lugones’s Peregrinajes/Pilgrimages: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (2003), which borrows from Turner’s folklore to suggest liminality (“in-betweenness”) might serve to create coalitions between women and people of color in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 50. Loy, “Parturition,” lines 76–77 and 81–89. 51. Peppis, “Rewriting,” 35. 52. Loy, “Parturition,” line 109. Calliphoridae is a family of insects with 1,200 species (including bluebottles), sometimes called “carrion flies” and “cluster flies.” They are commonly known as a vector of disease, particularly dysentery, paratuberculosis, and salmonellosis. They are commonly referenced in literature, either indirectly or directly (e.g., in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra). 53. Loy, “Parturition,” lines 117–120. 54. This is not necessarily to suggest that Loy breaks with eugenics entirely, as “Parturition” has a notably biological bent, not unlike the “free love eugenicists” such

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as Marie Stopes. Nevertheless, “Parturition” has a distinct view of biological life and subjecthood compared to the “Feminist Manifesto,” as outlined here. 55. Loy, “Parturition,” lines 106–107. 56. Charles Larson, “Introduction,” in An Intimation of Things Distant: The Collected Fiction of Nella Larsen (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), xii. 57. Ibid., xv. 58. Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 395. 59. Larsen was also critical of some aspects of the Harlem Renaissance, such as racial uplift discourse—the idea that African Americans should “lift” their “people” to obtain greater rights. As Helga Crane, the protagonist of Quicksand says, her Harlem friends “didn’t want to be like themselves. What they wanted, asked for, begged for, was to be like their white overlords.” Larsen, Quicksand, 74. 60. Doyle, Freedom’s Empire, 412. 61. Qtd. in C. Larson, “Introduction,” xiii. 62. Nella Larsen, “Freedom,” in An Intimation of Things Distant: The Collected Fiction of Nella Larsen (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), 15. This is the only reference to colonial spaces in the story, but Larsen does illustrate the man’s Orientalist perspectives of these areas as places to “lose himself.” He specifically contrasts these places with the “familiar” spaces of North America and Europe. Interestingly, “The Wrong Man” includes multiple references to colonialism: “A tall, thin man, his lean face yellowed and hardened as if by years in the tropics” (363); “Ralph Tyler, an explorer, just back from some godforsaken place on the edge of nowhere. Been head of some expedition lost somewhere in Asia for years [. . .] They say he brought back some emeralds worth a king’s ransom” (365). 63. Larsen, “Freedom,” 13. 64. Ibid., 14. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Qtd. in George Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line (New Haven, CT: Harvard University Press, 2006), 199. 69. Lorraine E. Roses and Ruth E. Randolph, Harlem’s Glory: Black Women Writing, 1900–1950 (New Haven, CT: Harvard University Press, 1996), 519. 70. C. Larson, “Introduction,” xiii. 71. Fisk University, a historically black liberal arts college in Tennessee, played an important role in advancing African American college education and was praised by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folks. Larsen’s dual education at Fisk and Copenhagen exemplifies her transnational identity and worldviews, including her ambivalence toward uplift politics in the United States. 72. Darryl Pickney, “Introduction,” in Passing (New York: Restless, 2018), 11. 73. Ibid., 12. 74. Caresse John, “Strategic Ambivalence: A Feminist Standpoint Theory Reading of Nella Larsen’s Novels,” Feminist Formations 23, no. 1 (2011): 95.

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75. Nella Larsen, “The Wrong Man,” in The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen (Floyd, VA: Wilder Publications, 2014), 364. 76. Ibid., 369. 77. Thadious Davis, “Black Women’s Modernist Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers, ed. Maren Tova Linett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 96. 78. Keguro Macharia, “Queering Helga Crane: Black Nativism in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand,” Modern Fiction Studies 57, no. 2 (2011): 255. 79. Ibid., 256. 80. Larsen, “Freedom,” 14. 81. Jess Waggoner, “‘My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience’: Afro-Modernist Critiques of Eugenics and Medical Segregation,” Modernism/modernity 24, no. 3 (2017): 509. 82. Ibid., 510. 83. Hutchinson, In Search, 12. 84. Macharia, “Queering Helga Crane,” 256. 85. Douglas Baynton, Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 82. 86. Ibid., 85. 87. Larsen, “Freedom,” 15. 88. Ibid., 16. 89. Ibid. 90. Beverly Haviland, “Passing from Paranoia to Plagiarism: The Abject Authorship of Nella Larsen,” Modern Fiction Studies 43, no. 2 (1997): 296. 91. Ibid., 301. 92. Larsen, “Freedom,” 15, 16. 93. Hutchinson, In Search, 199–200. 94. Larsen, “Freedom,” 17.

Chapter Five

The Tramp Social Parasitism, Vagrancy, and Health

In Classical drama, the “parasite” is a “flatterer,” sycophantic “swindler,” or “sponger,” a stock character made popular by authors such as Xenophon, Plautus, and Lucian.1 Friedrich Schiller and Arthur Conan Doyle are among the authors who revived this Classical trope in later centuries. In Classical dialogues or Schiller’s writing, “parasite” was a relatively harmless and even comedic label for someone who seeks fortune (both Lucian and Schiller refer to parasitism as an “art”), but by the twentieth century, being labeled a parasite had potentially fatal consequences. For example, the Soviet Union enacted anti-social parasite laws to punish those who worked less than half of the year.2 Fascists defined “undesirable” groups as die Parasiten [the parasites], and the economic turmoil of the Great Depression led to a surge in vagrants, commonly called “parasites.”3 Throughout the twentieth century, politicians, sociologists, and medical professionals transformed the social parasite into a political term; it was a symbol for what threatened the social body. This chapter focuses on “tramps,” a group that was central to debates on social parasitism. I focus on the work of Jack London and George Orwell and analyze popular conceptualizations of parasitism and poverty from the fin de siècle to the mid-1930s. The tramp character in these authors’ works signals a growing ambivalence toward social parasites, especially amid biopolitical debates about the management of the body politic. The parasite developed into a symbol of the perceived degeneracy and dependency that threatened the progress of modernity. This character was commonly represented as disease-ridden and morally defective. Further, sociologists and medical professionals like Josiah Flynt and Havelock Ellis described them as sexually “deviant” or queer.4 London identifies as a tramp while simultaneously reiterating the problematic rhetoric of Flynt and others. But Orwell challenges the 137

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idea that tramps are a parasitic threat to the body politic, developing a notion of interdependent identity in his earlier works. While both London and Orwell advance socialist agendas in their writings, these authors differ significantly in their understanding of social parasitism. London’s The People of the Abyss (1903) and The Road (1907) are autobiographical accounts of poverty in the East End of London and North America, respectively. London’s tramp stories rely on a journalistic perspective to document the dehumanizing conditions of being houseless, and he commonly identifies as a “hobo” or tramp even when he is no longer destitute. For London, tramping is an adventure that provides freedom, though he does not necessarily make the same claims for other tramps. His tramp stories are inflected by eugenics and a liberalist sense of indepedence: for London, other “hoboes” are often degenerate parasites that do not fit with his socialist vision. Put differently, London’s political beliefs, habits, and writing style are shaped by his experience of being houseless, yet he also tends to portray tramps (other than himself) as irredeemable. Although directly influenced by London’s writings on tramping, Orwell challenges the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century representations of tramps in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935). He argues that, while the public might imagine tramps as “parasites, worthless in their very nature,”5 the terms “parasite” and “work” are shaped by classist ideologies. These authors’ first-hand accounts of tramping serve different ends: London’s life on the road shows the purported degeneracy of modernity, while Orwell exposes the limits of capitalism. I compare these authors’ tramp stories to show that the genre is essential to understanding parasitism and dependency in the modernist period and beyond. Though London’s writing ultimately privileges an individualistic notion of the humanist subject—a healthy, autonomous citizen perfected through eugenics—Orwell’s tramp character reflects a communal identity in which dependency is not a weakness but a fact of life. And both authors connect tramping to storytelling, recalling the Classical trope of the parasite as a witty person who earns food and lodging by telling tales. Though London and Orwell are very different authors, both emphasize first-hand accounts. According to these two authors, many representations of tramps in the nineteenth century obscure the lived experience of poverty because they are second-hand accounts or entirely fictionalized. About the working class in England, for example, Friedrich Engels writes that “I have lived long enough amidst you to know something about your circumstances.”6 Yet, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) relies on second-hand accounts, statistics, and economic theory. London writes that this is not the type of experience he aims to relate in The People of the Abyss: “I was open to be convinced by the evidence of my eyes, rather than

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by the teachings of those who had not seen, or by the words of those who had seen and gone before.”7 Reflecting on the composition of Down and Out in his later book The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell relates a similar plan: “I had read the unemployment figures but I had no notion of what they implied.”8 London and Orwell emphasize that the lived experience is necessary for its representation, which is reflected in the very nature of their writing styles. Additionally, Orwell identifies the literary tradition—including London’s work—as a key culprit in framing tramps as social parasites. For Orwell, the idea of the “tramp-monster” had been embedded in the popular imagination by novels and magazines, transforming the relatively harmless tramp or parasite into a pervasive social threat. Scholar Kim Moody writes that, although one of the best-known tramps today is likely Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp,” the popular portrayal of the professional tramp dates to the Gilded Age: “In his Strikers, [Allen] Pinkerton contributed to the ‘tramp scare’ of the 1870s by reminding his reader that while tramps, like the poor, have always been with us and while some are simply happy-go-lucky fellows, ‘you oftener get a vagabond’ who is taken by ‘shiftlessness, discontent, [and] restlessness.’”9 This dangerous tramp character was cemented in the popular imagination by the turn of the century. For example, in his 1901 book Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life, Flynt describes tramps in general as “human parasite[s].”10 He takes most offense at what he calls the “city tramp”: “He is a parasite fed by parasites and hated by all self-respecting beggars. He is found wherever the traveling hoboes congregate, and there is no town in any country that I have visited where he does not flourish.”11 Flynt creates a hierarchy of tramps, suggesting one can retain self-respect while begging; however, he also argues that those who resort to “crude” offenses are parasitical. London, who dedicates The Road to Flynt, often reiterates this position. For example, London claims that he “became a tramp—well, because of the life that was in me, of the wanderlust in my blood [. . .] well, just because it was easier to than not to.”12 He portrays himself as one of the few self-respecting tramps among a sea of dishonest and degenerate “hoboes,” suggesting that he is houseless simply because he could not stand the life of a laborer. The Orwellian tramp, however, is not an idler on the road by choice; instead, he is a worker who has been forced into destitution by disability, illness, or a poor economy. London and Orwell wrote about tramps against the backdrop of the Gilded Age success stories by Horatio Alger and Charles Morris as well as the novels of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. In success narratives, tramps were often lazy, lowly villains who physically resembled the rags-to-riches protagonist but scorned honesty and industry. As Christine Photinos asserts, “in the era of the ‘self‐made man,’ the resolutely idle tramp was an aberration and an outrage. He was the sinister opposite of the hard‐working and ambitious boy

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heroes who strode through the pages of nineteenth‐century popular success literature.”13 While much of London’s writing tends to romanticize life on the road, his naturalistic style also documents the realities of poverty: “London wrote romantic versions of the tramp or hobo and then would suddenly ratchet up to a naturalism that went beyond Twain in telling some horrible truths.”14 Much as London’s stories about the Klondike privilege a sense of freedom, his tramp stories attempt to balance the dangers of life on the road with a romantic sense of adventure. For Orwell, though, tramps are determined to work and despise charity (even if they begrudgingly accept it). They are not lazy individuals but the product of a broken system. Orwell’s writing on vagrancy emphasizes the ennui imposed by the lifestyle, anonymized characters and locations, and masses of nomadic vagrants moving throughout Europe. His writing style is circular and meandering, designed not to lead to a character’s financial success or to create a sense of adventure but to develop a feeling of stagnancy. The narrative arc reflects the realities of capitalism, as most characters’ lives never improve in the end. In A Clergyman’s Daughter, the protagonist Dorothy does not learn from her experience as a tramp nor benefit in any way. She questions her faith in Christian charity, loses the respect of many townspeople, and is in the same economic standing at the end of the novel as she is at the start. Throughout the modernist period, several other authors wrote from a similar perspective, including W. H. Davies, the so-called “Tramp Poet” and author of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908), and Tom Kromer, author of Waiting for Nothing (1935). Kromer’s book, in particular, uses what Robert Dale Parker refers to as a “[shrunken] style and structure to match the Depression’s terrible reduction of what had come to seem like ordinary life.”15 This short, blunt literary aesthetic eschews continuity, a clear narrative arc, and character development in favor of highly descriptive prose written in the present tense.16 Orwell’s Down and Out relies on a similar style, favoring a curt realism over aesthetics and plot development. I also address the differences between how London and Orwell represent public health and disability. London’s writing is strongly influenced by the eugenic thinking of H. G. Wells and his Anticipations series. The title of London’s The People of the Abyss, for example, is a phrase Wells uses to describe the working class: “the nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, exports, or poisons its People of the Abyss [. . .] will certainly be the ascendant or dominant nation before the year 2000.”17 London portrays the disabilities and diseases common in the working class, but such a perspective is used to claim that a greater “management” of life is needed in Western civilization. In contrast, Orwell’s representations of sickness and disability do not further a eugenic ideology. He criticizes medical inspections of tramps, noting that they are designed to prevent diseases from spreading

