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Prophets in Babylon: Five California Novelists in the 1930s by Margaret C. Jones

1994; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.1994.0120

1948-7142

Esther F. Lanigan,

Asian American and Pacific Histories

Reviews 73 their culture. Luckily for scholars of Native American, cultural, ethnic, and humor studies, Kenneth Lincoln was not among the seminar participants, for he has given us a masterful and entertaining study ofthis rich tradition. Ranging from outsider stereotypes ofthe “wooden Indian”to tribal, inter­ ethnic, and insider jokes, Lincoln redresses negative attitudes about Native American peoples by probing comic realities evident in history, folklore, lin­ guistics, anthropology, and the arts. For example, he examines the history of the trickster tale, using it to explore not only tribal origin myths but the twists the characters take through time. In the chapter “Indi’ns Playing Indians,” Lincoln analyzes Hanay Geiogamah’s Body Indian, a play by the American Indian Theater Ensemble first performed at La Mama Experimental Theater Club in New York in 1972. The Kiowa playwright ‘jokes down,”according to Lincoln: “Indianjokes are embeddeddeeplyin the cultures ... and theyserve as secular prayers to ground and revitalize tribal peoples.” The beauty of Lincoln’s book is its inclusiveness yet its breadth. Indian humor is not simply ajoke or tale; it’s interplay which, as in the case of Body Indian, expresses the scrapping, the banter, the common losses on the edge of contemporaryIndian survival. The sequence ofthe book’schapters movesfrom historical encounters, expressions, and attitudes about and by Indians to phe­ nomena of feminist Indian humor, Red English, and popular mixed-blood music. Interplay is shown to be historical and thematic as well: each chapter assesses examples ofinterethnic humor. Lincoln’s adept analysis of not only oral but literary Indian humor, as he dedicates chapters to Louise Erdrich, James Welch, N. Scott Momaday, and Howard Norman, extends the critical bounds for appreciating each of these authors. The work of poets and visual artists also exemplifies the comic genius which has fueled the Native American creative renaissance of the last twenty years—a tradition which Lincoln argues is a result of the unconscionable suffering native populations have suffered through time. Singular in its field, Indi’nHumoroffers a fund of sources and scholarship, and is a model for further ethnic and multidisciplinary studies. It’s a bold and wittybook. SHELLEYARMITAGE University ofHawaii atManoa Prophets in Babylon: Five California Novelists in the 1930s. By Margaret C.Jones. (NewYork: Peter Lang, 1992. 156 pages, $33.95.) The five California novelists under consideration here are Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Aldous Huxley, Arnold B. Armstrong and Nathanael West. MargaretJones contends that these novelists find in California “a parody of 74 WesternAmerican Literature Eden or some Canaan”in the form ofutopian novels. Four of the novels she considers utopian—ParchedEarth (Armstrong), TheGrapesofWrath (Steinbeck), Co-op (Sinclair) and AfterMany a SummerDies theSwan (Huxley) emerge from Depression-era, agrarian California, while TheDay oftheLocust deals with the disappointed characters who come to Hollywood in search of their dreams, finding instead onlya “dream dump.”In each ofthe novelsJones interprets the central character as both a prophet-figure and savior. Although Jones seems mostin command ofher material on Steinbeck and West, certainlyher analysis ofSinclair and ofHuxley admirablyforegrounds new material. Jones persuasively demonstrates the viability of the prophet/savior trope, giving the reader close textual readings coupledwith careful cultural analysisto expose the ideological assumptions of the 1930s California that these five novelists read back to us. To build her case, the writer draws from diverse sources: Carey McWilliams’sstudy of migrant farm labor in the 1930s,Factories in theFields, Kevin Starr’s more recent Inventing theDream, and a 1940 issue of TheAssociatedFarmer, a sample ofher method in illuminating the period. More surprising and less effective for her purpose,Jones insists on proving to us that she can dance the dialogic byinserting Bakhtin and providing uswith a lengthy note on his theory through a secondary source. Mainly, however, the notes are first-rate, and the reader will gain insight intoJones’smeaning and method by reading them. In fact, the notes frequently contain the most straightforward and uncluttered prose ofthe book. This study succeeds in discovering an important slant on the “American dream”rendered Californian in the prophetfigures ofthese 1930s texts. In the end, Prophets ofBabylonconcludes somewhat evangelically that the message of these utopian novelists may continue to resonate as the world approaches “crisis”because of...