Another valence of the small room

In an uneven, but repeatedly suggestive article on I Married a Communist, the political theory influenced critic Sorin Radu-Cucu offers a lively take on Ira Ringold's Zinctown cabin and its connection to two other rooms: Johnny O'Day's ascetic retreat amongst the steel mills of northern Indiana and Lenin's "anchorite room [in Zurich] where the revolutionary founder of Bolshevism had lived in exile for a year and a half ” (Roth 278, quoted in Radu-Cucu 178). In Radu-Cucu's view, Ringold's shack becomes infused with the Communist mythology of "retreat from capitalist life"; these rooms achieve meaning, then, not just in terms of their isolation from the antagonistic world of the social (to use Roth's ideas) but in terms of their legibility within a larger cultural narrative, as manifested by their visual similarity to a famous scene from such a cultural narrative, Lenin's own room. DeLillo has Oswald play with this idea in Libra (a similar text to IMAC, in many ways) but DeLillo makes clear that Oswald's motivations are personal first and political second: his shaky grasp of Communism leads to his repeating ideas like "Trotsky's cell" without a clear understanding of how Trotsky's cell figures into the larger mythology of Communism itself that Roth reproduces in IMAC.

All this is to say that the small room isn't just a recurring trope, it's also a recognizable one, one that assumes meanings--as a retreat from capitalist life, infused with a proletarian pastoral--borrowed from larger narratives.