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to the middle class (especially smallpox), not to treat impoverished people. He argues that the laws regulating vagrancy in Britain systematically perpetuate chronic illness; disabled people are often forced to become vagrants in exchange economies that privilege able-bodiedness. Tracing the development of the social parasite from Wells to London and Orwell, this chapter shows how some of the most marginalized individuals in society came to be at the center of biopolitical debates about welfare and public health. I begin with London’s ambivalent portrayal of poverty: he is at once sympathetic to the poor and disapprovingly cynical. His writing is saturated with eugenics, suggesting civilization will degrade in the twentieth century. I then shift to Orwell’s writing, in which the tramp is less a parasite than a “man out of work” who struggles against the middle- and upper classes. At stake in these tramp stories are the politics of representation; London and Orwell seek a more ethical and accurate way to represent poverty, engaging the social welfare debates that define twentieth- and twenty-first-century politics. Ultimately, the shifts between London and Orwell represent a broader questioning that one can “perfect” humanity through biosocial engineering. By the 1930s, economic turmoil and the looming threat of fascism undermined the notion that humanistic ideology would necessarily lead to social progress. IN THE ABYSS AND ON THE ROAD: JACK LONDON London’s The People of the Abyss was published in 1903 following his assignment from the Macmillan Company to report on the coronation of Edward VII. Marie L. Ahearn writes that London planned to travel from England to South Africa to report on the Boer War for the American Press Association, but the second assignment was canceled. As a result, London remained in England, going underground in the “slums of the East End” to document “the account of this descent” over seven weeks.18 The East End at this time was a particularly impoverished part of London, especially after a surge of Jewish immigrants arrived after fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe and Russia.19 As Ahearn notes, The People of the Abyss is not “a sociological study, a reporter’s eye-witness account, an adventure in slumming, or a non-fiction essay,” nor does it “fit neatly into the fiction category”; it is a form of journalism in which London is “an active participant and a creator” (not unlike what many now call “the New Journalism”).20 But The People of the Abyss is not only notable because it defies generic conventions; instead, I argue that its subjective reporting, along with London’s The Road, is driven by the eugenic ideology underpinning the text. London ambivalently describes poverty, self-identifying as a hobo or tramp.21 Yet, his argument

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revolves around biofuturity—curing the purported degeneracy of poverty, instilling middle-class values, and eliminating social parasites. Narratives of biofuturity imagine a future in which social relations are inseparable from the “improvement” of the social body through eugenic practices. The phrase “the people of the abyss” is derived from Wells’s Anticipations series and used throughout London’s oeuvre. For example, in his dystopic science-fiction novel The Iron Heel (1908), London defines the concept in detail. The Iron Heel is told from the year 2600 A.D. in the form of a discovered manuscript, and the narrator of this manuscript, in a footnote, claims: “The people of the abyss—this phrase was struck out by the genius of H. G. Wells in the late nineteenth century A.D. Wells was a sociological seer, a sane and normal as well as warm human. Many fragments of his work have come down to us, while two of his greatest achievements, Anticipations and Mankind in the Making, have come down intact.”22 Throughout The Iron Heel, “the people of the abyss” are described as the “great helpless mass of the population,” as “pitiable,” or “a mob, an awful river that filled the street.”23 The allusions to Wells in the passage above are taken from his Anticipations series, in which Wells outlines his vision for the future. But in describing social issues in Anticipations, Wells also tends to undergird his thinking with classism and eugenics. For example, describing the people of the abyss as “the ‘submerged’ portion of the social body,” Wells writes that one consequence of progress “is the appearance of a great number of people without either property or any evident function in the social organism. This new ingredient is most apparent in the towns, it is frequently spoken of as the Urban Poor, but its characteristic traits are to be found also in the rural districts. For the most part its individuals are either criminal, immoral, parasitic in more or less irregular ways upon the more successful classes.”24 Wells equates social success and morality, implying that those individuals who do not have wealth or an obvious function within society are immoral and “parasitic.” This type of social parasitism is dangerous, according to Wells, as it is a regressive social behavior that threatens a society’s progress (notably, he describes society as an “organism,” a living thing). Wells aims to create a Platonic “New Republic,” but one without “inferior races” of men. He implies there is little room for the “black man,” the “yellow man,” and “that alleged termite in the civilized woodwork, the Jew.”25 The “civilized man” at the head of Wells’s New Republic is ultimately white, Anglo-Saxon, able-bodied, and “without any parasitic dependence on people.”26 Wells uses the parasite as a catch-all category, transforming the stock character of Classical writings into a social threat. Dependency is dangerous to Wells’s brand of liberalism, which he aims to quash through eugenic policies. Wells’s vision of the New Republic casts a long shadow over London’s The People of the Abyss. London writes that there is nowhere in the city where

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one may “escape the sight of abject poverty,” and he describes the East End as a “human wilderness.”27 As London relates his interviews throughout the city, he depicts the working class as a primitive force that degrades the civilization of London. Though he describes the “working” class, many of the individuals he interviews are in destitute poverty, often working part-time or not at all. And many of the tramps in the East End are conflated with the working class, as the vagrants were either laborers who had been affected by disease and unemployment or were living in the East End. Furthermore, according to sociological surveys at the end of the nineteenth century, Whitechapel, the heart of the East End, was “the dwelling place of Jews—tailors, bootmakers, and tobacco workers,” as the Jewish community numbered as many as 130,000.28 This densely Jewish, working-class community is described by London as “the noisome and rotten tide of humanity which the powers that be are pouring eastward out of London Town [. . .] the city poor folk are a nomadic breed; so they migrate eastward, wave upon wave, saturating and degrading neighborhood by neighborhood, driving the better class of workers before them to pioneer, on the rim of the city, or dragging them down.”29 This dichotomy between a nomadic “mob” and the “better class of workers” casts the city’s poor as a contagion, “pouring” out of and “saturating” the city with degradation as they spread. Much as the “parasitic classes” are a social drain in Wells’s writing, the nomadic poor in London’s work are “dragging down” the middle class. This is representative of the greater tension within London’s writing, in which he claims to advocate for the poor but portrays them as dangerous. American eugenicists, including David Starr Jordan, also influenced London’s views. Jordan’s Foot-notes to Evolution (1898) argues that degeneracy was spread through the breeding of the poor and that altruism only worked to perpetuate the pauper class: “Degeneration occurs when weakness mates with weakness.”30 For Ewa Barber Luczak, London was not simply an “American explorer” in the East End, as he also imagined himself as “an American scientist who utilized eugenic discourse to structure the chaotic world of London’s slums.”31 Luczak illustrates that Jordan’s writings not only impacted London’s thinking but also led the author to believe that he could “engineer society” in a new way by writing The People of the Abyss. Luczak identifies an Emersonian strain within Jordan’s writing, a rhetoric of American individualism, Self-Reliance, and social action that make its way into his writing. As I discuss later in this chapter, Orwell tended to reject London’s emphasis on American individualism, suggesting that The People of the Abyss takes such a “cynical” perspective of social parasites because London is describing a type of “American tramping” that was not a part of the “English character.”32 This rejection of American ideology undergirds Orwell’s work. London’s writing tends toward ethnography, as he

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attempts to attribute the poverty of the East End to social degradation. This theory of degeneration is derived from Jordan’s theories about evolution and devolution, especially London’s assertion that East Enders were “degrading neighborhood by neighborhood.” London claims that “inferior” heredity was prevalent among the poor because it is spreading rapidly; poverty becomes a form of disease that can be caught and transmitted through “breeding.” Disease exemplifies the danger of the nomadic poor for many eugenicists. London writes about smallpox in particular, which he claims kills one in six tramps. Even if they recover from the disease, they are often pock-marked and financially destitute: “[the tramps] had been working when smitten by the disease, and both had emerged from the hospital ‘broke.’”33 Scenes such as this are the source of London’s socialist politics, as tramping is described in these moments as harsh and unfair. In addition to the verminous infestations and starvation the tramps endure, London shows that health and poverty are intertwined. Although industrialization brings wealth to some, it also pollutes the city and transforms the working class into a “noisome tide” of laborers and vagrants. As a result, London argues for greater biopolitical management of the poor, reflecting wider cultural anxieties about the spread of disease through social parasites. The proliferation of smallpox via tramps was an especially prominent public health issue in the United Kingdom at the turn of the century. For example, in a 1904 editorial in The Lancet titled “The Spread of Small-pox by Tramps,” a medical officer argues that vagrancy is one of the greatest threats to the public: “What a potent factor in maintaining the prevalence of small-pox is that unemployed and largely unemployable degenerate, the habitual vagrant or tramp [. . .] The fact that this parasite upon the charity and good nature of the community is in his turn a vehicle for the spread of other parasites, both animal and vegetable, is common knowledge.”34 Here, the infected individual is framed as a vector of disease regulated with preventative measures, not a patient to be treated. “Animal parasites” likely refers to pests such as lice or insects. However, it is unclear whether “vegetable parasites” includes bacteria or blight, mold, and other organisms that affect food stores. The author’s language further reinforces this regulatory perspective by suggesting that tramps are “unemployable” and “degenerate,” implying they are unlikely to contribute to the social good. Tramps become biosocial parasites, individuals who not only drain the resources of a society but also spread contagious disease and immorality. The conflation of biological and social contagion is a feature of many outbreak narratives, including London’s representations of smallpox in The People of the Abyss. Priscilla Wald writes that the notion of contagion “gradually evolved from a metaphor to a carefully articulated sociological concept” at the turn of the century and was “formalized as social contagion.” This

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social contagion names “the primary mechanism of social cohesion in the emerging science of society.”35 Drawing on scholars such as Mary Poovey, Wald argues that diseases in fiction dramatize membership in a “social body,” furthering collectivist reform agendas. Social contagion can also reference “deviancy,” whether sexual or moral, which I discuss in more detail in my section on Orwell. The phrase “social contagion” conflates health and identity, including issues surrounding nationalism and group identity (consider the surge in Jewish immigration in the East End and Wells’s and London’s subsequent anxieties about biofuturity). For example, in Joaquin Miller’s 1886 novel The Destruction of Gotham, “ten thousand tramps [. . .] erupt into apocalyptic conflagration,” interweaving “public-health concerns with nativist sentiment” and intensifying “the stigmatizing of already despised populations and the places where they lived.”36 Both the editorial in The Lancet quoted above and London’s writing tend to cast tramps as biosocial vectors for contagion, and contagion became a connective and transformative social force. As Wald concludes, “the rhythm of social and cultural communities followed that of their biotic bases.”37 As sociologists, politicians, and medical officers more readily conceptualized the middle- and upper classes as ecologies—as organic, networked communities—so too were vagrants understood as a social disease. Rather than being part of the cohesive social body, the tramps became parasites on that body, a sickness to be eradicated. London’s writing reflects this stereotyping, as he argues that tramps are ultimately “encumbrances” on social health. While diseases such as smallpox disproportionately affected the impoverished, in many “historical cases, what may have had some rational basis became wholesale racist or classist stereotyping.”38 For example, in exchange for room and board at a public lodging house, London works at Whitechapel Infirmary. There he cleans and disinfects rooms, which he argues is suitable work for tramps: “these men of the spike [. . .] are encumbrances. They are of no good use to anyone, nor to themselves. They clutter the earth with their presence, and are better out of the way. Broken by hardship, ill fed, and worse nourished, they are always the first to be struck down by disease.”39 On some level, London implies that the tramps with whom he works are victims with little agency. He uses the phrases “broken by hardship” and “struck down” to portray them as objects of violence. But this passage also shows that London views tramps as more than just victims, as they “encumber” those with whom they live and “clutter the earth.” His rhetoric asserts that tramps should be controlled, if not exterminated; they are a danger to the health of the body politic, at present and in posterity. Underlying London’s portrayal of tramps as a health threat is an argument for “better breeding.” Like many other writers in the modernist era, he rejected the conservatism of “main-line” eugenics while still endorsing a

