In looking to Muriel Rukeyser’s 1938 poem, “The Book of the Dead,” my paper examines Rukeyser’s documentary treatment of the 1932 Hawk’s Nest Tunnel disaster of West Virginia. This event, which claimed the lives of at least 764 tunnel workers, marks the largest industrial catastrophe in American history. When Union Carbide hired tunnelers to mine silica under Gauley Mountain without the protection of masks or ventilation, workers quickly contracted acute silicosis, a deadly lung disease. Rukeyser’s modernist poem deploys a variety of documents, including testimony from the 1936 congressional hearing on the incident, letters from workers and their families, and eye-witness accounts of the drilling. The text mobilizes these records to explore the tunnel’s construction and aftermath in the context of a specific manifestation of capitalist demands for profit and accumulation. I suggest that “The Book of the Dead” creates a hybrid of documentary and epic memorialization to totalize the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel as a synecdoche of capital’s contradictory development during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than drawing a positive correlation between histories of modernism and the punctuated events that one might position as disastrous signals of capital’s steady violence, I read “The Book of the Dead” for the manner in which it discloses systemic transformations of the American economy. I specifically argue that the poem encounters an invisible relationship between the building of the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel in 1930-1932 and the problems of industrial profitability that came into sharp relief on October 24, 1929. By revealing some of the structural contradictions that brought these problems to a head when the economy crashed, Rukeyser’s text pivots on a relationship between industrial advancement and system-wide declines in profit—a contradiction whose eruption is concretely embodied by the ravaged lungs of those who helped drill the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel.
About the presenterThomas Johnson Nez
My research explores the multiple intersections of popular culture, political economy, discursive embodiment, and aesthetic form. Drawing from critical race theory, psychoanalysis, and Marxism, I approach the long-history of hegemonic formation in the United States as a patchwork of material sites of struggle. I currently work at Longwood University’s English and Modern Languages Department, where I teach classes in American modernism, film, and writing.