Chapter 1: American Realism: 1865-1890

CRITICS AND LITERARY historians of all persuasions have found

that such broad descriptive terms as classicism, romanticism, and
realism are valuable and necessary despite their multiple meanings. To
describe a writer, work, theme, or genre as classic, romantic, or
realistic is to employ a useful frame of reference whence further
examination and discussion may proceed. What is required, of course,
is some general agreement on the frame of reference, and for the past
several decades there have been frequent attempts to sharpen our
awareness of the full implications of the terms classicism and
romanticism. Realism, as a more recent, seemingly less complicated
literary mode, has had less such attention devoted to it. Indeed,
George J. Becker's essay in Modern Language Quarterly several
decades ago has been one of the few notable attempts to define
realism. 1 Becker, basing his definition upon European and American
fiction since approximately 1870, listed three criteria of the realistic
mode. The first is verisimilitude of detail derived from observation
and documentation. The second is an effort to ap proach the norm of
experience--that is, a reliance upon the representative rather than the
exceptional in plot, setting, and character. The last is an objective, so
far as an artist can achieve objectivity, rather than a subjective or
idealistic view of human nature and experience. 2

It would be difficult to quarrel with Becker's definition, given the wide

range of his survey. His definition clearly requires modification,
however, if it is to be applicable within narrower national and
chronological limits, and such a modification is particularly important
in American literary history, where realism is used to characterize an
entire age. What I propose to do, then, is to use Becker's criteria of
verisimilitude, representativeness, and objectivity as a means of
approaching a definition of realism as it actually functioned in the late
nineteenth-century American novel. My belief is that late nineteenth-
century American realism varies from Becker's definition in two
important ways. First, it achieves a greater diversity in subject matter
than is suggested by the criterion of the representative. Secondly, it is
essentially subjective and idealistic in its view of human nature and

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experience--that is, it is ethically idealistic. Three texts will illustrate
my thesis: William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham ( 1885),
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ( 1884), and Henry
James's What Maisie Knew ( 1897). I realize, of course, that earlier or
later works by these novelists may or may not support my belief, and
that works by other contemporaneous authors may contradict it as
well. I am also aware that the realism of the nineties was in many
respects less optimistic than that of the seventies. But the three works
chosen are characteristic and well-known novels by the three leading
realists of the period, and a generalization drawn from them need not
be universally applicable to have implications for the period as a
whole.

The three works are novels of manners in the sense that each focuses
on the relationship of its central character to a particular social world.
Each introduces a moral tension or conflict between the protagonist
and his milieu. The Rise of Silas Lapham centers on the individual's
relation to the business world; Huck Finn on his relation to the world
of formalized codes of social belief and behavior; What Maisie Knew
to the world of extramarital sexual intrigue.

The Rise of Silas Lapham clearly fulfills the initial two criteria of
Becker's definition. Indeed, it is offered as a prime example of
realistic fiction by Gordon Haight in his essay on Howells in the
Literary History of the United States and by M. H. Abrams in his
definition of realism in A Glossary of Literary Terms. The world of
Silas Lapham is that of commonplace late nineteenth- century Boston.
Here is no Ahab pursuing his whale with monomaniacal frenzy, no
Leatherstocking matching wits and skill with red or white foes in the
forest, no Chillingworth brewing potions, but Lapham going down to
business each day, taking pride in his family, his trotter, his success in
the world. That world, however, is not free from evil, and the moral
drama in which Ahab, Leatherstocking, and Chillingworth played is
still on the boards. But now, in everyday Boston, evil is more
commonplace, is more that which we are accustomed to in our
everyday affairs, is more realistic, if you will. It is the falsifications of
Silas's former business partner; it is the willingness of the English
agents to defraud their backers; it is Silas's own hardhearted treatment

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of his partner earlier in their careers. Moreover, evil is now so
prevalent that the individual immersed in it is frequently unaware that
he is participating in or committing evil. The point of the novel,
however, is that Silas, though years of business life have partially
atrophied his moral sense, does, at a moment of crisis, realize that a
particular action is evil and does have the moral strength to make the
correct choice. In his rejection of the opportunity to save his fortune,
he rises not only above his earlier moral muteness, but also (and more
importantly) above the society around him. He is ultimately morally
superior to the business world which is his world.

Of course, Howells advocated probability of motive, and Silas's moral

values do not appear from nowhere. They are founded in his poor but
honest Vermont boyhood and in his wife's conscience. But explaining
the source of an action does not make that action probable. Howells's
belief in Silas's ability to rise above his world is basically idealistic,
since it is a private belief in what should be rather than a depiction of
what usually is. While Howells's conception of man and society is not
crudely primitivistic, it owes much to a belief in the individual's innate
moral sense and in the corrupting effects of the pressures of society.
Such a belief does not have to be set in a jungle or forest to be
operative.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, like much of Twain's work, is in the

local color and tall tale traditions. From both of these Twain derived
an emphasis on verisimilitude of detail. In Huck Finn, Twain's
introductory note on accents is an indication of his conscious attempt
to achieve accurate detail. But though Tom and Huck and Jim may be
representative characters, their adventures are picaresque and are
unusual rather than commonplace. We sometimes forget that the plot
of the novel encompasses a full range of acts of violence, from the
ambuscade of the Arabs to the near-lynching of Jim. It is possible,
however, to struggle with the idea that the total effect of Huck Finn is
realistic despite the extraordinary nature of Huck's adventures. This
effect is partially gained by the satiric thrust of the novel, by its
constant puncturing of the falsely heroic and the sentimental, by its
burlesque of the ex traordinary rather than its literal acceptance of it.
In addition, Huck Finn is somewhat like Tom Jones in that the intense

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verisimilitude of detail in the portrayal of individual incidents and
characters dominates the novel and tends to blur the exceptional
quality of the incidents themselves. In short, part of Twain's purpose
in his use of the extraordinary is to deflate it, and his use of vividly
concrete detail helps achieve this end. In any case, though Twain does
not completely fulfill the criterion of the representative, he
nevertheless in his own way justifies his traditional inclusion among
the realists.

In Huck Finn, as in The Rise of Silas Lapham, the social world is the
embodiment of evil. Twain's world is larger than Howells's, however,
and includes many forms of codified and institutionalized behavior
and belief. Huck's decision not to inform on Jim (in the chapter "You
Can't Pray a Lie") reveals the power of such codes. His resolution,
Huck decides, is wrong and will result in his damnation. The irony, of
course, is that he is led to this conclusion by what he knows is right--
the code of slavery--although he does what he is instinctively led to
do. Like Howells, then, Twainindicated that the world around us is
frequently corrupt and false. This belief, which received its most
obvious fictional representation in Huck's crisis, is also apparent in
several other major incidents in the novel and in its very structure.
Tom's romantic code of behavior, the code of the feud, of honor, of
the mob, all are shown to lead to tragedy or near-tragedy--to the true
damnation of the participant. Huck and Jim, drifting down the
Mississippi, seek to evade these codes.

As Howells had done, Twain revealed his faith in man's ability to rise
above the evil around him and achieve an ethical victory. Huck's
moral values, like those of Silas, are effectively anticipated, since he
has come to know and to value Jim as a companion in escape and as a
human being. But Huck's ability to make the correct moral choice
despite the world around him is both more brilliantly ironic and more
fundamentally idealistic than Silas's. Silas at least knew what was
right and what was wrong. Huck must struggle against a false
knowledge of right and wrong, and his correct decision is indicative of
Twain's faith in the individual's ability to rise above society even
when he is unaware that he is so doing.

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What Maisie Knew is a psychological novel. James's interest, as he
tells in his preface, was not primarily in the story, but rather in its
refraction through the intelligence of a child. This technique would
both illumine her mind and--because of her youth and freshness of
vision--cast an ironic glow over the sordidness of the story. In order to
achieve this end, James informs us, verisimilitude required that the
child be a female rather than "a rude little boy." In addition, in order
for the child to be the major source of moral insight, as well as "ironic
center," she would have to be invested with "perceptions easily and
almost infinitely quickened" and great "vivacity of intelligence,"
though not "in a manner too grossly to affront probability." James's
intent was to present experience through a consciousness that had the
ability to absorb and contemplate experience and ultimately the ability
to draw moral deductions from that process. The need for such a
consciousness, it is clear, encouraged the choice of an unusual central
intelligence, one exceptional in perception and sensitivity, and
therefore beyond the range of the representative. Yet though the
intelligence itself is unusual, verisimilitude and probability are
maintained as guides in the presentation of the refractor, and the total
effect is that of psychological realism. In other words, James's practice
of the psychological novel inherently encouraged a violation of one of
the criteria of realism while at the same time he attempted to achieve
the effect of realism.

As Twain does in Huck Finn, James juxtaposes a child and an evil

world. The various adults who constitute Maisie's world shuttle her
among themselves either to vex one another or to provide a screen for
illicit relations. By the close of the novel Maisie knows two things.
She has a knowledge of the world of adult promiscuity, jealousy, and
desire. She has also, however, discovered her moral sense, partially
under the guidance of Mrs. Wix, but (as becomes apparent when Mrs.
Wix herself almost succumbs at the close) more as a reaction against
the world around her. It is as if the irritation of that world had caused
her moral sense to emerge and at last to assert itself in her refusal to
remain with Sir Claude, whom she loves, under circumstances which
she recognizes as both absolutely and pragmatically evil. Maisie, too,
then, has risen above the world and has achieved an arduous moral
victory. Huck's victory was difficult because it required him to subvert

5
the dictates of knowledge and conscience. Silas's victory required the
sacrifice of riches, Maisie's of love. But for all three victory can be
and is gained.

Howells, Twain, and James indicate the ideal possibilities of action

within particular social contexts, rather than the way most men act
within these contexts. Those who are willing to struggle against the
general current, and to be damned or to sacrifice wealth and love in
the name of principle, have been and still are the exception, not the
rule. The three writers, in short, dramatize a vision of experience in
which individuals achieve that which is still a goal for mankind at
large. This view of experience is, of course, a traditional one of much
humanistic art, as well as a product of the more masculine side of
nineteenth-century American romantic idealism--the side that does not
minimize the strength of the forces tending to corrupt the spirit of man
while it continues to affirm both the necessary and probable victory of
the hu man spirit over these forces. The three writers gain much of
their thematic power from their adherence to this view of experience.
It is not a view, however, which fulfills the criterion of realism
requiring an objective rather than a subjective or idealistic vision of
human nature and experience.

Moreover, two of the three writers extend the subject matter of realism
beyond the representative. Howells alone fulfills this criterion, and is a
kind of mean in this respect, whereas Twain devotes much of his
attention to the unusual in incident, James to the unusual in character.
The significance of this extension is that Twain and James, rather than
Howells, indicate the direction American fiction was to take. For
although very few twentieth-century novelists have been concerned
with the commonplace, many of our major writers have been occupied
with what it is possible to call the horizontal and vertical extensions of
realism--that is, the fiction of external violence and interior
monologue.

Late nineteenth-century American realism was attacked in its own

time for unidealized pictures of commonplace life, and for many years
continued to be so characterized; in fact, however, it was neither
unidealized nor--for the most part-commonplace. Rather, in its

6
variation from these two criteria of a conventional definition of
realism--that is, in its ethical idealism and in its exploration of richly
diverse experience-it achieved both its vitality and its promise of
future growth.

Hamlin Garland's 1891 Main-Travelled Roads: Local Color as

Art
HAMLIN GARLAND WAS born in a narrow upland valley (a
"coolly") near West Salem, Wisconsin, on September 14, 1860. His
father was a farmer, and Garland spent his youth as a farm boy in
western Wisconsin and in northeastern Iowa, near Osage. From 1876
to 1881 he worked on the family farm from spring to fall and attended
the Cedar Valley Seminary in Osage during the winter. ("Seminary"
was a western name for any school offering advanced education.)
Garland's graduation in 1881 coincided with his father's decision to
resettle his family on new land in South Dakota. But Garland himself
was dissatisfied with farming as a way of life. Instead of joining his
family, he spent three miscellaneous years in the West as a school
teacher, carpenter, and South Dakota land claimant. In October, 1884,
he sold his Dakota claim and moved to Boston in order to prepare
himself for a career as a teacher of literature.

This recital of the bare facts of Garland's youth casts considerable

light on the subject matter of Main-Travelled Roads. Garland's
experiences as a farm boy are the source of his intimate knowledge of
the details of farm life and of his awareness that the seasonal cycle of
planting and harvest is the principal reality of a farm existence. His
biography also suggests the source and location of the three "matters"
of his middle border fictional world. Settled primarily in the two
decades following the Civil War, the middle border was the area
between the older states of the Northwest Territory ( Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois) and the last frontier of the Rocky Mountains. To Garland, the
middle border was specifically the high valleys of western Wisconsin
("Up the Coulé" and "The Return of a Private"), the wheat and stock
farms of Iowa ("A Branch-Road," "Under the Lion's Paw," and "Mrs.
Ripley's Trip"), and the plains of Dakota ("Among the Corn-Rows").
Most of his middle border stories are set in Iowa, since his years as an

7
Iowa farm boy and seminarian were the principal sources of his
knowledge of western farm and town life.

Garland's early years influenced the stories of MainTravelled Roads in

other important ways. As he came of age in Iowa, he experienced both
the backbreaking, mind-numbing labor of an unmechanized and
understaffed western farm and the world of the mind and spirit which
he was encountering at the seminary. By the time he graduated, he had
come to associate the first kind of life with his father and with farming
and the second with the city, particularly with the cities of the East,
from which all culture came. His first independent act, therefore, was
to leave his father and farming, and his second was to make his way to
Boston. These two actions were to constitute the emotional center of
Garland's personal and literary life for over a decade. On the one hand,
he had successfully rebelled against the life of the farm and had
escaped to the richer world of the East. On the other, escape meant
desertion--desertion not only of his family, particularly of his
overworked and rapidly aging mother, but also of his region and its
needs. When Garland came to write his early stories of the middle
border, he discovered that the themes of joyous escape and guilty
return were intimately associated with his response to his area.

In Boston, Garland soon made a place for himself. After some initial
difficulties and hardships, he succeeded in becoming a lecturer and
teacher. Various Bostonians who had cultivated him as an interesting
western type found that his personal intensity and wideranging
"advanced" ideas were compelling in their own right. He became
friendly with a large number of minor writers and artists and visited
their homes and studios. In mid-1886, he began to write reviews and
articles for the high-toned Boston Evening Transcript, and a year later
he met and interested William Dean Howells, then the foremost
American literary personage. He had grown a Van Dyke beard, and
with his Inverness cape and slouch hat he was a striking figure in the
subdued Boston literary scene of the late 1880s.

During his early years in Boston, Garland was under the spell of the
evolutionary philosophy of Herbert Spencer. Guided by Spencer's
belief that all life was an evolutionary progress from the simple to the

8
complex, he wrote an ambitious history of American literature.
Despite the labor required of him as a teacher and critic, he also began
to think of himself as an embryonic writer of fiction. He had been
stimulated by the recent work of such midwestern writers as E. W.
Howe and Joseph Kirkland, and in part under their influence began a
number of middle border short stories and a Dakota novel. But by
mid- 1887 Garland had been away from Iowa and Wisconsin for many
years. It was therefore with the thought of refreshing his memory of
western life, as well as seeing his family, that he arranged a trip to the
West in the summer of 1887. He would not only visit Ordway, South
Dakota, where his family was farming, but also his old homes in Iowa
and Wisconsin.

During his trip Garland kept a journal in which he recorded his

impressions and ideas. Two recurrent themes appear in these notes--
his dismay at the conditions of western life, and his conviction that
these conditions were both explainable and remediable. Garland's
dismay, of course, was in part the product of his years in Boston.
Shabby, dust-filled towns and fly-blown, suffocating farm kitchens
were depressingly bleak after the theatres, concerts, and physical
comforts of city life. But Garland's shock was also conditioned by his
conscious comparison of western life as it was and as it had been
traditionally portrayed. In conventional novels and poems about farm
life, the independent farmer, "with his simple rusticity and healthful
habits," was characterized as "the happiest man in the world." 1 As
Garland travelled west, however, he found not the happy yeoman but
the Iowa farmer, who, he noted,

has more to irritate him than any other sort of man on earth. The
calves, pigs, and horses are as perverse as ugly dispositions can make
them. The farmer wears dirty and sticky clothing, goes without
bathing, is parched by the wind and burned by the sun. He is a pack-
horse who never lays down his load.

No beauty, no music comes into his life. He lives apart from his
fellows and all the little courtesies and amenities of life are unknown
to him.

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Garland's angle of vision in this passage is initially that of the
"insider" who knows the truth about farm life and who therefore
implicitly despises the bucolic as a literary convention. But he is also
an "outsider" who is aware of the rich life, the "beauty," which is both
unknown and unavailable to the farmer. This two-fold vision of
western life is present in many of the stories of Main-Travelled Roads.
Occasionally it appears as an awkwardly explicit anti-bucolic
statement, as in "Up the Coulé": "'The poet who writes of milking the
cows does it from the hammock, looking on,' Howard soliloquized, as
he watched the old man Lewis racing around the filthy yard after one
of the young heifers that had kicked over the pail in her agony with
the flies and was unwilling to stand still and be eaten alive." 3 But
more often, and more effectively, Garland's double angle of vision
unobtrusively colors scene after scene in which he depicts the
drudgery and sterility of farm life. For example, his choice of detail in
the scene just noted--the flies and filth of farmyard milking--
represents a conscious reversal of one of the traditional idyllic images
of the pastoral.

Garland not only found western town and country life inadequate but
also, as I have noted, had an explanation for this condition. Even
before coming to Boston he had read Henry George's Progress and
Poverty, and during his Boston years his belief in George's land
theories had deepened. As he viewed the West, therefore, he
attributed, as did George, all economic and social deprivation to the
evils of land speculation. He commented in his notebook:

As one goes west from Charles City [Iowa], the country changes to a
fresher green. There is much open land, richly covered with grasses, a
paradise for stock-raisers and yet few make use of it. The houses are
mainly hovels, the towns are squalid little affairs and the whole land
looks as though blighted by some mysterious curse. And it is--the
speculator's curse.

The country, though splendidly fertile, is but sparsely settled, the

settlers passing over it for the purpose of getting the free lands
beyond. What part of it as is farmed is but scratched over. The
enormous productive power of the land is untouched. The settlers

10
have a crude, rough look, thin, small and dressed illy. They show that
they live apart from the centers of thought.

As one looks at the wretched little farms, the ghastly little towns, and
the splendid sort of a pleasant country lying waste, he exclaims, here
is the very example of the folly of our land system.

The controlling image in this passage is that of a rich, fertile land

lying vacant because it is owned by speculators who are waiting for
high prices (and therefore large mortgages) while farmers scratch out
a living on less arable but cheaper land farther west. It is an image
which Garland later shaped into the plot and theme of his most well-
known story, "Under the Lion's Paw. " Henry George had argued that
land speculation would be impossible if all land in a specific area were
taxed as though it were in full use. No one could afford to own unused
land if such a tax system were adopted, and thus the only possessor of
land would be the user. No landlord could arbitrarily raise the price of
land, as Butler does in "Under the Lion's Paw," because there would
be no landlords.

Garland occasionally introduced George's beliefs directly into his

stories, as when Grant McLane in "Up the Coulé" comments on the
evils of land speculation. But for the most part his economic theories
inform the stories of Main-Travelled Roads in two oblique but
important ways. One is in his dramatization of the mortgage as the
major source of fear in western life. The prospect of foreclosure
haunts almost all the farmers of Main-Travelled Roads. The other is in
the tone of indignation which characterizes his depiction of the
hardships and bleakness of western life, a tone which emerges out of
his conviction that these conditions are the product of an unjust land
system rather than attributable either to the farmers or to the land. In
his review of Main-Travelled Roads in 1891, Howells noted that
Garland's style exhibited "a certain harshness and bluntness." This
quality was already present in Garland's journal entries of 1887. For as
he made his way west, Garland was responding with undisguised
anger as he viewed the fear-ridden, labor-racked, unfulfilled lives of
these his own people.

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In his autobiography A Son of the Middle Border Garland implied that
he returned from his 1887 trip white with anger and immediately
dashed off the stories of Main-Travelled Roads. His belief that he
wrote the stories at this time stems from his mistaken recollection that
he made a second summer journey to the West in 1889. Since he had
published two of the stories of Main-Travelled Roads by September,
1889, he later assumed that these and the other stories of the collection
must be the product of his trip of 1887. In fact, Garland returned to
Boston in the fall of 1887 and during the next nine months completed
an unpublished Dakota novel and wrote the autobiographical sketches
of "Boy Life on the Prairie" and a few short stories, none of which are
in Main-Travelled Roads. In the summer of 1888 (not 1889, which he
spent in the East), he again visited the West, and it was this trip which
was the major stimulus for the composition of the stories of Main-
Travelled Roads. Garland had begun to participate actively in the
Henry George movement in November, 1887. During his journey to
the West the following summer, he encountered at first hand the hard
times which the droughts of 1887 and 1888 had brought to the
Mississippi Valley. In addition, Garland's mother suffered a paralytic
stroke during his visit to the family farm on the parched Dakota
prairie. Thus, he returned to Boston in the fall of 1888 with an intense
awareness of worsening social and family conditions and a fully
aroused social conscience. His experiments in autobiography and
fiction during 1887-88 had given him greater control of his craft than
he possessed in late 1887, and his sense of purpose, of righteous
anger, was now at fever pitch. From the fall of 1888 to early 1890
Garland wrote the best of his short fiction, including not only the
stories of Main- Travelled Roads but also a number of excellent
stories collected in Prairie Folks ( 1893).