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socialist vision for biopolitical regulations. As Donald Childs notes, “eugenics was positioned by writers from the 1880s to the 1930s to assume responsibility for a creation recently orphaned by the death of God.”40 For example, the Fabian Society emphasized a form of selective “breeding” (rather than extermination or genocide). And figures such as Wells were popular enough “to make the discourse of eugenics an important part of Fabian public policy and private gossip alike.”41 London’s emphasis on breeding in “The Ghetto” chapter reveals this eugenic ideology: “the men of the Ghetto are the men who are left—a deteriorated stock, left to undergo still further deterioration [. . .] Those who are lacking, the weak of heart and head and hand, as well as the rotten and hopeless, have remained to carry on the breed. And year by year, in turn, the best they breed are taken from them.”42 This passage demonstrates that although London’s first-person account is designed to document the realities of poverty, his writing is ultimately concerned with the future. In short, his interest in documenting the poor is founded on the threat of spreading degeneracy to posterity. The writing shifts the focus away from those currently living in poverty to those yet to come; it is about the imagined communities of the future, not necessarily the suffering of those about whom London writes. Humans are described as animalistic “stock,” and phrases such as “year by year” reveal this anxiety for the future. London argues that the best of the population have either left the country or have been enlisted in the army, and the result he describes is “a new race” that has “sprung up, a street people” or “the pavement folk.”43 He views tramping as a cycle of degeneration that will only increase if it is not eliminated. Throughout The People of the Abyss, London writes about the precarity of life, the pervasiveness of suicide, and the limited opportunities for children before ending with a chapter titled “The Management.” Here he reiterates his question, “Has Society bettered the lot of the average man?” in several forms, concluding that the answer is a resounding “No.” For London, social mismanagement is the cause. Better political management becomes the solution to the social problems listed throughout the work, though London rarely goes into detail as to what this would entail other than eliminating the perceived parasites of the East End by “breeding a better stock.” The danger of “street people” or “pavement folk” is, according to London, emphasized by their parasitic nature, which London goes on to discuss in more detail in his 1907 book The Road. This book is arguably a continuation of The People of the Abyss, as it relates to his time as a so-called hobo in North America at the turn of the century. Although the events in this narrative take place before The People of the Abyss, The Road was published nearly five years later, and it expands his previous arguments for eugenic regulations. Also written as a first-hand account of poverty, The Road represents a tension between a masculine subculture, which emphasized personal liberty,

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and a working-class political movement. John Lennon writes, “Jack London was a selfish hobo,” an “individualistic [train] rider [. . .] in competition with all members of society.”44 Yet London was also a champion of the Socialist Labor Party of America and an advocate for the (white) working class; the “boxcar politics” of The Road paradoxically privilege the lower and working classes while also portraying tramps as criminals, con-men, and social parasites who threaten the collective good. Orwell would later describe tramping in The Road as a “deliberate, cynical parasitism,”45 which I argue is established by the generic and political aspects of London’s writing. The writing style of The Road connects to what London describes as life on the road—using “fiction” or deception to earn his food—and the story that opens The Road illustrates this aim. London is trying to grift for a meal, but the man he asks for food demands that London work in exchange. London tries to get out of the work, seeking charity instead. The man sees through his deception, though: “‘I don’t believe you want to work [. . .] I have always earned my food. The trouble with you is that you are idle and dissolute.’”46 London admits, “In fact, I didn’t want to work.” This becomes the start of a game in which London claims that “the beggar must ‘size up’ his victim [. . .] the successful hobo must be an artist.”47 In framing those who give him money as “victims,” he implies from the start of The Road that beggars take advantage of others and are never quite who they seem. And he goes on to write that the “training of my tramp days is due much of my success as a story-writer [. . .] I quite believe it was my tramp-apprenticeship that made a realist out of me. Realism constitutes the only goods one can exchange at the kitchen door for grub.”48 It is the sense of Realism that London emphasizes, the interweaving of real events with literary narrative, that interests him. Realism in this sense does not refer to verisimilitude; rather, it is a literary method that advances an argument in which the author uses facts and real events to present their perception of reality. Storytelling becomes a way to engage others, and the readers of The Road become the “marks” London has sized up. That The Road begins with this anecdote is not coincidental, as London is identifying the framework of what follows: the reader is about to give their time (and presumably their money) for his story. This type of tramp aesthetic or storytelling—in which the tramp sizes up his “mark” and “sells” his story—evokes the Classical conception of parasitism. For Lucian, for example, the “sponger” or parasite (parasitos) exchanges a story for a meal: “Parasitism is an art; it is not only an art, but the noblest and best of all others [. . .] the Parasite can do nothing, is not in his Geer, till he be well lin’d with Meat and Drink, and performs best, and shews the Perfection of his Art at a well-furnished Table.”49 Lucian satirically critiques the logic by which art is defined by declaring the parasite the ultimate artist. And Michel Serres notes that this conception of the parasite “invents

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something new.” For Serres, “Since he does not eat like everyone else, he builds a new logic [. . .] He wants to give his voice for matter, (hot) air for solid.”50 While the parasite or tramp might be interpreted as a social dependent, as someone who takes something (i.e., food) for nothing, Lucian and Serres challenge this notion. Instead, the tramp “builds a new logic” in which storytelling governs economies of exchange. London’s narrative framework uses a similar logic, exchanging his stories for a meal. But the historical context of The Road sets it apart from Lucian’s De Parasito, as London’s work is influenced by eugenics. While Lucian may playfully refer to parasites as raconteurs or artists, London was writing in an era of purported degeneracy. For Wells and London, parasitic dependence was seen a regressive behavior, even though London identifies as a tramp in some stories. For example, as he begs for food from another individual, London writes that his “mark” is “burdened with all her bourgeois morality,” of which he is eager to take advantage: “While that good woman warmed up biscuits, fried bacon, and cooked more eggs, and while I kept pace with her in taking care of all that she placed before me, I enlarged the picture of that poor orphan boy and filled in the details. I became that poor boy. I believed in him as I believe in the beautiful eggs I was devouring. I could have wept for myself. I know the tears did get into my voice at times. It was very effective.”51 This passage shows the deeper tension in London’s writing between his liberal conception of Self and his socialist advocacy; morality becomes a luxury rather than a virtue. He takes advantage of the moral goodness of others, telling stories to get a meal from a woman. In The People of the Abyss, this type of behavior reflects the “human wilderness” and “rotten humanity” he describes flooding out of the East End; however, London is now himself part of that “wilderness,” paradoxically participating in its degeneracy. The ideological differences between The People of the Abyss and The Road are partly rooted in geography, or the differences between British and American society. In The People of the Abyss, he lives among the tramps, documenting the “mob” of the Jewish East End; he immerses himself in the culture, donning rags and traveling throughout the city as an outsider pretending to be part of the British working class. But in The Road, he is more at home as he writes about his experience as an actual tramp. He does not need to purchase clothing to disguise himself on the road, as he does in the East End, and he travels much further by rail in The Road. Instead of Jewish immigrants, London describes minor characters who are Black, Irish, or Italian, and as a result, London is less overtly antisemitic. But his experiences in The Road are supplemented by The People of the Abyss, as it informs his attitude toward many tramps in the United States. Despite self-identifying as a tramp, London describes hoboes as physically degraded. For example, when he is arrested for vagrancy in Pennsylvania,

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he depicts his fellow inmates in the Erie County Penitentiary as “the awful abysses of human degradation”52 (evoking the title of his previous book). Their depravity is not simply moral but also physical: “Our hall was a common stews [i.e., full of bawdy people], filled with the ruck and filth, the scum and dregs, of society—hereditary inefficients, degenerates, wrecks, lunatics, addled intelligences, epileptics, monsters, weaklings, in short, a very nightmare of humanity. Hence, fits flourished with us. These fits seemed contagious.”53 The language used here, such as “nightmare” and “monsters,” alongside disabilities such as epilepsy, conflates poor health with poor morals, and the inmates are portrayed as “badly addled creature[s]” who howl at night, fight each other, and steal.54 London’s tone shifts in the penitentiary sections as he loses his freedom of movement, and the story becomes an exposé of prison life. London relates the injustices of the American legal system, showing, for example, that tramps rarely received a fair trial. Inmates were typically left to do the guards’ work, delivering food and patrolling, without pay. But the writing tends to return to degradation: the poor conditions the inmates experience is juxtaposed with their identity as “monsters” of society. And the reference to “contagion” reinforces the underlying argument that, despite embodying a version of the tramp, London ultimately advocates for their eradication (or at least rehabilitation and assimilation) to protect the body politic. London would later write about his time in the penitentiary and on the “doss” or “tramp” as a key source of his socialist attitudes in essays such as “How I Became a Socialist” (1903) and “What Life Means to Me” (1905). In these essays, he suggests that even if tramps are degraded, few can truly succeed against the economic forces of modernity. He writes, “I think it is apparent that my rampant individualism was pretty effectively hammered out of me, and something else as effectively hammered in. But, just as I had been an individualist without knowing it, I was now a Socialist without knowing it.”55 For Richard Etulain, however, London mostly discusses socialism after his time on the road, and there are significant discrepancies between the The Road and his short essays. When examining London’s diary entries as a tramp, Etulain notes that London was more concerned with being a “boy-hero” in his own story, creating a young, single, white male identity. Lennon further supports this position, arguing that “London’s type of monolithic individualist ideology” contrasted the “transient mutualism” on which most other tramps relied.56 By the end of The Road, London also writes that even though he is no longer a tramp, he still feels the need to follow the “clamor” of his “liberty-loving ancestors.”57 This is not to suggest that London was not a “true” socialist; rather, my analysis challenges the idea that his tramp stories must necessarily align with his political essays or activism. The literary aspects of The People of the Abyss and The Road—the adventure,

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the cunning protagonist, the story of success—drive London to write about himself as an individual who is ultimately separate from the “parasitic” classes that he and Wells decry. Throughout The People of the Abyss and its sequel The Road, London creates a conflicted portrait of tramp life. His portrait contrasted the attitude of many other tramps, and it created a tension between what London claims elsewhere and his seeming disdain for the poor. In addition to the literary aspects of these two works, London’s biofuturistic bent shapes his writing, as he ultimately reconciles this contradiction between individual liberty and mutualism by casting the lower classes as sub-human, as a breed of “pavement folk” that are not suited for the New Republic imagined by Wells. One of the key differences between London and Orwell is what I identify as London’s tramp-storytelling and his biofuturistic ideology; Orwell specifically challenges London’s representation of the tramp-parasite. For Orwell, London’s first-hand account of poverty provided an innovative way to explore social issues, yet London ultimately failed to adopt a collective, interdependent sense of the working class. In Orwell’s writing, literature is framed as a tool for a new type of politics that recognizes the limitations of liberal humanism. In Down and Out in Paris and London, he outlines his critique of literary history and the representation of tramps as parasites, later developing these ideas in his experimental novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter. THE ORWELLIAN TRAMP Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) documents Orwell’s tramping expeditions over eighteen months. It was his first full-length book, the first to use his penname, and the first of three nonfiction, exposé-style works that advance socialist ideologies to middle- and upper-class audiences (the other two are The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia).58 Down and Out is written in a journalistic, matter-of-fact tone. The narrative is undergirded by several arguments for social reform, from amending the British Vagrancy Act to establishing government-sponsored communal farms.59 Orwell questions why tramps were commonly understood as social parasites, and he rethinks previous conceptualizations of vagrancy. The tramps in Orwell’s writing are eager to work but have few opportunities, they are often disabled or chronically ill, and the general public and the police commonly despise them. Orwell’s arguments aim at literary history and nationalism; he suggests that literature has historically failed to represent the “true” nature of social parasites and that the American sense of individualism clashes with British politics. According to Orwell, London’s “American tramping” is separate from “English tramping,” which raises larger questions about American

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ideologies such as Emersonianism. While Orwell’s representation of tramps is not entirely unproblematic, including his ambivalence toward stereotypes about the queer sexuality of tramps, I ultimately suggest that his tramp stories resist a liberalist, individualistic ideology in favor of a communal sense of identity rooted in mutual dependency. Down and Out borrows literary techniques from fiction to create a subjective portrait of poverty. The veracity of many events has been called into question, and Orwell himself writes in an introduction to the French edition that many of the characters are “intended more as representative types” than actual people.60 Down and Out initially featured only the Paris sections—then called A Scullion’s Diary—as Orwell spent much of his time in Paris working as a plongeur (dishwasher or scullion). After the Paris manuscript was rejected for publication, he added material from articles he had previously written about the City of London in the 1920s. But, Orwell included them after the Paris sections, skewing the chronology of events.61 For Stephen Greenblatt, it is not the “pseudo-philosophical essay” style of Down and Out that is Orwell’s “true vehicle” for criticizing capitalism, but his talent for the “satirical description” of the world as “the ashes of a dead civilization.”62 Down and Out is informed by Orwell’s journalism from the late 1920s and early 1930s, displaying a tension between what Raymond Williams calls “observation and imagination.” This is not only a formal tension but also a “problem of social relationships.”63 As Williams explains, “the political point is the literary point. What is created in the book is an isolated independent observer and the objects of his observation [. . .] What is left in is ‘documentary’ enough, but the process of selection and organization is a literary act.”64 He suggests that Orwell’s style is influenced by James Joyce’s “ordinary” foci in Ulysses, situating Orwell among modernists who experiment with the character of the observer and the created world they describe. And, as I discuss, this likely informs Orwell’s experimentalism in his later book, A Clergyman’s Daughter. This subjective, journalistic style is how Orwell reevaluates tramping, as Down and Out aims to show the “truth” of vagrancy. According to Orwell, literary representations have skewed the English understanding of poverty, which he aims to correct at the level of content and form. He argues that negative social attitudes toward begging result from never having lived with tramps. For Orwell, many social problems arising from the Great Depression, such as increased vagrancy, are only exacerbated by the limited views of the middle- and upper classes. The epigraph indicates his aims from the start: “O scathful harm, condition of poverte.” Quoting Chaucer, Orwell implies that the “scathful” (or pernicious) harm of poverty is an established idea in English culture, but that the position of “beggars” has become especially negative in the popular imagination: “In childhood we have been taught that

