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Jim Beggs
English 864
Prof. Jim Cahalan

“The Turnpike to Salvation”: Postmodernism in William Kennedy's Ironweed

William Kennedy's novel Ironweed engaged in fundamental problems of human existence

in a very nuanced, non-totalizing manner. Not too surprisingly, attempts to neatly analyze the

novel under a singular theoretical approach have produced readings that were opposed to one

another in terms of theory and politics. Often an article or essay somehow feels inadequate when

it cannot make a totalizing statement or argument about a work of literature. The novel clearly

addressed what it meant to be a bum, the suffering of individuals under capitalism, guilt, and the

potential for redemption for a troubled figure such as Francis Phelan. While Kennedy dealt with

the criss crossing layers of human experience, he placed an emphasis on the links between place

and the understanding of self. The novel demonstrated a materialist conceptualization of bums,

their subjectivities, their positions within society and their low place under national capitalism.

The tensions between the materialist philosophy of the novel and its aesthetics reveal the novel as

a site of class conflict. Considerations of place and the postmodern reveal the configurations of

discourses that constrain and compel people on paths not of their own choosing. Religion, class,

and the literary intertwine in Ironweed producing a dense fabric difficult to unravel.

In some ways Kennedy played down the historical setting of the novel, with the Great

Depression receiving only a brief mention rather late in the novel. However, Phelan's guilt over

killing a man during a trolley strike foregrounds the history of the labor movement and the

government's violent responses to unionizing for improved conditions of labor. The presence of

dead people from Francis's past indicate his highly troubled nature, perhaps being either

psychological or spiritual hallucinations resulting from his guilt over their deaths. Classifying
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Francis's hallucinations as the manifestation of schizophrenia reduces the complexities of the

novel for me, and potentially makes abnormal an alternative experience, whether spiritual or

existential, as Foucault might have argued. The difficulty in pinning down one specific approach

to analyze the novel marks it as philosophically postmodern. It engages with postmodernism

critically. Francis's life as a bum, his return to Albany, the reawakening of his sexuality and his

memories within Albany reveal Kennedy's desperate struggle to ascribe meaning and worth to the

suffering and hopelessness of the “weeds” on the margins of United States society.

The histories of capitalism and the labor movement within the United States were crucial

to Ironweed. Modern methods of transportation such as trains and trolley have been markers of

modernity and capitalist development in the United States. They have been associated with brutal

capitalist land grabbing and the exploitation of farmers, such as in the case of Frank Norris's The

Octopus. Francis witnessed the accident and the memory of seeing the train hit his father, send it

in a fifty foot arc through the air, and landing mangled on the ground haunted him for the rest of

his life. “So many people go crooked when they die” (15). The mangled body of his father helped

preserve the memory of the mangled body of his son for Francis, heightening his own agony and

transferring some of his guilt over his son's death to his father's. By the time that Francis returned

to Albany, the modernity of the trolleys had already worn off. “Terrific machines, but now they're

goin'” (21). Temporally, Kennedy situated the moment of Francis's return at the postmodern

moment when the novelty of modernity has worn off and the formerly glorious marks of progress

were now scars on the landscape. After seeing steam rise from a manhole on State Street “Francis

imagined the subterranean element at the source of this: a huge human head with pipes screwed

into its ears, steam rising from a festering skull wound “(63). Violence and wounds were the

sources of the unattractively and seedy urban landscape of Albany. The macabre image revealed
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the truly horrific toll that urban development and sprawl took upon the citizens and the natural

environment of Albany.