Although there has been some confusion about when the stories of
Main-Travelled Roads were written, there is little doubt about the
specific source of almost every story. "A Branch-Road" was inspired
by Garland's encountering at Osage a worn and haggard farm wife
who had been a classmate at the Cedar Valley Seminary. "Up the
Coulé" and "The Return of a Private" are autobiographical stories. The
first depicts Garland as Howard McLane, a successful actor who is
visiting his family in the West; the second is an account of the return

12
of Garland's father from the Civil War, an account so close to the fact
that Garland later used most of it unchanged in A Son of the Middle
Border. "Among the CornRows" was drawn in part from Garland's
Dakota novel, and "Mrs. Ripley's Trip" was based on an anecdote told
by his mother. Only "Under the Lion's Paw" lacks a specific source, a
circumstance which suggests the pervasiveness of its situation in
western life.

Garland had great difficulty in publishing his work. One of his most
bitter stories, "John Boyle's Conclusion," which deals with the suicide
of a Dakota farmer, was rejected by several magazines before it was
accepted by a minor radical journal. The journal suspended several
years later without having published the story. 5 Other such stories had
parallel fates--rejection by the major journals (the Atlantic Monthly,
Harper's Monthly, and the Century), acceptance by minor ones, or
total rejection. Harper's Weekly published three of his stories, but all
were relatively short for a Garland story and only Under the Lion's
Paw was openly radical. "Up the Coulé" and A Branch-Road," two of
Garland's longest and best stories of this period, found no outlet. It
was with considerable joy, therefore, that Garland discovered B. O.
Flower, editor of the Arena, a radical but widely read Boston monthly
which had begun to appear in December, 1889. In the spring of 1890
Flower accepted Garland's "A Prairie Heroine," a story of the physical
and spiritual dissolution of an overworked farm wife which had been
rejected by several magazines. Flower welcomed its bitter tone, asked
for more like it, and paid promptly and well. For more than two years
a Garland article or story appeared in almost every issue of the Arena.

Early in 1891, Flower suggested that Garland collect some of his

stories in a volume to be published by the Arena Publishing Company,
a subsidiary enterprise of the Arena. Garland chose for the collection
his two unpublished novelettes, which had apparently proven too long
even for the Arena, and four of his published stories. Main-Travelled
Roads, Garland's second book (his first was the radical play Under the
Wheel, published in 1890), appeared simultaneously in hard and paper
covers in early June, 1891. Garland's Boston friends, including
Howells, gave the volume a good local press, but elsewhere it was less
favorably received. The continuing agricultural depression had led to

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the formation of the Farmers' Alliance, a radical organization which
elected several congressmen in 1890. By mid-1891 a fullscale farmers'
party, the People's Party (or Populists), was in the planning stage for
the election of 1892. Reviewers in the East therefore tended to
associate Garland's intemperate tone with rebellious, ignorant farmers
and to condemn both the tone and the farmers. Western reviewers,
however, attacked the accuracy rather than the tone of Garland's
portrayal of farm life. The West, as they saw it, needed affirmation
rather than negative and destructive criticism. As Garland later
recalled,

I had a foolish notion that the literary folk of the west would take a
local pride in the color of my work, and to find myself execrated by
nearly every critic as "a bird willing to foul his own nest" was an
amazement. Editorials and criticisms poured into the office, all written
to prove that my pictures of the middle border were utterly false.

Statistics were employed to show that pianos and Brussels carpets

adorned almost every Iowa farmhouse. Tilling the prairie soil was
declared to be "the noblest vocation in the world, not in the least like
the pictures this eastern author has drawn of it."

The later history of Main-Travelled Roads is in part a history of

Garland's literary career. During the early 1890s Garland led a divided
life. He lectured on George's theories; he wrote radical stories, novels,
and articles for the Arena and similar journals; and in 1892, he
campaigned in Iowa for Populist candidates. But Garland was also
anxious to achieve recognition and success as an "artist," to have his
stories accepted and praised by such figures as Richard Watson
Gilder, the poet-editor of the prestigious Century. By the mid-1890s
Garland's career had moved firmly in this second direction. His radical
fiction had been poorly received, and his most ambitious novel, Rose
of Dutcher's Coolly ( 1895), had been viciously attacked for its sexual
themes. Moreover, he had lost much of the personal fervor of his
radicalism. In 1893 he "rescued" his parents from their Dakota farm
and resettled them, in retirement, at West Salem. And in 1896 the
Populist Party, Garland's major hope for the achievement of reform in
the West, was absorbed into the Democratic Party, and both groups

14
were defeated by McKinley Republicanism. Early in 1896 Garland
undertook to write a biography of Ulysses S. Grant, a project which
occupied him for several years. When he returned to fiction in 1898 it
was as the author of popular Rocky Mountain romances.

Throughout his radical years of the late 1880s and early 1890s
Garland had written a kind of story which critical opinion, as reflected
in the Century and its editor, held to be more "artistic" than the stories
of Main-Travelled Roads. Known even in its own time as local color,
this kind of story was usually set in far-off, quaint corners of America.
Its tone was either light or nostalgic, and it made an effort to inform
the reader about customs long-gone or unknown. Garland had written
of the middle border in a nostalgic, informative vein from the very
beginning of his career, as in his "Boy Life on the Prairie" sketches of
1888. In these and similar works, Garland permitted time to dull the
sharp edge of experience, and his theme was that of the unusual
customs and events of western life of the past. This theme appears
only occasionally in the stories of the first edition of Main-Travelled
Roads. Unfortunately, Garland in his later career chose to destroy the
integrity of that edition by including stories written concurrently with
those of the first edition but reflecting primarily a nostalgic attitude
toward the West. He added three such stories in 1899, two in 1920,
and a last in 1930. The impact of Main-Travelled Roads as a coherent
and unified vision of western life was therefore weakened in these
editions, and many readers who have encountered the book only in its
later forms have been unable to appreciate either the historical
significance or the permanent value of the 1891 collection.

All the stories of the 1891 Main-Travelled Roads have major flaws as
stories, yet the book as a whole is powerful and evocative and has an
aesthetic effect far superior to that of any one story. Garland's
weaknesses as a writer of fiction, to discuss them first, are readily
apparent. Throughout his career he had great difficulty with plot, and
even his best stories contain inept narrative devices. For example,
several of the stories of Main-Travelled Roads are marred by
melodramatic and sentimental touches. The endings of "Under the
Lion's Paw" and "A Branch-Road" resemble Victorian melodrama. In
both stories the action is frozen at the close in a scene of heightened

15
(and overwritten) moral crisis--Will demanding a decision from
Agnes, Haskins threatening Butler. In both scenes a child suddenly
appears either to add a touch of sentiment or to resolve the tension.
Garland's difficulties with the mechanics of plot are particularly
evident in his longer fiction. He often relies, in such works, on
fortuitous events as a fictional crutch. Will's carriage accident in "A
Branch-Road" plays this role, as does the lost letter in "Up the Coulé."
Garland was on treacherous ground in the plotting of any long work of
fiction and at the close of any short work--two occasions when
narrative ability is put to its severest test.

Yet the book as a whole is artful and moving. One way in which
Garland achieves these effects is by his road metaphor. The metaphor
is introduced in the title, pursued in the dedication and preface, and
maintained in the epigraphs to each story. The road is of course a
traditional image of man's journey through life, but it was a
particularly apt image for the West of Garland's time. The West in the
late nineteenth century was indeed a main-travelled road, a place of
constant coming and going, of settling and resettling, of departure and
return. Both Garland and his family had experienced the West
primarily as movement. The restlessness of Garland's father, the desire
of his mother to put down roots, and Garland's own departures and
returns had been the principal sources of tension in the family. It is not
surprising, therefore, that Garland not only used the road image as an
overt linking device in the collection as a whole but also structured
each story around a physical move from one place to another. And it is
of major significance that this move in every story is a return. The
most obvious and, for Garland, most poignant kind of return is that of
the successful figure to the people of his former world whom he had
left behind to decay under the conditions of western life. "A Branch-
Road" and "Up the Coulé" contain a return of this nature. But the
motif also appears in the form of the return of the weary traveller from
the great adventure of his life in order to take up again the burdens and
hardships of daily existence, as in "The Return of a Private" and "Mrs.
Ripley's Trip." Finally, in Among the Corn-Rows and Under the Lion's
Paw," characters who have ventured farther west return to older
settlements of the middle border because of a flaw or inadequacy in
their new world which they hope to correct in the old. The road image

16
is thus the thematic and structural center of the book, for in every
story the "end of the journey," the return, is to the unending toil of
western life. Even Julia Peterson, who is escaping from the heavy
field work of her father's Wisconsin farm in Among the Corn-Rows"
(the most buoyant story in the collection), will find that the labor of a
Dakota kitchen and farmyard awaits her.

The return theme requires more detailed discussion in A Branch-Road

and Up the Coulé." The two stories dramatize Garland's sense of guilt
toward his family and his fear that he will be unable to compensate
them for his "desertion." In both stories the returning figure attempts
to make amends for his negligence, but he can offer only pity and
material comfort. In each instance farm life has taken its toll and
crushed or permanently embittered the spirits of those left behind.
Within this autobiographical theme the two stories contain another,
less apparent, autobiographical element which has special significance
for Garland's later career. Will Hannan and Howard McLane have
attended a seminary; Will is studying to be a lawyer, and Howard has
graduated and has been successful in the East. Each character
responds to the conditions of western life in a manner appropriate to
his superior training and experience. Will is disturbed by the crude
behavior of the farm hands at the threshing, and Howard is affronted
by the ugliness of farm life. Both characters are socially and
aesthetically superior to western life, 7 and Garland associates their
superiority with a failure or limitation of sympathy. Will fails to
consider the feelings of Agnes in the first part of A Branch-Road," and
Howard has failed to consider that his family might be in need.
Garland's joining of superiority and selfishness into a single theme has
a twofold meaning for his work and career. The theme represents the
particular configuration which he gave to his powerful sense of guilt
in his early work. But the theme also anticipates his gradual
estrangement from his area. For once Garland rescued his family, as
he did in 1893, his sense of social and aesthetic superiority to the
middle border became his dominant response and thus precluded his
permanent involvement in its life either as person or as artist. During
his later career the middle border inspired in him a genteel revulsion
as he compared its ugliness and its failures in taste and decorum with
the scenic grandeur of the Far West or the cultural richness of New

17
York and London. In A Branch-Road and Up the Coulé revulsion is a
functional and moving theme because it is inseparable from the pain
and guilt of unfulfilled responsibility. Revulsion alone, however, was
to lead Garland to flee the West as subject matter and as theme. And
he was never to find another area of experience which engaged him as
deeply as did the middle border in the late 1880s and early 1890s. The
stories of Main-Travelled Roads have another unifying element
besides that of the road as theme and form. Although Garland had
little talent for plot, he had a superb pictorial sense. Main-Travelled
Roads can be described as a collection of landscapes and genre scenes.
One such group of pictorial images juxtaposes the beauty of nature (a
spring morning, a summer day, a sunset) and the ugliness and toil of
farm activities. Another focuses on a man and a woman. The man is
plowing in the mud on a cold autumn day. Every muscle of his body is
straining and he is exhausted in body and spirit. The woman is at work
in a dirty, cramped, hot kitchen. She is poorly dressed and goes about
her tasks sullenly. The image of the man behind the plow was
particularly moving to Garland (he had himself been that man, or
youth), and he not only repeated it several times but also had Howard
McLane imagine it as a landscape painting "by a master greater than
Millet, a melancholy subject, treated with pitiless fidelity":

A farm in the valley! Over the mountains swept jagged, gray, angry,
sprawling clouds, sending a freezing, thin drizzle of rain, as they
passed, upon a man following a plough. The horses had a sullen and
weary look, and their manes and tails streamed sidewise in the blast.
The ploughman clad in a ragged gray coat, with uncouth, muddy boots
upon his feet, walked with his head inclined toward the sleet, to shield
his face from the cold and sting of it. The soil rolled away, black and
sticky and with a dull sheen upon it.(96-97)

A final group of pictorial images is that of genre scenes--the threshing,

the party at the McLanes, the Sunday dinner at Widow Gray's. Since
the occasion is a holiday or an exciting group activity, the scene
usually has a cheerful cast, though the reality or memory of intense
labor is always present. These recurrent landscape and genre portraits
(nature and farm, farmer and farm wife, and social gatherings)
"illustrate" the road motif in the collection--the road of western life

18
that is "hot and dusty in summer, and desolate and drear with mud in
fall and spring," though it "does sometimes cross a rich meadow
where the songs of the larks and bobolinks and blackbirds are tangled"
(5).

Main-Travelled Roads is an important historical document. It portrays

more vividly than any work of its time the physical and social
conditions which led to the Populist revolt. But the book is also art.
Despite his weaknesses as a writer of fiction, Garland found in the
images of his youth a means of successfully imposing theme and form
upon his experiences and his feelings. Road and picture, rather than
plot, constitute the permanently moving in the stories of the collection.
Since Garland was seldom to write as well again, his later work has
adversely influenced the reputation of his early fiction. But in the
1891 Main-Travelled Roads Garland did write well, and the book
deserves more credit for its intrinsic merits than it has usually
received.

19
The Ethical Unity of The Rise of Silas Lapham

CRITICS OF HOWELLS'S The Rise of Silas Lapham have usually

examined its subplot as an excrescence arising from a need to satisfy
the popular demand for a romantic entanglement, as a digressive
attack on the sentimental self-sacrifice of the "Tears, Idle Tears"
variety, or as an overexpansion of the comedy of manners strain in the
novel. Each of these points of view has a certain validity. But it is also
true that the subplot and main plot have fundamentally similar themes,
and that an examination of the thematic function of the subplot will
elucidate both the ethical core of the novel and the relationship of that
core to a prominent theme in Howells's later economic novels. 1

The main plot of The Rise of Silas Lapham concerns Silas's financial
fall and moral rise. It revolves around his business affairs and social
aspirations, and it concludes with his decision to sacrifice wealth and
position rather than engage in business duplicity. The subplot centers
on the triangle of Tom Corey and Irene and Penelope Lapham. Tom is
mistakenly believed by all to be in love with Irene. The dilemma
caused by his revelation that he loves Penelope is resolved when Irene
is informed of the error. Irene then withdraws, leaving Tom and
Penelope free to marry.

The dilemma or conflict within the subplot is solved by the use of an

"economy of pain" formula. 2 Despite Penelope's willingness to
sacrifice herself, Irene must be told of Corey's true sentiments, and
Penelope and Corey must be encouraged to fulfill their love. In this
way Irene suffers but Penelope and Tom are spared the pain of
thwarted love. One rather than three suffers lasting pain. Of the three
characters who determine the resolution of the subplot, Lapham
realizes instinctively the correct course of action, Mrs. Lapham is
helpless and hesitant--this despite her moralizing throughout the
novel--and the clergyman Sewell articulates the principle involved and
confirms Lapham's choice.

20
The problem which Silas must solve in the main plot parallels that in
the subplot. The three groups who will be affected by his decision are
he and his family ( Lapham is a participant now as well as an arbiter),
Rogers and his family, and the English agents who wish to purchase
Lapham's depreciated mill. 3 The crucial point is that the Englishmen
are more than mere scoundrels and more than the agents for an
"association of rich and charitable people" (325); they also represent
society at large. This fact is somewhat obscured in the context of the
financial trickery involved in the sale, since the agents are willing to
be cheated. But Howells indicated the social implications of the sale
when he immediately compared it to the defrauding of municipal
governments. In both instances wealth and anonymity encourage
dishonesty, and in both instances dishonesty undermines that which is
necessary for the maintenance of the common good--effective
governments on the one hand, fair play and honest dealings in
business affairs on the other. Lapham's refusal to sell therefore
ultimately contributes to the well-being of society as a whole.

The thematic similarity in the two plots is that both involve a principle
of morality which requires that the individual determine correct action
by reference to the common good rather than to an individual need.
Within the subplot this principle requires Lapham to choose on the
basis of an "economy of pain" formula in which the fewest suffer.
Within the main plot it requires him to weigh his own and Rogers's
personal needs against the greater need of all men for decency and
honesty. His "rise" is posited exactly in these terms, for at one point in
the events leading up to his rejection of the Englishmen's offer he
reflects quizzically that "It was certainly ridiculous for a man who had
once so selfishly consulted his own interests to be stickling now about
the rights of others of others" (330).

The method used to achieve moral insight is also similar in both plots.
What is required is the ability to project oneself out of the immediate
problem in which the personal, emotionally compelling need or desire
is seen out of proportion to the need of the larger unit. In the subplot
Mrs. Lapham finds this difficult, and Sewell asks her," 'What do you
think some one else ought to do in your place?' " (240) In the main
plot it is no doubt Silas's realization of the honesty that he would ask

21
of other men in a similar situation which aids him in making the same
demand of himself. Lastly, as in the subplot, Silas is capable of moral
insight, Mrs. Lapham again falters, and Sewell (at the end of the
novel) attempts explanations.

One of the functions of the subplot is therefore to "double" the moral

theme of the novel, to intensify and clarify it by introducing it within a
narrower, more transparent dilemma. The subplot also plays other
important roles. Dominating the center of the novel it is solved before
the full exposition of Lapham's business crisis. 4 It occurs, in other
words, between Howells's early remark that Lapham "could not rise"
(50) to unselfishness in his dealings with Rogers and Lapham's own
words at the close which indicate a concern for the "rights of others."
The subplot thus contributes to the "education" of Lapham in the
correct solution of moral problems. His moral rise is the product of
more than a conscience troubled by his earlier treatment of Rogers. It
is also the result of his ready absorption of the "economy of pain"
formula as a moral guide in the subplot, a formula which he later
translates into its exact corollary, the greatest happiness for the
greatest number, when he is faced in the main plot with the more
difficult problem of the ethical relationship of the individual to
society. To sum up, the subplot of The Rise of Silas Lapham serves the
functions of doubling the statement of the novel's theme, of
foreshadowing the moral principle governing the main plot, and of
introducing Lapham to the correct solution of moral problems.

It is possible, at this point, to suggest that the ethical core of the novel
can be described as utilitarianism (as interpreted by John Stuart Mill),
since both plots dramatize a moral principle in which the correct
action is that which results in the greatest happiness for the greatest
number. I do not wish to intimate that Howells consciously adopted
the ethical ideas of Mill. Rather, I believe that the similarity between
Mill's utilitarianism and the ethical principles of The Rise of Silas
Lapham is probably the result of parallel attempts to introduce the
ethical teachings of Christ within social contexts and yet avoid
supernatural sanctions. Howells's emerging Christian socialism in the
late 1880s is well known, and Mill wrote:

22
I must again repeat... that the happiness which forms the utilitarian
standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent's own happiness,
but that of all concerned.... In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we
read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as you would be
done by, and to love your neighbor as yourself, constitute the ideal
perfection of utilitarian morality.

That Howells was conscious of the applicability of the Golden Rule to

the theme of The Rise of Silas Lapham is clear, I believe, from his
ironic use of it in connection with Rogers. When Rogers senses that
Lapham may reject the Englishmen's offer, his appeal to Lapham is
based on the premise that

In our dealings with each other we should be guided by the Golden

Rule, as I was saying to Mrs. Lapham before you came in. I told her
that if I knew myself, I should in your place consider the
circumstances of a man in mine, who had honorably endeavored to
discharge his obligations to me, and had patiently borne my
undeserved suspicions. I should consider that man's family, I told Mrs.
Lapham. (327)

But Lapham's answer is the response of a man who is aware of the

sophistry of a narrow use of the Golden Rule and who recognizes the
necessity for the consideration of a wider range of obligation that
individual need. "'Did you tell her,'" he asks Rogers, " 'that if I went in
with you and those fellows, I should be robbing the people who
trusted them?'" (327)

There is a twofold advantage in viewing the main and subplots of The

Rise of Silas Lapham as controlled by a similar conception of moral
behavior. First, the novel takes on a thematic unity and structural
symmetry. It is within a single moral system, for example, that the
apparent conflict between the attack on self-sacrifice in the subplot
and Lapham's selfsacrifice in the main plot is reconciled. Penelope's
self- sacrifice would diminish the sum total of happiness of those
affected by her action, and therefore is wrong; Silas's selfsacrifice
increases the happiness of mankind collectively, and therefore is right.
8
Secondly, the theme of the novel anticipates Howells's acceptance of

23
Tolstoy's ethical ideals within the next few years and helps explain his
response to those ideals once he encountered them. For in the two
plots of The Rise of Silas Lapham Howells had already begun working
out a belief that man must rise above himself and view life, as, he later
explained, Tolstoy had taught him to view life, "not as a chase of a
forever impossible personal happiness, but as a field for endeavor
toward the happiness of the whole human family. 9"' The conviction
that man's primary commitment is to mankind was to be one of the
themes which Howells emphasized in the series of novels from Annie
Kilburn ( 1888) to A Traveller from Altruria ( 1894). In The Rise of
Silas Lapham that theme appears in a less obvious social context (
Howells had to strain for the connection between the English agents
and society) and--more importantly--as an obligation which the
average individual can grasp and fulfill. His novels during the years
following the Haymarket crisis were to examine the theme of man's
duty to his fellow men more intensively but less hopefully.