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tramps are blackguards, and consequently there exists in our minds a sort of ideal or typical tramp—a repulsive, rather dangerous creature.”65 Orwell challenges the image of this “tramp-monster” by humanizing poverty with his subjective style, and he attempts to experience being a tramp. Down and Out undermines an ideological construction of poverty taught “in childhood,” and Orwell suggests the root of this stereotype is popular culture. Orwell specifically cites Jack London’s writing as a key source of the problematic representation of tramps as social parasites. According to Walter Rideout and Gordon Beadle, London’s The Road and The People of the Abyss were the initial sources of inspiration for Orwell to disguise himself as a tramp and record his experiences. For Beadle, “London and Orwell were aware of the suffering caused by the authorities and otherwise humane people because of the repulsive, often inhuman condition of the poor. Objects of fear and disgust seldom elicit sympathy.”66 But Orwell also notes that London is among the writers who suggest tramps are parasitical and maliciously lazy: “Deliberate, cynical parasitism, such as one reads of in Jack London’s books on American tramping, is not in the English character.”67 Orwell distances himself from London, arguing that his representations of tramping have served to undermine social reform. When describing other tramps, London suggests they are little more than parasites—a contradiction Orwell attributes to London’s American identity. The image of the parasite is especially harmful because it obscures the realities of unemployment and how tramps are often eager to work. Hence, Down and Out replaces the image of the “tramp-monster” and “parasite” with that of the “Englishman out of work.” These intimations connect Orwell’s early work to posthumanists such as Cary Wolfe in the sense that he tends to challenge the ways humanistic ideology informs capitalism (or what it means to be “human” in a capitalist society). For Orwell, the liberalist sense of Self-Reliance at the core of London’s writings subtly reinforce the exclusion of some of society’s most marginalized individuals. In other words, Orwell tends to resist the notion that some people do not fit within the Enlightenment project of social progress; instead, humans need to redefine their conception of “progress.” Especially in Orwell’s tramp stories, the critiques of humanism converge around issues of identity and emobidied experience. As Wolfe asserts, the posthuman world emphasizes the “ongoing, differentiated construction and creation of a shared environment, sometimes converging in a consensual domain, sometimes not, by autopoetic entities that have their own temporalities, chronicities, perceptual modalities, and so on—in short, their own forms of embodiment” (xxiv). In other words, while not all iterations of posthumanism are anti‑captialist, Wolfe critiques the liberalist sense of Self, the monolithic identity presumed within capitalist systems that privilege economic logic or economic epistemology above all else. Tramps (and the genre

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of tramp stories) often establish their own idiosyncratic sense of temporality and methods of navigating social systems. Similarly, as Serres describes, the parasite “invents something new” (50), its own logic or economy. Indeed, the first section of Serres’s The Parasite questions the clear cut distinctions between a mouse or rat who steals from the dinner table of a tax collector; in this fable, Serres resists the notion that the tax collector is any less parasiticial. Instead of viewing the world through hierarchical models, The Parasite emphasizes material networks. In Orwell’s work, the parasite or tramp cannot be disembodied and made into a statistical figure; when they are disembodied and abstracted, it is too easy to portray the parasite as a “bleed” on the system. In other words, even as he quotes figures, Orwell emphasizes living in poverty. The tramp is often disabiled or has a chronic illness, and they experience hunger and sleep deprivation. Tramp stories emphasize distinctive bodies with boils, sore feet, and bad odors that also enjoy simple pleasures like warm fires, bread, and cigarettes. The social parasite does not easily fit within the capitalist logic or humanist ideology, which is ultimately why London aims to eradicate the tramp and Orwell aims to shift the view of poverty. One of the key complications that arises in modernity, as many modernists such as Orwell identify, is the changing definition of what it means to be “human” in various stages of capitalism. For a special issue of New Formations in 2017, editors Manuela Rossini and Mike Toggweiler note that the modernist conceptions of time and history shape humanist theories of progress and productivity. As they ask, “How, for example, are we to think of social progress and innovation outside ‘neoliberal culture’ with its notion of modernity that has left too many of its constituting Others behind?”68 The various disabled tramps and impoverished individuals in Orwell’s writing struggle to find a place in British society as it changes rapidly in the 1930s. Writing in the Posthuman Glossary, Stefan Herbrechter argues that the conditions of capitalism arising in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (particularly “late capitalism”) define what it means to be “human” in ways too narrow to be truly inclusive. In short, the machines and clocks of modernity impact our understanding of “human time” and human bodies, creating an illusory conception of a normalized human subject. Herbrechter notes that, in this sense, critical posthumanism, as espoused by figures such as Wolfe or Braidotti, is not necessarily a “new trend”; instead, it can trace its origins to twentieth-century thinkers who engaged issues of an increasingly globalized, advanced form of neoliberal capitalism.69 The increasing mechanization and, later in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, digitalization of society complicates various definitions of the Human (and “posthuman”). In Posthuman Capitalism, Yasmin Ibrahim writes that people are increasingly conceptualized as “an entity blurring oppositional realms between the synthetic and biological/organic, and between reality and

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fiction. Posthuman capitalism is then the reassemblage of other spheres of human life and activities not directly assessed as productive aligning these with the extractive tendencies of capital and its predeliction for accumulation of wealth and value in its primitive modes.”70 While Ibrahim orients much of her focus toward data, her arguments also point to a longer history between posthumanism and capitalism. Ibrahim shows how the reassessment of “productive” forms of human life and activities tends to realign such activities to be absorbed within broader capitalist modes. In other words, what “counts” as work or the value of particular bodies and minds is perpetually reassessed. For posthumanist scholar Ruben Borg, many modernists embraced the inorganic and mechanistic, such as Marcel L’Herbier in L’inhumaine (1924), which views “the pairing of man and machine” as “a triumph of modernist style.” Alternatively, in Chaplin’s Modern Times, the iconic tramp is “chewed up” in the gears of a machine to symbolize the a “self-conscious reflectio[n] on the ways in which the mechanisation of labour defines the historicity of the present moment.” As Borg continues, the film imagines “the modern condition as a dehumanising existence, severing work from work-product, transforming the labourer’s body into a replaceable part of an inorganic whole.”71 In the context of the Orwellian tramp, the impoverished are put at risk due to the perception that their labor is unproductive and because of the harsh conditions that often degrade their bodies. Such a view is a paradoxically inhuman perspective of the human; it establishes an idealized human divorced from embodiment, or the lived realities of many of the tramps. While Orwell contends that the notion that tramps are social parasites is perpetuated by authors such as London, his arguments in Down and Out are also intertwined with questions about how labor is conceptualized within liberalism. Orwell writes that to many, it seems that “Working men ‘work,’ [but] beggars do not ‘work’; they are parasites, worthless in their very nature.”72 Orwell documents the wide variety of tasks that tramps perform, especially, as he notes, given that outright begging has been illegal in the United Kingdom since 1824.73 Tramps worked as screevers (street artists), acrobats, organ-grinders, street photographers, hymn singers, and “peddlers” (selling matches, bootlaces, or perfume). For Orwell, tramps do much the same work as others, but it is rarely viewed as “productive” labor. This assessment of how the British define labor is directly related to Orwell’s criticism of the idea that tramps are social parasites; both “labor” and “parasite” are relative terms, the latter of which is often used as a label for the most marginalized individuals in a community. Orwell’s critique shows the privileging of profit over the physical work of the laborer, yet his arguments also extend to language and popular imagination. Orwell is not simply reiterating a Marxist distinction between use-value and exchange-value; instead, by showing the types of jobs that tramps do and the language used to demean them, he

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reveals the specific mechanisms (the language and ideology) that perpetuate the image of the “tramp-monster” and “parasite.” His first-person narration is, in this sense, a corrective to the capitalist image of the tramp from a generation before. Images of disability and chronic illness challenge the notion that membership in the moral community hinges on one’s capacity for making a profit. The tramp’s life and work also mark their bodies in the form of scars, disability, and disfigurement. Orwell’s focus on chronic illness and disabilities is part of his “realistic” style, as they are topics misrepresented in popular portrayals of tramps in the past. Unlike London, Orwell is not concerned with engineering the future; instead, he focuses heavily on the present in most of his early writings. Health relates to tramping in two ways in Down and Out. First, disabled people are likely to become houseless in a society that equates production with able-bodiedness, and, second, vagrancy leads to chronic illness, malnourishment, and disease. While London emphasizes disability and disease to argue for the eradication of tramps, Orwell emphasizes the present state of tramps in Britain. Focusing on health, Orwell can show that tramps are not lazy individuals; instead, their society fails to accommodate them. One example of how disability leads to poverty is Orwell’s friend Boris, who is made virtually destitute because of his “lame” leg. Boris, a former Russian officer who had worked as a waiter at a prestigious hotel in Paris, had promised Orwell work if he should ever need it. However, by the time Orwell finds him again, Boris is starving to death. He loses his job after several days in the hospital, and, despite treatment, his leg is only worse by the next time Orwell finds him. After this, the two look for work together in hotels around the city, often with little luck. For example, the pair almost finds work in one scene, but the manager notices Boris’s limp and refuses to hire them. Down and Out emphasizes that tramps are not simply avoiding work; high unemployment rates reflect a decreasing demand for labor. As he summarizes in his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier, “at that time [1928] nobody cared to admit that unemployment was inevitable, because this meant admitting that it would probably continue. The middle classes were still talking about ‘lazy idle loafers on the dole’ [unemployment insurance] and saying ‘these men could all find work if they wanted to.’”74 Down and Out repeatedly shows Orwell and others inquiring for work but failing to find any, because it exemplifies the extent of unemployment in Britain. This repetitive failure shapes the ethos of the narrative; unlike the heroes of Gilded Age success stories, the protagonist of Down and Out works intensely but never earns enough to support himself. And unlike in London’s The Road, tramping is not a daring adventure but a tedious and physically exhausting life. Boris’s inability to find work because of his limp is also part of Orwell’s technique for recasting the tramp. It suggests that a person’s health or

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disability plays too prominent a role in social success. Boris is qualified to work in a restaurant, but, given the high unemployment (and large size of the labor pool), employers dismiss him because of his leg. Boris is also paralleled by a character in the London section of Down and Out named Bozo, who is denied work because he is disabled: “His right leg was dreadfully deformed, the foot being twisted heel-forward in a way horrible to see.”75 Bozo works as a screever to make money, but he spends much of his time with the other tramps in the spikes (lodging houses). Bozo earned his living as a housepainter, but after the war, he fell off a stage from forty feet onto the pavement. Bozo’s social status changes abruptly because of his disability, which Orwell spends several pages detailing. Not only does he like Bozo—an intelligent, amiable character—but Orwell also argues that there is something fundamentally wrong with Bozo’s treatment. Even though he receives some compensation, it is not nearly enough; the accident ultimately leads Bozo to become houseless. Orwell’s focus on disability and unemployment functions as a counternarrative to the “disabled confidence man,” or the tramp whose sole purpose is to exploit a benefactor class as a parasite. Disabilty theorists Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell write that by the nineteenth century, “disabled people represent prototypical nonproducers in exchange economies because the terms of their social participation often exceed a system’s willingness to accommodate them.”76 Even in the twentieth century, Orwell suggests this ideology is still pervasive, as Boris and Bozo are conceptualized by others as nonproducers despite their qualifications to wait tables or paint. (Notably, Boris and Bozo are not simply pretending to be skilled workers, as they later demonstrate their expertise.) Snyder and Mitchell write that “consequently, disabled people become parasitical, or so runs the narrative of capitalism [. . .] The Confidence-Man unveils disability’s centrality to achieving this goal by examining the degree to which bodies marked as deviant provide an opportunity to solidify other social actors’ beliefs in their own moral goodness and proximity to normative ideals.”77 Orwell positions his narrative from the disabled tramp’s point of view, showing how “deviant” bodies are ostracized in an exchange economy. Orwell asserts that even if a tramp is imagined as a parasite, he is “a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community,” and “he pays for [his lifestyle] over and over in suffering.”78 In this sense, the Orwellian tramp challenges the notion that success is the result of hard work and proper morals; instead, Orwell shows systemic ableism and classism play a major role in creating vagrancy. Throughout Down and Out, Orwell juxtaposes disability and tramping, whether to show the limitations of ableist societies or the pervasiveness of disabilities among tramp communities. Orwell writes in one passage about an “imbecile” who “said that he was too tired to walk and clung to the railings,