The strike that Francis participated in was not dealt with great depth in the narrative and

only revisited at various points for Francis to experience a guilt trip for the unfortunate events

that transpired during the strike. He helped to string up bedsheets on the trolley wires and light

them on fire to halt the trolley cars, which were being driven by scabs brought in to replace the

striking workers. In response to stone throwing from the striking workers, soldiers sent to escort

the scabs and the trolley car fired on the workers. The repressive state apparatus exercised force

in order to contain the threat of the labor movement. From a New Historical perspective, it would

be irresponsible not to consider the union busting of Ronald Reagen, who fired over 10,000 air

traffic controllers in 1981, only two years before the publication of the novel. As Christopher

Craig noted in an article on teaching Ironweed to undergraduate students, it was easy to view

Francis and the other characters as enduring the consequences of their own poor choices. Such a

reading to a certain extent might obscure the history of the maintenance of underclasses for

capitalist exploitation. “Like other socially conscious novels of the late postwar period, Ironweed

sometimes struggles against its own political priorities” (29). While the novel seemed quite

progressive politically, a reader can easily become judgmental of Francis's tendency to go “on the

bum” and run from his troubles. Something happened when Francis returned to Albany,

particularly when he learned that his wife Annie had never revealed any aspect of Francis's role

in the death of their son Gerald. There is a material aspect to Francis's suffering and expiation,

but his transformation took place on other levels as well. Craig's most helpful point was to

identify the novel itself as a site of class conflict. The novel reproduced the tendency during the

Reagan era to obscure the real causes for economic recession and enact punitive measures against
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the underclasses (30). In terms of challenging the myopia of certain students, a materialist

reading of Ironweed was useful to Craig to challenge student's unconscious buying into the

interests of the ruling classes which were often contrary to their own interests. However, Marx's

absolute claim that ideologies only obscured the material basis for all social conflicts

oversimplified ideology, and such a reading reduces the complexity of Kennedy's narrative.

The key to understanding the arc of the novel came when Francis visited the grave of his

dead infant son. After Francis talked to Gerald, something happened.

Gerald, through an act of silent will, imposed on his father the pressing obligation to

perform his final acts of expiation for abandoning the family . . . And after you have

performed them you will not understand that they were expiatory any more than you have

understood all the other expiation that has kept you in such prolonged humiliation. Then,

when you these final acts are complete, you will stop trying to die because of me. (19)

The novel did not really seem to treat Francis's interactions with dead people as the manifestation

of a mental illness. The primary way to read Gerald's imposition on his father, than, is as an

interface between the natural and the supernatural. The notion of Francis's life as an expiation

gave some religious meaning and value to his psychological suffering and the brutality of his

everyday life. The use of expiation brought in religious language to Francis's experience and

suggested the possibility that Francis could somehow atone for the wrongs that he committed in

his life. However, there is no vengeful God demanding a pound of flesh in sacrifice. Instead,

there is “act of silent will” on the part of Gerald who imposes this obligation on Francis in order

to save his life. Brennan O'Donnell examined the importance of Catholicism and Dante's

Purgatory in informing the religious outlook and the form of the novel. The expiation was by no

means a traditional Catholic one, he does not go to confession to confess and make an act of
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contrition. Even to his own family, his own act of contrition was quite inadequate in its

confession of guilt and resolve to amend his future conduct. But something has changed within

Francis. When he heard Oscar's broken song he felt “a compulsion to confess his every

transgression of natural, moral, or civil law; to relentlessly examine and expose every flaw of his

own character, however minor” (50). The religious instinct within Francis did not die out

altogether as here he demonstrated perfect contrition. To a certain extent, perhaps he can let go of

his guilt long enough to briefly reunite with his family before the brutality of the capitalist social

order again forced him to go on the bum to avoid prison. The fact that Francis abandoned his

family was tragic, but Kennedy avoided judging him too much within the narrative. In fact, flight

was what came most naturally to Francis and brought him the most pleasure, as the passage just

after he killed Rowdy Dick in self defense indicated.

The Legionnaires who demolish the encampment where many of the bums lived, the

soldiers who fired on the striking trolley workers, and the police who would pursue Francis due

to the murders he committed were all part of the repressive state apparatus. The religion that gave

Francis a strong sense of guilt over his lifestyle was part of the ideological state apparatus that

served the needs of capital. For Francis and the other bums, the clergy, despite preaching about

transcendental matters were merely cogs in the postmodern ideological state apparatusthat kept

them down. While the narrator claimed that the true targets of the preachers were “the others: the

dipsos, the deadbeats, the wetbrains, and the loonies, who needed more than luck,” religious

discourse had substantial effects on the bums (34). The preachers revealed how the ideology of

postmodernity had infected their theology, revealing that they served the interests of an

oppressive state rather than a liberating deity. Reverend Chester preached “Who will give you a

ride on the turnpike to salvation? Jesus will! Jesus delivers!” (34). Rather than a divine street of
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gold, the meek were on the an asphalt turnpike, on which they will have to pay a toll on the way

to heaven. Asphalt had the distinct mark of modernity, especially before the national expansion of

highways under Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower.