24
Chapter 2 American Naturalism: 1890-1910

MOST LITERARY CRITICS and historians who attempt

definitions are aware of the dangers and advantages inherent in this
enterprise. But few, I believe, recognize that many literary genres and
modes have their barriers of established terms and ideas to overcome
or outflank. The writer who seeks to define tragedy usually finds that
his definition takes shape around such traditional guideposts as the
tragic hero, the tragic flaw, recognition and catharsis, and so on.
American naturalism, as a concept, has two such channelled
approaches to its definition. The first is that since naturalism comes
after realism, and since it seems to take literature in the same direction
as realism, it is primarily an "extension" or continuation of realism--
only a little different. The second almost inevitable approach involves
this difference. The major distinction between realism and naturalism,
most critics agree, is the particular philosophical orientation of the
naturalists. A traditional and widely accepted concept of American
naturalism, therefore, is that it is essentially realism infused with a
pessimistic determinism. Rich ard Chase argues that American
naturalism is realism with a "necessitarian ideology," and George J.
Becker (defining all naturalism, including American) considers it as
"no more than an emphatic and explicit philosophical position taken
by some realists," the position being a "pessimistic materialistic
determinism." 1 The common belief is that the naturalists were like the
realists in their fidelity to the details of contemporary life, but that
they depicted everyday life with a greater sense of the role of such
causal forces as heredity and environment in determining behavior
and belief.

This traditional approach to naturalism through realism and through

philosophical determinism is historically justifiable and has served a
useful purpose, but it has also handicapped thinking both about the
movement as a whole and about individual works within the
movement. It has resulted in much condescension toward those writers
who are supposed to be naturalists yet whose fictional sensationalism
(an aspect of romanticism) and moral ambiguity (a quality

25
inconsistent with the absolutes of determinism) appear to make their
work flawed specimens of the mode.

I would like, therefore, to propose a modified definition of late

nineteenth-century American naturalism. 2 For the time being, let this
be a working definition, to be amplified and made more concrete by
the illustrations from which it has been drawn. I suggest that the
naturalistic novel usually contains two tensions or contradictions, and
that the two in conjunction comprise both an interpretation of
experience and a particular aesthetic recreation of experience. In other
words, the two constitute the theme and form of the naturalistic novel.
The first tension is that between the subject matter of the naturalistic
novel and the concept of man which emerges from this subject matter.
The naturalist populates his novel pri marily from the lower middle
class or the lower class. His characters are the poor, the uneducated,
the unsophisticated. His fictional world is that of the commonplace
and unheroic in which life would seem to be chiefly the dull round of
daily existence, as we ourselves usually conceive of our lives. But the
naturalist discovers in this world those qualities of man usually
associated with the heroic or adventurous, such as acts of violence and
passion which involve sexual adventure or bodily strength and which
culminate in desperate moments and violent death. A naturalistic
novel is thus an extension of realism only in the sense that both modes
often deal with the local and contemporary. The naturalist, however,
discovers in this material the extraordinary and excessive in human
nature.

The second tension involves the theme of the naturalistic novel. The
naturalist often describes his characters as though they are conditioned
and controlled by environment, heredity, instinct, or chance. But he
also suggests a compensating humanistic value in his characters or
their fates which affirms the significance of the individual and of his
life. The tension here is that between the naturalist's desire to represent
in fiction the new, discomforting truths which he has found in the
ideas and life of his late nineteenth-century world, and also his desire
to find some meaning in experience which reasserts the validity of the
human enterprise. The naturalist appears to say that although the
individual may be a cipher in a world made amoral by man's lack of

26
responsibility for his fate, the imagination refuses to accept this
formula as the total meaning of life and so seeks a new basis for man's
sense of his own dignity and importance.

The naturalistic novel is therefore not so superficial or reductive as it

implicitly appears to be in its conventional defi nition. It involves a
belief that life on its lowest levels is not so simple as it seems to be
from higher levels. It suggests that even the least significant human
being can feel and strive powerfully and can suffer the extraordinary
consequences of his emotions, and that no range of human experience
is free of the moral complexities and ambiguities which Milton set his
fallen angels to debating. 3 Naturalism reflects an affirmative ethical
conception of life, for it asserts the value of all life by endowing the
lowest character with emotion and defeat and with moral ambiguity,
no matter how poor or ignoble he may seem. The naturalistic novel
derives much of its aesthetic effect from these contrasts. It involves us
in the experience of a life both commonplace and extraordinary, both
familiar and strange, both simple and complex. It pleases us with its
sensationalism without affronting our sense of probability. It discovers
the "romance of the commonplace," as Frank Norris put it. Thus, the
melodramatic sensationalism and moral "confusion" which are often
attacked in the naturalistic novel should really be incorporated into a
normative definition of the mode and be recognized as its essential
constituents.

The three novels which I have chosen to illustrate this definition, and
also to suggest the possible range of variation within it, are Frank
Norris's McTeague ( 1899), Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie ( 1900),
and Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage ( 1895). These works
are important novels by the three leading late nineteenth-century
American naturalists, and each novel has frequently been read as a key
example of its author's values and his fictional form. A definition
drawn from these three novels will not be applicable to all late
nineteenth-centur naturalistic fiction. But, given the significance of
these writers and of these novels, it would, I believe, be a useful
introduction to this major movement in American literary history.

27
A good deal of McTeague is devoted to depicting the routine, ordered
world of Polk Street, the lower middle class service street in San
Francisco on which McTeague practices and lives. The life of Polk
Street enters the novel in two ways--through set pieces describing
street activities or the daily lives of the central characters in relation to
the life of the street, and through constant incidental allusion to its
activities and inhabitants. Norris dramatically establishes Polk Street
as above all a life of the repetitious and constant. The street exists as a
source of the ordered and the routine in McTeague's life, as a world
where the harness shop, the grocery, and the car conductors' coffee
joint are always available in their set roles, where the children go to
school at the same time each day, followed by the shop clerks coming
to work, and so on. McTeague is settled and content in this life, and
we recognize that his inner needs and outer world are in harmony.

A central theme in Norris's work is that beneath the surface of our

placid, everyday lives there is turbulence, that the romance of the
extraordinary is not limited to the distant in time and place but can be
found "in the brownstone house on the corner and in the office
building downtown." 4 Norris therefore used the incident which had
stimulated him to write the novel, a vicious murder in a San Francisco
kindergarten, as a controlling paradox in McTeague as in scene after
scene he introduces the sensational into the commonplace activities
and setting of Polk Street. So we have such incidents as McTeague
grossly kissing the anesthetized Trina in his dental parlor, or the
nearly murderous fight between Marcus and McTeague at the picnic.
Some of the best moments in the novel powerfully unite these two
streams of the commonplace and the extraordinary. In one such
moment the frightened and incoherent Trina, having just found
Maria's corpse with its cut throat and its blood soaked clothes, rushes
out into the everyday routine of Polk Street and has difficulty
convincing the butcher's boy that something is wrong or even
convincing herself that it is not improper "to make a disturbance and
create a scene in the street." 5

Norris believed that the source of this violence beneath the surface
placidity of life is the presence in all men of animal qualities which
have played a major role in man's evolutionary development but

28
which are now frequently atavistic and destructive. 6 Norris's theme is
that man's racial atavism (particularly his brute sexual desires) and
man's individual family heritage (alcoholic degeneracy in McTeague's
case) can combine as a force toward reversion, toward a return to the
emotions and instincts of man's animal past. McTeague is in one sense
a "special case" of reversion, since his atavistic brutality is in part
caused by his degenerate parents. He is also, however, any man caught
up in the net of sex, and in this second aspect of man's inherited
animal nature Norris introduces a tragic element into McTeague's fall,
an element which contributes to the novel's thematic tension.

In describing the courtship of Trina and McTeague, Norris is at pains

to stress their overt sexual innocence yet intuitive sexuality. The
woman in Trina "was not yet awakened; she was yet, as one might
say, without sex" (14). For McTeague, Trina is his "first experience.
With her the feminine element suddenly entered his little world. It was
not only her that he saw and felt, it was the woman, the whole sex, an
entire new humanity" (16). Despite their innocence and lack of
experience, both react intuitively and atavistically--McTeague desiring
to seize and possess her, she instinctively withdrawing yet desiring to
be conquered.

The most important sexual encounter between McTeague and Trina

occurs at the B Street Station where McTeague for a second time
proposes. When Trina hesitates, he seizes her "in his enormous arms,
crushing down her struggle with his immense strength. Then Trina
gave up, all in an instant, turning her head to his. They kissed each
other, grossly, full in the mouth" (48). Within the literary conventions
of the day, this kiss symbolizes Trina's sexual submission. At this
moment the strands in the web of sexual determinism begin to pull
taut, for "the instant she allowed him to kiss her, he thought less of
her. She was not so desirable, after all" (48). McTeague senses this
diminution along with a dim awareness "that this must be so, that it
belonged to the changeless order of things--the man desiring the
woman only for what she withholds; the woman worshipping the man
for that which she yields up to him. With each concession gained the
man's desire cools; with every surrender made the woman's adoration
increases" (48). Norris is concerned in this second meeting not with a

29
special flaw in McTeague or Trina but with a sexual determinism
affecting all men. The possessive sexual desire of the man aroused by
the first woman he experiences sensually, the instinctive desire of the
woman for sexual submission responding to the first man who assaults
her--these are the atavistic animal forces which bring Trina and
McTeague together.

A major theme in McTeague is therefore that of the sexual tragedy of

man and woman. Caught up by drives and instincts beyond their
control or comprehension, they mate by chance. In McTeague sex is
that which comes to all men and women, disrupting their lives and
placing them in relationships which the sanctity of marriage cannot
prevent from ending in chaos and destruction. Norris does not tell the
old tale of the fallen fornicator, as he does in Vandover and the Brute,
but rather reaches out toward the unexplored ground of the human
dilemma of sexual attraction.

The tension between this deterministic aspect of Mc Teague and its

humanistic element does not lie in McTeague as a fully developed
tragic figure. Rather, it is contained in the theme that man can seldom
escape the violence inherent in his own nature, that man's attempt to
achieve an ordered world is constantly thwarted by man himself.
Norris devotes much attention to the element of order in the details of
McTeague's life not only because of his belief in the romance of the
commonplace but because the destruction of that order is the source of
the tragic quality in McTeague's fall and of our own compassionate
involvement with him despite his grotesqueness. Norris carefully
documents McTeague's life as a dentist and as an inhabitant of Polk
Street because the habitual tasks and minor successes of this life
represent the order and stability which McTeague requires. In the
course of the novel we begin to feel compassion for him as he
becomes a victim of Trina's avarice and as we recognize that his
emerging brutality is at least partly the result of the destruction of his
world. When McTeague learns that he can no longer practice
dentistry, his reaction is that of a man whose life is emptied of all
meaning. In a scene of considerable power Trina comes upon him
sitting in his dental chair, "looking stupidly out of the windows, across
the roofs opposite, with an unseeing gaze, his red hands lying idly in

30
his lap" (151). We are never completely one with McTeague; his brute
strength and dull mind put us off. But because he is trapped in the
universal net of sex, and because we recognize the poignancy of the
loss of his world, we respond to him ultimately as a human being in
distress, as a figure of some significance despite his limitations--as a
man, in short, whose fall contains elements of the tragic.

For McTeague is in part a tragic novel. True, McTeague neither bears

full responsibility for his fate nor is he in any sense noble or profound.
He is rather like Gervaise in L'Assommoir: they are both poor
creatures who want above all a place to rest and be content, yet who
are brought low by their needs and desires. There is a sense of
common humanity in McTeague's fall, and that quality is perhaps the
modern residue of the tragic theme, since we are no longer certain of
man's transcendent nobility or of the reality of major responsibility for
our fates. The theme of McTeague is not that drunkenness leads to a
tragic fall, but that tragedy is inherent in the human situation given
man's animal past and the possibility that he will be dominated by that
past in particular circumstances. Norris does not deny the strength of
man's past or present animality, but neither does he deny the
poignancy of the fall of even such a gross symbol of this animality as
McTeague. It is out of this tension that much of the meaning and
power of the novel arises.

Even more than Norris, Theodore Dreiser creates a sense of the

solidity of life. His early novels in particular affirm that we cannot
escape the impact of physical reality and that this fact is one of the
few that man may know with certainty. So the several worlds of
Carrie--her sister's working class existence, her life with Drouet in
Chicago and with Hurstwood in New York--achieve a sense of
massiveness both in their painstaking documentation and in their
inescapable effect on Carrie. The effect on us, however, is not only to
enforce a sense of the importance of clothes, of furniture, of how
much one owes the grocer and of exactly how much one earns and
spends--the impact, too, is of normalcy, of the steady pace of life,
since life does indeed seem to be measured out in coffee spoons.
Dreiser's ability to capture the tangible commonplace of everyday
existence powerfully suggests that the commonplace and everyday are

31
the essence of experience, par ticularly since he returns again and
again to the unexciting details of the furnishings of an apartment or
the contents of a meal. Moreover, Dreiser's dispassionate tone
contributes to this effect. This is not to say that his fiction lacks an
ironic dimension. He frequently sets events or beliefs in ironic
juxtaposition, as when Carrie is worried that Hurstwood will discover
that she and Drouet are unmarried though she herself is unaware that
Hurstwood is married. But Dreiser's irony differs from Crane's intense
and pervasive ironic vision of life, a vision which colors every
incident or observation in Crane's work with the implication that
things are not what they seem. Dreiser's plodding, graceless
paragraphs imply the opposite--that the concrete world he so seriously
details is real and discernible and that nothing can shake or undermine
it.

Dreiser's central theme in Sister Carrie, however, sets forth the idea--
Lionel Trilling to the contrary 7--that the physically real is not the only
reality and that men seek something in life beyond it. His theme is that
those of a finer, more intense, more emotional nature who desire to
break out of their normal solid world--whether it be a Carrie
oppressed by the dull repetitiousness and crudity of her sister's home,
or a Hurstwood jaded by the middle class trivialities of his family--
that when such as these strive to discover a life approximate to their
natures they introduce into their lives the violent and the
extraordinary. Carrie leaves her sister's flat for two illicit alliances,
attracted to each man principally by the opportunities he offers for a
better life. Drouet and Hurstwood represent to her not so much wealth
or sexual attraction as an appeal to something intangibly richer and
fuller in herself. She is drawn to each in turn, and then finally to
Ames, because each appeals to some quality in her temperament
which she finds unfulfilled in her life of the moment. Dreiser's
depiction of her almost asexual relations with all of these men
represents less his capitulation to contemporary publishing restrictions
(although some of this is present) than his desire that the three
characters reflect the upward course of Carrie's discovery and
realization of her inner nature. Finally, Carrie's career on the stage
symbolizes both the emotional intensity she is capable of bringing to
life and the fact that she requires the intrinsically extraordinary and

32
exciting world of the theatre to call forth and embody her emotional
depth.

Hurstwood also introduces the sensational into his life by reaching out
beyond his established world. For him, the extraordinary arises from
his attempt to gain and then hold Carrie, since she represents to him
his last opportunity to grasp life fully and intensely. We follow him as
he breaks the seemingly set mold of his life by his theft and by his
elopement. His participation in the violence of the street car strike is
his final attempt to recover his fortunes (and Carrie) in New York.
With Carrie gone, he sinks still further and eventually commits
suicide.

Hurstwood's suicide can be explored as a typical example of Dreiser's

combination of the concretely commonplace and the sensational. It
takes place in a cheap Bowery hotel. Hurstwood's method is to turn on
the gas, not resolutely but hesitantly, and then to say weakly, "What's
the use?" as he "stretched himself to rest." 8 Dreiser thus submerges an
inherently sensational event in the trivial and unemotional. He not
only "takes the edge off" the extraordinariness of the event by his full
and detached elaboration of its commonplace setting but also casts it
in the imagery of enervation and rest. This scene is in one sense a
special instance, since Hurstwood seeks death as a refuge. But
Dreiser's total effect as a novelist is often similar to the effect
produced by this scene as he dramatizes throughout Sister Carrie the
solidity and therefore seeming normalcy of experience and yet its
underlying extraordinariness if man seeks beyond the routine. His
principal aesthetic impact, however, is different from that of Norris,
who appears to combine the sensational and commonplace much as
Dreiser does. Norris's effect is basically that of dramatic
sensationalism, of the excitement of violence and sudden death.
Dreiser's effect is more thematic and less scenic because he colors the
sensational with the same emotional stolidity with which he
characterizes all experience. It is not only that the sensational and
extraordinary exist in our commonplace lives, Dreiser appears to say,
but that they are so pervasive and implicit in our experience that their
very texture differs little from the ordinary course of events. Thus,
such potentially exciting and dramatically sensational moments in

33
Dreiser's fiction as the seduction of Jennie Gerhardt or the
imprisonment of Frank Cowperwood have an almost listless dullness
compared to Norris's treatment of parallel events in his fiction.

Carrie, like many of Dreiser's characters, has her life shaped by

chance and need. Chance involves her with Drouet and later plays a
large role in Hurstwood's theft and therefore in her own departure with
him. Her needs are of two kinds--first to attain the tangible objects and
social symbols of comfort and beauty which she sees all around her in
Chicago and New York, and then to be loved. Of the major forces in
her life, it is primarily her desire for objects that furnish a sense of
physical and mental well-being--for fine clothing and furniture and
attractive apartments and satisfactory food--which determines much of
her life. As she gains more of these, her fear of returning to poverty
and crudity--to her sister's condition--impels her to seek even more
vigorously. Much of the concrete world that Dreiser fills in so
exhaustively in Sister Carrie thus exists as a determin ing force in
Carrie's life, first moving her to escape it, as in her encounters with
working-class Chicago, and then to reach out for it, as when Drouet
takes her to a good restaurant and buys her some fashionable clothes
and so introduces into her imagination the possibility of making these
a part of her life.

But Carrie's response to her needs is only one side of her nature. She
also possesses a quality which is intrinsic to her being, though its
external shape (a Drouet, a dress seen on the street) is determined by
accidental circumstance. For in this his first novel Dreiser endows
Carrie with the same capacity to wonder and to dream which he felt so
strongly in himself. It is this ability to dream about the nature of
oneself and one's fate and of where one is going and how one will get
there and to wonder whether happiness is real and possible or only an
illusion--it is this capacity which ultimately questions the reality and
meaning of the seemingly solid and plain world in which we find
ourselves.

This "dream" quality underlies the most striking symbol in the novel,
the rocking chair. The rocking chair has correctly been interpreted as
principally a symbol of circularity because Carrie rocks on her first

34
night in Chicago and again at the novel's close in her New York
apartment. 9 Dreiser seems to imply by the symbol that nothing really
has happened to Carrie, that although her outer circumstances have
changed, she is essentially the same both morally and spiritually. The
symbol does indeed function in this way, but it also, in its persistence,
reflects Carrie's continuing ability to wonder about herself and her
future and this reveals that her imaginative response to life has not
been dulled by experience. Although she has not achieved the
happiness that she thought accompanied the life she desired and which
she now has, she will continue to search. Perhaps Ames represents the
next, higher step in this quest, Dreiser implies. But in any case, she
possesses this inner force, a force which is essentially bold and free.
Although it brings her worry and loneliness--the rocking chair
symbolizes these as well--it is an element in her which Dreiser finds
estimable and moving. She will always be the dreamer, Dreiser says,
and though her dreams take an earthly shape controlled by her world,
and though she is judged immoral by the world because she violates
its conventions in pursuit of her dreams, she has for Dreiser--and for
us, I believe--meaning and significance and stature because of her
capacity to rock and dream, to question life and to pursue it. Thus
Carrie seeks to fulfill each new venture and gain each new object as
though these were the only realities of life, and yet by her very
dissatisfaction and questioning of what she has gained to imply the
greater reality of the mind and spirit that dreams and wonders. The
rocking chair goes nowhere, but it moves, and in that paradox lies
Dreiser's involvement with Carrie and his ability to communicate the
intensity and nature of her quest. For in his mind, too, the world is
both solid and unknowable, and man is ever pursuing and never
finding.