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until the Tramp Major had to dislodge him and start him with a kick,” parenthetically adding that “there is an imbecile in every collection of tramps.”79 Tramps are not allowed to stay in the same spike more than a night, which leads to a life of walking from town to town in search of low-cost lodging—a life few would cling to if they had a choice. The “imbecile” Orwell mentions here is one of many in the story, and he suggests that they are subject to the same high unemployment rate as Boris and Bozo because of their disabilities.80 This is not simply a correlation but an indication of the limitations of current social models. Orwell sometimes uses disability as an analogy to emphasize his point: “It follows that the ‘Serve them damned well right’ attitude that is normally taken towards tramps is no fairer than it would be towards cripples or invalids.”81 While this elides some of the realities of ableism, and the differences between poverty and disability, it also reinforces Orwell’s critique, given that many of the tramps he describes are, in fact, disabled. In addition to showing that disabled people are mistreated in exchange economies, Orwell challenges traditional representations of the “tramp-monster” and “parasite” by demonstrating the physical toll of tramping. Many of the men Orwell meets had contracted diseases because they were denied access to regular bathing, shelter, and nutritious food: “The Irishman was a friendly old man, but he smelt very unpleasant, which was not surprising when one learned how many diseases he suffered from [. . .] With this assemblage of diseases he had tramped the roads for fifteen years.” He lists “diseases” such as eczema, myopia, chronic bronchitis, back pain, dyspepsia, urethritis, varicose veins, and bunions.82 Orwell repeatedly characterizes tramps this way throughout the book, challenging the idea that tramps are able-bodied and lazy men who victimize hard-working Brits. Instead, tramps are much more likely to be chronically ill and unable to work. Furthermore, these illnesses are implicitly linked to life on the road and sleeping out of doors, such as bronchitis from exposure or bunions from walking in poor shoes. Orwell is critical of policies that prevent tramps from staying in the same spike for two nights in a row without vacating, which often forces them to move to the next town to find a suitable lodging house. The immense amount of walking involved in this lifestyle also harms their bodies. Drawing on his essay “The Spike,” published in the New Adelphi in 1931, Orwell speaks with a tramp who summarizes it as “the system which makes a tramp spend fourteen hours a day in the spike, and the other ten in walking and dodging the police.”83 Medical officials inspect Orwell and his fellow tramps twice in twenty-four hours, “for the authorities have a terror of smallpox and its distribution by tramps.” Still, none of the tramps receive treatment for their other illnesses, even though “there were not ten decently built men among us, and half, I believe, should have been in hospital.”84

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The Orwellian tramp establishes an observational aesthetic of detachment that informs Orwell’s 1930s novels. Documenting this type of hero in Orwell’s early fiction, Terry Eagleton argues that it is related to a wider “paradox: those who escape from the ordinary world by intellectual pursuits or political ideologies are satirized, but so also are those who involve themselves ‘mindlessly’ with it. The only viable stance is one of passive withdrawal within the world.”85 This attitude reflects Orwell’s understanding of his position in history. Orwell, embodying the tramp in Down and Out, is neither a “contemptible capitalist” nor a radical ideologist; he becomes an observer. In Wigan Pier, Orwell reflects on his time as a tramp, writing that, on his return from Burma as an imperial police officer, he wanted to turn his attention toward the atrocities and “economic injustice” in Britain: “the social outcasts: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. These were ‘the lowest of the low,’ and these were the people with whom I wanted to get in contact.”86 This desire to remove himself from middle-class society is an attempt to escape the ideology that obscures the nature of poverty. For example, Orwell writes in The Road to Wigan Pier that “I wanted to get in touch with them [tramps], but I still thought of them as alien and dangerous,” writing that “I did not know what a tramp looks like. (How few people do know this, by the way! Look at any picture of a tramp in Punch. They are always twenty years out of date).”87 Though many elements of Down and Out are fictionalized or exaggerated, Orwell recreates London’s experiment in The People of the Abyss and The Road, contrasting London’s American perspective of tramps as parasitically contagious or as con-men. Orwell’s tramp stories are not entirely limited to his journalistic writing, as Down and Out influenced his 1935 novel A Clergyman’s Daughter. In this story, Dorothy Hare lives a seemingly routine life as a clergyman’s daughter; however, a bout of amnesia leaves her stranded in London, where she takes up with tramps and begins to walk the country. She earns wages as a hop-picker (an experience Orwell also wrote about in his journalism), begs for food, is arrested for vagrancy, and eventually becomes a teacher at a school for girls.88 While her memory does return and she goes home, her life is altered when she questions her faith in religious institutions. Much as Orwell went on an eighteen-month journey as a tramp in Paris and London, so does Dorothy temporarily become a tramp. Orwell and Dorothy experience first-hand the effects of tramping, the attitude of the public toward down-and-outers, and the problems associated with certain forms of charitable giving. I suggest A Clergyman’s Daughter is Orwell’s attempt to remedy the way tramps had been represented in fiction: he undermines historical representations of tramping in Down and Out and offers a potential solution two years later in A Clergyman’s Daughter. Orwell critiques the limits of institutional charity, yet

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I also suggest that this novel’s experimental elements reimagine the tramp as a communal subject that challenges the humanistic, individuated Self. Extending Orwell’s critique of social parasitism, A Clergyman’s Daughter focuses on tramping in relation to charitable giving. A Clergyman’s Daughter is one of Orwell’s less‑popular novels, and has drawn limited critical attention for its experimentalism. In certain sections, for example, Orwell wrote the text as dramatic dialogue, and he included an interlude section. The novel revolves around notions of charity and dependency, first criticizing the institutionalized forms of Christian charitable giving and later advancing a secular, communal sense of identity. Dorothy tries and fails to organize several charitable events in the first part of the story. In the second part, she loses her memory and is forced to beg for her livelihood, and in the final sections, she loses her faith in the church as an establishment as she makes her way home. The book emphasizes the lived realities of poverty and forces a middle-class character (not unlike the assumed middle-class reader)89 to experience life “on the bum.” The tramp is not a parasite in this work but a sympathetic figure who differs drastically from longstanding stereotypes. A Clergyman’s Daughter undermines institutionalized forms of charitable giving in favor of the community-based ethics of giving. Orwell is not alone in pursuing this topic around this period, as Anzia Yezierska similarly criticized charity-run boardinghouses less than a decade earlier in Arrogant Beggar (1927). In this story, a young Jewish narrator, Adele Lindner, tries to make her way in the Lower East Side but fails. For Dana Mihăilescu, Yezierska’s novel is one of several about the contrast between twentieth-century individualism and a more communal (in this case, Jewish) ethics. For Mihăilescu, this novel emphasizes community-based giving rather than institutionalized giving, in which beggars adopt a sense of transient mutualism and help one another. Arrogant Beggar advocates a return to the Judaic chesed [lovingkindness] and tzedakah [righteousness] in lieu of organized philanthropy. A Clergyman’s Daughter has a similar structure and scope. It begins with a critique of institutionalized giving, followed by the female protagonist struggling in destitute poverty, and ends by seeking alternative modes of compassion. Furthermore, in the 1934 film Beggars in Ermine, a group of tramps (many of whom are disabled) forms a so-called beggars’ union. Jess Waggoner argues this film represents a distinct form of collective identity. While Waggoner focuses on an “emergent disabled collectivity,”90 they note that Beggars in Ermine nevertheless centers on “tensions between notions of labor and charity” that ultimately reinforce a collective identity.91 This is not to overlook the differences between Yezierska’s novel, Beggars in Ermine, and A Clergyman’s Daughter, but to show that the relationship between tramping and charity was a central issue in several narratives in the late 1920s and early

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1930s. A Clergyman’s Daughter performs a sort of ethical test that places an everyday character in extreme poverty and ignorance (via amnesia) and asks, are there more just ways to organize our society for those in need? How would the (presumably middle-class) reader fare in this situation? Dorothy’s amnesia could, after all, happen to anyone (though her gender does play a crucial role). Orwell recreates the “realistic,” subjective account of poverty seen in Down and Out, only this time, fiction places the reader in a similar situation. A Clergyman’s Daughter begins with a long section detailing Dorothy’s duties before her amnesia, which she carries out with efficiency and pious diligence. Her father, a rector in Suffolk, is entirely oblivious to the realities of everyday housework and expenses, and his failures in the stock market also suggest financial mismanagement and a penchant for gambling. In this first section, Dorothy works closely with a religious charity. The rector “left the dirty work of the parish entirely to his wife, and after her death (she died in 1921) to Dorothy.”92 Many among the rector’s shrinking congregation do not donate much to charity, often less than sixpence. Orwell portrays Dorothy as the backbone of the community, even though her father gets recognition for her work. Without her, Orwell makes clear, the local church would likely fail. The rector has a “perfect abhorrence of Harvest Festivals,” viewing them as distractions and “necessary evils.”93 The rector shirks his duties, and his daughter must work long hours to cook, clean, run errands, and organize these charity events. And though these charities earn very little money, Dorothy is dedicated to the Church. She goes so far as to self-mortify by pinching herself, abstaining from food, and refusing other basic pleasures. Orwell emphasizes Dorothy’s labor and the lack of appreciation (and compensation) for her work. This contrasts her life on the road. An aggressive man, Mr. Warburton, accosts her one night, and, though it is never clarified, the text suggests she may have been raped. Dorothy wakes in London with no memory of how she got there or who she is. Initially, she is unable to read, and she stumbles around the city as she learns how to operate in the world. Among the first people she meets are tramps, including one named Nobby, who asks her to join his group. At first, Dorothy is confused by their diction, as they use slang to ask her if she is “on the beach” or “on the bum.” After she produces a half-crown, the tramps are eager to take her in. Here, Orwell shows that the tramps are partly motivated by money but also that they conceptualize themselves as a group. This is illustrated by Dorothy offering up the half-crown, thinking—in her amnesic state—that it is a penny. The group does not steal it but instead asks her if she wants to join them. They are neither selfless nor selfish, and Orwell suggests that Nobby’s emphasis on being “united” is not

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merely empty rhetoric. Dorothy, using a pseudonym, follows Nobby and the others to the countryside to look for work as hop-pickers. The roving communities that form around hop-picking season often practice a communal ethos that Orwell praises, even while he recognizes their harsh living conditions. The workers and tramps work together to earn small wages, sharing food and resources to survive. Dorothy’s group first reaches “hop country” only to find “discouraged people, mostly tramps, trailing back to London,” as most of the work had gone to “home pickers”—those who lived in the area.94 This irritates many of the tramps, who criticize the “bloody interferin’ gets of a Labour Government” that “brought in a law to say as no pickers was to be taken on widout the farmer had proper accommodation for ‘em.”95 This represents the short-sighted legislative moves that Orwell criticized; the Labour Party demanded that farmers provide accommodations for migrant workers, which backfired, leading farmers to refuse work to tramps and others who did not already have a place to live. Writing about his own experiences in the 1931 article “Hop Picking” for The New Statesman and The Nation, Orwell argues that “as far as wages go, no worse employment exists.” The piece-work system, where pickers are paid by bushel, not hourly wages, “disguises the low-rate of payment.”96 Orwell argues that the exploitation occurs because there is no shortage of potential workers and misleading tales about earning up to five pounds per day. The exploitation of workers and failed social policies necessitate that the hop-picking community work and live together. As Orwell writes, “Dorothy and Nobby very nearly would have starved, and would have starved altogether if the other pickers had not fed them. But everyone was extraordinarily kind.”97 The local community makes incredible sums thanks to the pickers, yet they still describe them as “cockney dirt.” This partly has to do with the type of work the pickers do, which is physically demanding and monotonous. As Orwell explains in Down and Out, “nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it be profitable.”98 A Clergyman’s Daughter reflects this argument; the hop pickers work hard and support the industry, but the community knows that few people can make a profit at it. Therefore, hop pickers are imagined as “parasitic” or “cockney dirt.” In these passages, Orwell emphasizes the distinction between the tramp hop pickers and the farmers and shopkeepers, as the tramps survive through communal interdependence (and recognize their reliance on one another). The middle class, however, refuses to view hop picking as “real” work, which, by their logic, makes Dorothy and others parasitic. Much as in Down and Out, Orwell notes that the lifestyle also affects the health of the workers—many of whom are ill or disabled. For example, after Nobby is arrested for theft, Dorothy teams up with a tramp named Deafie. He is described as a “queer old man and a poor companion” who was “as deaf

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as a post.”99 This is just one example of a disabled tramp in the story. Orwell also documents the vermin and the “hop lice” that spread among the workers, and that with the “coarse food and insufficient sleep . . . your wits seemed to thicken, just as your skin did.”100 Following hop season, when Dorothy is living on the streets and sleeping in Trafalgar Square, a policeman finds her asleep and wakes her, noting she is in poor physical health. While some tramps are on the road because illness and disability make it hard for them to find work, Dorothy’s condition reveals how much tramping exacerbates illness and takes a physical toll on a person’s body. It is also important to note that tramps were commonly cast as sexual “deviants,” a stereotype that Orwell tends to perpetuate. His description of Deafie as a “queer old man” carries various connotations, implying that “queerness” may also refer to homosexuality. Among tramp communities, “deviant” sexuality was arguably common. In The Road, for example, London very briefly mentions that he “practically skipped” his “gay-cat apprenticeship.”101 Owen Clayton suggests London avoids the topics because of his hypermasculinity, or his “insecurity over the historical reality that London was a young and potentially vulnerable eighteen-year-old boy during his days as a hobo.”102 Additionally, Orwell writes in Down and Out about one encounter he has in the spike: “About midnight the other man began making homosexual attempts upon me [. . .] Homosexuality is general among tramps of long standing.”103 In both London’s and Orwell’s writing, the discussion of queer sexuality is brief, though they suggest it is often a result of virtually all tramps being men. Hence, Dorothy’s status as a female tramp is somewhat unusual in A Clergyman’s Daughter. This view of queer sexuality among tramps was also discussed by sociologists who wrote about sexual “deviance” as evidence that tramps were morally inferior. In an appendix to Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion titled “Homosexuality Among Tramps,” Flynt argues that one in ten hoboes performs “unnatural intercourse” and that “Boys are the victims of his passion.”104 Portraying the homeless as perverts who prey on children, Flynt suggests that because “women are so scarce ‘on the road’ [. . .] this disproportion has something to do with the popularity of boys.”105 Most of his evidence is anecdotal, and he relies heavily on speculation, concluding that “the sexually perverted men I have met in vagabondage [. . .] are abnormally masculine,” adding that their sexuality may be either “inborn or acquired.”106 Orwell and London in many ways reproduce this negative image of tramps. Orwell suggests that homosexuality is yet another “danger” to life on the road, similar to disease and illness, and he portrays Deafie’s “queerness” as potentially sinister. Though Orwell resists the eugenic ideology of London’s writing, his tramp stories fail to address the potentially problematic ways in which Flynt and others portray queer desire. Orwell’s anxieties about the threat of

