by H. T. Tsiang
Similarly, revolutionary romanticism sought to dispel false, lulling beliefs in the oppressive, bourgeois status quo, striving instead to reveal a new path for the working classes. As Moissaye Olgin explains in a 1934 article for New Masses, a magazine that Tsiang avidly read, “revolutionary romanticism” is:
romanticism that forecasts the future, that sees the outlines of a future beautiful life in the present struggles of the workers, a romanticism which combines a sober attitude towards the present with an understanding of the tremendous changes in life and the human personality that will take place under proletarian rule.30
As Olgin’s explanation makes clear, revolutionary romanticism emphasizes the systemic changes in store for the group rather than possibilities for the kind of individual fulfillment typically associated with conventional romanticism.
In Hanging, Tsiang references the conventions of traditional realism and bourgeois romance but gives them the ideological spin described by Gorky and Olgin. It should thus come as no surprise that Tsiang is not trying for subtlety in his depiction of how dominant financial, governmental, and religious interests—“a new Trinity” formed by “Business, Politics and the Holy Spirit”—all fail, and often outright exploit, the weak and vulnerable. Characters display hardly any psychological depth, and the novel’s “plot” develops in a herky-jerky, seemingly irrational way.
In this way, the novel makes us understand that politics and economics have more to do with Mr. Nut and Miss Stubborn’s relationship than anything we might call love. Although Mr. Nut’s near-love-connection with Miss Stubborn helps to propel the novel’s narrative, he ultimately comes to understand that Miss Stubborn, the most clearly identified communist in the novel, is more important as a political exemplar than as a potential mate. Likewise, Miss Digger is a distraction, though of a different sort and with a different purpose. In the end, the novel makes us understand that the “future beautiful life” of Mr. Nut and Miss Stubborn lies not in marital bliss or bourgeois domesticity but in a wider class-based revolution. Consequently, Hanging ends not with the guy getting the girl but rather with Mr. Nut as a fully transformed class-conscious hero who uses his apparent naiveté to lead Mr. System into a trap. As the novel’s narrator intones more than once:
Nut was acting nuttily. His eyes, however, were expressing deep thoughtfulness. He was acting nuttily as a soldier off for war. But he was thoughtful as a soldier when he turns his gun.
This insistence on the disruption of traditional novelistic technique in the service of political messaging puts Hanging squarely in league with a form that would eventually come to be known as the “collective novel.” According to literary historian Barbara Foley, collective novels employ “experimental devices that break up the narrative and rupture the illusion of seamless transparency.”31 Certainly, Hanging’s lack of seamless plotlines and often jarring juxtapositions of poetry and prose, humor and seriousness, performance and exposition, seem to qualify it as an example of the form.
In addition, collective novels feature the collective or “the group as a phenomenon greater than—and different from—the sum of the individuals who constitute it” and “narratorial interventions [that] unambiguously remind readers that they should conceive of the characters as a unified group.” Thus, while we might think that we know people as individuals, Tsiang’s novel jarringly reminds us that we often overlook the specificity of fellow human beings and reduce them to types: a nut, a gold-digger, a stubborn communist, a rat-like gangster, and a capitalist. Tsiang’s novel goes on to group Mr. System, Mr. Wiseguy, and Mr. Ratsky as members of the “Rich Men’s Club,” which schemes together at the “Conference for Saving Capitalism.” Opposing them are Mr. Nut, Miss Digger, and Miss Stubborn, who eventually realize their common class interests, though their group identity never gets dramatized as clearly as the Rich Men’s Club.
Another characteristic of collective novels is, as Foley explains, that they “frequently assert direct documentary links with the world of the reader” by presenting “verisimilitudinous descriptions of environment” and making “unambiguous reference to verifiable episodes in the class struggle.”32 Tsiang’s novel accomplishes this documentary function by describing Mr. Nut’s perambulations through mid-1930s Manhattan street by street, naming particular landmarks and referring to events such as the suicide of artist Gan Kolski on April 18, 1932 and the attempted assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt by Giuseppe Zangara on February 15, 1933. Interestingly, then, the effectiveness of the collective novel turns on its ability to invoke a sense of everyday reality at the same time that it disrupts it in key ways.
Some of Tsiang’s inspiration for these techniques—and indeed for the book as a whole—might very well have been the 1933 novel Union Square by Albert Halper, described by Foley as one of the best examples of the collective novel. Like Hanging, Halper’s book also features a perambulating protagonist who meets characters named for particular aspects of their identity, such as Mr. Boardman, a manufacturing executive, and Mr. Feibleman, a relatively powerless vendor of toasted chestnuts. While both Halper’s and Tsiang’s novels follow collective novel conventions, however, the latter experiments with them more freely, mixing them with ideas from other forms.
