for word of their men after an accident. Like ''I Want the Women up North To Know," this passage attacks the modernist aesthetic, which elevates a concern for form over a concern for subject, yet it also argues that Olsen's subject itself is worthy of the transformations of enduring art.
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| | And could you not make a cameo of this and pin it onto your aesthetic hearts? So sharp it is, so clear, so classic. The shattered dusk, the mountain of culm, the tipple; clean line, bare beauty....
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| | Surely it is classical enough for youthe Greek marble of the women, the simple, flowing lines of sorrow, carved so rigid and eternal. (30)
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And the voice goes on to prophesy revolution against the companies and the system they represent: "Please issue a statement: quick, or they start to batter through with the fists of strike, with the pickax of revolution" (31).
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In chapter 5, we hear the voice of the revolutionary prophet twice. The first passage comments on the life of young Jim Tracy, Jim Holbrook's codigger in a sewer, who quits when the contractor insists that two men must do the amount of digging previously done by several. Here, the voice is at first scathingly satiric, pointing out how Tracy will be victimized by his own naive belief in the shibboleths of American culture-"the bull about freedomofopportunity," and predicting Tracy's inevitable descent into the hell of unemployment, hunger, cold, vagrancy, prison, death; damned forever for his apostasy to "God Job." The passage concludes with an apology to Jim, in which the narrator speaks with the collective "we" of the revolutionists:
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| | I'm sorry, Jim Tracy, sorry as hell we weren't stronger and could get to you in time and show you that kind of individual revolt was no good, kid, no good at all, you had to bide your time and take it till there were enough of you to fight it all together on the job, and bide your time, and take it till the day millions of fists clamped in yours, and you could wipe out the
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