The most damning accusation that Kennedy's Ironweed makes against late capitalism was

the commodification of human sexuality and the reduction of the value of sexuality solely to its

exchange value. In the middle of Frederic Jameson's discourse on how the Lacanian

conceptualization of schizophrenia provided a “suggestive aesthetic model” for postmodern

culture, Jameson made an interesting statement. Rather than diagnose people or even our society,

Jameson suggested that “there are, one would think, far more damaging things to be said about

our social system than are available through the use of psychological categories” (26). Jameson

quickly returned to the schizophrenic issue and left exactly what he was thinking when he wrote

that sentence somewhat of a mystery. Kennedy's treatment of sexuality in Ironweed, however,

provides a damaging statement about our social system. In Capital, Marx made the distinction

between the use value and exchange value of objects. For capitalists, the exchange value of

commodities was more important because they had more commodities than they could ever

personally use. Through selling commodities, or realizing their exchange value, they could

accumulate more wealth. In a postmodern society “the very memory of use value is effaced”

(Jameson 18).

Among the bums of William Kennedy's Ironweed, sexuality has been reduced to pure

exchange value. After Francis turned Helen over to Finny so she would have a place to spend the

night, he knew that there would be sex exchanged between Helen and Finny. Just as he himself

sometimes had to sleep with Clara in order to have a place to sleep, Francis took Helen's

“cuckoldry” in stride. “Fornication was standard survival currency everywhere, was it not?” (89).
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Being able to exchange sexual intercourse for shelter or other goods was essential to the survival

of the bums. Rosskam, who hired Francis for a day, also provided intercourse to lonely

housewives, in addition to taking their rags and other junk, which he can then sell at the

junkyard. It is almost as if Rosskam was expected to sleep with women as part of his job

responsibilities. Compared with hauling junk, being a gigolo to lonely housewives seemed a

more pleasant activity at work, particularly given the number of “ohboys” he uttered. Rosskam's

encounter with the “hot slut” is more awkward and funny than arousing. He said: “They ask for

it. You go house to house, you get offers. This is not a new thing in the world” (94). Because of

its reduction to exchange value for the bums' survival, intercourse was no longer an activity

strictly for pleasure or reproduction. Instead, the fornication between bums was merely an

iteration of a timeless contract within society, that sexuality had always been about more than

pleasure or reproduction. The use of “fornication” distinctly marked the sinful activity of

intercourse outside of marriage. The use of sin was one mechanism through which the church

sought to control people's behavior. Yet there existed a sharp contradiction within capitalist

Albany that sought to reform the reprobate and the needs of capital.

For the first half of the novel, Francis was mostly asexual, until he worked with Rosskam

and revisited the neighborhoods where he first became aware of sexuality. When Francis turned

Helen over to Finny for cuckoldry, he essentially abandoned their relationship and closed off any

future possibility for a restoration of a sexual relationship between them. Francis only recalled

the sexuality he experienced free of commodification when he returned to his neighborhood with

Rosskam. First he began to recollect the illicit affair he carried on with his married neighbor

Katrina Daugherty. The affair functions as the nostalgia inimical to postmodern culture. Katrina

frequently talked of a poet and poetry and Francis therefore associated his relationship with
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Katrina with a very Romantic notion of love. The metaphor of the fire, which Katrina was earlier

injured by and ultimately died in allowed Francis to construct a memory of sexuality that was

free of the capitalist taint in his present moment. Yetman's article identified Kennedy's two

primary uses in the novel of Romanticism. First, Kennedy employed Romantic ideas in his use of

epiphanies, often negative ones. Citing two of Kennedy's influential predecessors, epiphanies

restored people in the poetry of William Wordsworth, while they chastened them in the prose of

