Meet Me on the Barricades is Harrison's most experimental work. The
novel includes a series of fantasy sequences that culminate in a scene
heavily indebted to the Nighttown episode in James Joyce's Ulysses (the
novel was published a year before James Thurber's better-known short
story, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"). The novel is also Harrison's
only foray into satire--an especially unexpected turn given that the
Spanish Civil War literary canon, and particularly works of literature
written in the midst of the war, tend towards earnestness rather than
irony. Harrison's novel is thus a unique book, significant for its
self-consciousness as a modernist novel and as a political document. Out
of print since its single publication run in 1938, this critical edition
recovers Harrison's important commentary on the heated "culture wars" of
the 1930s and the Spanish Civil War. With an original critical
introduction and extensive textual and editorial notes, this edition
draws on original archival research to situate the novel within the
modernist and leftist North American canons. Meet Me on the Barricades
is a densely allusive text that layers global politics, revolutionary
theory, classical music, literary theory, world history, and
anti-Stalinism, as well as emergent biological discourses about sex. It
recounts a few days in the life of P. Herbert Simpson, a middle-aged,
weak-hearted oboist with the New York Symphony Orchestra and leftist
fellow traveller. Simpson is subject to wild hallucinations that are
sometimes daydreams, sometimes drunken delirium, and on occasion
intricate dreams while asleep. He imagines escaping his unrewarding
marriage with a prudish, domineering wife through a passionate fantasy
of a Russian girlfriend, and escaping his day job in the symphony to
fight on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War.