The Red Badge of Courage also embodies a different combination of

the sensational and commonplace than that found in McTeague.
Whereas Norris demonstrates that the violent and the extraordinary
are present in seemingly dull and commonplace lives, Crane, even
more than Dreiser, is intent on revealing the commonplace nature of
the seemingly exceptional. In The Red Badge Henry Fleming is a raw,
untried country youth who seeks the romance and glory of war but
who finds that his romantic, chivalric preconceptions of battle are

35
false. Soldiers and generals do not strike heroic poses; the dead are not
borne home triumphantly on their shields but fester where they have
fallen; and courage is not a conscious striving for an ideal mode of
behavior but a temporary delirium derived from animal fury and social
pride or fear. A wounded officer worries about the cleanliness of his
uniform; a soldier sweats and labors at his arms "like a laborer in a
foundry"; 10 and mere chance determines rewards and punishments--
the death of a Conklin, the red badge of a Fleming. War to Crane is
like life itself in its injustice, in its mixing of the ludicrous and the
momentarily exhilarating, in its selfdeceptions, and in its acceptance
of appearances for realities. Much of Crane's imagery in the novel is
therefore consciously and pointedly antiheroic, not only in his
obviously satirical use of conventional chivalric imagery in unheroic
situations (a soldier bearing a rumor comes "waving his [shirt]
bannerlike" and adopting "the important air of a herald in red and
gold" [5]) but also more subtly in his use of machine and animal
imagery to deflate potentially heroic moments.

Crane's desire to devalue the heroic in war stems in part from his
stance as an ironist reacting against a literary and cultural tradition of
idealized courage and chivalry. But another major element in his
desire to reduce war to the commonplace arises from his casting of
Fleming's experiences in the form of a "life" or initiation allegory.
Henry Fleming is the universal youth who leaves home unaware of
himself or the world. His participation in battle is his introduction to
life as for the first time he tests himself and his preconceptions of
experience against experience itself. He emerges at the end of the
battle not entirely self-perceptive or firm-willed--Crane is too much
the ironist for such a reversal--but rather as one who has encountered
some of the strengths and some of the failings of himself and others.
Crane implies that although Fleming may again run from battle and
although he will no doubt always have the human capacity to
rationalize his weaknesses, he is at least no longer the innocent.

If The Red Badge is viewed in this way--that is, as an antiheroic

allegory of "life"--it becomes clear that Crane is representing in his
own fashion the naturalistic belief in the interpenetration of the
commonplace and the sensational. All life, Crane appears to be

36
saying, is a struggle, a constant sea of violence in which we inevitably
immerse ourselves and in which we test our beliefs and our values.
War is an appropriate allegorical symbol of this test, for to Crane
violence is the very essence of life, not in the broad Darwinian sense
of a struggle for existence or the survival of the fittest, but rather in
the sense that the proving and testing of oneself, conceived both
realistically and symbolically, entails the violent and the deeply
emotional, that the finding of oneself occurs best in moments of stress
and is itself often an act of violence. To Crane, therefore, war as an
allegorical setting for the emergence of youth into knowledge
embodies both the violence of this birth and the commonplaces of life
which the birth reveals--that men are controlled by the trivial, the
accidental, the degradingly unheroic, despite the preservation of such
accoutrements of the noble as a red badge or a captured flag. Crane
shows us what Norris and Dreiser only suggest, that there is no
separation between the sensational and the commonplace, that the two
are coexistent in every aspect and range of life. He differs from Norris
in kind and from Dreiser in degree in that his essentially ironic
imagination leads him to reverse the expected and to find the
commonplace in the violent rather than the sensational beneath the
trivial. His image of life as an unheroic battle captures in one ironic
symbol both his romanticism and his naturalism--or, in less literary
terms, his belief that we reveal character in violence but that human
character is predominantly fallible and selfdeceptive.

Much of Crane's best fiction displays this technique of ironic

deflation. In Maggie, a young urchin defends the honor of Rum Alley
on a heap of gravel; in "The Open Boat," the stalwart oiler suffers an
inconsequential and meaningless death; in "The Blue Hotel," the death
of the Swede is accompanied by a derisive sign on the cash register;
and in "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," the long-awaited "chivalric"
encounter is thwarted by the bride's appearance. Each of these crucial
or significant events has at its core Crane's desire to reduce the violent
and extraordinary to the commonplace, a reduction which indicates
both his ironic vision of man's romantic pretensions and his belief in
the reality of the fusion of the violent and the commonplace in
experience.

37
As was true of Norris and Dreiser, Crane's particular way of
combining the sensational and the commonplace is closely related to
the second major aspect of his naturalism, the thematic tension or
complexity he embodies in his work. The Red Badge presents a vision
of a man as a creature capable of advancing in some areas of
knowledge and power but forever imprisoned within the walls of
certain inescapable human and social imitations. Crane depicts the
similarity between Henry Fleming's "will" and an animal's instinctive
response to crisis or danger. He also presents Fleming's discovery that
he is enclosed in a "moving box" of "tradition and law" (21) even at
those moments when he believes himself capable of rational decision
and action--that the opinions and actions of other men control and
direct him. Lastly, Crane dramatizes Fleming's realization that
although he can project his emotions into natural phenomena and
therefore derive comfort from a sense of nature's identification with
his desires and needs, nature and man are really two, not one, and
nature of fers no reliable or useful guide to experience or to action.
But, despite Crane's perception of these limitations and inadequacies,
he does not paint a totally bleak picture of man in The Red Badge.
True, Fleming's own sanguine view of himself at the close of the
novel--that he is a man--cannot be taken at face value. Fleming's self-
evaluations contrast ironically with his motives and actions throughout
the novel, and his final estimation of himself represents primarily
man's ability to be proud of his public deeds while rationalizing his
private failings.

But something has happened to Fleming which Crane values and

applauds. Early in the novel Fleming feels at odds with his comrades.
He is separated from them by doubts about his behavior under fire and
by fear of their knowledge of his doubts. These doubts and fears
isolate him from his fellows, and his isolation is intensified by his
growing awareness that the repressive power of the "moving box" of
his regiment binds him to a group from which he now wishes to
escape. Once in battle, however, Fleming becomes "not a man but a
member" as he is "welded into a common personality which was
dominated by a single desire" (30). The "subtle battle brotherhood"
(31) replaces his earlier isolation, and in one sense the rest of the
novel is devoted to Fleming's loss and recovery of his feeling of

38
oneness with his fellows. After his initial success in battle, Henry
loses this quality as he deserts his comrades and then wanders away
from his regiment in actuality and in spirit. His extreme stage of
isolation from the regiment and from mankind occurs when he
abandons the tattered soldier. After gaining a "red badge" which
symbolically reunites him with those soldiers who remained and
fought, he returns to his regiment and participates successfully in the
last stages of the battle. Here, as everywhere in Crane, there is a
deflating irony, for Henry's "red badge" is not a true battle wound. But
despite the tainted origin of this symbol of fraternity, its effect on
Henry and his fellows is real and significant. He is accepted gladly
when he returns, and in his renewed confidence and pride he finds
strength and a kind of joy. Crane believed that this feeling of trust and
mutual confidence among men is essential, and it is one of the few
values he confirms again and again in his fiction. It is this quality
which knits together the four men in the open boat and lends them
moral strength. And it is the absence of this quality and its
replacement by fear and distrust which characterizes the world of "The
Blue Hotel" and causes the tragic denouement in that story.

Crane thus points out that courage has primarily a social reality, that it
is a quality which exists not absolutely but by virtue of other men's
opinions, and that the social unity born of a courageous fellowship
may therefore be based on selfdeception or on deception of others. He
also demonstrates that this bond of fellowship may be destructive and
oppressive when it restricts or determines individual choice, as in the
"moving box" of the regiment. Fleming, after all, at first stands fast
because he is afraid of what his comrades will do or think, and then
runs because he feels that the rest of the regiment is deserting as well.
But Crane also maintains that in social cohesion man gains both what
little power of selfpreservation he possesses and a gratifying and
necessary sense of acceptance and acknowledgement difficult to attain
otherwise. Crane therefore establishes a vital organic relationship
between his deflation of the traditional idea of courage and his
assertion of the need for and the benefits of social unity. "He attacks
the conventional heroic ideal by showing that a man's actions in battle
are usually determined by his imitation of the actions of others--by the
group as a whole. But this presentation of the reality and power of the

39
group also suggests the advantages possible in group unity and group
action.

There is, then, a moral ambiguity in Crane's conception of man's

relationship with his fellows, an ambiguity which permeates his entire
vision of man. Henry Fleming falsely acquires a symbol of group
identity, yet this symbol aids him in recovering his group identity and
in benefiting the group. Man's involvement with others forces him into
psychic compulsion (Henry's running away), yet this involvement is
the source of his sense of psychic oneness. Henry is still for the most
part self-deceived at the close of the novel, but if he is not the "man"
he thinks he has become, he has at least shed some of the innocence of
the child. Crane's allegory of life as a battle is thus appropriate for
another reason besides its relevance to the violence of discovery. Few
battles are clearly or cleanly won or lost, and few soldiers are clearly
God's chosen. But men struggle, and in their struggle they learn
something about their limitations and capacities and something about
the nature of their relations with their fellow men, and this knowledge
is rewarding even though they never discover the full significance or
direction of the campaign in which they are engaged.

The primary goal of the late nineteenth-century American naturalists

was not to demonstrate the overwhelming and oppressive reality of the
material forces present in our lives. Their attempt, rather, was to
represent the intermingling in life of controlling force and individual
worth. If they were not always clear in distinguishing between these
two qualities in experience, it was partly because they were novelists
responding to life's complexities and were not philosophers
categorizing experience, and partly because they were suffi ciently of
our own time to doubt the validity of moral or any other absolutes.
The naturalists do not dehumanize man. They rather suggest new or
modified areas of value in man while engaged in destroying such old
and to them unreal sources of human self-importance as romantic love
or moral responsibility or heroism. They are some distance from
traditional Christian humanism, but they have not yet reached the
despairing emptiness of Joseph Wood Krutch's The Modern Temper.
One should not deny the bleak view of man inherent in McTeague's or
Hurstwood's decline or in Fleming's self-deceptions, but neither

40
should one forget that to the naturalists man's weaknesses and limited
knowledge and thwarted desires were still sources of compassion and
worth as well as aspects of the human condition to be more
forthrightly acknowledged than writers had done in the past.

Nor is naturalism simply a piling on of unselective blocks of

documentation. A successful naturalistic novel is like any successful
work of art in that it embodies a cogent relationship between its form
(its particular combination of the commonplace and sensational) and
its theme (its particular tension between the individually significant
and the deterministic). There is a major difference, within general
similarities, between Norris's discovery of the sensational in the
commonplace and Crane's dramatization of the triviality of the
sensational. This variation derives principally from the differing
thematic tension in the two novels. Norris wishes to demonstrate the
tragic destruction of McTeague's commonplace world by the violence
inherent in all life, whereas Crane wishes to dramatize Fleming's
violent initiation into the commonplace nature of the heroic. Norris
and Crane occupy positions in American naturalism analogous to that
of Wordsworth and Byron in English romanticism. Like the poetry of
the two earlier figures, their fiction expresses strikingly individual and
contrasting visions of experience, yet does so within a body of shared
intellectual and literary assumptions belonging to their common
historical and literary moment. The naturalistic novel is thus no
different from any other major literary genre in its complex
intermingling of form and theme, in its reflection of an author's
individual temperament and experience within large generic
similarities, and-at its best--in its thematic depth and importance. We
have done a disservice to the late nineteenth-century American
naturalists by our earlier simplistic conception of their art.

Naturalism and Form

MOST CRITICS WHO discuss American literary naturalism do so

both warily and wearily. What is one to say about this significant yet
intellectually disreputable body of literature which ranges from the
stylism of Crane to the anti-stylism of Dreiser, which is often
characterized by a species of adolescent naturalism, Cady begins with

41
an ideal construct of the naturalistic ethos--principally that of a
universe of forces in which man is an insignificant and even
contemptible figure--and then finds that few naturalists coherently or
consistently inform their work with this ethos. Thus, he approaches
naturalism with the almost instinctive distaste of the intellectual
toward writers who handle ideas sloppily.

After one has noted the foreign influences, the documentation of

sensational lower class life, the too-ready absorption of contemporary
scientism, and the intellectual confusion, there seems little to say,
except perhaps to speculate on the twist of literary fortune which casts
up this sport on the American scene while for the most part sparing
their English cousins.

Edwin Cady's essay "Three Sensibilities: Romancer, Realist,

Naturalist," in his The Light of Common Day ( 1971), is typical of
much discussion of American naturalism. In order to distinguish
among the major nineteenth-century American literary movements,
Cady adopts the strategy of defining the literary sensibility or
temperament which produced a characteristic work within each
movement. He is remarkably perceptive and persuasive in describing
the sensibilities of the romancer and the realist--the quality of mind
which seeks to transcend the limitations of experience in the one and
to affirm the moral and aesthetic value of our limited but shared
perception and experience in the other--but his strategy fails him when
he reaches naturalism. At this point he throws up his hands in despair
at the incongruity between what naturalists appeared to believe about
human nature and what such a belief implies about their sensibilities.
He therefore concludes that in fact there is no such thing as a
naturalist sensibility; there are only covert humanists and ameliorists
playing with naturalistic ideas and subject matter. "Upon Norris and
all the other artists of his richly endowed generation," Cady writes,
"the sensibility of the naturalist exerted a magnetic pull. Nobody was a
naturalist. There really are no naturalists in American literature.
Everybody born after the Civil War felt and responded after his
fashion to the terrible pull of a sensibility in the grounds for which
nobody finally believed."

42
Cady's observation is of course true, but its truth is for the most part
critically unproductive. Almost every major writer in any age is a
humanist, and in more or less degree the distinctive shape he gives his
qualified endorsement of the human condition is a literary mask--be it
romanticist, realist, or naturalist--through which a gifted and feeling
man speaks. To say that there are no true naturalists but only the
"magnetic pull" of a contemporaneously compelling literary mask is to
state an extreme instance of a general truth. Moreover, like so many
critics of American

What, then, are we to do with American naturalism, since it seems

intractable to criticism and since we cannot erase it from our literary
history? A possible way out of our dilemma is to seek critical
approaches or strategies which bypass the hazards which result from
considering naturalism primarily as a movement closely allied to its
contemporary intellectual and social background. We might posit, for
example, a critic of naturalism who has read a great many novels from
Defoe to the recent past but little else. This reader would have a kind
of sophisticated innocence. He would possess much awareness of how
fiction works as an art form and of major changes in the form of the
novel throughout its history, but he would be unaware of all matters
involving the origins and the ideological and cultural context of
particular moments in the history of the form. From the vantage point
of this sophisticated innocence, our critic could look at some
characteristic late nineteenth-century American novels to determine if
they share, not traces of evolutionary thought or Zolaesque
sensationalism, but rather a distinctive fictional style or shape which
can be interpreted as the response of this generation of writers to their
experience and which distinguishes this moment from other moments.

To begin, then. From the angle of vision of a sophisticated innocence,

a work of fiction takes its form from its narrative of what happens to
people when they interact with each other, or within themselves, or
with their worlds, and thus create physical or psychological events.
The major tradition in Eng lish and American fiction until the closing
decades of the nineteenth century was to depict most sequences of
events-that is, the physical, intellectual, or spiritual movement of
characters through time--as progressive. Narratives were progressive

43
not merely in the superficial sense of the moral romance, in which
good characters were rewarded and evil ones punished, but also in the
deeper sense of most great fiction from Tom Jones and Pamela to The
Scarlet Letter and Middlemarch. Tom wins his Sophia and Pamela her
Mr. B., the scarlet letter at last does its office, and Dorothea and
Ladislaw though not as fresh as they once were are also not as
illusioned. The world, in short, may be a difficult place, and man is
imperfect, but the passage of time profits the bold and good hearted
and leavens life with judgment if not with wisdom. The major
characteristic of the form of the naturalistic novel is that it no longer
reflects this certainty about the value of experience but rather
expresses a profound doubt or perplexity about what happens in the
course of time.

When I say "the form of a naturalistic novel," I mean, of course, not a

single, describable entity but a complex of devices and techniques
which differs in degree and kind from writer to writer and from novel
to novel while still sharing certain general and therefore abstractable
tendencies. In a book length study, I would attempt to discuss all of
the more prominent of these narrative tendencies. But on this
occasion, I can examine only one--the naturalistic symbol-though I
hope that it is a choice which usefully illustrates my principal
observation about the form of the naturalistic novel. 2

Here, then, are three late nineteenth-century narratives that a reader

bred on earlier fiction would expect to end with an effect of
progressive development or change: a story in which an honest
workingclass man begins to move into the lower middle class because
of his occupation and because of an advantageous marriage; one in
which a girl from the provinces survives the storms and hazards of the
city and gains great success because of her natural abilities; and a third
in which a raw country youth takes part in a great battle and proves his
courage both to himself and to his comrades. In each of these novels--
McTeague, Sister Carrie, and The Red Badge of Courage--there is a
pervasive and striking symbol which, in a sense, accompanies the
protagonist on his adventures. McTeague's is that of gold--the gold he
works with as a dentist, the gold of Trina's hoard that he later covets,
the gold mine that he discovers late in the novel, and in particular the

44
gold tooth advertising sign which to him means success and
prominence in his profession and therefore a confirmation of his shaky
sense of personal and social sufficiency. Carrie's symbol is that of the
rocking chair in which she so often sits and muses about the happiness
that she longs for, whether her anticipated happiness be that of
pleasure, success, or beauty. And Henry Fleming's is a wound, a red
badge of courage which testifies to his fellows that he is not the
coward he fears he may be.

A major characteristic of each of these symbols is that it functions

ironically within the structure of its novel. McTeague acquires more
and more gold, from his initial small dental supply to the gold tooth to
Trina's gold coins to an entire mine. Yet despite his gain of this
symbol of wealth and therefore presumably of class and esteem, his
movement from midway in the novel is downward both socially and
personally until he reaches his final condition of a pursued animal.
Carrie looks out over the teeming streets on her first night in Chicago
and rocks and dreams of a happiness which consists of smart clothes,
flashy men, and evenings at the vaudeville theatre. Eight years later, at
the close of the novel, she is a famous New York musical comedy
actress and has acquired all of these and more but she still rocks and
dreams of a happiness which might be hers if only she could devote
herself to the art of dramatic expression. And Fleming, having run
from the battlefield in terror, acquires his red badge by a blow from
one of his own retreating comrades. But when his red badge of
ignominy is divorced from its source, it quickly begins to act upon
others and eventually upon Henry as a sign of his honorable
participation in battle.

I do not wish to suggest that these symbols and the narratives in which
they occur are entirely similar. Obviously, there is much difference in
tone, in depth of implication, and in literary success between Norris'
arbitrary and often fulsome gold symbolism, Dreiser's skillful and
evocative use of the rocking chair as a rhythmic symbol in several
senses, and Crane's reliance on an intense verbal as well as structural
irony when describing the effects of Henry's wound. Yet the symbols
perform parallel roles in their respective narratives in that they
structure and inform our sense not only that human beings are flawed

45
and ineffectual but also that experience itself does not guide, instruct,
or judge human nature. One of the principal corollaries of a
progressive view of time is the belief that man has the capacity to
interact meaningfully with his world and to benefit from this
interaction. But the effect of the naturalistic novel, as is suggested by
its symbolic structure, is to reverse or heavily qualify this expectation.
McTeague, Carrie, and Fleming are in a sense motionless in time.
They have moved through experience but still only dimly comprehend
it and themselves, and thus their journeys through time are essentially
circular journeys which return them to where they began. McTeague
returns to the mountains of his youth and stands dumb and brute-like
before their primeval enmity; Carrie still rocks and dreams of a
happiness she is never to gain; and Fleming is again poised between
gratuitous selfassurance and half-concealed doubt.

The form of the naturalistic novel therefore engages us in a somewhat

different aesthetic experience than does the form of an archetypal
eighteenth or nineteenth-century novel. Whatever the great range of
theme and effect of earlier novels, we are more or less instructed and
elevated by our experience of their imagined worlds. That deeply
gratifying sense of knowing so well the characters of a novel that we
are unwilling to part from them at the close of the book is one of the
principal effects of a fiction in which the confident moral vision of the
writer has encouraged him to depict life with fullness, richness, and
direction--with a sense, in short, that both internal and external
experience has a kind of describable weight and value. But the form of
the naturalistic novel begins to create an effect of uncertainty, of doubt
and perplexity, about whether anything can be gained or learned from
experience--indeed, of wonder if experience has any meaning aside
from the existential value of a collision with phenomena. For what do
the massively ironic symbols of McTeague's gold, Carrie's rocking
chair, and Fleming's wound tell us but that life is a sliding or drifting
rather than a march and that the ultimate direction and possible worth
of experience are unfathomable.

If the naturalistic novel is to be properly understood, however, it is

necessary to qualify a view which maintains that its major impact is
that of the inefficacy of time. For while the naturalistic novel does

46
reflect a vast skepticism about the conventional attributes of
experience, it also affirms the significance and worth of the skeptical
or seeking temperament, of the character who continues to look for
meaning in experience even though there probably is no meaning.
This quality appears most clearly in Dreiser's portrayal of Carrie, who,
whatever the triviality of her earlier quest or the fatuousness of her
final vision, still continues to seek the meaning she calls happiness. It
is present in a more tenuous form in the fact that Henry has survived
his first battle--that is, his first encounter with life in all its awesome
complexity--and is undismayed by the experience. And it exists faintly
in the recollection we bring to McTeague's fate of his earlier
responsiveness to the promise of Trina's sensuality and to the minor
pleasures of middle class domesticity. So the Carrie who rocks, the
Fleming who is proud of his red badge, and the McTeague who stands
clutching his gold in the empty desert represent both the pathetic and
perhaps tragic worth of the seeking, feeling mind and the inability of
experience to supply a meaningful answer to the question which is
human need. The naturalistic symbol thus accrues to the protagonist a
vital ambivalence. It is both a sign of his identity, in that it represents
the static reality of his goal or quest in an uncertain, shifting world,
and it is a sign of the impossiblity of fulfilling goals or of discovering
meaning in a world of this kind.