Another, related genre of radical literature from which Tsiang undoubtedly borrowed was the agitprop play, a significant part of the New York theater scene of the 1930s. Unlike conventional plays, which invited audiences to identify with individualized characters facing and resolving crises in typically realistic settings, agitprop plays discouraged audience identification and traditional expectations regarding plot. In 1931, when director and playwright Hallie Flanagan first observed such theatre, “she discerned the start of a distinct theatrical and dramaturgical style consisting of ‘a direct, terse, hard-hitting phraseology, a machine gun repetition, [and] a sharp, type analysis with no individual characterization.’”33 Plays in this style sought to alert audiences to the ideological blinders that they wore. And by encouraging their viewers to see the world anew, they hoped to push them to take action. To accomplish this, agitprop plays employed various alienating effects including harsh sounds and lighting, stylized movement, direct addresses to the audience, and dialogue filled with non sequiturs, in addition to the kind of linguistic repetition described by Flanagan.
Tsiang knew well the world of the agitprop play, having acted in Roar China in 1930,34 so it is unsurprising that many of its conventions pop up in Hanging. Like a play, Tsiang’s novel is divided into four acts. It also self-consciously includes terse, repetitive language that aims not at telling a traditional story but rather at revealing a critical perspective on reality and calling audience members to action. At the beginning of the novel—and in the first three acts in the book—we read the following words:
It’s under this system!
It’s under this system!
Mr. System
Beware:
The Hanging
On
Union Square! . . .
These lines read very much like a script for a mass recitation, an agitprop form that “consisted of a simple descriptive narrative, often a poem, that built to a direct exhortation of the audience, normally to organize, strike, or fight.”35
So while some critics may have misunderstood Tsiang’s repetitive language as a humorous indication of his naiveté or a lack of fluency in English, we can recognize it as being motivated by a sharp political mind that asks us to think even as we smile at sequences such as: “He is radical; he has no money. He is conservative; he has money. He is wishy-washy; he has a wishy-washy amount of money.” Just as a crowd at the end of the novel chants and follows searchlights to the stage at the center of Union Square, we, the readers of this novelized version of agitprop, are asked to think about material and social conditions “under this system.” We are being asked to move ideologically from our initial, unwitting gath
ering for the purposes of entertainment to Mr. Nut’s ultimate, if implicit, call to join not just a revolutionary way of seeing reality, but also a revolution itself.36
AN EPIC SATIRE
As readers, we experience this critical, dynamic version of reality not only by traveling along Tsiang’s stylistically bumpy road, but also from the perspective of Mr. Nut—and in particular, his journey from false consciousness to class consciousness. Given this political trajectory, it comes as no surprise that Tsiang chose to subtitle his novel “An American Epic.”37 Like James Joyce, whose 1922 modernist classic Ulysses featured a similarly perambulating hero and chapters pegged to the hours of the day, Tsiang may have hoped that associating his novel with the genre of the epic would help to suggest the global and momentous importance of his relatively local and mundane narrative.
As with all epics, Hanging begins in medias res, in this instance with Mr. Nut not being able to pay his ten-cent check. And although Mr. Nut is neither favored by Athena nor gifted with cleverness or martial prowess, Tsiang’s hero does possess some special qualities that belie his humble exterior and unemployed status. For example, despite his basic innocence, he is observant and broadly empathetic.
This becomes apparent very early on, when he first meets Miss Stubborn, whom he initially takes to be a young man. Trying to make conversation, he asks: “How’s business?” Immediately, the narrator reports from Mr. Nut’s perspective:
Upon hearing this, the color of the young fellow’s face suddenly changed and his eyebrows rose. The dark spots of his eyes became steady and because of the steadiness it made the surrounding white parts appear smaller. Mr. Nut knew that the young fellow was angry. But Mr. Nut didn’t know why.
Mr. Nut proves throughout the narrative to be generous, thoughtful, and in the end, resolute. This makes him a fine hero in a Marxist epic, for it enables us to watch a fairly likable character observe and interact with other people, with and against whom he will work to gain a truer sense of the world and his role in it. At one level, Hanging is about a day in the life of one unemployed man, but the epic conventions encourage us to expect more.
Such moves were familiar to those who, like Tsiang, aspired to be practitioners of Socialist Realism. As literary critic Katerina Clark explains, novels in this tradition typically follow a central character as he or she undergoes a rite of passage, which normally involves a journey to consciousness, consultation with mentors, distractions, sacrifice, crises, and a climax that marks the character’s transformation.38 Thus Mr. Nut is introduced to us as a cog recently ejected from the capitalist machine, having lost his job three months before the start of the novel. In Act I, he finds himself in the awkward position of not being able to pay his bill at a cafeteria. In spite of his commonality with the dispossessed, Mr. Nut at first clings to the bourgeois ideology of upward mobility:
Yes, he was a worker. Now. For the time being! But how could they tell that he would not, someday, by saving some money, establish a business of his own?
In short, Mr. Nut begins with false consciousness and hence perceives reality through false—i.e., conventional or bourgeois—eyes. He undertakes a journey, learns from others, descends into the Underworld (via a movie theater), offers to sacrifice himself, overcomes obstacles, and ultimately perceives reality and those around him in a “truer,” more critical way. This journey both educates Mr. Nut about the kinds of desperation faced by his fellow city-dwellers, and reveals the exploitation that the powerful exercise on the weak. By the end, he understands that Mr. Wiseguy was never his friend, Mr. System has to be taken down, and Miss Stubborn is not only attractive but also correct.
