Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel

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168 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel


diligence), it is clear that they would not commonly permit vacation
homes, catamaraning, and water-skiing. The fact that poverty and
desperation are what spur the average Puerto Rican of the 1960s into
taking on a menial, low-paid job in a glove factory is simply effaced.
Thus, in addition to Safer’s observation that both Moby-Dick and
American Pastoral offer parallels in their rich, elaborately detailed
depictions of a particular trade, we could also add that both novels
qualify these representations by suggesting they are conducted in
the shadow of ethical malformation or dissonance, which the reader
recognizes all too well. Indeed, one might say that in this respect
both characters constitute morally accurate depictions of the con-
temporary human being, whose actions, especially in a world that
is interconnected by trade and financial exchange, have tangible
consequences and ramifications that are global in scale. To borrow
Dominic Head’s words, the moral dubieties we can detect in both
characters therefore work to reveal if not “exorcise our collective
complicity in the [... ] excesses of the contemporary.”^87
The image of rich capitalists being morally oblivious to the exploit-
ative relationship they have with economically vulnerable laborers
reemerges in I Married a Communist. During one of Eve and Ira
Ringold’s parties, Zuckerman describes a somewhat awkward encoun-
ter he has with a tobacco-plantation magnate from prerevolutionary
Cuba. Rosalind and her wealthy fianc é e, Ram ó n, are represented in
ways that resemble the almost quaintly complacent ignorance the
Swede has of the sociopolitical implications of robust, free-market
capitalism. Speaking with “eager innocence, with a joyful blend of
pride and accomplishment” about their “enormous wealth,” Rosalind
falls silent upon the subject of the tobacco workers in their employ.^88
With confident indignation, the impressionably young Zuckerman
inwardly condemns what he considers their callous neglect of the iniq-
uitous conditions of their workers, who exist in a state of “malnutrition
and ignorance” and are deprived ownership of the “land your fianc é ’s
family illegitimately holds” (p. 140). Such opprobrium is noticeably
absent in Zuckerman’s descriptions of Levov in American Pastoral —a
feature that makes the narrative all the more provocative.
A s obser ved above, L evov’s work a lso involves ta k ing adva nta ge of
the poverty and disorganization of labor in the Caribbean, a process

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