The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class by Cynthia Cruz (review)

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• The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class by Cynthia Cruz
• Josh Polinard (bio)

the melancholia of class: a manifesto for the working class Cynthia Cruz
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Robin DiAngelo's bestseller White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (2018) opens with a quote by Charles Baudelaire, arguably most known nowadays as a popular line from the 1995 film The Usual Suspects: "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." The allusion implies that the most effective means of addressing white supremacy in the US is to first regard it as an insidious, silent oppressor, lurking in the shadows of a clandestine, all-but-completely-disavowed white privilege rather than solely as a signifier for pointy white hats and swastika-clad purveyors of amphetamines.

Cynthia Cruz's The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class cautions us of a similar form of disavowal—one that secures the advantage of the ruling class by insisting there simply is no working class in the United States. As Cruz states in chapter 3, "Neoliberalism's message … states vehemently that we are all born with the same privileges, that we all have the same advantages, and that those who do not succeed have only their own ineptitude and/or laziness to blame."

Although the bulk of Cruz's manifesto outlines the trajectory of other working-class artists' fulfillment of the rags-to-riches myth—albeit in a manner that calls the fulfillment part into question—it is the close examinations of her own struggle as a working-class author that are perhaps the most poignant. As she states in the previously mentioned chapter: [End Page 162]

When during my two years in the [MFA writing program] I was told repeatedly by my classmates and my professors that my poems made no sense, I felt ashamed and assumed, automatically, that they were right. As a result, I deleted large portions of my writing. It took me decades to recognize that the very things I was erasing in my writing were class-based, which is to say that what my classmates and teachers were unable to comprehend was my worldview. When I am told to make my work more "clear," what I am actually being told is to make my writing adhere to a certain cultural aesthetic, which is formed and determined by middle-class writers and editors … assimilating into the literary elite is the payoff.

What Cruz shares here speaks to the melancholia referred to in the title of the book, which Freud, in his essay "Mourning and Melancholia," explains as "mentally characterized by a profoundly painful depression … the inhibition of any kind of performance, and a reduction in the sense of self, expressed in self-recriminating and self-directed insults, intensifying into the delusory expectation of punishment."

Cruz's examinations of artists such as Amy Winehouse and Christopher Molina, among others, further outline the decline of working-class artists who, for the most part, never recovered from the above-mentioned effects of this brand of melancholia. These examinations reveal not only a pattern in their respective declines but a tear in the fabric of the myth of meritocracy.

In addition to its function as a memoir and manifesto, The Melancholia of Class serves as a useful guide for evaluating the authenticity of work purportedly intended to cause social change. As a case in point, Cruz's assessment of Barbara Loden's film Wanda (1971) contrasts the authentic aspects of Loden's work with the slicker attributes pervasive among films that make it past the gatekeepers of the mainstream film industry.

Slickness implies seamless assimilation and conformism to [middle-class] culture. It also suggests that the artist has herself become slick; that she has forsaken who she was for a shiny, alternative version of herself. Loden's insistence on the authentic is demonstrated by a number of factors. For example, there are only two actors in the [End Page 163] film, and it was shot on a...