* * *
—
If the clear purpose of all of Tsiang’s literary appropriation was political change, his radical ambitions are apparent from the very first—in fact, from the original edition’s extremely unconventional cover, which reads: “YES . . . the cover of a book / is more of a book / than the book is a book . . . I say—NO . . . SO.” By proclaiming the fact of Hanging’s publication-as-a-book as opposed to a collection of loose manuscript pages, the cover works simultaneously as boast and critique: boast on behalf of the author’s tenacity and critique of those who do not value his ideas.
To these notions, Tsiang says both “yes” and “no.” Yes, the book is now available for dissemination and hence has a different kind of value than a sheaf of typewritten paper. But no, the ideas between the covers are not in and of themselves any more valuable than if they had not been bound. Of course, a major theme in Hanging concerns covers or appearances. Mr. Wiseguy thinks that elevator shoes make the man, and most dismiss Mr. Nut as a harmless fool based on his appearance. But it turns out in the end that Mr. Wiseguy is as short on mettle as Mr. Nut is dangerous.
So when Tsiang opens his tale in classic epic fashion with an invocation to the muses, it’s an invocation with a twist. Instead of calling on immortal beings for inspiration, he locates the authority of the muse in himself:
What is unsaid
Says,
And says more
Than what is said.
SAYS I
With characteristic humor and seeming illogic, even the authority of self-as-muse is undercut by the message of the invocation itself. Tsiang’s “American epic” features a muse that asks us to constantly question appearances and listen to silences. Much remains unsaid in conventional realism and bourgeois society; what remains unspoken is often more valuable than what is spoken. Like the burlesque shows at the Howdy Club, The Hanging on Union Square proceeds to both hide and reveal its significance.
* * *
—
From his early days protesting against foot-binding to his short political career working for Sun Yat-sen to his later days advocating for economic justice, Tsiang aimed to move people to action through his writings—paper bullets that could change the direction of the wind. With The Hanging on Union Square, Tsiang put his oar into the conversation about what was wrong with the world during the 1930s. He wanted to transcend his identity as a “young Chinese poet” and become a major troublemaker, an idiosyncratic, hybrid version of Hamlet, Odysseus, Christ, and his own fictional creation, Mr. Nut.39 And he sought to achieve this purpose by imaginatively—and perhaps indiscriminately—borrowing techniques from a dizzying variety of genres. In so doing, Tsiang may have been following the principle of nalai zhuyi, or strategic appropriation from other writers, formulated by the influential Chinese author and literary theorist Lu Xun.40 Lu argued that globalism and modernism compelled writers to abandon notions of generic purity; he thus encouraged writers to accomplish their artistic—and sometimes political—ends by freely appropriating from a variety of sources. Even Lu, however, may not have been able to predict the creative and disorienting ways that The Hanging on Union Square combines these forms.
Small wonder then that every publisher Tsiang initially approached declined to take on The Hanging on Union Square. Putnam’s Sons, Minton, Balch, & Company could not imagine that the book would sell well enough to make “publication remunerative.” Little, Brown, & Company and Coward-McCann agreed. Covici-Friede suggested that he “re-write the story in straight-forward terms as a realistic novel.” Of course, H. T. Tsiang did not aim for remuneration or realism. Thanks to his own initiative, people were able to read his book during his lifetime. Thanks to Penguin Classics, the Trouble Maker’s masterwork will find the mainstream audience he always sought.
FLOYD CHEUNG
NOTES
1. All Tsiang-Rockwell correspondence can be found in the Rockwell Kent papers at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. In all of Tsiang’s publications, he signed his name as H. T. Tsiang. His full name on official documents is Hsi-tseng Tsiang. The Library of Congress romanizes his family name as Chiang, and in the pinyin system, his full name is Jiang Xizeng.
2. Besides being in possible violation of the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Tsiang may have faced deportation under the Alien Immigration Act of 1917 and the Anarchist Act of 1918, which sought to exclude radical and subversive aliens.
3. For this and other compositions, his fellow inmate Pierre Ferrand called Tsiang the “Poet Laureate of Ellis Island.” See A Question of Allegiance (Tampa: American Studies Press, 1990), 73–75.
4. James Baldwin, interview by Mel Watkins, New York Times Book Review (23 Sep. 1979): 3.
5. Qtd. from the biographical note accompanying the Rockwell Kent papers.
6. Letter from Kent to Tsiang, 14 Jan. 1941.
7. Letter from Kent to Tsiang, 30 Jan. 1941. Kent and his wife would eventually regret reaching out to Tsiang on account of his annoying persistence.
8. Rev. of The Hanging on Union Square. New York Herald Tribune 9 June. 1935: 9.
9. Rev. of The Hanging on Union Square. New Republic 31 July 1935: 343–44.