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“deviant” sexuality inform his characterization of tramps in A Clergyman’s Daughter, even if Dorothy’s gender puts her in a unique position. In addition to his potentially problematic attitudes toward queerness, Orwell reiterates many of his political arguments from Down and Out in A Clergyman’s Daughter by using experimental literary techniques. The Trafalgar Square section breaks with the third-person narrative to create an experimental dramatic interlude. This short chapter has a chorus of voices, extended parenthetical breaks, and dramatic dialogue between several characters. At multiple points, these characters—tramps who huddle together at night for warmth—will form a “monstrous shapeless clot,” reflected by the changes in narration.107 In other words, as Dorothy becomes more a part of the tramp community, the genre begins to reflect her shifting identity. While critics, and arguably Orwell himself, view this section as a sort of failed experiment, I argue it is part of Orwell’s larger arguments on tramping and parasitism. The tramps communicate using a dialogic form, an interdependent style that reflects their mutualist sense of identity. Their communication (i.e., communal stream-of-consciousness) challenges the independent Self. The Trafalgar Square section begins as several more-experienced tramps give advice about life on the road. But as the chapter continues, these tramps eventually perform a mock-religious ritual that undermines Dorothy’s religiosity earlier in the story. The dialogue—reminiscent of the bizarre and, at times, impossible events in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses—is loosely related but generally cacophonous: Daddy: Paying money for water! . . . Bum it, boy, bum it! Don’t buy what you can bum and don’t bum what you can steal. That’s my word—fifty year on the road, man and boy [. . .] Snouter: Don’t you pay nothing. Worm it out of the old tart. Snivel. Do the doleful. [. . .] Mrs. McElligot: De poor kid, she aint got no sense. Why don’t she go up to Piccadilly Circus where she’d get her five bob reg’lar? She won’t do herself no good bummin’ round de Square wid a set of miserable ole Tobies.108

In the three passages, selected here from different pages in the section, the experienced tramps discuss common mistakes that new tramps such as Dorothy make. It includes paying for hot water, refusing to “snivel” and “go on the dole” (government benefits), or begging in the wrong parts of the city. Additionally, Mrs. McElligot’s suggestion to “get her five bob reg’lar” is likely a reference to prostitution, given the context of an earlier conversation. These sections are interspersed with popular songs sung by Ginger, Charlie, and other characters, and Deafie repeats a dirty saying several times: “With

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my willy willy, with my willy willy.”109 The songs and nonsense phrases create dissonance, making the section hard to follow. Deafie’s repeated references to his “willy” imply sexual deviance, yet it also adds to the cacophonous dialogue. In other words, the Trafalgar Square section creates a heterogeneous collection of voices to reflect the identity Dorothy begins to adopt. Orwell is careful not to romanticize tramping, but it is important to note that he represents this community as more interconnected than the pious one in Suffolk by portraying the tramp community using experimental techniques. The Trafalgar Square section culminates as the tramps begin to cling “indiscriminately together” to create warmth for the long nights, which results in a mock religious ritual performed by a former priest, Mr. Tallboys. The narrator notes in parenthesis that “the animal heat of the piled bodies” made “itself felt,” and that a “drowsiness [descended] upon everyone.”110 This becomes one of the few ways that Dorothy and others can fall asleep for any period, especially given the near-freezing temperature of London following hop season. Mr. Tallboys begins as though at an alter: “Dearly beloved brethren, we are gathered together in the sight of God for the solemnization of unholy blasphemy. He has afflicted us with dirt and cold, with hunger and solitude, with the pox and itch, and the headlouse.”111 The content of this speech evokes the Christian masses Dorothy attends at the beginning of the novel, including Mr. Tallboys use of Latin elsewhere in the Trafalgar Square section. The men and women blend into a large pile, some cursing because they have run out of cigarettes while others try to sleep. After Mr. Tallboys continues his “prayer,” the narrative begins to dissolve, likely into one of Dorothy’s dreams as she falls asleep. Though the scene is particularly ominous given the apocalyptic tone and imagery, Dorothy is at home in the pile of bodies. She has lost her faith at this stage in the narrative and Mr. Tallboys’s words mean very little to her. When a policeman offers to take her to the M. A. B. (the Metropolitan Asylums Board), Dorothy refuses: “No, no! Leave me. I’d rather stay here.”112 She has become part of this community and fears leaving it now. Dorothy’s time as a beggar ultimately ends with her arrest as a “parasite” or “sturdy beggar.” However, the time she spends in Trafalgar Square is ambivalently represented. She claims that she “dared not apply to organized charity,” in part because she did not wish to be discovered. She “became one of that curious tribe, rare but never quite extinct—the tribe of women who are penniless and homeless, but who make such desperate efforts to hide it that they very nearly succeed.”113 A Clergyman’s Daughter suggests that tramps have a different ethos and identity. They are a collective community, working together to ensure their survival. And Orwell departs from his usual minimalist realism to represent tramping in a way that breaks with what he perceived

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as the tramp-monster—London’s “cynical parasitism” in The Road and The People of the Abyss. It is also notable, as Orwell writes in the passage above, that Dorothy is a woman.114 In other words, Dorothy is not a stereotypical tramp because of her gender, which works to further Orwell’s arguments. However, it also makes Dorothy easier to spot and is part of the reason for her arrest. Her gender complicates the traditional tramp story, as Dorothy is arguably more vulnerale to sexual assault and can be easily recognized by authorities. It also leads to her near-forced employment at a girl’s school after she is arrested for vagrancy. Ironically, Dorothy has freedom as a tramp that she does not have elsewhere, though, again, Orwell rarely romanticizes houselessness. A Clergyman’s Daughter ends as Dorothy makes her way back home. It is never fully clarified how she ended up in London, nor why she had amnesia. She reflects on larger questions about what she will do once her father dies (she presumes that she will become a poor “spinster”). Eventually, however, she loses herself in housework much as she could lose herself in hop-picking earlier in the story: ‘The problem of faith and no faith had vanished utterly from her mind.”115 While the ending has a mixed tone, it seems that Dorothy is in some ways trapped by her labor and that Christian charity offers few answers. For Richard Smyer, the story represents a “rebellion against a socially and philosophically reactionary Christian worldview.”116 And Robert A. Lee goes so far as to suggest that A Clergyman’s Daughter promotes a conservative attitude in which one should simply live with the failures of their communities and accept the world as it is. For Lee, Orwell was not to be truly radicalized until his time in Catalonia fighting the fascist military.117 My reading contradicts the perceived conservatism of Orwell’s early fiction. Certainly, Orwell is not unproblematic, particularly given his use of stereotypes in Down and Out. But if we read A Clergyman’s Daughter as an extension of Down and Out, the novel becomes a highly political critique. For example, the stagnancy of Dorothy’s life, which does not end in success, directly contradicts the success stories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—an idea Orwell discusses in Down and Out. Orwell challenges the notions that tramps are social parasites or that Christian charity can fully address vagrancy in Britain. Instead, he promotes social welfare programs. Even the experimental sections of the novel—which Smyer, Lee, and Raymond Williams characterize as a poor imitation of Joyce—offer a distinct representation of poverty and communal identity. Reflecting on the Trafalgar Square section, Dorothy thinks of the clergyman tramp that performs the “ritual.” In particular, she notes the conflagration of voices: “For your not liking the tune was also part of the tune.”118 The cacophony of the scene made her uncomfortable, but she realizes that

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it is “part of the tune,” part of the reality of homelessness and the transient mutualism embraced by the tramps. She continues, noting that there was “no pseudo-religion of ‘progress’ with visions of glittering Utopias and ant-heaps of steel and concrete.”119 Here, Orwell implicitly challenges the biofuturity that underlays London’s writings, which is compared to the messianic vision at the core of Christianity. For Dorothy, one must focus on the present. Her pessimistic understanding of life as dark and “dreadful” is interrupted by her daily activities as she prepares for a local pageant play about English history. While Dorothy does not specifically advocate for socialism, she does challenge her culture’s emphasis on Christian charitable giving as a realistic method of combatting poverty. Though A Clergyman’s Daughter does not end by advocating specific policies, it shows the limits of British politics in the twentieth century. Like Dorothy, the reader may also go back to their ordinary life at the end of the novel, but Orwell’s critique of independence looms large in Dorothy’s (and the reader’s) mind. The literary experimentation and underlying challenge to discourses that privilege independence reflect Orwell’s wider critique of literary history; a new form of fiction was needed to represent the poor, including their heterogenous yet communal ethos and identity. Throughout this chapter, I show how tramps became the center of a wider biopolitical debate about the cohesion of the social body. Tramps were often imagined as social parasites in the popular imagination, which authors such as H. G. Wells and Jack London tend to reiterate. However, Orwell’s writing directly opposes this. He recognizes the limited views that people have of tramps, including the problematic ways authors tended to conceptualize social parasitism. This is tied to issues of health and biofuturity, including London’s emphasis on eugenics, and Orwell writes about how the systemic ableism in England perpetuated the increasing number of tramps in the late 1920s and early 1930s. His arguments in Down and Out are put into practice in A Clergyman’s Daughter, which helps to explain this novel—one so often seen as an idiosyncrasy in Orwell’s oeuvre. The text embraces an experimental form in which Orwell attempts to find new ways of imagining tramps through interdependency: they live with one another, share resources, care for each other, and—in the Trafalgar Square section—begin to communicate and think together. The tramp life is associated with a heterogeneous sense of identity, one that contradicts the liberalism of Wells and London, whose problematic representations of tramps revolve around a sense of autonomous, masculine Self. For Orwell, Down and Out and A Clergyman’s Daughter combine the political and the literary; the very nature of the content and form resists the liberal humanist sense of Self and aims to create a communal subject.

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NOTES 1. See, for example, Xenophon’s Symposium, Plautus’ Boetia, or Lucian’s dialogue On the Parasite (or De Parasito), as well as Alciphron’s Epistles and Libanius’ Declamations 28, 29. Terms: “flatterer” [kolax]; “swindler” [sykophantēs]; and “sponger” [parasitos]. For more information on the Classical trope, see Peter Brown’s entry in the Oxford Classical Dictionary and H. G. Nesselrath’s Lucian’s Dialogue of the Parasite: Investigation and Commentaries (1985). 2. Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Social Parasites: How Tramps, Idle Youth, and Busy Entrepreneurs Impeded the Soviet March to Communism,” Cahiers du Monde Russe 47, no. 1–2 (2006): 377–408. The rise of socialist and communist governments in the twentieth century gave the term parasitism a more rigid definition with the introduction of anti-social parasite laws. Sheila Fitzpatrick writes that the terms parasitical [paraziticheskie or паразитические in Russian] and parasite [тунеядцы] were widespread in Europe and Eurasia, used at first to describe the bourgeoisie who exploited laborers and later to allude to vagrants and loiterers who would not do their “fair share.” By the mid-twentieth century, it was common in Eastern Europe and Russia to convict individuals for parasitism. See David Remnick “Gulag Lite,” New Yorker, 13 December 2010, https:​//​www​.newyorker​.com​/magazine​/2010​/12​/20​/gulag​-lite. 3. Regarding the use of “parasite” in fascist contexts, see Mein Kampf (“Die Parasiten” or a similar term is used approximately fourteen times to refer to Jewish people or non-whites). Regarding an increase in vagrancy as a result of the Great Depression, see Max Krafchik’s “Unemployment and Vagrancy in the 1930s” in the Journal of Social Policy, which suggests a strong correlation between high rates of unemployment and documented cases of vagrancy. 4. See Appendix A in Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion, vol. 2, “Homosexuality Among Tramps” by Josiah Flynt. 5. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (New York: Harcourt, 1961), 173. 6. Friedrich Engels, On the Conditions of the Working Class in England (London: Lawwrence and Wisehart, 1984), 12. 7. Jack London, The People of the Abyss (New York: Archer House, 1963), 5. 8. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, 1958), 149. 9. Kim Moody, Tramps and Trade Union Travelers: Internal Migrations and the Organized Labor in Gilded Age America, 1870–1900 (New York: Haymarket, 2019), 117. 10. Josiah Flynt, Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life (New York: The Century, 1901), 95. 11. Ibid., 134. 12. London, The Road (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 15. 13. Christine Photinos, “The Figure of the Tramp in Gilded Age Success Narratives,” Journal of Popular Culture 40, no. 6 (2007): 995. 14. Jeanne Campbell Reesman, “Tramps and Hobos: Adventure and Anguish in Mark Twain and Jack London,” The Mark Twain Annual 15, no. 1 (2017): 73.

