178 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
and “warm friendliness,” where workers would often break into song
and dance during shifts, without causing any overall disruption in
the flow of production (p. 93). Indeed, the romantic image of such
interethnic harmony and togetherness, which clearly has a strong
cosmopolitan appeal, smacks of a certain mechanical utopianism.
More specifically, it appears as a “dream” that Ringold evokes in the
pursuit of an ideology whose restrictive and puritanical regard for
culture and the arts are almost certainly inconducive to cosmopoli-
tan practice.
In a sense, then, the music-filled factory floor Ringold describes
resembles the patrician capitalist dream endorsed by the Swede
in American Pastoral , with its belief in the free market as a sphere
that enables universal success and happiness to those who but try.
Indeed, the Swede’s particular experience of the American dream
has features that resonate with Ringold’s utopian factory: it employs
and trains a large number of black American workers. Furthermore,
the Swede’s dream openly embraces the prospect of international
expansion and mobility and, by moving from Newark to Puerto
Rico and China, illustrates that it does not allow itself to be limited
by nationalistic loyalties.
However, as is demonstrated above, Levov’s neoliberal utopian
dream, like the idyllic factory Ringold envisages, is compromised
by the character’s myopia (an ignorance of the destabilizing and
deleterious social effects of global free-market capitalism). In both
cases, this myopia is denounced with violent excess by the nov-
els’ respective antagonists. In I Married a Communist , this occurs
when Erwin Goldstein, an old army friend of Ringold’s repudiates
Communism (more specifically as it is interpreted by the Soviet
Russians) as “a crazy fairy tale” that necessitates that those in power
‘control people’s every thought or shoot ’em” (p. 95). He then pro-
ceeds to pull a gun on Ringold and demand that he leave his house
immediately. It is interesting to note that these words of Goldstein’s
are echoed by Rita Cohen when she upbraids Levov for believing in
“fucking fairytales” while exploiting “the brown and yellow people
of the world [... and living] in luxury behind the nigger-proof secu-
rity gates of his mansion’ (pp. 133–136). While it is quite appar-
ent that the utterances of both characters quoted above occur in