Since I have been discussing the naturalistic novel in relation to some

basic changes in the form of fiction, it would be useful to look forward
to the modern novel in order to clarify the significant connection
between the fumbling and tentative efforts of the naturalists to reflect
through form a new vision of experience and the conscious and
sophisticated formalistic experiments by many twentieth-century
novelists which have been directed toward achieving a similar end.
Obviously, some of the most distinctive qualities of the fiction of
Norris, Dreiser, and Crane are in the mainstream of the nineteenth-
century novel--the full documentation of Norris and Dreiser, for
example, and the arch cleverness of Crane's narrative voice at its
worst. Yet by again concentrating on the naturalistic symbol, we can
see, I think, how the naturalistic novel stands on the threshold of the
modern novel. First, as Richard Ellmann reminds us, one of the basic
qualities of Joyce's fiction is his demonstration that "the ordinary is

47
the extraordinary," that the movement of two men through a
commonplace June day in Dublin contains a universe of emotional
force and moral implication, though this universe may be expressed
by such symbolic acts as those of masturbation and defecation. The
gold tooth, rocking chair, and superficial head wound are also
commonplace, even tawdry objects and events which symbolize
complex and elemental emotions of pride, desire, and fear. Second,
the ironic symbolic structure of the naturalistic novel anticipates the
absence in much modern serial art of a progressive and developmental
notion of time. Because Carrie is still rocking, because McTeague has
returned to his original animal state (original both to him and to his
species), and because Fleming, despite his wound, is still naively self-
deceptive, we realize that time in the shape of experience has been less
useful for these characters than it had been for a Dorothea Brooke or a
Hester. Soon, indeed, novelists such as Joyce and Virginia Woolf and
Faulkner were to discover even more innovative and radical ways to
represent through form the insignificance of the forward movement of
time in comparison to the timelessness which is the union of a
character and his past.

I can perhaps now suggest, after having glanced both backwards and
forwards, that the distinctiveness of the form of the naturalistic novel
lies in the attempt of that form to persuade us, in the context of a fully
depicted concrete world, that only the questioning, seeking, timeless
self is real, that the temporal world outside the self is often
treacherous and always apparent. The naturalistic novel thus reflects
our doubts about conventional notions of character and experience
while continuing to affirm through its symbolism both the sanctity of
the self and the bedrock emotional reality of our basic physical nature
and acts. Put in terms of the history of art, the late nineteenth-century
naturalistic novel anticipates both the startling, convention-destroying
concreteness and the profound solipsism of much modern art.

At this point we can usefully return to Cady and those other critics
who have approached naturalism primarily in relation to its origin and
ideas and can note the value of this approach once the stylistic
distinctiveness and direction of the naturalistic novel have been
established. The influence of Darwinism and French fiction, the

48
notion that man is a brute and life a struggle, the belief that we are but
ciphers in either a cosmic storm or a chemical process--this kind of
awareness about what the naturalists absorbed and believed can help
clarify our understanding of the themes which preoccupied individual
naturalists in the muddy pool which is the coming together of a
particular temperament and a historical moment. We need not ask
which came first or which was predominant-the temperament, the
overt beliefs and influences of the age, or the unconscious stumbling
of a generation toward a different kind of fictional form. We need
only realize that for this particular moment in literary history we have
been neglecting the last as a way of controlling and shaping our
awareness of the first two. We neglect at our peril the fact that Moby
Dick, whatever else it may be, is a story of a whale hunt, and we are
also in danger, critically speaking, when we neglect the equally simple
observation that most late nineteenth-century naturalistic novels are
about people who seem to be going nowhere.

American Literary Naturalism: Dreiser

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM has almost always been

viewed with hostility. During its early years the movement was
associated with Continental licentiousness and impiety and was
regarded as a literature foreign to American values and interests. "We
must stamp out this breed of Norrises," a reviewer of McTeague cried
in 1899. In our own time, though antagonism to naturalism is
expressed more obliquely, it is as deeply rooted. A typical discussion
of the movement is frequently along the following lines. The critic
will examine the sources of naturalism in late nineteenth-century
scientism, in Zola, and in post-Civil War industrial expansion. He will
note that to a generation of American writers coming of age in the
1890s the mechanistic and materialistic foundations of contemporary
science appeared to be confirmed by American social conditions and
to have been successfully applied to the writing of fiction by Zola. But
he will also note that Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore
Dreiser were often muddled in their thinking and inept in their fiction,
and he will attribute these failures to their unfortunate absorption of

49
naturalistic attitudes and beliefs. Our typical critic will then discover a
second major flowering of naturalism in the fiction of James T.
Farrell, John Steinbeck, and John Dos Passos in the 1930s. He will
remark that scientism has been replaced by Marxism and that the
thinking of this generation of naturalists is not so much confused as
doctrinaire, but his account of their work will still be governed by the
assumption that naturalism is a regrettable strain in modern American
literary history.

Indeed, the underlying metaphor in most accounts of American fiction

is that naturalism is a kind of taint or discoloration, without which the
writer would be more of an artist and through which the critic must
penetrate if he is to discover the essential nature and worth of the
writer. So those writers who most clearly appear to be naturalists, such
as Dreiser and Farrell, are almost always praised for qualities which
are distinct from their naturalism. We are thus told that Dreiser's
greatness is not in his naturalism and that he is most of all an artist
when not a philosopher. And so the obvious and powerful thread of
naturalism in such major figures as Hemingway, Faulkner, and (closer
to our own time) Saul Bellow is almost always dismissed as an
irrelevant and distracting characteristic of their work.

This continuing antagonism to naturalism has several root causes. One

of the clearest is that many critics find naturalistic belief morally
repugnant. But whereas earlier critics stated openly their view that
naturalism was invalid because man was as much a creature of divine
spirit as animal substance, the more recent critic is apt to express his
hostility indirectly by claiming that naturalistic novelists frequently
violate the deterministic creed which supposedly informs their work
and are therefore inconsistent or incoherent naturalists. On one hand,
this concern with philosophical consistency derives from the naturalist
writer's interest in ideas and is therefore a justifiable critical interest.
On the other, there seems little doubt that many critics delight in
seeking out the philosophically inadequate in naturalistic fiction
because man is frequently portrayed in this fiction as irredeemably
weak and deluded and yet as not responsible for his condition. It is the
rare work of fiction of any time in which threads of free will and
determinism do not interweave in a complex pattern that can be called

50
incoherent or inconsistent; on strictly logical grounds man either has
free will or he does not. Yet it is principally the naturalistic novel
which is damned for this quality, which suggests that it is the
weighting of this inconsistency toward an amoral determinism--not its
mere presence--that is at stake.

Another source of the hostility of modern critics to the naturalistic

novel lies in recent American political history. American naturalism of
the 1890s was largely apolitical, but in the 1930s the movement was
aligned with the left wing in American politics and often specifically
with the Communist Party. In the revulsion against the Party which
swept the literary community during the 1940s and 1950s, it was
inevitable that naturalistic fiction of the 1930s would be found
wanting because the naturalists of that decade, it was now seen, had so
naively embraced some form of communist belief. The most
influential critical discussions of American naturalism during the
1940s and 1950s-- Philip Rahv's "Notes on the Decline of American
Naturalism," Malcolm Cowley's "A Natural History of American
Naturalism," and Lionel Trilling 's "Reality in America"--have as an
underlying motive a desire to purge American literature and its
historiography of an infatuation with an alien and destructive political
ideal.

A final reason for the antagonism toward naturalistic fiction is that

several generations of academic critics have been attracted by an
increasingly refined view of the aesthetic complexity of fiction. They
have believed that a novel must above all be organic--that is, the
product of a romantic imagination--and they have found principally in
the work of Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, and to a lesser extent
James, that enlargement of metaphor into symbol and that interplay of
irony and ambivalence which bring fiction close to the complex
indirection of a metaphysical lyric. Stephen Crane is the only
naturalistic writer whose fiction satisfies these expectations, and his
work is generally held to be uncharacteristic of the non-artistry of a
movement more adequately represented by Dreiser.

I do not wish to suggest by this brief survey of the critical biases

which have led to the inadequate examination of American naturalism

51
that there are not naturalistic novels which are muddled in conception
and inept in execution. But just as we have long known that the mind-
set of an early nineteenth-century critic would little prepare him to
come to grips with the essential nature and form of a romantic poem,
so we are coming to realize that a generation of American critics has
approached American literary naturalism with beliefs about man and
art which have frequently distorted rather than cast light upon the
object before them.

Theodore Dreiser is the author whose work and career most fulfill the
received notion of American naturalism; indeed, it is often difficult to
determine the demarcation between literary history and critical
biography in general discussions of American naturalism, so
completely is Dreiser as thinker and writer identified with the
movement in America. It would be instructive, therefore, to test the
example of Dreiser--to note, initially and briefly, those characteristics
of his career and work which lead us to describe him as a naturalist;
and then, more fully, to examine some of the naturalistic elements in
his fiction. But unlike so much of the criticism of naturalism which I
have been describing, I do not wish to undertake this test with the
assumption that Dreiser's fiction is confused in theme and form
because he is not a consistent naturalist or that his work is best when
he is least naturalistic. In short, I do not wish to consider his
naturalism as an unfortunate excrescence. Rather, I want to see how
his naturalistic predispositions work in his fiction and whether or not
they work successfully.

Dreiser was born an outsider. His parents were of Catholic, German-

speaking immigrant stock and throughout Dreiser's youth the large
family was agonizingly poor. As a young man Dreiser sought the
success and position which his parents had lacked and also shed the
religious and moral beliefs which, he believed, had appeared to
shackle them. While a young reporter in Pittsburgh in the early 1890s,
he found his deepest responses to life confirmed by his reading of
Herbert Spencer and Balzac. There were, he believed, no discernible
supernatural agencies in life, and man was not the favored creature of
divine guidance but an insignificant unit in a universe of natural
forces. Although these forces, whether biological or social, were the

52
source of racial progress, they often crushed the individual within
their mechanistic processes. Like many of his generation, Dreiser
found that the observed realities of American society supported this
theory of existence. The mills and libraries of Pittsburgh were
evidence of progress, but the lives of the immigrant foundry workers--
to say nothing of the lives of Dreiser's own errant sisters and brothers-
-appeared dwarfed and ephemeral compared with the grinding and
impersonal power of a vast economic system and a great city. Yet the
city itself, as Balzac had amply, demonstrated, was exciting and
alluring, and not all were crushed who sought to gain its wonders. In
Sister Carrie Dreiser was to write, "Among the forces which sweep
and play throughout the universe, untutored man is but a wisp in the
wind."8 But though Hurstwood is swept away by these forces, and
though Carrie's career is that of a storm-tossed ship, Carrie survives
and indeed grows in understanding by the close of the novel. So
accompanying Dreiser's endorsement of an amoral determinism there
exists a disconcerting affirmation of the traditionally elevating in life--
of Carrie, for example, as a figure of "emotional greatness," that is, of
imaginative power. Forty-five years after Sister Carrie Dreiser joined
the Communist Party while celebrating in his last two novels the
intuitive mysticism at the heart of Quaker and Hindu belief. Here, in
brief, at the two poles of his career and work is the infamous
intellectual muddle of Dreiser and, by extension, of naturalism itself.
And this muddle appears to be matched by a corresponding lack of
control and firmness in fictional technique. Dreiser documents his
social scene with a pseudo- scientific detachment yet overindulges in
personal philosophical disquisitions; he attempts to write a "fine" style
but produces journalistic cliché and awkwardness.

So in most important ways Dreiser fulfills the conventional definition

of the American naturalist. All the major paradoxes are present: his
identification with the "outsider," which was to lead to a
contemptuous view of the mainstream of middle class American life,
yet his lifelong worship of "success"; his acceptance of a "scientific"
mechanistic theory of natural law as a substitute for traditional views
of individual insight and moral responsibility, yet his affirmation of
many of these traditional views; and his deep response to a major
European novelist, including the form of his fiction, yet his seeming

53
neglect of style and form. I cannot hope to discuss these major
characteristics of Dreiser as a naturalist as each appears in his eight
novels. But I can pursue the vital naturalistic theme of mechanistic
determinism in two of his principal novels, JennieGerhardt Gerhardt
and An American Tragedy, and thereby reach toward at least a modest
understanding of the example of Dreiser.

Dreiser began Jennie Gerhardt in early 1901, soon after the

publication of Sister Carrie. He wrote most of the novel during the
next two years, though he did not complete it until late 1910. Like
Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt is about a girl from a poor family who
has several sexual affairs with men of higher station but who emerges
from her adventures not only unsullied but also elevated in character
and insight. The novel differs from Sister Carrie primarily in Dreiser's
characterization of Jennie and of Lester Kane, the principal man in
Jennie's life. Kane, at least on the surface, is a more powerful,
successful, and contemplative figure than Hurstwood, and Jennie
differs from Carrie in that she is a warm and generous giver rather
than a taker.

In the course of the novel, Jennie is seduced first by Senator Brander,

by whom she has a child, Vesta, and then by Lester Kane. She and
Kane are attracted to each other by a powerful natural "affinity" and
they live together contentedly for several years. But because Lester is
gradually forced to accept that a permanent union with Jennie would
adversely affect his business career and the comfortable certainties of
his social and family life, they do not marry. Eventually they part,
Lester marries Letty Gerald, a woman of his own class, and Jennie
suffers the death of both her father and Vesta.

One of the major scenes in Jennie Gerhardt is Lester's visit to Jennie

after the death of Vesta. Deeply depressed by Vesta's death and by his
realization that he erred in leaving Jennie, Lester tells her "it isn't
myself that's important in this transaction [that is, life itself]
apparently; the individual doesn't count much in the situation. I don't
know whether you see what I'm driving at, but all of us are more or
less pawns.

54
We're moved about like chessmen by circumstances over which we
have no control." This famous pronouncement, which has supplied
several generations of literary historians with a ubiquitous image for
the philosophical center of American naturalism, requires careful
analysis both in its immediate context and in relation to the novel as a
whole if it is to be properly understood.

Whatever the general truth of Lester's words, they represent a personal

truth. His pawn image expresses both his sense of ineffectuality in the
face of the central dilemma of his life and a covert supernaturalism
which has characterized his thought throughout the novel despite his
overt freethinking. Earlier he had attributed his difficulties merely to
bad luck. But by the time he and Jennie separate, he has elevated and
generalized "fate" into a specific force which is at once social,
supernatural, and (as far as he is concerned) malevolent:

It was only when the storms set in and the winds of adversity
blew and he found himself facing the armed forces of
convention that he realized he might be mistaken as to the
value of his personality, that his private desires and opinions
were as nothing in the face of a public conviction; that he was
wrong. The race spirit, or social avatar, the "Zeitgeist" as the
Germans term it, manifested itself as something having a
system in charge, and the organization of society began to
show itself to him as something based on possibly a spiritual,
or, at least, supernatural counterpart.(373-74)

Lester's speculative statement that men are but pawns in the control of
circumstances is thus in part an explanation and a defense of his own
conduct. In particular, it is a disguised apology to Jennie for his failure
to marry her when he could have done so. But it is also a powerful
means of characterizing Lester. Throughout his life he had lived for
the moment and had postponed making decisions about the direction
of his life. But the decisionless flow of time contained an impetus of
events which constituted an implicit and irreversible decision, and
when Lester at last awoke to the fact that his life had been decided for
him, he bitterly and angrily blamed fate.

55
Because Lester is a perceptive and on the whole an honest figure, his
belief that men are pawns involves more than a rationalization of his
own indecisiveness and ineffectuality. His belief also aptly
characterizes social reality as that reality has been dramatized in the
novel. The pressure of circumstances on Lester in his relationship with
Jennie has indeed been intense, from their initial meeting within the
convention of a seduction--a convention which appeared to preclude
marriage--to the later opposition of Lester's personal, business, and
social worlds to the continuation of the relationship. In a passage cut
from Chapter XL of the final holograph of the novel, Dreiser himself,
as narrator, echoed Lester's attribution of superhuman powers to social
force. "The conventions in their way," he wrote, "appear to be as
inexorable in their workings as the laws of gravitation and expansion.
There is a drift to society as a whole which pushes us on in a certain
direction, careless of the individual, concerned only with the general
result."

In his final position as one deeply puzzled by the insignificance of the

individual, Lester therefore reflects a persistent strain in Dreiser's
thought. Before making his pawn speech to Jennie, Lester had "looked
down into Dearborn Street, the world of traffic below holding his
attention. The great mass of trucks and vehicles, the counter streams
of hurrying pedestrians, seemed like a puzzle. So shadows march in a
dream" (400). The scene effectively images both Lester's and Dreiser's
belief that life is a helter-skelter of activity without meaning either for
its observers or for the "shadows" who give it motion. As a man aware
of the direction of modern thought, Lester is able to give this view of
life an appropriate philosophical framework. In the years that pass
after Vesta's death, his response to life, Dreiser tells us, becomes
"decidedly critical":

He could not make out what it was all about. In distant ages a queer
thing had come to pass. There had started on its way in the form of
evolution a minute cellular organism which had apparently reproduced
itself by division, had early learned to combine itself with others, to
organize itself into bodies, strange forms offish, animals, and birds,
and had finally learned to organize itself into man. Man, on his part,
composed as he was of self-organizing cells, was pushing himself

56
forward into comfort and different aspects of existence by means of
union and organization with other men. Why? Heaven only knew....
Why should he complain, why worry, why specu late?--the world was
going steadily forward of its own volition, whether he would or no.
Truly it was. (404-05)

It must not be assumed, however, that Lester's pessimistic response to

the "puzzle" of man's role in a mechanistic world is Dreiser's principal
and only philosophical theme in Jennie Gerhardt. For Jennie, though
not Lester's equal in formal knowledge or in experience, is his equal in
the "bigness" of her responsiveness to the underlying reality of life,
and she discovers not only puzzlement and frustration in life but also
an ineradicable beauty. Dreiser therefore follows his comments on
Lester's critical outlook with an account of Jennie's final evaluation of
life. This evaluation, because of its source and its strategic location,
has significance equal to Lester's beliefs. Jennie, Dreiser writes,

had never grasped the nature and character of specialized

knowledge. History, physics, chemistry, botany, geology, and
sociology were not fixed departments in her brain as they
were in Lester's and Letty's. Instead there was the feeling that
the world moved in some strange, unstable way. Apparently
no one knew clearly what it was all about. People were born
and died. Some believed that the world had been made six
thousand years before; some that it was millions of years old.
Was it all blind chance or was there some guiding
intelligence--a God? Almost in spite of herself she felt that
there must be something--a higher power which produced all
the beautiful things--the flowers, the stars, the trees, the grass.
Nature was so beautiful! If at times life seemed cruel, yet this
beauty still persisted. The thought comforted her; she fed
upon it in her hours of secret loneliness. (405)

Jennie and Lester's complementary views of life represent Dreiser's

own permanent unresolved conception of the paradox of existence. To
both figures the world "was going steadily forward of its own
volition," apparently guided by some unknowable power. Individuals
counted for little in this process, but individuals of different

57
temperaments might respond to the mechanism of life in different
ways. One kind of temperament might be bitter and despairing,
another might affirm the beauty which was inseparable from the
inexplicable mystery of life. It has frequently been noted that Dreiser
himself held both views at different stages of his career--that he
stressed a cruelly indifferent mechanistic universe in Hey Rub-a-Dub-
Dub (1920) and a mechanistic world of beauty in The Bulwark (
1946). It has not been as fully realized that he held the two positions
simultaneously as well as consecutively and that he gave each position
equal weight and dramatic expression in Jennie Gerhardt without
resolving their "discrepancy." For to Dreiser there was no true
discrepancy; there was only the reality of distinctive temperaments
which might find truth in each position or, as in his own case, of a
temperament which might find an element of truth in both. Dreiser's
infamous philosophical inconsistency is thus frequently a product of
his belief that life is a "puzzle" to which one can respond in different
ways, depending on one's makeup and experience.

The naturalistic "philosophy" of deterministic mechanism in Dreiser's

novels is therefore usually secondary, within the fictional dynamics of
each novel, to the role of the concept as a metaphor of life against
which various temperaments can define themselves. Or, to put the
matter another way, Lester's belief in one kind of mechanistic
philosophy and Jennie's in another are less significant fictionally than
the depiction of Jennie as a woman of feeling and of Lester as a man
of speculative indecision. But it should also be clear that in attributing
a secondary fictional role to the mechanistic center of Jennie Gerhardt
I am not saying that the philosophy muddles the novel or that the
novel is successful for reasons other than the philosophy. I am rather
saying that the philosophy and the fiction are one and inseparable. As
a late nineteenthcentury novelist, Dreiser absorbed and used
naturalistic ideas. But he did not do so, at his best, in a way which can
be distinguished from his absorption of an understanding of character
and of experience in general. It is this unity of understanding and of
purpose which gives Dreiser's novels their power. At his most
successful, Dreiser embodies in his novels the permanent in life not
despite the ideas of his own time but because, like most major artists,
he uses the ideas of his own time as living vehicles to express the

58
permanent in man's character and in man's vision of his condition and
fate.

