Russomania '36

Farrell and the Externals

I ended my last post in a hurry on this note:

I’ll close by noting that [James T.] Farrell was an externalist. Yes, he did come from a genuine proletarian background, and he made a name for himself writing about it, but he would spend most of his life looking back at it from the outside, from a lofty plane - on literal planes flying between New York City and Paris every year.

Today I realized I could just call him an external. In Marvel Comics’ mythology, the

Externals are a rare loose-knit group of possibly ten of a subspecies of powerful immortal mutants” also known as the High Lords.

The Externals from Excalibur vol. 4 no. 12 (2020(, drawn by Marcus To

I quit reading Marvel Comics just months after the Externals first appeared in 1992, so I don’t know what the reasoning behind their Externals’ name is. I’m guessing it was chosen because it contained the letter X which is associated with mutants in the Marvel Universe because of the X-Men (men with “ex-tra power” according to X-Men #1 [1963]). I speculate further that the name reflects how the Externals are outside not just human society but even mutant society. Hence their other, more self-explanatory name: the High Lords.

That other name might fit Farrell as well. Long after his career had peaked in the thirties before he became a thoughtcriminal, he was still able to get paid thousands to speak, live in Manhattan, and fly to Paris at least once a year. High Lord privilege.

But I don’t reserve external in lowercase for High Lords. One can be in dire poverty and still be external. In fact, I think most people are externals. Here’s why.

In his book The Butlerian Setup, Innomen defined externalism as consisting of three steps:

Externalism consists of three steps:

1. Acknowledge that all evidence comes through experience

2. Use experiential evidence to infer entities or domains existing outside experience

3. Treat these inferred externals as more fundamentally real than experience itself

This pattern appears universally across explanatory frameworks:

Materialist externalism: Sensory experiences are caused by mind-independent material objects. Physical reality exists independently of observation and is what truly exists. Consciousness is derivative, emergent, or epiphenomenal. The material world is objective reality; experience is subjective appearance.

Theological externalism: Religious experiences, moral intuitions, and revelations are caused by transcendent God or spiritual realm. Divine reality exists independently of human experience and is what truly matters. Earthly suffering is temporary; eternal consequences are real. The spiritual realm is objective; worldly experience is subjective and secondary.

Idealist externalism: Individual experiences are manifestations of Absolute Mind, World Spirit, or transcendent consciousness. Ultimate reality exists beyond individual experience. Personal consciousness is derivative appearance of deeper reality.

Panpsychist externalism: Experiential properties are fundamental features of physical reality. Consciousness is distributed across matter. Individual experience provides evidence for universal proto-consciousness as fundamental physical property.

Despite enormous differences in content, all these frameworks share identical structure: posit something beyond experience, treat experience as evidence for it, make the posited external more real than the experience used to infer it.

Almost everyone believes in an externalist framework. I don’t want to criticize 99.99% of people here, though. Instead, I will focus on what I’ll call soteric externalism. The soteric external posits a savior (Greek σωτήρ sōtḗr) beyond personal experience, treats nth-hand experience as evidence for it, and makes the posited external more real than the experience used to infer it or anything they can more directly experience.

How was Farrell a soteric external? In the thirties he viewed the USSR as a soteric state. In 1935, he attended the First American Writers’ Congress where, according to Robert K. Landers,

Malcolm Cowley, the fellow-traveling literary editor of the New Republic, decried “the brutality of our society” with its heartless upper classes, declared that art and culture “cannot live in such a world” and lauded “the overflowing vitality of literature and culture in the Soviet Union.” No dissent on that point was heard. “The Soviet Union has destroyed the lie that the masses cannot build culture,” Mike Gold affirmed. “They are building the mightiest culture in the world.”

What bugs me as an illiterate outside the literary scene is how proletarian literature does not seem to be either created or consumed by “the masses” - an external abstraction, vague, faceless silhouettes holding up hammers and sickles on a Red horizon in the minds of prolelit writers and readers who might as well be High Lords to the working class.

I know a blue-collar American who doesn’t seem to have a single book in his house. Prolelit or otherwise. He wouldn’t read the English equivalent of 蟹工船 The Crab Cannery Ship (1929), the pinnacle of Japanese prolelit.

Of course The Crab Cannery Ship had red on the cover - and not as a patriotic show of loyalty to the Japanese Empire.