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15. Robert Dale Parker, “A Poetics of the Great Depression: Style and Aesthetics in Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing,” Studies in American Fiction 45, no. 2 (2018): 235. 16. Parker illustrates this style by citing the first line of chapters one through six: “It is night”; “It rains”; “I sit down at the table in this mission”; “It is evening”; “It is afternoon, and I have not eaten today”; “I sit on this curb and watch” (qtd. in Parker 239). These are characteristic of the declarative sentences that pervade the novel, and, while Kromer discusses time, it is often relating to an immediate problem (i.e., where he will eat or sleep that day). Additionally, pronouns such as “It” (without a clear antecedent) give the prose a sense of vagueness. 17. H. G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (New York: Harper, 1902), 230. 18. Marie L. Ahearn, “The People of the Abyss: Jack London as a New Journalist,” Modern Fiction Studies 22, no. 1 (1976): 73. 19. See for example Tony Kushner’s writings on Jewish representation in the East End. Kushner notes that in the early twentieth century, “East End Jews were at best an embarrassment to the established community,” and he argues that historiography over the past 100 years has changed significantly to celebrate the East End immigrant past. The Jewish community offers a snapshot of the “poverty, racism, sweated labor, the housing crisis, the lack of schools and social facilities” that were common in the East End at the fin de siècle. Tony Kushner, “The End of the ‘Anglo-Jewish Progress Show’: Representations of the Jewish East End, 1887–1987,” Immigrants and Minorities 10, no. 1–2 (1991): 79. 20. Ahearn, “The People,” 74–75. 21. The terms hobo and tramp appear to be used interchangeably, though London prefers the former in most cases, particularly when writing about the United States (e.g., see his Hobo Diaries). Orwell tends to write about “vagrants” or “tramps,” rarely using the word hobo. According to the OED, hobo originates in the Western United States, and there is some debate about whether there is a difference between it and tramp, as the latter has a much longer history as a pejorative term. Tramp was first used to refer to “tramping” or walking extreme distances (which dates to the seventeenth century: for example, in F. P. Verney & M. M. Verney Mem. Verney Family 17th Cent. (1904) II. 204: “Thay goo so Lick [like] trampis, so durty, tis a sham to see them” [see OED entry on “Tramp”]). By the late nineteenth century, Josiah Flynt and others note that “The tramp’s name for himself and his fellows is Hobo” (1891). In an 1889 article in Ellensburgh Capital (Washington), the author notes that “The tramp has changed his name, or rather had it changed for him, and now he is a ‘Hobo.’” See OED entry on Hobo for more information. 22. London, The Iron Heel (New York: Gossett and Dunlap, 1907), 252, n1. 23. Ibid., 302, 326. 24. Wells, Anticipations, 79. 25. Ibid., 315. 26. Ibid., 308. 27. London, People, 13, 12.

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28. Matthew Reisz, “Celebrating the East End’s Jewish Heritage,” New York Times, 7 June 1987. 29. London, People, 31. 30. David Starr Jordan, Foot-notes to Evolution (New York: D. Appleton, 1898), 284. 31. Ewa Barbara Luczak, Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination: Hereditary Rules in the Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave, 2015), 72. 32. Orwell, Down and Out, 202. 33. London, People, 94. 34. “The Spread of Small-pox by Tramps,” Lancet, 13 Feb. 1904, 446. 35. Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke Univerity Press, 2008), 116. 36. Ibid., 115. 37. Ibid., 155. 38. Margaret Battin et al., The Patient as Victim and Vector: Ethics and Infectious Disease (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 312. 39. London, People, 110–11. 40. Donald Childs, Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 4. 41. Ibid., 10. 42. London, People, 219. 43. Ibid., 226, 227. 44. John Lennon, Boxcar Politics: The Hobo in U. S. Culture and Literature, 1869–1956 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 59. 45. Orwell, Down and Out, 202. 46. London, The Road, 8, 10. 47. Ibid., 8, 12. 48. Ibid., 13. 49. Lucian, De Parasito, in The Works of Lucian, trans. Henry Sheers, et al. (London, 1715), 98, 99–100. 50. Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence Schehr (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 35. 51. London, The Road, 20, 22. 52. Ibid., 106. 53. Ibid., 114. 54. Ibid., 116. 55. London, “How I Became a Socialist,” Literature Network, accessed 25 July 2020, http:​//​www​.online​-literature​.com​/london​/3875. 56. Lennon, Boxcar, 84. 57. London, The Road, 203. 58. John Sutherland writes that Eric Arthur Blair chose “George Orwell” as a pseudonym to “shield his family’s possible embarrassment,” noting that “Orwell” was a “round English name.” (See Sutherland, an Introduction to Down and Out in Paris and London.)

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59. See “The Vagrancy Act of 1824” (5 Geo. 4. c. 83). Before the publication of Down and Out, the Vagrancy Act was amended in 1838, 1871, 1888, 1889, 1912, and 1925 (also see the Criminal Justice Act); by the time of Orwell’s memoir, the Vagrancy Act outlawed sleeping outdoors, begging, acts that may cause “moral outrage,” soliciting for immoral purposes, prostitution, and gay sex. William Wilberforce was among opponents to the Act, noting it was a “catch-all” law that was easily abused; it allowed police officers to indiscriminately punish impoverished people, women, and gay men, among others. See also Moran, “Homeless People are Vulnerable.” 60. Orwell, An Age Like This, 1920–1940: The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Biddegord, ME: Nonpareil Books, 2004), 114. 61. Many of the articles used as material for the London section appeared in leftist publications, such as “The Spike” (1931, published in New Adelphi), “Beggars in London” (1928, Le Progrès Civique), “A Day in the Life of a Tramp” (1928, Le Progrès Civique), and “Common Lodging Houses” (1932, New Statesman). 62. Stephen Greeblatt, “Orwell as Satirist,” in George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Raymond Williams (London: Prentice Hall, 1974), 105. 63. Raymond Williams, “Observation and Imagination in Orwell,” George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Raymond Williams (London: Prentice Hall, 1974), 53. 64. Ibid., 61. 65. Orwell, Down and Out, 200. 66. Gordon Beadle, “George Orwell’s Literary Studies of Poverty in England,” Twentieth-Century Literature 24, no. 2 (1978): 191. 67. London, Down and Out, 202–203. 68. Rossini, Manuela and Mike Toggweiler, “Posthuman Temporalities,” New Formations 92, no. 1 (2017): 5–10. 69. Herrechter, Stefen, “Critical Posthumanism,” In Posthuman Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), n.p. 70. Yasmin Ibrahim, Posthuman Capitalism: Dancing with Data in the Digital Economy (New York: Routledge, 2021), 2. 71. Ruben Borg, “Modernism and the Posthuman,” Glossary of the Posthuman, Nov. 2017, https:​//​criticalposthumanism​.net​/literary​-modernism​-and​-the​-posthuman​ -2. 72. Ibid., 173. 73. See the 1824 British Vagrancy Act. 74. Orwell, Wigan Pier, 85. 75. Orwell, Down and Out, 161. 76. Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 46. 77. Ibid. 78. Orwell, Down and Out, 173. 79. Ibid., 199. 80. See also 115, 126, and 143.

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81. Ibid., 202–3. 82. Ibid., 139. 83. Orwell, “The Spike,” in The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism, ed. Kevin Kerrane and Ben Yagoda (New York: Scribner, 1997), 250. 84. Ibid., 248. 85. Terry Eagleton, “Orwell and the Lower-Middle-Class Novel,” in George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Raymond Williams (London: Prentice Hall, 1974), 33. 86. Orwell, Wigan Pier, 149. 87. Ibid., 150–51. 88. Orwell himself began teaching at The Hawthorns High School, a boys’ school, in 1932. Notably, upon his return to London in 1929, he met Brenda Salkeld, a clergyman’s daughter who was a gym teacher at St. Felix Girls’ School, to whom he later proposed. (She rejected the proposal.) See D. J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life (New York: Henry Holt, 2003). 89. Orwell repeatedly notes that most of the working-class and impoverished people he meets either cannot or do not read. For example, the headmistress Mrs. Creevy “Had never read a book right through in her life, and was proud of it” (234). And, among the hop-pickers, “they were all abysmally ignorant; they informed you with pride that not one of them could read a single word” (125). While it is difficult to attain the accuracy of these statements, Orwell does suggest that A Clergyman’s Daughter was written for the middle- and upper classes—not the poor. (Orwell liked to refer to himself paradoxically as “lower-upper-middle class” [Wigan Pier 8], given his education at Eton College, despite his relatively low family income [he was named a King’s Scholar, a “charitable” scholarship originally designed by Henry VI]. However, he commonly demonstrates a disdain for the “abysmal ignorance” of the lower classes, so aspects of his novel may be exaggerated.) 90. Waggoner, “‘The Seriously Injured of Our Civic Life’: Imagining Disabled Collectivity in Depression-Era Crip Modernisms,” Moderni Fiction Studies 65, no. 1 (2019): 90. 91. Ibid., 105. 92. Orwell, A Clergyman’s Daughter (New York: Harcourt, 1950), 23. 93. Ibid., 27–28. 94. Ibid., 113. 95. Ibid., 114. 96. Orwell, “Hop Picking,” The New Statesman, reprinted 13 April 2013, 103. 97. Orwell, Clergyman, 132. 98. Orwell, Down and Out, 173. 99. Orwell, Clergyman, 154. 100. Ibid., 127, 135. 101. London, The Road, 285. 102. Owen Clayton, “Punks, Prushuns, and Gay-Cats: Vulnerable Youth in the Work of Jack London and A-No. 1,” Studies in American Naturalism 14, no. 1 (2019): 75. 103. Orwell, Down and Out, 147.

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104. Josiah Flynt, “Homosexuality Among Tramps,” Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Vol. 2, Sexual Inversion, ed. Havelock Ellis (Philadelphia, PA: Davis and Co., 1908), 220. 105. Ibid., 221. 106. Ibid., 224. 107. Orwell, Clergyman, 190. 108. These quotes appear on different pages. See Orwell, Clergyman, 172, 173, 176. 109. Ibid., 167. 110. Ibid., 191. 111. Ibid., 191–92. 112. Ibid., 193. 113. Ibid., 201. 114. Orwell specifically notes that women were quite rare in tramp communities, though not unheard of.)It is not entirely clear why women are sparse in tramp communities. In his essay “The Spike,” for example, he notes that he arrived with “forty-eight men and one woman,” and that when the spike opened, “the woman was sent off to the workhouse” (246). In Wigan Pier, Orwell talks about tramps and prostitutes together, which may imply that there are so few female tramps because they may be more likely fall back on prostitution instead of begging. 115. Orwell, Clergyman, 320. 116. Richard Smyer, “Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter: The Flight from History,” Modern Fiction Studies 21, no. 1 (1975): 34. 117. Robert A. Lee, Orwell’s Fiction (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 25. 118. Orwell, Clergyman, 316. 119. Ibid.

Epilogue

Parasites pervade the world today. Take Bong Joon Ho’s Academy Award-winning film Parasite (2019), which follows a low-income family as they gain access to a wealthy family’s home. The impoverished family poses as a highly credentialed tutor, art therapist, chauffeur, and housekeeper to engrain themselves in the household.1 When coming up with a title, Joon Ho notes the controversies that ensued: “[I]t seems very obvious that Parasite refers to the poor family, and I think that’s why the marketing team was a little hesitant. But if you look at it the other way, you can say that [the] rich family, they’re also parasites in terms of labor. They can’t even wash dishes, they can’t drive themselves, so they leech off the poor family’s labor. So, both are parasites.”2 The term “parasite” is rarely stable; its meaning varies depending on perspective, and its application to an individual can, in some cases, be fatal. The film and its title critique the inherent wealth inequalities that arise in late-stage capitalism, as well as the economic logic that can reduce individuals to so‑called parasites. Small details of the film reflect other stories about parasites, such as Mr. Park’s revulsion toward Oh Geun-sae’s odor at the end of the movie. The violence up to this point in the film had mostly been between two poorer families, but, upon seeing Mr. Park wince at the smell of someone from a lower class, Mr. Kim is triggered. Kim unexpectedly picks up a knife and drives it through his wealthy employer—a scene that casts murder as the ultimate form of class revolt. The wealthy elite’s disgust for the bodies of the impoverished parallels many accounts of “the spike” in tramp stories or the nomadic people in Great Depression writing. Much of Joon Ho’s film is unique to the Korean context, but it also speaks to Orwell and London, H. G. Wells, and Greco-Roman stories about the parasite. It is a story, in one form or another, that has been told many times: parasites are dangerous and disruptive. To be a social parasite is to be revulsive—to be “less than human” and excluded from moral consideration. Joon Ho’s film reevaluates this position, even if the narrative does not fully endorse the “parasitic” way of life. 173