Most students of American literature are aware that Dreiser derived

the central plot and much of the detail of An American Tragedy from
the Chester Gillette-Grace Brown murder case of 1906. Less
commonly known is that although Dreiser's principal source--the
reports of Gillette's trial in the New York World--presented him with a
wealth of detail about Gillette's life in Cortland (the Lycurgus of the
novel) leading up to the murder of Grace Brown, it offered only a few
hints about Gillette's experiences before his arrival in that city. Thus,
Book One of An American Tragedy, which deals with Clyde's early
life in Kansas City, is in a sense "invented." Such major events of this
portion of the novel as Clyde's sister's pregnancy, his job at the Green-
Davidson Hotel, his longing for Hortense, and the automobile accident
which concludes the book have no source in Gillette's life.

Because Dreiser in Book One is "inventing" a background for Clyde it

is possible to view this section of the novel as the application to
fiction of a simplistic deterministic ethic in which the author crudely
manufactures hereditary and environmental conditions that will
irrevocably propel the protagonist toward his fate. So, in Book One,
we are offered Clyde's weak and fuzzy-minded father and coldly
moralistic mother. We discover that Clyde is a sensitive youth who
longs for the material and sensual pleasures of life but lacks the
training, strength, and guile necessary to gain them. Ergo: weakness
and desire on the one hand and irresistible attraction yet
insurmountable barriers on the other will resolve themselves into an
American tragedy.

Dreiser in this opening section of the novel is indeed seeking to

introduce the deterministic theme that a young man's nature and early
experience can solidify into an inflexible quality of mind which will
lead to his destruction. Yet once said this observation is as useless to
criticism as the equally true statement that King Lear is about the
failure and triumph of love. For Dreiser in Book One of An American
Tragedy is not a simple: and simple-minded naturalist applying a
philosophical theory to documentary material but rather a subtle

59
fictional craftsman creating out of the imagined concrete details of a
life an evocative image of the complex texture of that life.

Clyde's desire for "beauty and pleasure" in Book One is in direct

conflict with his parents' religious beliefs and activities, and thus
Clyde's dominant impulse from early boyhood is to escape. At fifteen
he makes his first major break from his parents' inhospitable mission
existence and toward the life he desires when he gets a job as assistant
clerk at a drugstore soda fountain. This position, with its
accompanying "marvels" of girls, lively talk, and "snappy" dressing,
offers a deeply satisfying alternative to the drab religiosity of Clyde's
boyhood. He recognizes the appeal of this new world "in a revealing
flash": "You bet he would get out of that now. He would work and
save his money and be somebody. Decidedly this simple and yet
idyllic compound of the commonplace had all the luster and wonder
of a spiritual transfiguration, the true mirage of the lost and thirsting
and seeking victim of the desert." (I, 26)

Dreiser's summary of Clyde's response to the lively worldliness of the

soda fountain introduces a theme, and its imagery and tone, which
pervades the entire novel. Clyde's need--his thirst--has the power to
transform "spiritually" the tawdry and superficial world of the
drugstore into the wondrous and exalted. So frequent and compelling
is Dreiser's use of "dream" in connection with Clyde's longing that we
sometimes fail to realize that his desires also have a basically religious
context in which his "dream" is for a "paradise" of wealth and position
ruled by a "goddess" of love. Clyde at this moment of insight at the
soda fountain is truly converted. He has rejected the religion of his
parents only to find a different kind of heaven to which he pledges his
soul with all the fervor and completeness of his parents' be lief. It like
their "cloudy romance" of a heaven above, Clyde's vision of a
"paradise" below is a "true mirage." He has thus not really escaped
from his parents, and his initiation into life at the soda fountain and
later at the GreenDavidson is no true initiation, for he has merely
shifted the nebulous and misdirected longings of his family from the
unworldly to the worldly. He still has the naïveté, blindness, and
absolute faith of his parents' enthusiasm and belief. And because he is,

60
like them, a true believer, he does not learn from experience and he
does not change.

Clyde's job as a bellhop at the Green-Davidson is both an extension

and an intensification of his conversion experience at the soda
fountain. To Clyde, the hotel is "so glorious an institution" (I, 33), a
response which at once reflects the religiosity of its sexual attractions
and their embodiment in a powerful social form. The Green-Davidson
has both an intrinsic and an extrinsic sexuality. So deep and powerful
is Clyde's reaction to its beauty and pleasure--to its moral freedom,
material splendor, and shower of tips--that he conceives of the hotel as
a youth does his first love. The Green-Davidson to Clyde is softness,
warmth, and richness; it has a luxuriousness which he associates with
sensuality and position--that is, with all that is desirable in life: "The
soft brown carpet under his feet; the soft, cream-tinted walls; the
snow-white bowl lights set in the ceiling--all seemed to him parts of a
perfection and a social superiority which was almost unbelievable" (I,
42). "And there was music always--from somewhere" (I, 33). Clyde
thus views the hotel both as "a realization of paradise" and as a
miraculous gift from Aladdin's lamp, two images of fulfillment which,
in their "spiritualizing" of his desires, appropriately constitute the
center of his dream life.

But the hotel has a harsh and cruel sexuality in addition to its soft,
warm and "romantic" sensuality. Older women and homosexuals prey
on the bellhops, who themselves frequent whores, and the hotel offers
many instances of lascivious parties on the one hand and young girls
deserted by their seducers on the other. Clyde, because of his
repressed sexuality, cannot help responding to this aspect of sex with
"fascination" despite his fears and anxieties. The sexual reality of the
hotel is thus profoundly ambivalent. Clyde longs above all for the
"romance" of sex and for warmth and a sense of union, but the overt
sexuality which he in fact encounters is that of hardness, trickery, and
deceit--of use and discarding. Both Clyde's unconscious need and his
overt mode of fulfillment join in his response to Hortense. "'Your eyes
are just like soft, black velvet,'" he tells her. "'They're wonderful.' He
was thinking of an alcove in the Green-Davidson hung with black
velvet" (I, 112). Clyde unconsciously desires "softness" and later finds

61
it in Roberta, but he is also powerfully drawn by the "hardness" of
wealth and sexual power which he is to find in Sondra and which he
first encounters at the Green-Davidson. Thus he endows Hortense
with an image of warm softness which reflects his muddled awareness
of his needs. For though Hortense is properly associated in his mind
with the Green-Davidson because of their similar sexual "hardness,"
she is incorrectly associated with an image of softness and warmth.

Clyde's belief that the Green-Davidson is a "glorious... institution"

also represents his acceptance of the hotel as a microcosm of social
reality. So he quickly learns that to get ahead in the world--that is, to
ingratiate himself with his superiors and to earn large tips--he must
adopt various roles. So he accepts the hierarchy of power present in
the elaborate system of sharing tips which functions in the hotel. So he
realizes that he must deceive his parents about his earnings if he is to
have free use of the large sums available to him as an eager novice in
this institution. And because the world of the Green-Davidson--both
within the hotel and as hotel life extends out into Clyde's relations
with the other bellhops and with Hortense--also contains Clyde's
introduction into sexual desire and sexual warfare, he assumes that the
ethics of social advance and monetary gain are also those of love.
Thus, when in Lycurgus he aspires to the grandeur of Sondra and her
set, his actions are conditioned by an ethic derived from the Green-
Davidson--that hypocrisy, dishonesty, roleplaying, and sexual deceit
and cruelty are the ways in which one gains what one desires and that
these can and should be applied to his relationship with Roberta.

The major point to be made about Dreiser's rendering of the Green-

Davidson Hotel as an important experience in Clyde's life is that we
respond to his account not as an exercise in determinism but as a
subtle dramatization of the ways in which a distinctive temperament--
eager, sensitive, emotional, yet weak and directionless--interacts with
a distinctive social setting which supplies that temperament with both
its specific goals and its operative ethic. Again, as in Jennie Gerhardt,
there is a naturalistic center to this fictional excellence. It is correct to
say that Clyde's life is determined by his heredity and environment.
But, once more, as in Jennie Gerhardt, the naturalism and the fictional
strength are inseparable. The naturalism is not an obstacle to the

62
excellence but the motive thrust and center of the bed-rock fictional
portrayal of how people interact with their worlds and why they are
what they are.

To sum up. One of the major conventions in the study of American

naturalism is that naturalistic belief is both objectionable in its own
right and incompatible with fictional quality. But the example of
Dreiser reveals that the strength often found in a naturalistic novel
rests in the writer's commitment to the distinctive form of his
naturalistic beliefs and in his ability to transform these beliefs into
acceptable character and event. We are moved by the story of Jennie
and Lester and by the account of Clyde's career not because they are
independent of Dreiser's deepest beliefs but rather because they are
successful narratives of man's impotence in the face of circumstances
by a writer whose creative imagination was all of a piece. Until we are
willing to accept that the power of a naturalistic writer resides in his
naturalism, we will not profit from the example of Dreiser.

63
Hamlin Garland and Stephen Crane: The Naturalist as Romantic
Individualist

MOST CRITICS of American literature no longer feel obliged, as did

Bliss Perry in 1912, to preface an examination of the American mind
with a defense of the attempt. Now usually accepted are the beliefs
that the American experience has been unique and that it has resulted
in both a unique intellectual consciousness known as the American
mind and a unique literature. What is less certain, however, is the
particular nature of the American experience and mind and of their
effect upon American literature. One of the most striking common
denominators in otherwise often diverse interpretations of the
American mind is that of romantic individualism--that is, a pervasive
and widespread faith in the validity of the individual experience and
mind as a source of knowledge and a guide to action. It is true, of
course, that this romantic individualism has never lacked criticism.
But its tenacious strength in spite of frequently valid and forceful
attack is itself an indication of the depth of the faith in the individual
in American life, whether it be ex pressed in Jeffersonian liberalism,
transcendentalism, or the literary revolt of the twenties.
I would like to examine the nature and scope of romantic
individualism in the critical ideas of Hamlin Garland and Stephen
Crane. These two writers are often discussed as naturalists and the
period in which they flourished is almost always considered primarily
as a segment of the European naturalistic movement and its influence
and manifestation in America. The Zolaesque experimental method is
explained and the use of such "scientific" elements in literature as the
force of heredity and environment is sketched. All this, of course, is
pertinent and necessary. But it is also necessary to indicate that the
early American naturalists were very much nineteenth-century
Americans and that much in their work and ideas which makes them
square pegs in the round hole of such a "standard" definition of
naturalism as "pessimistic determinism" may be caused by their
absorption of nineteenth-century American ideas. For though Garland
and Crane are usually (and rightfully) considered to be among the
earliest representatives of American literary naturalism, I wish to point
out in addition--not that they were at heart Jeffersonians,

64
transcendentalists, or anticipators of the twenties--but rather that they
too, each in his own way, consciously and unconsciously, were part of
the broad current which is the stream of American romantic
individualism.
In this introduction to Crumbling Idols, Hamlin Garland noted the
twofold purpose of the work: "to weaken the hold of conventionalism
upon the youthful artist" and "to be constructive, by its statement and
insistent restatement that American art, to be enduring and worthy,
must be original and creative, not imitative."2 Both of these purposes
were in trinsically linked to the evolutionary interpretation of
literature Garland had derived during his early years in Boston.
During those years ( 1884-87) he had immersed himself first in the
works of Taine and Herbert Spencer and later in those of Edward
Dowden, H. M. Posnett, William Dean Howells, and Thomas Sergeant
Perry. From Taine he accepted a belief that literature was conditioned
by time and place. From Spencer, the source of much of his thought,
Garland formulated a conception of literature as a dynamic
phenomenon closely related to the physical and social evolutionary
progress from incoherent homogeneity to coherent heterogeneity.
With the aid of H. M. Posnett's Comparative Literature he then
combined these two ideas into an evolutionary critical system.
Literature was required to keep pace with evolutionary progress by
mirroring the intense social and individual differences which the
progress from homogeneity to heterogeneity had caused. He
concluded that the local colorist was the only writer capable of
capturing contemporary social and individual complexity, since he
alone worked in close enough detail with an area he knew intimately.

This "dynamic concept of art"--that is, the idea that art must reflect an
ever-changing world--Garland first stated in an unpublished series of
lectures, "The Evolution of American Thought," and repeated again
and again in Crumbling Idols. "Life is always changing," he wrote,
"and literature changes with it. It never decays; it changes" (77). The
relativist position in artistic creation and criticism was that art is not a
matter of the imitation or use of the great works or ideas of the past,
but that "life is the model."

65
Garland, then, conceived of literature as his contemporaries in
American philosophy, the pragmatists--also founding their system
upon evolutionary thought--conceived of ideas. 3 Just as ideas were
not absolute because they must work in the world and the world is
ever changing, so art has no absolutes, but must reflect and interpret
an ever-changing world by means of new material and new forms.
And just as William James's pragmatism sets up a pluralistic universe
in which the individual is the source of truth, so Garland conceived of
artistic truth as pluralistic and as centered in the individual artist.

Garland derived this emphasis on impressionistic artistic truth from

his reading of Véron's Aesthetics shortly after he had formulated his
evolutionary critical system. In his extensively marked and annotated
copy of Véron he wrote on the first page of the Introduction: "This
book influenced me more than any other work on art. It entered into
all I thought and spoke and read for many years after it fell into my
hands about 1886." Véron's critical ideas appealed to Garland because
they were in a number of ways parallel to those he himself had just
formulated. In his opposition to the French Academy, Véron, who was
also the author of La supériorité des arts modernes sur les arts
anciens, was much in step with the contemporary ideas which had
influenced Garland. He too claimed to be using science as the basis
for his study, and he too demanded that the artist deal with life about
him, since evolution "must give birth to new forms of art appropriate
to the new forms of civilization." But whereas Garland had required
that local color be the means by which the artist keep pace with
evolution, Véron required a form of impressionism. "There are but
three ways open to art," he wrote, "the imitation of previous forms of
art; the realistic imitation of actual things; the manifestation of
individual impressions." Of these three forms of art, Véron argued that
only the last deserved the name, for "the determinant and essential
constituent of art, is the personality of the artist." But it should be
emphasized that Véron's impressionism was restricted and controlled
by his insistence that art be anchored in observed fact: "TRUTH and
PERSONALITY: These are the alpha and omega of art formulas;
truth as to facts, and the personality of the artist."

66
Here was a system which shared two characteristics of Garland's own
belief. It stressed the necessity for art to represent change, and it
required that this be done through the expression of individual
personality, the most important product of evolutionary progress from
homogeneity to heterogeneity. Garland was sufficiently impressed by
Véron's ideas to begin using them almost immediately. So, for
example, in noting a talk with his artist friend John Enneking in early
1887, Garland described Enneking's artistic principles in terms of
Véron's three kinds of art. Enneking had initially been "conventional"
and had "sought the ideal," Garland noted. He had then turned to
nature in an attempt to depict it "absolutely as it was." His third and
final stage was comparable to Véron's personal impression of
observed fact. "He now paints the effect of a scene. That is, he gives
us the natural as it affects him."

Garland had little difficulty placing Véron within his evolutionary

critical system, since an individual response to observed fact was but
another way, to Garland, of stating the idea of local color and all its
implications for American literature. For the only literature which
could reflect truthfully the life of a particular time and place was that
produced by the individual artist, unshackled by rules and
conventions, working in close harmony to that life. Garland wrote in
Crumbling Idols:

Art, I must insist, is an individual thing,--the question of one man

facing certain facts and telling his individual relations to them. His
first care must be to present his own concept. This is, I believe, the
essence of veritism: "Write of those things of which you know most,
and for which you care most. By so doing you will be true to yourself,
true to your locality, and true to your time." (35)

But as Garland pointed out in Crumbling Idols, "The sun of truth

strikes each part of the earth at a little different angle" (22). As truth is
relative in time because of evolutionary change, so it is relative in
place owing to the product of that change, the increased social
complexity and heightened individuality which have resulted from
evolutionary progress. The impressionist or veritist reflecting the life
around him cannot help being a local colorist, since by his reference to

67
nature he must needs represent the uniqueness of his particular area. In
Crumbling Idols Garland stated an aesthetic system in which
evolutionary ideas served as the intellectual foundation,
impressionism as the artistic method advocated, and local color as the
end product in the various arts.

Throughout Crumbling Idols Garland used impressionism and veritism

interchangeably. For example, he defined the two in almost exactly
similar terms. Impressionism was "the statement of one's own
individual perception of life and nature, guided by devotion to truth"
(50); while "This theory of the veritist is, after all, a statement of his
passion for truth and for individual expression" (21). He appears to
have derived the coined word veritism as an antonym for effectism,
Valdés's term (popularized by Howells) for the sensational in
literature. In an early article in Ibsen, Garland praised Ibsen's handling
of character because it followed "the general principle of verity first
and effect afterwards," and later in the same discussion he used the
word veritist for the first time. But for Garland, "true" art was
primarily the product of an individual response to observed fact, and
the term veritist soon received the impressionistic cast with which it is
used in Crumbling Idols.

Far from being the awkward yawp of a confused naturalist (as it

usually has been considered), Crumbling Idols embodies a coherent
aesthetic system. Central to this system--and the emotional center of
reference in all of Garland's thought-was the right and need of the
individual to be free. The artist must be freed from past and present
literary masters in order that he may perceive for himself the truth of
his own locality and thereby keep literature in step with evolutionary
progress. As Emerson had attempted to free the American scholar
from that which prevented him from perceiving truth for himself and
had called for men of letters to throw off the domination of Europe, so
Garland called upon the young writer of the West to interpret life for
himself and cast off his subservience to the East. And even Emerson
and Whitman--those fountainheads of American radical
individualism--would not have stated the doctrine of faith in the
individual artist more vigorously than Garland at the close of
Crumbling Idols:

68
Rise, O young man and woman of America! Stand erect! Face the
future with a song on your lips and the light of a broader day in your
eyes. Turn your back on the past, not in scorn, but injustice to the
future. Cease trying to be correct, and become creative. This is our
day. The past is not vital.... To know Shakespeare is good. To know
your fellow men is better. All that Shakespeare knew of human life,
you may know, but not at second hand, not through Shakespeare, not
through the eyes of the dead, but at first hand. (190-91)

Until some twenty years ago it was customary to begin any

consideration of Stephen Crane with an account of the critical neglect
of his work. This complaint is no longer justified, for there has been in
recent decades much critical interest in both Crane's biography and his
work. From the initial treat ment of Crane as an inexplicable genius,
as a literary "natural," there has evolved a conception of him as a
conscious and subtle craftsman and artist. From being considered as a
bright but short-lived and uninfluential meteor in the literary
firmament, he is now thought, somewhat exaggeratedly to be sure, to
have innovated the "two main technical movements of modern fiction-
-realism and symbolism."

My concern here, however, is not with the meaning or technique of

Crane's writing, but rather with the quality of mind and literary self-
confidence which led him to that writing. This self-confidence took
two literary forms--a choice of material which would shock, as in
Maggie ( 1893); and a willingness to trust his imagination in dealing
with material about which he knew little, as in The Red Badge of
Courage ( 1895). The story of a prostitute who was both a product and
a victim of her environment was perhaps not as contemporaneously
shocking as it was once thought to be, but to Crane, a young and
comparatively unread writer, it appeared so. He inscribed several
copies of Maggie with the admonition that "It is inevitable that you
will be greatly shocked by the book but continue, please, with all
possible courage, to the end."13 A serious author who will knowingly
shock his readers is an author confident of the correctness of his vision
of life, despite its being out of joint with conventional morality. And
an author who will--as Crane did in The Red Badge--trust his

69
imaginative conception of war and of its effects on men is just as
confident of the validity of his personal vision.

One reason for Crane's self-confidence suggests itself immediately.

Both Maggie and The Red Badge were written before Crane was
twenty-three. In Crane's case, however, the selfconfidence of a
youthful and temperamentally cocky personality was reinforced and
given an explicit rhetoric by the acceptance of an impressionistic
critical doctrine. A clue to the source of this doctrine lies in Crane's
lifelong sense of debt toward Hamlin Garland and William Dean
Howells. This sense of debt was undoubtedly derived in part from
Garland's and Howells's early aiding and championing of Crane. But it
also derived, it appears, from Crane's early adoption and use of a
particular critical idea of Garland's and Howells's.

In 1891, when Crane was nineteen and had as yet written little, he
spent the summer helping his brother report New Jersey shore news
for the New York Tribune. One of his assignments was to cover a
series of "Lecture Studies in American Literature and Expressive Art"
which Hamlin Garland was giving at the Avon-by-the-Sea Seaside
Assembly. Garland, at this time, was an enthusiastic advocate of
impressionism in painting and literature and was formulating and
writing the essays which would comprise Crumbling Idols. On August
17, Garland gave a lecture on Howells which Crane reported for the
Tribune. Garland, in discussing Howells's work and ideas, placed him
squarely in his own evolutionary, impressionistic critical system.
Howells, Crane reported Garland, believed in '"the progress of ideals,
the relative in art.'" He therefore '"does not insist upon any special
material, but only that the novelist be true to himself and to things as
he sees them.'" On the surface, it would appear that these remarks
would make little impression on a listener. But Crane not only heard
them, he reported them. Moreover, he immediately became acquainted
with Garland and spent some time with him at Avon that summer and
the next, when Garland again gave a lecture series and Crane again
reported shore news.