That book only sold 15,000 copies before the Japanese government banned it. I doubt it would have sold far more copies if it had been allowed to circulate.¹ The number of crab cannery ship workers who read it might have been zero. Much of the working class might have had difficulty reading it. The prewar Japanese script was the most complex in the world at the time (and its simplified postwar successor retains that dubious honor). Examining a study of immediate postwar literacy in Japan, J. Marshall Unger concluded in Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan (1994) that

the Japanese educational system had not overcome the intrinsic liabilities imposed on it by the Japanese writing system itself. Few Japanese were totally illiterate [as of 1946], but the vast majority experienced some degree of difficulty in reading and writing that their education did not alleviate.

As a novelist, 小林多喜二 Kobayashi Takiji was not part of that “vast majority”. He had higher education that few in Japan had before the war, and he himself was not a laborer. His masterpiece

was not based on any personal experiences of the author, but was influenced by Yoshiki Hayama's semi-autobiographical novel Umi ni Ikuru Hitobito [People Who Live on the Sea]. The work's immediate inspiration came from Kobayashi's reading of a newspaper's description of floating crab cannery Hakuai-maru (博愛丸) workers who had been treated brutally and sued their captain on their return to shore.

Kobayashi was an external, and not just in the broad sense of the term that describes almost everyone. He was a white-collar worker imagining what it would be like to be part of The Workers!™, who in his book are not individuals with names:

Kobayashi considered his use of a collective protagonist rather than a singular hero was a step forward in the creation of a proletarian literature, a claim he made in a letter to his mentor Korehito Kurahara immediately upon completion of the work.

[…]

The work has no single protagonist, and the only named character, the superintendent Asakawa, is portrayed as an inhuman monster.

The individual is evil; the collective is good.

The other characters are various groups of oppressed people: fishermen who began as impoverished farmers and plan on using their earnings to rehabilitate their farms, but wind up resorting to drinking and whoring in Hakodate and Otaru; factory hands in their early teens who have been abandoned by poverty-stricken parents; and students who have been tricked into believing that ship work is attractive summer employment.

My goal here is not to rehabilitate capitalists. I assume the oppression was real. I don’t really know. My point is that Kobayashi didn’t really know either. He was telling his fellow Marxists what they wanted to hear about their external soteric class.² Which probably was mostly true.

I suspect what they believed about the Soviet Union - their external soteric state - was less true.

Robert K. Landers’ An Honest Writer (2004) gave me the impression that in the thirties, James T. Farrell was more interested in the Soviet Union than in his native United States, much less his hometown of Chicago, despite having made his mark as a chronicler of Irish Catholic Chicago. He had a Leftist version of the Russomania I now see on the dissident Right. As I wrote in my last entry,

He [Farrell] was more interested in the murder of Kirov in the USSR than in the murder of Blacks in Chicago, despite his rhetoric about racial equality.

And he was really invested in Trotsky. He went to Mexico to see and even personally speak to the great man.

Why? What was the appeal of the Red star?

The fact that it shone so far away. It was external. It could be whatever Farrell and his fellow travellers wanted it to be. They were not constrained by trivia like a knowledge of Russian. Or like (eyeroll) experience in Russia.³ Who needed that? For Farrell, whose magnum opus Studs Lonigan was a condemnation of his own people - the Irish Catholics of Chicago - the utopia - literally ‘no-place’ - of the USSR was an appealing alternative.

Here is horrible; there must be better.

A false dichotomy - just as false in 2026 as it was in 1936.

1. The Crab Cannery Ship did sell 500,000 copies in 2008, but this article makes me suspect most of its readers were college-educated white-collar workers unhappy with their employment situation rather than proletarians.

2. I just realized there is no modern equivalent of Kobayashi’s novel for the Mike Rowe cult of the Respectable Right. Unless one counts the TV show Dirty Jobs (2003-2012; 2022-2023) in which Rowe LARPed in this or that low-status profession for a day. Like Kobayashi before him, Rowe is one of the Good People who guides fellow Good People through the alien world of noble savages.

3. To be fair, Farrell’s buddy Edmund Wilson had gone to the USSR to see paradise for himself. But seeing is not necessarily understanding. His Window on Russia (1972) gives me the impression that he knew very little Russian at the time - and what he did know he picked up on the spot during his visit.

If you do not know a language, you are largely at the mercy of those who do know it. Your experiences are second-hand, and you take the risk of trusting the first hand that reaches what you cannot grasp - or merely pretends to do so.