James Joyce. As a postmodernist, Kennedy seemed to have fused the diametrically opposed

approach to epiphanies. In Francis's realizations about the commodified nature of sexuality—that

it was used as currency for bums' survival—he had a very negative epiphany about the state of

life in a postmodern society. He also had negative epiphanies about other aspects of society

including labor relations, the low position of bums within the social hierarchy, and his own

character. In spite of all the negative elements, the novel seemed to take on a more hopeful tone

as it progressed—if for no other reason than when a person like Francis has hit rock bottom, the

only direction in which he can move is up.

The end of the novel differed from what readers might have expected of such a seedy

postmodern novel that regularly listed the horrific ways in which laborers and bums died.

Readers witnessed the case of Sandra, who laid exposed the elements, not even wanting to move

in order to obtain more alcohol. When the characters later return to her, she has died and the feral

dogs ate parts of her corpse. The scene reflects the pervasive tone of seediness and sensation, that

human beings existed and died under such abject conditions, as they laid directly outside a

charitable religious mission founded to help them. Francis primarily dealt with Catholic doctrine

in an irreverent way. The novel opened with a discussion of how restricted Catholic cemeteries

were, only allowing desceadants of the faith to be buried within, and even then only if they
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avoided serious sins before death that could not be repented of, like suicide. The parody of

Purgatory reflected a strongly Catholic worldview, yet any ministries to aid the bums were

distinctly absent from Ironweed. Reverend Chester, who ran the mission where the bums stayed

sober mostly to receive a free meal, was a Methodist. While poor Catholics such as Helen Archer

were often represented as deeply pious, there were equally skeptical poor people such as Francis.

The resentment stemmed from the Church's perceived indifference to suffering of its faithful

during the Great Hunger. Kennedy attempted to balance the dirtiness of the bums' lives with the

beauty of his own prose, but the more lyrical sections fail to overcome the abject material

conditions.

Even the Methodist minister who aided the bums in Kennedy's novel seemed

unfortunately callous toward the human suffering going on around him. As a true believer, he

believed that spiritual solutions would most aid people in elevating themselves out of bumhood.

However, his model of social reform totally neglected to take someone such as Francis Phelan

into account. The only thing Francis really aspired to in life was to have no aspirations. While

Reverend Chester helped to meet some of Francis's material needs in providing a pair of socks

and getting him a day's employment with Rosskam, he was a firm believer in tough love and

refused to allow people who were drunk inside the mission. Sandra's death in the dust outside the

mission showed the absolute worst case scenario for the consequences of “tough love.” In the

presence of Helen and Francis, Jack and Clara listed the numerous unfortunate demises of

various bums. The retelling of their shocking deaths with their nicknames almost elevated them

to a mythic status within hobo lore. “And Poocher Felton, he bought it in Detroit, pissed his pants

and froze tight to the sidewalk . . . Foxy Phil Tooker, a skinny little runt, he froze all scrunched

up, knees under his chin. 'Stead of straightenin' him out, they buried him in half a coffin” (77).
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The social welfare system of the early twentieth century could not provide the safety net to

prevent human beings from becoming frozen to the sidewalk by their urine and dying from

exposure. The largest steps to combat more widespread poverty during the Great Depression, the

setting of the novel, would not come until Roosevelt's New Deal, after the novel ended. However,

it is worth noting that Kennedy wrote the novel in the early 1980s. The recession during the late

1970s and early 1980s and even now during the early twenty-first century have revealed that

despite significant improvements in welfare for the poor, poverty continued as a problem

endemic to capitalism. Capitalism produced greater levels of overall wealth, but generally over

time the wealth became concentrated in fewer hands. Policy developments such as Reagan's

“trickle down economics,” and the deregulation or lack of regulation of financial services and

banks facilitated the accumulation of wealth by the wealthy, the fragmentation of the professional

managerial class, and the growth of lower classes.