In 1895 Crane inscribed a copy of The Red Badge to Howells as a

token of the "veneration and gratitude of Stephen Crane for many

70
things he has learned of the common man and, above all, for a certain
readjustment of his point of view vic toriously concluded some time in
1892." About a year earlier he had written in a letter that in 1892 he
had renounced the "clever school in literature" and had "developed all
alone a little creed of art which I thought was a good one. Later I
discovered that my creed was identical with the one of Howells and
Garland." The important elements in these two statements of literary
indebtedness are Crane's realization of a debt to Howells and his
further realization of the similarity of his "little creed" with the critical
ideas of Garland and Howells. Whether Crane discovered his creed
"all alone" and merely received confirmation from Garland and
Howells, or whether he "victoriously concluded" his acceptance of the
creed after being introduced to it by Garland's statement of Howells's
belief, is perhaps not too important. Important, rather, is Crane's
derivation in 1892 of a concept of personal honesty and vision similar
to both Garland's idea--which Garland saw exemplified in Howells--
that "'the novelist [must] be true to himself and to things as he sees
them'" and Howells's own statement that the novelist should above all
"remember that there is no greatness, no beauty, which does not come
from truth to your own knowledge of things." Crane distinctly
parallels these statements in several of his sparsely recorded critical
remarks. In 1896, for example, he wrote: "I had no other purpose in
writing 'Maggie' than to show people to people as they seem to me. If
that be evil, make the most of it," Earlier that year he had stated this
idea even more elaborately: "I understand that a man is born into the
world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not at all responsible for his
vision--he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty."

Crane, then, entered the literary arena armed with a powerful weapon-
-a belief in the primacy of his personal vision. On a superficial level,
this faith led him to exploit and defend the unconventional and
forbidden in Maggie, confident of the validity of showing "people to
people as they seem to me." On a level of greater depth and
significance, his faith in his own vision led him to exploit his inner
eye, his imaginative conception of war and its effects. In both, Crane--
like Garland-was revealing an acceptance of the strain of romantic
individualism which demands that the artist above all be independent

71
and self-reliant, that he be confident that within himself lies the
touchstone of artistic truth.

FRANK NORRIS's definition of naturalism is important because an

understanding of his use of the term may help to explain both his own
practice of fiction and the more general American reaction to
Zolaesque literary principles. My reason for reintroducing the much-
debated question of Norris's definition is that I believe new light can
be shed on the subject by the examination of not only his wellknown
"A Plea for Romantic Fiction", but also his lessknown "Zola as a
Romantic Writer" and his relatively unknown "Weekly Letter" in the
Chicago American of August 3, 1901.

Norris placed realism, romanticism, and naturalism in a dialectic, in

which realism and romanticism were opposing forces, and naturalism
was transcending synthesis. Realism, to Norris, was the literature of
the normal and representative, "the smaller details of every-day life,
things that are likely to happen between lunch and supper."
Moreover, realism does not probe the inner reaches of life; it "notes
only the surface of things." Howells is Norris's archetype of the
realistic writer. Romanticism differs from realism both in its concern
for "variations from the type of normal life," and in its desire to
penetrate beneath the surface of experience and derive large
generalizations on the nature of life. Romanticism explores "the
unplumbed depths of the human heart, and the mystery of sex, and the
problems of life, and the black, unsearched penetralia of the soul of
man." To Norris "the greatest of all modern romanticists " is Hugo.

Now what of naturalism? Although Norris at times called Zola a

romanticist, it is clear that he intended in that designation to
emphasize Zola's lack of affinity to Howellsian realism rather than to
eliminate naturalism as a distinctive descriptive term. Naturalism, as
conceived by Norris, resolved the conflict between realism and
romanticism by selecting the best from these two modes and by
adding one constituent ignored by both. In his "Weekly Letter" to the
Chicago American of August 3, 1901, he partially described this
synthesis. He began with a distinction between Accuracy and Truth.
Accuracy is fidelity to particular detail; Truth is fidelity to the

72
generalization applicable to a large body of experience. Since a novel
may therefore be accurate in its depiction of a segment of life and yet
be untrue, Norris inquired what is the source of truth in fiction, if a
literal transcription of life itself is inadequate. He began to find his
way out of this dilemma when he asked:

It is permissible to say that Accuracy is realism and Truth

romanticism? The divisions seem natural and intended. It is not
difficult to be accurate, but it is monstrously difficult to be True; at
best the romanticists can only aim at it, while on the other hand, mere
accuracy as an easily obtainable result is for that reason less worthy.
Norris then asked:
Does Truth after all "lie in the middle"? And what school, then, is
midway between the Realists and Romanticists, taking the best from
each? Is it not the school of Naturalism, which strives hard for
accuracy, and truth? The nigger is out of the fence at last, but must it
not be admitted that the author of La Débâcle (not the author of La
Terre and Fécondité) is up to the present stage of literary development
the most adequate, the most satisfactory, the most just of them all?
Naturalism, in short, abstracts the best from realism and romanticism--
detailed accuracy and philosophical depth. In addition, naturalism
differs from both modes in one important characteristic of its subject
matter. As Norris explained in his Wave essay on "Zola as a Romantic
Writer":

That Zola's work is not purely romantic as was Hugo's lies chiefly in
the choice of Milieu. These great, terrible dramas no longer happen
among the personnel of a feudal and Renaissance nobility, those who
are in the fore-front of the marching world, but among the lower--
almost the lowest--classes; those who have been thrust or wrenched
from the ranks, who are falling by the roadway. This is not
romanticism--this drama of the people, working itself out in blood and
ordure. It is not realism. It is a school by itself, unique, somber,
powerful beyond words. It is naturalism.

What is particularly absorbing in this definition is that it is limited

entirely to subject matter and method. It does not mention

73
materialistic determinism or any other philosophical idea, and thus
differs from the philosophical orientation both of Zola's discussions of
naturalism and of those by modern critics of the movement. Norris
conceived of naturalism as a fictional mode which illustrated some
fundamental truth of life within a detailed presentation of the
sensational and low. Unlike Zola, however, he did not specify the
exact nature of the truth to be depicted, and it is clear that he believed
Hugo's "truth" as naturalistic as Zola's. With Norris's definition in
mind, then, we can perhaps understand his remark to Isaac Marcosson
that The Octopus was going to be a return to the "style" of McTeague-
-"straight naturalism." Although the early novel is consciously
deterministic in its treatment of human action and the later one
dramatizes a complex intermingling of free will and determinism, this
contradiction is nonexistent within the philosophical vacuum of
Norris's definition.

Norris's definition, however, is not only significant for his own

fictional practice. It also clarifies some fundamental characteristics of
the naturalistic movement in America. It suggests that for many
Americans influenced by European naturalistic currents, the
naturalistic mode involved primarily the contemporary, low, and
sensational, which was elaborately documented within a large
thematic framework. The writer might give his work a philosophical
center--indeed, the naturalistic mode encouraged such a practice. But
the core ideas or values present in particular works tended to be
strikingly diverse from author to author, as each writer approached his
material from an individual direction rather than from the direction of
an ideological school. American naturalism, in other words, has been
largely a movement characterized by similarities in material and
method, not by philosophical coherence. And perhaps this very
absence of a philosophical center to the movement has been one of the
primary reasons for its continuing strength in this country, unlike its
decline in Europe. For writers as different as Dreiser and Crane, or
Farrell and Faulkner, have responded to the exciting possibilities of a
combination of romantic grandioseness, detailed verisimilitude, and
didactic sensationalism, and yet, like Norris, have been able to shape
these possibilities into works expressing most of all their own
distinctive temperaments.

74
Stephen Crane's Maggie and American Naturalism
STEPHEN CRANE'S MAGGIE: A Girl of the Streets has often served
as an example of naturalistic fiction in America. Crane's novel about a
young girl's fall and death in the New York slums has many of the
distinctive elements of naturalistic fiction, particularly a slum setting
and the theme of the overpowering effect of environment. Crane
himself appeared to supply a naturalistic gloss to the novel when he
wrote to friends that Maggie was about the effect of environment on
human lives. Yet the novel has characteristics which clash with its
neat categorization as naturalistic fiction. For one thing, Crane's
intense verbal irony is seldom found in naturalistic fiction; for
another, Maggie herself, though she becomes a prostitute, is strangely
untouched by her physical environment. She functions as an almost
expressionistic symbol of inner purity uncorrupted by external
foulness. There is nothing, of course, to prevent a naturalist from
depending on irony and expressionistic symbolism, just as there is
nothing to prevent him from introducing a deterministic theme into a
Jamesian setting. But in practice the naturalist is usually di rect. He is
concerned with revealing the blunt edge of the powerful forces which
condition our lives, and his fictional technique is usually
correspondingly blunt and massive. When Zola in L'Assoramoir and
Nana wished to show the fall into prostitution of a child of the slums,
his theme emerged clearly and ponderously from his full description
of the inner as well as outer corruption of Nana and from his
"realistic" symbolism. Crane's method, on the other hand, is that of
obliqueness and indirection. Irony and expressionistic symbolism ask
the reader to look beyond literal meaning, to seek beyond the
immediately discernible for the underlying reality. Both are striking
techniques which by their compelling tone and their distortion of the
expected attempt to shock us into recognition that a conventional
belief or an obvious "truth" may be false and harmful. Perhaps, then,
Maggie can best be discussed by assuming from the first that Crane's
fictional techniques imply that the theme of the novel is somewhat
more complex than the truism that young girls in the slums are more
apt to go bad than young girls elsewhere.

75
The opening sentence of Maggie is: "A very little boy stood upon a
heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley." The sentence introduces
both Crane's theme and his ironic technique. By juxtaposing the value
of honor and the reality of a very little boy, a heap of gravel, and Rum
Alley, Crane suggests that the idea of honor is inappropriate to the
reality, that it serves to disguise from the participants in the fight that
they are engaged in a vicious and petty scuffle. Crane's irony emerges
out of the difference between a value which one imposes on
experience and the nature of experience itself. His ironic method is to
project into the scene the values of its participants in order to
underline the difference between their values and reality. So the scene
has a basic chivalric cast. The very little boy is a knight fighting on his
citadel of gravel for the honor of his chivalrous pledge to Rum Alley.
Crane's opening sentence sets the theme for Maggie because the novel
is essentially about man's use of conventional but inapplicable abstract
values (such as justice, honor, duty, love, and respectability) as
weapons or disguises. The novel is not so much about the slums as a
physical reality as about what people believe in the slums and how
their beliefs are both false to their experience and yet function as
operative forces in their lives.

Let me explore this idea by examining first the lives of the novel's
principal characters and then the moral values which control their
thinking about their lives. Crane uses two basic images to depict the
Bowery. It is a battlefield and it is a prison. These images appear
clearly in the novel's first three chapters, which describe an evening
and night in the life of the Johnson family during Maggie's childhood.
The life of the family is that of fierce battle with those around them
and among themselves. The novel opens with Jimmie fighting the
children of Devil's Row. He then fights one of his own gang. His
father separates them with a blow. Maggie mistreats the babe
Tommie; Jimmie strikes Maggie; Mrs. Johnson beats Jimmie for
fighting. Mr. and Mrs. Johnson quarrel. Mrs. Johnson beats Maggie
for breaking a plate; Mr. Johnson strikes Jimmie with an empty beer
pail. Mr. Johnson comes home drunk and he and Mrs. Johnson fight--
all this in three rather short chapters. Crane's fundamental point in
these chapters is that the home is not a sanctuary from the struggle and
turmoil of the world but is rather where warfare is even more intense

76
and where the animal qualities encouraged by a life of battle--strength,
fear, and cunning--predominate. The slum and the home are not only
battlefields, however, but are also enclosed arenas. Maggie's tenement
is in a "dark region," and her apartment, "up dark stairways and along
cold, gloomy halls" (12, 15), is like a cave. Crane's description of the
Johnson children eating combines both the warfare and cave images
into one central metaphor of primitive competition for food: "The
babe sat with his feet dangling high from a precarious infant chair and
gorged his small stomach. Jimmie forced, with feverish rapidity, the
greaseenveloped pieces between his wounded lips. Maggie, with side
glances of fear of interruption, ate like a small pursued tigress" (19-
20). By means of this double pattern of imagery, Crane suggests that
the Johnsons' world is one of fear, fury, and darkness, that it is a world
in which no moral laws are applicable, since the Johnsons'
fundamental guide to conduct is an instinctive amorality, a need to
feed and to protect themselves.

Once introduced, this image of the Bowery as an amoral, animal

world is maintained throughout Maggie. Mr. Johnson dies, Jimmie
assumes his position, and the Johnsons' family warfare continues as
before. Maggie and Jimmie go to work, and each finds that struggle
and enclosure mark his adult world. Jimmie becomes a belligerent
truck driver, imprisoned by his ignorance and his distrust. He respects
only strength in the form of the red fire engine which has the power to
crush his wagon. Maggie works in a prisonlike sweat shop where she
is chided into resentment by her grasping employer. Theirs are lives of
animal struggle and of spiritual bleakness in which they only faintly
realize their own deprivation. Maggie sits with the other girls in her
factory workroom in a vague state of "yellow discontent," and Jimmie,
the brawling teamster, "nevertheless..., on a certain starlit evening,
said wonderingly and quite reverently: 'Deh moon looks like hell,
don't it?'" (40).

The moral values held by the Johnsons are drawn almost entirely from
a middle-class ethic which stresses the home as the center of virtue,
and respectability as the primary moral goal. It is a value system
oriented toward approval by others, toward an audience. In the
opening chapter of the novel, Jimmie hits Maggie as Mr. Johnson is

77
taking them home. Mr. Johnson cries, "'Leave yer sister alone on the
street'" (14) (my italics). The Johnsons' moral vision is dominated by
moral roles which they believe are expected of them. These roles
bring social approbation, and they are also satisfying because the
playing of them before an audience encourages a gratifying
emotionalism or self-justification. The reaction to Maggie's fall is
basically of this nature. She is cast out by her mother and brother for
desecrating the Home, and her seducer, Pete, rejects her plea for aid
because she threatens the respectability of the rough and tumble bar in
which he works. The moral poses adopted by the Johnsons and by
Pete have no relation to reality, however, since the home and the bar
are parallel settings of warfare rather than of virtue.

The key to the morality of the Bowery is therefore its selfdeceiving

theatricality. Those expressing moral sentiments do so as though
playing a role before a real or implied audience. Crane makes the
dramatic nature of Bowery morality explicit in scenes set in dance
halls and theatres. In a dance hall, an audience of Maggies, Jimmies,
and Petes listens enraptured to a song "whose lines told of a mother's
love and a sweetheart who waited and a young man who was lost at
sea under the most harrowing circumstances" (61-62). Later, Maggie
and Pete see plays in which the heroine was rescued from the palatial
home of her guardian, who is cruelly after her bonds, by the hero with
the beautiful sentiments. ... Maggie lost herself in sympathy with the
wanderers swooning in snow storms beneath happy-hued church
windows. And a choir within singing "Joy to the World." To Maggie
and the rest of the audience this was transcendental realism. Joy
always within, and they, like the actor, inevitably without. Viewing it,
they hugged themselves in ecstatic pity of their imagined or real
condition. (70)

The audience identifies itself with maligned and innocent virtue

despite the inapplicability of these roles to their own lives. "Shady
persons in the audience revolted from the pictured villainy of the
drama. With untiring zeal they hissed vice and applauded virtue.
Unmistakably bad men evinced an apparently sincere admiration for
virtue" (71).

78
This same ability to project oneself into a virtuous role is present in
most of the novel's characters. Each crisis in the Johnson family is
viewed by neighbors who comprise an audience which encourages the
Johnsons to adopt moral poses. In the scene in which Maggie is cast
out, both Jimmie and Mrs. Johnson are aware of their need to play the
roles of outraged virtue in response to the expectations of their
audience. Mrs. Johnson addresses the nieghbors "like a glib
showman," and with a "dramatic finger" points out to them her errant
daughter (132-33). The novel's final scene is a parody of Bowery
melodrama. Mrs. Johnson mourns over the dead Maggie's baby shoes
while the neighbors cry in sympathy and the "woman in black" urges
her to forgive Maggi. In the midst of her exhortations, "The woman in
black raised her face and paused. The inevitable sunlight came
streaming in at the windows" (161). Crane in this scene connects the
sentimental morality of melodrama and the sactimoniousness of
Bowery religion. Both the theatre and the mission purvey moral
attitudes which have no relation to life but which rather satisfy
emotional needs or social approval. The heroes and heroines of
melodrama cannot be confronted with reality, but the church is
occasionally challenged. When it is, as when the mission preacher is
asked why he never says "we" instead of "you," or when Maggie seeks
aid from the stout clergyman, its reaction is either nonidentification
with reality ("'What?'" asks the preacher) or withdrawal from it (the
clergyman sidesteps Maggie). It is as though the church, too, were a
sentimental theatre which encouraged moral poses but which ignored
the essential nature of itself and its audience.

Both of these central characteristics of the Bowery--its core of

animality and its shell of moral poses--come together strikingly in
Mrs. Johnson. There is a bitter Swiftian irony in Crane's portrait of
her. Her drunken rages symbolize the animal fury of a slum home, and
her quickness to judge, condemn, and cast out Maggie symbolizes the
self-righteousness of Bowery morality. In a sense she symbolizes the
entire Bowery world, both its primitive amorality and its sentimental
morality. It is appropriate, then, that it is she who literally drives
Maggie into prostitution and eventual death. Secure in her moral role,
she refuses to allow Maggie to return home after her seduction by
Pete, driving her into remaining with Pete and then into prostitution.

79
Maggie is thus destroyed not so much by the physical reality of slum
life as by a middleclass morality imposed on the slums by the
missions and the melodrama, a morality which allows its users both to
judge and to divorce themselves from responsibility from those they
judge.

Crane's characterization of Maggie can now be examined. His

description of her as having "blossomed in a mud puddle" with "none
of the dirt of Rum Alley... in her veins" (41) is not "realistic," since it
is difficult to accept that the slums would have no effect on her
character. Zola's portrait of Nana dying of a disfiguring disease which
symbolizes her spiritual as well as physical corruption is more
convincing. Crane's desire, however, was to stress that the vicious
deterministic force in the slums was its morality, not its poor housing
or inadequate diet, and it is this emphasis which controls his
characterization of Maggie. His point is that Maggie comes through
the mud puddle of her physical environment untouched. It is only
when her environment becomes a moral force that she is destroyed.
Maggie as an expressionistic symbol of purity in a mud puddle is
Crane's means of enforcing his large irony that purity is destroyed not
by concrete evils but by the very moral codes established to safeguard
it.

But Maggie is a more complex figure than the above analysis

suggests. For though her world does not affect her moral nature, it
does contribute to her downfall by blurring her vision. Her primary
drive in life is to escape her mud puddle prison, and she is drawn to
Pete because his apparent strength and elegance offer a means of
overcoming the brutality and ugliness of her home and work. Her
mistaken conception of Pete results from her enclosed world, a world
which has given her romantic illusions just as it has supplied others
with moral poses. Her mistake warrants compassion, however, rather
than damnation and destruction. She is never really immoral.
Throughout her fall, from her seduction by Pete to her plunge into the
East River, Crane never dispels the impression that her purity and
innocence remain. Her weakness is compounded out of the facts that
her amoral environment has failed to arm her with moral strength (she
"would have been more firmly good had she better known why"

80
[115]), while at the same time it has blinded her with self-destructive
romantic illusions ("she wondered if the culture and refinement she
had seen imitated... by the heroine on the stage, could be acquired by a
girl who lived in a tenement house and worked in a shirt factory" [72-
73]).

There is considerable irony that in choosing Pete, Maggie flees into

the same world she wished to escape. Like Mrs. Johnson, Pete desires
to maintain the respectability of his "home," the bar in which he
works. Like her, he theatrically purifies himself of guilt and
responsibility for Maggie's fall as he drunkenly sobs "'I'm good f'ler,
girls'" (150) to an audi ence of prostitutes. And like Maggie herself, he
is eventually a victim of sexual warfare. He is used and discarded by
the "woman of brilliance and audacity" just as he had used and
discarded Maggie. In short, Maggie can escape the immediate prison
of her home and factory, but she cannot escape being enclosed by the
combination of amoral warfare (now sexual) and moral poses which is
the pervasive force in her world.