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Modernist Parasites questions this revulsion toward organisms that are so distant from the idealized humanistic Self. The book shows that many organisms depend on others to survive and thrive. This book aims to raise issues of power and encourage self-reflexivity among those “who dwell in one of the many scattered centres of power of advanced post-modernity.”3 And this reflexivity extends to marginalized humans as well as nonhuman life. A posthumanist view of parasitism may also require writers and scientists to change their view of the natural environment. For example, in recent years, the rise of Environmental Parasitology (or simply “E.P.”) has introduced debates about the ethical status of parasitic species. Daniel Preston and Pieter T. J. Johnson note that “Parasites can shape community structure through their effects on trophic interactions, food webs, competition, biodiversity, and keystone species.”4 Parasites are also effective “accumulation indicators,” precursors that provide an early signal of climate change impacts.5 Parasites can help us recognize environmental degradation faster, yet, for this same reason, they are also more prone to extinction. True biodiversity preservation may need to start with parasites in the coming years, but the lack of data on some parasite species indicates that they do not figure into such calculations as prominently as other nonhuman creatures.6 Put differently, parasites have a P. R. problem for which humanism may be partly responsible. Stories about the natural environment, about the relationship between humankind and nonhuman life, shape science and ethics. Parasitism is a prime example of the interconnectedness of “culture” and “nature”—an unsustainable dichotomy. This book shows how the figure of the parasite was simultaneously a biological and social category. The term itself comes from the Classical tradition, preserved throughout history with tropes and motifs. But in the modernist period—with the rise of Darwinism, ecology, and parasitology—the term became especially fraught. Medical reports from the trenches portrayed pests as a public health threat and little more, while trench poets offered a more nuanced view of vermin as a distinct form of animate, rapidly reproducing life. In Great Depression literature, Steinbeck and Caldwell portray parasites to different ends, yet both ultimately write about hookworms, flies, and other creatures as nonhuman social actors. The fictional Joads and Lesters were never in complete control of their fate, as they struggled against the “million enemies of the earth.” The parasite also provided inspiration for reimagining the subject/object divide and recognizing the interdependency of various forms of life. Kafka, Lispector, and West anticipate posthumanist perceptions of the world, offering philosophical and literary challenges to the stable Self inherited from traditional humanism. Similarly, within debates on feminism and poverty, “social parasites” are at the center. Being dependent on others in modernity

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often means losing some recognition or moral consideration. But writers such as Orwell, Loy, and Larsen question whether independence is really an achievable ideal or yet another line in the sand that must be constantly redrawn to maintain social hierarchies. Reading with parasitism at the foreground illustrates a distinct form of modernist narrative within critical posthumanism. As I discuss in chapter 3, for example, many modernist authors reacted to the bureaucratic and increasingly mechanized world—to the inorganic—by exploring the organic, vitalized perspectives offered by parasites. Becoming-parasite in modernist literature is exemplified by the cilia of the cockroach in Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H. as well as the embodied experience of tramping in Orwell’s writing. The rats and lice in trench poetry animate the otherwise sterile and dead landscape, while the white moth and bluebottles in Loy’s writing create life from death. The modernist parasite narrative adds to current discussions surrounding posthumanism because parasites are so distant from the category of “Human” as it is defined within various humanisms. In addition to the writers in the previous chapters, several parasite stories were excluded from this monograph for one reason or another. For example, early drafts included sections on tropical illness in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, the avant-garde literary production of Djuna Barnes’s late work, and Steinbeck’s writing on Latin America. Faulkner’s Mosquitoes seems like an obvious example of modernist parasitism, and, as I note in the introduction, Zora Neale Hurston mentions hookworm disease—an issue in rural Black communities experience to this day, as evidenced by Catherine Coleman Flowers’s recent book Waste (2020). Flowers illustrates the recent reemergence of hookworm disease in the South, particularly within poor Black communities. And these stories about parasitic outbreak are, unfortunately, quite familiar to how many modernists discussed them. Reading Flowers’s book today alongside modernist texts such as Seraph on the Suwanee or Tobacco Road illustrate how little has changed in nearly one hundred years. In this sense, understanding the history of the parasite is also important amid political and ethical debates in the present. The elision of some parasite stories, such as Hurston’s or Faulkner’s, is rooted in their idiosyncratic use of the parasite rather than a lack of merit. In some cases, analyses of these stories have found (or will find) a home in other publications. In conclusion, the parasite is one of many figures at the margins of society, yet the parasite is often perceived as dangerous and deadly—and therefore is further marginalized. Parasites and pests transmit disease, eat food supplies, and infest the houses of humans. Yet a posthumanist lens allows readers to recognize the bioethical relationships of dependency embodied by the parasite—a term so often used to refer to disempowered humans. Given its rich literary history, the figure lends itself to analysis over time, illustrating how

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a relatively innocent term can become potentially dangerous. It seems only fitting to end this book by playing parasite and stealing an ending from a more accomplished author, Michel Serres. For Serres, the parasite is exhausting to write about because it consumes everything and “overflows,” even from the pages of the book. So, he is relieved to draw his book to a close: “It finally is separate from me. Thus, the horrible insect slowly left my room, through the creaking door, one May morning, in Venice. Something had begun. Quiet, serene, no anxiety. The high seas . . . ”7 NOTES 1. See Schiller’s The Parasite (1797) and Conan Doyle’s The Parasite (1894). The title of Joon Ho’s film is 기생충 or Gisaengchung in Korean, which translates literally as “parasitic insect.” 2. Kevin Polowy, “Parasite: Bong Joon Ho Reveals Surprising Double-Meaning Behind the Title of 2019s Most Buzzed-About Film,” Yahoo Entertainment, 9 February 2020, https:​//​www​.yahoo​.com​/entertainment​/parasite​-movie​-title​-meaning​ -140024450​.html. 3. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 49–50. 4. Daniel Preston and Pieter Johnson, “Ecological Consequences of Parasitism,” Nature Education 3, no. 10 (2010): 47. https:​//​www​.nature​.com​/scitable​/knowledge​/ library​/ecological​-consequences​-of​-parasitism​-13255694. 5. B. Sures, M. Nachev, C. Selbach, et al., “Parasite Responses to Pollution: What We Know and Where We go in ‘Environmental Parasitology,’” Parasites and Vectors 10, no. 65 (2017): n.p. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1186​/s13071​-017​-2001​-3. 6. Carrie A. Cizauskas, et al., “Parasite Vulnerability to Climate Change: An Evidence-Based Functional Trait Approach,” Royal Society of Open Science 4, no. 1 (2017): n. p. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1098​/rsos​.160535. 7. Michel Serres, The Parasite, translated by Lawrence Schehr (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 253.

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Index

Page references for figures are italicized. aesthetics, 1, 25, 76, 97–101, 140, 147 Agamben, Giorgio: bare life, 80; The Open: Man and Animal, 3, 11 animal studies, 4–5, 9, 19–20 anti-parasite laws, 3, 14n8, 137, 167n2 Baynton, Douglas, 128–29 Benjamin, Walter, 5, 81 Bentham, Jeremy, 8 bioethics: Jewish ethics, 84, 159; language use and, 84–85; literary studies and, 8–9, 16nn31–32; physical dependency and, 80–83, 85–86; posthumanism and, 3–9, 77, 83. See also animal studies; care ethics; disability studies; eugenics biofuturity. See eugenics biopolitics, 18–20, 42n3, 79–80 Boer War, 23–24, 141 boll weevils (Anthonomus grandis), 52–53, 63, 65–67, 131n4 Braidotti, Rosi, 8, 42n3, 77, 80, 83, 112 British Medical Journal, 12, 23 Caldwell, Erskine, 12, 174; Tobacco Road, 64–70; You Have Seen Their Faces, 47–48, 63

care ethics, 83–86, 113 classism, 38, 52, 142, 146, 156 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 2, 137 Darwin, Charles, 9, 19, 96; Darwinism, 4, 9, 16n33, 111–12, 132n12, 174 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari: becoming (philosophical concept), 1, 3, 6, 15n10, 49, 76–99, 102n6, 131n6, 175; Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 81, 85; A Thousand Plateaus, 7, 15n10, 102n6 Derrida, Jacques, 8, 27 disability studies, 3, 71n15, 105n26, 128–29, 159; chronic illness and, 85, 141, 153, 155–57 Eliot, T. S., 25, 39, 88, 91 ethics of care (EOC). See care ethics ethics of the ordinary. See care ethics eugenics: biofuturity, 109, 142, 145–66; eugenic policies, 69, 74n61, 126–30, 141–44; family studies, 65, 74n61; fascism and, 113–14, 137, 167n3; socialism and, 138–46; sterilization, 48, 63, 65, 69–70, 74n61, 110 191

192

Index

family studies. See eugenics Farm Security Administration (FSA), 51–52, 56–57, 70 Faulkner, William, 1, 49, 56, 70, 175 feminism, 3, 13, 94, 109–19; childbirth and, 111, 122–24; écriture féminine, 87, 90, 105n55 First World War, 7, 10, 12, 18–42; chemical warfare and 17, 19, 20, 35–37; trench fever and, 18, 24 Foucault, Michel, 21–23 Gilligan, Carol, 9 Great Depression, 10, 12, 47–57, 70, 71n10, 137, 151, 167n3, 173–74 Haeckel, Ernst, 9, 96 Hayles, N. Katherine, 15n12 hookworm disease (Ancylostomiasis), 1, 10, 52, 56–57, 72n17, 72n32, 175 Hurst, Arthur, 12, 24 Hurston, Zora Neale, 1, 56, 127, 175 Huxley, Julian, 16n33, 19, 96 imperialism. See postcolonialism Jones, David, 12, 34–42 Joyce, James, 70, 151 Kafka, Franz: The Castle, 81; The Metamorphosis, 1, 7, 12–13, 75–85; The Trial, 81 Kittay, Eva Feder, 83–84, 86, 112–13 Larsen, Nella, 1, 13, 102, 175; “Freedom,” 13, 123–31; Passing, 123, 129–30; Quicksand, 123, 127; “The Wrong Man,” 126–27 lice, 7–8, 10–12, 17–26, 22, 29–31, 34, 36, 42, 51, 55–57, 144, 162, 175 Lispector, Clarice: “The Fifth Story,” 89–90; Near to the Wild Heart, 88; The Passion According to G.H., 12–13, 87–95; Stream of Life, 93

London, Jack: “How I Became a Socialist,” 149; The Iron Heel, 142; The People of the Abyss, 10, 13, 141–46; The Road, 13, 146–50, 162; “What Life Means to Me,” 149 Loy, Mina: “Aphorisms on Futurism,” 115; “Feminist Manifesto,” 13, 113–19; Insel, 116; “Parturition,” 13, 119–23 Lucian, 2, 137, 148 malaria, 10, 61 Mitchell, David and Sharon Snyder, 156 Nussbaum, Martha, 8 Orwell, George: A Clergyman’s Daughter, 13, 158–66; Down and Out in Paris and London, 1, 13, 150–58; Homage to Catalonia, 150; “Hop Picking,” 161; The Road to Wigan Pier, 139, 150, 155, 158; “The Spike,” 157–58 Owen, Wilfred, 12, 31–33 parasites: classical cultures and, 2, 148, 167n1; information theory and, 6; Parasite (film), 173–74; quasiobjects and, 6–7 parasitology: Environmental Parasitology (E.P.), 174; history of, 10, 19–25; medical journals about, 11, 23. See also tropical medicine postcolonialism, 19, 134n62. See also tropical medicine posthumanist philosophy, 3–9, 77, 90–92, 174–75 race: Harlem Renaissance writing, 123–27; London’s work and, 146; modernist feminism and, 110–12, 118; racial uplift politics, 127, 130, 134n71; Steinbeck’s work and, 12, 53, 61–63; “white trash” fiction, 53, 64–65

Index

Resettlement Administration (RA), 51–52 Richardson, Dorothy, 109 Rockefeller Foundation, 52, 56 Rosenberg, Isaac: “Break of Day in the Trenches,” 26–28; “God,” 28; “The Immortals,” 29–30; “Louse Hunting,” 30; “Spiritual Isolation,” 28 Sanger, Margaret, 110, 131n4 Schiller, Friedrich, 2, 137 Serres, Michel, 6, 14, 111–12, 153, 176 Shelley, Percy, 2, 33 Steinbeck, John, 6, 12, 174; The Forgotten Village, 61–63, 67; The Grapes of Wrath, 10, 12, 54, 57–63, 67; Harvest Gypsies, 12, 54–63, 67, 70; The Log from the Sea of Cortez, 59 sterilization. See eugenics

193

tropical medicine, 2, 10, 23–24, 175 turnip fly (Delia radicum), 65, 67–68 Uexküll, Jakob Johann von, 3, 11 vampire stories, 2, 14n7 Wells, H. G., 10, 142–43 West, Nathanael: Day of the Locust, 97; The Dream Life of Balso Snell, 1, 12–13, 95–102; “The Imposter,” 103n9; Miss Lonelyhearts, 96–97; “Through the Hole in the Mundane Millstone,” 98 Wharton, Edith, 109 Wolfe, Cary, 5–6, 8, 152–53 Woolf, Virginia, 4–5, 25, 70, 175 World War I. See First World War Yeats, W. B., 25

About the Author

Sebastian Williams, PhD, is assistant professor of English at Davis & Elkins College in West Virginia. He earned his doctorate from Purdue University in 2021 and primarily studies international modernism, health, and bioethics. His publications have appeared in the Journal of Medical Humanities, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE) and the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, among others. Williams teaches courses on modern and contemporary literature and writing in new media.

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