The second Romantic element was the relationship between the characters and nature,

with nature serving as “a powerful interpreter of human thought and behavior, and even social

status” (90). The setting of the mostly urbanized Albany removed the novel from the traditional

“rustic” setting of Romantic literature. Kennedy's choice of setting deliberately contradicted the

philosophical project that William Wordsworth put forth in his poetry. In the “Second Preface to

the Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth sought to displace the pollution of the urban with the pristine

language and imagery of the rural. While the contemplation of nature undoubtedly was a

pleasurable activity for William and his sister Dorothy, they only indirectly drew attention to the

underclasses struggling for survival as England lurched from feudalism to capitalism. Kennedy

sought to expose the wasteland of depression-era Albany. Timothy Criswell offered a definition

of place that was useful in thinking about Francis's relationship with Albany. Place could be the
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way that the individual comes to understand the world at large and makes connections on a

global scale. “Place, at a basic level, is space invested with meaning in the context of power. The

process of investing space with meaning happens across the globe at all scales and has done

throughout human history” (12). Francis's affiliations with the place of Albany were positive and

negative and how he came to understand his place within United States society. As Criswell

pointed out, place can denote a geographic location, a social position within a hierarchy, and a

sense of ownership about a dwelling. About the street he grew up on Francis said, “'This old

street. I used to own this street, once upon a time . . . I ain't talkin' about money” (64). The late

Dick Doolan joked that Francis should have sold the street while he owned it, but he did not

literally mean that he owned the street. The street was a home to him. He knew it intimately. But

it has changed drastically in his absence, causing him to lose the association between Albany and

home.

The capitalist development of Albany has turned its soil into dust, in which Sandra dies

outside the mission. The choking weeds represent the urban decay that sets in when businesses

close and no longer maintain the grounds they occupied. The days of excessive development had

ended, and the weed plants and the human weeds now choked the neglected areas of the city. The

bums squatted in abandoned houses, making use of property that otherwise unutilized. However

the police regularly raided properties that the bums were known to squat in and arrested the

inhabitants. Francis feared any kind of limitation on his freedom and incarceration would be an

especially onerous limitation on his freedom. He preferred to avoid the risk of arrest for the

comfort of a home and claimed that the weeds provided protection from the elements as well. He

did not lay unprotected in the dust as Sandra did. The property laws of capitalism allowed the

owners of a property to leave their property unutilized and to fall into disrepair even as families
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slept in boxes on the street because they could not even afford rent, let alone a mortgage or

buying a property outright.

The Albany of Ironweed was a dilapidated and a place with clearly demarcated class and

ethnic spaces. Phelan grew up within an Irish neighborhood and at one point noted that one

neighborhood was where the “lumber barons” lived. The Irish were mostly working class

proletariats, who contrasted against the lumber barons who would have owned the capital. The

Irish American laborers sold their labor to the lumber barons. As Francis wandered around

Albany, he knew and mentioned every street and neighbor that he ambled through. The

familiarity with Albany provided a sense of home for Francis, who as a bum, has been literally

homeless for much of his life. At one time, Francis occupied a higher social position within

Albany and United States society. As a professional baseball player and a trolley worker he

earned a living wage and could support his families. His guilt over his self-perceived moral

failings from the ideological state apparatuses such as the church psychologically interfered with

his material success. His family reinforced his own sense of moral failure, his daughter Margaret

in particular. Helen mentioned that she and Francis used to have the material markers of middle

class status, which they lost as Francis gave up his career in order to become a better alcoholic.

When Francis saw Margaret preparing dinner, she was overdressed for cooking in the kitchen,

wearing stockings, a wristwatch, a bracelet, and two rings on her ring finger. She strongly

resented Francis for having abandoned the family for twenty-two years and failing to provide for

the material support of the family. Being able to provide materially for a wife and children was a

key determinant in a man's ability to exercise his masculinity within the capitalist United States.

To an extent, Francis was emasculated because of his inability to provide at any level for his

family, but the material level in particular.

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Bodies in the novel were the sites of disease, disintegration, and marks from poor material

conditions. An allegedly benign tumor bloats Helen's stomach out, giving her a pregnant

appearance. The tumor cruelly parodied the physical appearance of pregnancy. Rather than being

a budding life, the tumor was like death growing within Helen's body. The smells and ugly

appearances of Francis's unkempt body were a source of shame for him. “He smelled the odor

that came up from his fetid crotch and stood up then and dropped his trousers” (71). He

vigorously and thoroughly cleansed himself. “He washed his genitals and buttocks, and all their

encrusted orifices, crevices, and secret folds.” He cleaned his most intimate parts, the ones that

are the greatest source of dirt and odor physically and spiritually. Later Francis cleaned himself

up and dressed nicely when he returned to his home, but his Billy tried to make Francis feel more

comfortable with his rough physical appearance. Francis repeatedly cleans himself throughout

the novel, including when he drinks from the creek after he kills the Legionnaire, but

consciousness of guilt and sin tainted his gestures toward religious redemption. When people in

the novel died, they did not become free of physical corruption. When his father and son die, they

go all crooked and corpses become food for feral dogs. Katrina's body was marked from a fire

earlier in her life, and a fire, which started in a nearby school and then spread to her house. The

close proximity of buildings within urban areas contributed to Katrina's death and perhaps her

scarring.

The novel ended on an apparently positive but certainly fragmented note. At first Francis

hopped on a train to flee the legal authorities who would be looking for the Legionnaire's

murderer. The narrative suddenly shifted and Francis was in the attic at Annie's home, talking

with her. The reader cannot be sure where Francis really was at the end of the novel. A reasonable

reading would be that mentally he can return to that space of the home and Billy's room, which
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were so meaningful and hopeful to him. “That room of Danny's had some space to it. And it got

the morning light too. It was a mighty nice little room.” The free space as well as the light, which

has religious connotations of the divine appealed to Francis at the end of the novel. When Francis

visited home again and underwent an expiation for his past sins, he experienced a conversion

without the formal apparatuses of the church. The conversion was not explicitly religious, with

literary criticism filling in the materialist, Romantic, or religious totalizing discourse to cover the

text's gaps in meaning.

Ironweed referred to the decaying urban landscape, but to the bums in the novel as well.

Despite neglect, deprivation, and extirpation, they thrive, grow, and return to sprout up once

again. The novel revealed the material conditions that saw the escalation of class conflict

throughout the twentieth century. National and international capitalism inform the ideological

state apparatuses that limit the autonomy of the bums. The decay of the markers of modernity

distinctly mark Kennedy's novel as a postmodern text. Through a consideration of place, readers

can uncover the intersections between the discourses that attempted to resolve the contradictions

of capitalism as it developed. Despite steady long-term growth of wealth within the United

States, an underclass of unemployed bums continued to exist for exploitation. Despite all the

measures taken against them, the weeds came back stronger and taller than ever. The great hope

of the novel was that the characters could escape the domination of capitalism in every aspect of

their lives through connections with place and memory.

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Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Media and Cultural Studies.

Eds. Meenakshi Gigi Durham & Douglas M. Kellner. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006.

Craig, Christopher. “'Nobody's a Bum All Their Life': Teaching Class Through William

Kennedy's Ironweed.” Radical Teacher 86 (2009): 28-38. EBSCOHost. Web. 18 April

2010.

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization. 1961. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke

UP, 1991.

Kennedy, William. Ironweed. 1983. New York: Penguin, 1984.

Marx, Karl. Capital. Moscow: Progress, 1886. Marxists Internet Archive. Web. 20 April 2010.

Norris, Frank. The Octopus. New York: Doubleday, 1901. Google Books. Web. 20 April 2010.

O'Donnell, Brennan. “Francis Phelan in Purgatory: William Kennedy's Catholic Imagination in

Ironweed.” Christianity and Literature 24 (2004): 51-71. EBSCOHost. Web. 18 April

2010.

Yetman, Michael G. “Ironweed: The Perils and Purgatories of Male Romanticism.” Papers on

Language and Literature 27 (1991): 84-104. EBSCOHost. Web. 17 April 2010.