In his famous inscription to Maggie, Crane wrote that the novel "tries
to show that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and
frequently shapes lives regardless." But he went on to write that "if
one proves that theory one makes room in Heaven for all sorts of souls
(notably an occasional street girl) who are not confidently expected to
be there by many excellent people." 3 The second part of the
inscription contains an attack on the "many excellent people" who,
like Maggie's mother, immediately equate a fallen girl with evil and
hell. Crane is here not so much expressing a belief in heaven as using
the idea of salvation and damnation as a rhetorical device to attack
smug, self-righteous moralism. The entire novel bears this critical
intent. Crane's focus in Maggie is less on the inherent evil of slum life
than on the harm done by a false moral environment imposed on that
life. His irony involving Mrs. Johnson, for example, centers on the
religious and moral climate which has persuaded her to adopt the
moral poses of outraged Motherhood and despoiled Home.

Maggie is thus a novel primarily about the falsity and destructiveness

of certain moral codes. To be sure, these codes and their analogous

81
romantic visions of experience are present in Maggie's environment,
and are in part what Crane means when he wrote that environment
shapes lives regardless. But Crane's ironic technique suggests that his
primary goal was not to show the effects of environment but to distin
guish between moral appearance and reality, to attack the
sanctimonious self-deception and sentimental emotional gratification
of moral poses. He was less concerned with dramatizing a
deterministic philosophy than in assailing those who apply a middle
class morality to victims of amoral, uncontrollable forces in man and
society. Maggie is therefore very much like such early Dreiser novels
as Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, though Dreiser depends less on
verbal irony and more on an explicit documentation and discussion of
the discrepancy between an event and man's moral evaluation of an
event. Maggie is also like The Red Badge of Courage, for the later
novel seeks to demonstrate the falsity of a moral or romantic vision of
the amorality which is war.

Crane, then, is a naturalistic writer in the sense that he believes that

environment molds lives. But he is much more than this, for his
primary concern is not a dispassionate, pessimistic tracing of
inevitable forces but a satiric assault on weaknesses in social morality.
He seems to be saying that though we may not control our destinies,
we can at least destroy those systems of value which uncritically
assume we can. If we do this, a Maggie (or a Jennie Gerhardt) will at
least be saved from condemnation and destruction by an unjust code.

Writers who seek greater justice, who demand that men evaluate their
experience with greater clarity and honesty, are not men who despair
at the nature of things. They are rather critical realists. Like William
Dean Howells, Crane wishes us to understand the inadequacies of our
lives so that we may improve them. Although Crane stresses
weaknesses in our moral vision rather than particular social abuses,
there is more continuity between Howells's critical realism and
Crane's naturalism than one might suspect. This continuity is not that
of subject matter or even of conception of man and society. It is rather
that of a belief in the social function of the novel in delineating the
evils of social life. If one sees such a writer as Crane in this light, the
often crude and outdated determinism of early American naturalism

82
lessens in importance. One begins to realize that American naturalism,
like most vital literary movements, comprised a body of convention
and assumption about the function and nature of literature which
unprescriptively allowed the writer to use this shared belief as the
basis for a personally expressive work of art. Crane's fiction is
therefore permanently absorbing and historically significant not
because he was a determinist or fatalist writing about the slums or
about the chaos of war. His fiction still excites because his ironic
technique successfully involves us in the difference between moral
appearance and reality in society. His fiction is historically important
because his expression of this theme within the conventions of
naturalistic fiction reveals the relationship between critical realism and
naturalism. But his fiction is perhaps even more significant
historically because he revealed the possibility of a uniquely personal
style and vision within naturalistic conventions. Our writers have
responded to the critical spirit and the fictional sensationalism and
freedom of naturalism without a sense of being burdened by
doctrinaire precepts and forms. And it is no doubt this invigorating
freedom within continuity which has been one of the principal reasons
for the strength and influence of the naturalistic movement in
America, from Crane and Dreiser to our own times.

83
Frank Norris's The Octopus
ONE OF THE most significant movements in the interpretation of
American literature during the 1950s and 1960s was the revitalization
of the critical method pioneered by V. L. Parrington in the 1920s. Like
Parrington, such writers as Marius Bewley, Richard Chase, Leslie
Fiedler, and Leo Marx synthesized "main currents" in American
literature and thought. Again like Parrington, they posited initially a
universal dialectic in American experience which accounts for the
distinctively American quality of these patterns in our culture. In
many ways this movement was estimable. It illumined large areas of
our national experience and expression. It also proved that a brilliant
critic can forge intellectual history and myth criticism into an exciting
and revealing tool of cultural research.

Yet despite my admiration for much synthetic criticism, I am troubled

by certain misgivings and reservations concerning its usefulness as a
tool of literary criticism, and would like to explain these doubts. My
example of a work of synthetic criticism is Leo Marx's "Two
Kingdoms of Force," an article which I will examine in relation to
Frank Norris's The Octopus. I choose Mr. Marx as an example of a
synthetic critic because I find him the most satisfying and the most
suggestive of the group I have named, and am therefore moved to
examine his critical method as representative of the group. I choose
The Octopus as my example of a literary work not because I wish to
explicate it (I have published explications elsewhere), and not because
Mr. Marx's comments on it are more or less satisfying than those on
other works. Rather, I know more about Norris's novel than any other
work discussed by Mr. Marx, and can best demonstrate my general
thesis by using it. In addition, I will introduce W. F. Taylor's The
Economic Novel in America to help clarify the issues involved in my
discussion.

Mr. Marx believes that a "common denominator" in much American

literature is "the opposition between two cardinal images of value.
One usually is an image of landscape, either wild or, if cultivated,
rural; the other is an image of industrial technology." This opposition
is not the result of a writer's direct reference to the historical fact of
industrialism. Rather, the impact of industrialism has caused opposing

84
"psychic states" to cluster around the opposing images of the
landscape and the machine. These states are above all those
suggesting love on the one hand and power on the other--that is,
accommodation to the organic creativity of nature or dominion over
nature. Though at first certain romantic writers ( Hawthorne, Thoreau)
consciously symbolized this opposition by means of images of nature
and the machine, within a short time the dramatic clash between
nature and machine became crystallized into a literary convention
whose use suggests a writer's subconscious acceptance of the conflict
rather than his explicit reference to it. Whether conscious or not,
however, the polarity between the kingdom of love and the kingdom
of power--almost always represented by images of nature and
technology--is to Mr. Marx "a dominant, probably the dominant theme
in our literature."

In a key passage, Mr. Marx explains that in Huckleberry Finn the

destruction of the raft by the steamboat reveals Twain's participation
in this theme despite Twain's avowed faith in industrial progress and
despite his lack of conscious symbolism in the incident. "In the face of
a discrepancy," Mr. Marx writes, "between what a writer tells us
directly, in his own words, so to speak, and what is implied by his
work, it is to his work that we owe the more serious attention. As
between mere opinion and the indirection of art, we assume that art
springs from the more profound and inclusive experience. "

Almost all the literary works and passages cited by Mr. Marx to
support his view are highly persuasive, including the scene in The
Octopus in which Presley experiences the massacre of a flock of sheep
by a railroad engine. This incident, Mr. Marx points out, destroys the
idyllic calm of the scene as well as Presley's sense of oneness with
nature. Norris's presentation of the railroad and nature thus appears
little different from that of a Hawthorne or Thoreau. Mr. Marx
concludes: "Presley listens to the agonized cries of the wounded
animals and the blood seeping down into the cinders, and thus the
theme of the novel is set."

In his discussion of The Octopus, Mr. Marx has followed a procedure

common in synthetic criticism: the critic derives a broad pattern from

85
particular images, passages, and scenes in a large number of works by
many authors; he then implies that this pattern is the key to the themes
of individual works. The opportunities for error and misdirection in
this method are familiar to readers of doctoral dissertations which
survey extensive material. In such works the student establishes a
tradition, "places" particular authors in this tradition, and finally
deduces an interpretation and evaluation of individual works in terms
of the author's tradition. On a more sophisticated level the same
danger is inherent in works of synthetic criticism.

Let me begin to explain more concretely the source of my doubts

about synthetic criticism by comparing Mr. Marx's interpretation of
late nineteenth-century American fiction with that of W. F. Taylor,
who has written one of the standard works on the subject. Mr. Taylor
studies the economic fiction (in a broad sense) of most of the major
figures of the age-Howells, Twain, Norris, and Garland--and of many
minor writers as well. He believes that the novelists of this period put
on record--indeed, with virtual unanimity they put on favorable
record--the coming of the Machine. Seldom if ever do they make the
machine per se the object of critical attack.... In America, in the course
of the conquest of the immense distances, the immense resources of a
continent, the usefulness of the Machine was a thing difficult indeed
to call in question; and, whether because of a tacit understanding of
that difficulty, or because of some other causative factor, American
novelists practically never did so. Instead, they mostly agreed with
Mark Twain in welcoming the Machine, seeing in mechanical power,
properly controlled, simply a means of realizing the old democratic
dream of universal material well-being.

What American novelists put on unfavorable record, what they

subjected to telling exposure and criticism, was not the Machine itself
but the misuse of the Machine by Society; not industrialism per se, but
the workings of an industrial order administered by a laissezfaire
capitalism.

Mr. Taylor thus states a "pattern" antithetical to Mr. Marx's. If one

reads The Octopus in terms of Mr. Taylor, its theme is the misuse of
the machine by an uncontrolled monopoly rather than distrust and fear

86
of the machine itself. But perhaps the antithesis between Mr. Marx
and Mr. Taylor demonstrates not that one is right and the other wrong,
but that The Octopus is a complex novel which is many things to
many critics. Perhaps, too, this antithesis can be resolved by a reading
of the novel which tries to come to grips with its own intrinsic pattern.

Norris borrowed from Joseph LeConte, one of his teachers at the

University of California, the idea that God is immanent in nature as a
universal force or energy, and he used this idea as the core theme of
The Octopus. As Presley views the harvested wheat fields toward the
end of the novel, he "seemed for one instant to touch the explanation
of existence." The explanation is that "FORCE only existed--FORCE
that brought men into the world, FORCE that crowded them out of it
to make way for the succeeding generation, FORCE that made the
wheat grow, FORCE that garnered it from the soil to give place to the
succeeding crop. " This universal force inherent in the life processes
of both human and nonhuman existence is finally characterized by
Presley as "primordial energy flung out from the hand of the Lord God
himself, immortal, calm, infinitely strong." 5 In The Octopus this
energy is symbolized primarily by the wheat and by the processes of
its growth and the "laws" of its production and distribution. Although
these processes and laws are impersonal, they benefit the race as a
whole. Individuals or groups determine their personal destinies by
recognizing these processes--that is, by recognizing God in nature--
and by tuning their lives in accord with them.

The moral center of the novel is thus nature, and evil is the failure to
understand the processes of nature or the attempt to thwart them.
Within this thematic core, the novel has a twofold structure. First,
three overly intellectual and fundamentally selfish young men--
Annixter, Vanamee, and Presley-come to accept the benevolence and
the omnipotence of the natural cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. By
this action, they rise above their personal sorrows and narrowness, and
thereby achieve contentment and a resolution of their problem.
Second, the ranchers and the railroad fail to realize the omnipotence
and benevolence of the natural law of supply and demand which
determines the production and the distribution of wheat. Both groups
greedily exploit the demand for wheat, the first by speculative

87
"bonanza" farming, the second by monopoly of transportation. Norris
hammers at this similarity early in Book 2 in parallel images of the
ranchers and railroad "sucking dry" the land. First, he describes a
railroad map of California, on which the railroad's lines are drawn in
red:

The map was white, and it seemed as if all the colour which should
have gone to vivify the various counties, towns, and cities marked
upon it had been absorbed by that huge, sprawling organism, with its
ruddy arteries converging to a central point. It was as though the State
had been sucked white and colourless, and against this pallid
background the red arteries of the monster stood out, swollen with
life-blood, reaching out to infinity, gorged to bursting; an excrescence,
a gigantic parasite fattening upon the life-blood of an entire
commonwealth. (II,5)

The greed of the railroad is matched by that of the ranchers, however,

for

they had no love for their land. They were not attached to the
soil. They worked their ranches as a quarter of a century
before they had worked their mines. To husband the resources
of their marvellous San Joaquin, they considered niggardly,
petty, Hebraic. To get all there was out of the land, to squeeze
it dry, to exhaust it, seemed their policy. When, at last, the
land worn out, would refuse to yield, they would invest their
money in something else; by then, they would all have made
fortunes. They did not care. "After us the deluge."(II, 14)

Both groups, moreover, engaged in corrupt acts in their struggle for

possession of the profitable land and its crop. There is no doubt, of
course, that Norris considered the railroad trust the more culpable of
the two, and that he indirectly suggested means of alleviating its hold
upon the community. But Norris's primary emphasis was that the
benevolent cycle of growth and the fulfilment of demand by supply
are completed regardless of whatever harm and destruction men bring
down upon themselves by their attempts to hinder or to manipulate
these natural processes for their own profit. 6

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The symbolic role of the railroad engine throughout The Octopus is
conditioned by the theme of the novel. Individual engines, such as that
which destroys the flock of sheep, do not symbolize the machine as a
power antithetical to that of nature. Rather, they symbolize a particular
railroad company whose monopolistic practices are antithetical to a
particular natural law. Norris underlines this symbolism at the close of
the passage which ends the description of the sheep massacre:

Then, faint and prolonged, across the levels of the ranch, he heard the
engine whistling for Bonneville. Again and again, at rapid intervals in
its flying course, it whistled for road crossings, for sharp curves, for
trestles; ominous notes, hoarse, bellowing, ringing with the accents of
menace and defiance; and abruptly Presley saw again, in his
imagination, the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with
its single eye, Cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon; but
saw it now as the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the
echo of its thunder over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood
and destruction in its path; the leviathan, with tentacles of steel
clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the ironhearted Power, the
monster, the Colossus, the Octopus. (I, 48)

The engine, then, is above all a symbol of the Octopus-that is, the
Trust. The monopoly is the soulless Force whose practices, spreading
death and destruction, are opposed to the landscape ("tentacles of steel
clutching into the soil"). Norris desires to engage our emotions to fear
and hate trusts, not industrialism or the machine. His theme in the
novel is not the conflict between technology and nature or between the
kingdom of power and the kingdom of love, as Mr. Marx suggests it is
in his discussion of the sheep massacre scene. His theme is that "all
things, surely, inevitably, resistlessly work together for good" (II,
361), that technology and the landscape are allied rather than
oppossed in the forward thrust toward human betterment. They are
allied, that is, so long as men use both landscape and machine (the
means of production and distribution of wheat) in accordance with
natural law.

Norris illustrates this possible alliance by means of Cedarquist, a San

Francisco industrialist and shipbuilder. Early in Book 2 Cedarquist

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outlines to Magnus Derrick a plan whereby the producers and
distributors of wheat can use the law of supply and demand in a way
which benefits both themselves and mankind. He explains:

The great word of this nineteenth century has been Production. The
great word of the twentieth century will be... Markets. As a market for
our Production--or let me take a concrete example--as a market for our
Wheat, Europe is played out. Population in Europe is not increasing
fast enough to keep up with the rapidity of our production. In some
cases, as in France, the population is stationary. We, however, have
gone on producing wheat at a tremendous rate. The result is
overproduction. We supply more than Europe can eat, and down go
the prices. The remedy is not in the curtailing of our wheat areas, but
in this, we must have new markets, greater markets. For years we have
been sending our wheat from East to West, from California to Europe.
But the time will come when we must send it from West to East.... I
mean, we must look to China. Rice in China is losing its nutritive
quality. The Asiatics, though, must be fed; if not on rice, then on
wheat.... What fatuous neglect of op portunity to continue to deluge
Europe with our surplus food when the East trembles upon the verge
of starvation! (II, 21-22)

On the basis of this perception, Cedarquist begins to ship wheat to the

East. In short, the "mechanical" distributor (a railroad or shipping
company) can with profit to himself aid the fulfillment of a benevolent
natural law rather than attempt to thwart the operation of the law for
excessive personal gain.

Norris therefore does establish a kingdom of love, but he not

unconventionally suggests that it is the kingdom of selflove, of greed--
not of power--which opposes it. In other words, Norris's basic attitude
corresponds less to the artist's sense that there is a contradiction
between the worlds of nature and the machine than to the capacity of
the popular mind to maintain without a sense of contradiction the
opposing ideals of cultural primitivism and industrial progress. Norris
holds in solution, without conflict, both the kingdom of love
(accommodation to nature) and of power (dominion over nature), just
as most eighteenth-century Englishmen (as Lois Whitney has pointed

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out) called for both a return to the simple and a progress toward the
complex, and just as the average American feels no discrepancy in
taking a jet to "get away from it all" in the North Woods.

Now in this cursory summary of The Octopus I have not taken up

what Mr. Marx considers "direct" testimony as evidence concerning
Norris's attitude toward the machine. I have not, for example,
discussed his California background, in which the importance of the
railroad to the well-being of the state was universally affirmed but in
which the Southern Pacific monopoly was often referred to as an
Octopus. I have not traced those occasions in Norris's fiction and
criticism when he deals honorifically with the industrialist and with
machines, including railroad engines. I have not introduced the
influence of Kipling, who combined in such works as Captains
Courageous an admiration both for the "natural" life and for railroads
and their machinery. Nor have I discussed Zola's influence on Norris's
depiction of destructive railroad engines and on his practice of
animalizing machines. I have not taken up any of these, though they
have all helped me to understand Norris's treatment of the railroad in
The Octopus.

But to return to one of Mr. Marx's most pertinent ideas (which he

introduces in connection with Huck's raft and the steamboat), that
though a fictional incident may not be literally symbolic of a nature-
machine conflict, it may draw upon the conventional imagery and
connotations of such a conflict. This observation is applicable to The
Octopus. Though Norris does not distrust the machine, he does
mistrust monopolies. He therefore uses the conventional imagery of
the machinenature "pattern" to add emotional intensity to his
engineOctopus-Trust symbolism. In short, the machine-nature
antithesis serves Norris as a reservoir of affective imagery, though it
does not necessarily function as a thematic key.

Norris's exploitation of the machine as a source of such imagery is

also demonstrated by a passage in which nature itself is presented as a
destructive machine. In this passage, Norris wished to depict how the
omnipotent and impersonal power of nature appears to a timid,
withdrawn, and frightened person, one whose timidity prevents her

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from sensing the fundamental benevolence of this power. To Mrs.
Derrick, therefore, the railroad and nature are equally destructive
because of their power. She first imagines the railroad (repeating
Presley's imagery) as a "galloping terror of steam and steel, with its
single eye, Cyclopean, red," etc. (I, 173). Then follows her conception
of nature:

She recognized the colossal indifference of nature, not hostile, even

kindly and friendly, so long as the human ant-swarm was submis sive,
working with it, hurrying along at its side in the mysterious march of
the centuries. Let, however, the insect rebel, strive to make head
against the power of this nature, and at once it became relentless, a
gigantic engine, a vast power, huge, terrible; a leviathan with a heart
of steel, knowing no compunction, no forgiveness, no tolerance,
crushing out the human atom with soundless calm, the agony of
destruction sending never a jar, never the faintest tremor through all
that prodigious mechanism of wheels and cogs. (I, 174)

Thus, it is apparent that Norris draws upon machine imagery to

provide emotional intensity to the description of any destructive force,
including nature itself when it is so conceived. This reliance does
indeed imply that despite his overt emphasis on the benevolent role of
the machine, Norris unconsciously participates in the "main current"
described by Mr. Marx. But I do not think that it is possible on the
basis of this participation to say that The Octopus is "really about" the
two kingdoms of force--that is, that its theme is set by its imagery of
the destructive machine.

Rather, I think it more meaningful to say that Mr. Taylor has seen that
Norris's theme involves an attack on the misuse of the machine, and
that Mr. Marx has seen that Norris relies on a traditional romantic
description of the machine. Both have described parts of Norris's
theme and art in The Octopus; neither has seen the novel whole; and
neither, indeed, have I in this brief paper.

How, then, to strive for this "wholeness"? I would suggest a critical

eclecticism. To know something of Norris's biography, of the
intellectual and literary influences upon him, and of his social milieu--

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to read The Octopus with a sense of its total impact and with a
recognition that its parts (including imagery and symbolism) should
be relevant to that impact-and to know something about such cultural
traditions as the "two kingdoms of force"--this seems to me to be the
best method for determining the meaning and significance of a
complex work of art. The conflict between the two kingdoms of force
may well be the dominant theme in American literature, and Norris
does partake of that theme in The Octopus. But the theme of The
Octopus is not "set" by scenes in which one element is the
conventional imagery of the destructive machine.

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Jack London
MOST OF THE significant criticism of Jack London has been devoted
to two interrelated issues: Is there a coherent center to London's ideas
or are they indeed hopelessly confused and contradictory; and what
are the sources of London's strength and appeal as a writer given the
superficiality of much of his work? So, for example, critics have often
grappled with the relationship between London's socialism and
Nietzscheanism, and they have sought to explain how a writer who
could achieve the seamless perfection of "To Build a Fire" could also
produce an extraordinary amount of trash. Whatever the value of these
efforts, almost all have been piecemeal in character. The critic tackles
a particular narrow problem or a specific work and then extrapolates
from it. At the considerable risk of moving to the other extreme of
overschematization and overgeneralization, I would like to suggest a
single dominant solution to the enigma which is Jack London. The
notion which I propose to pursue is that London as a thinker and as an
artist is essentially a writer of fables and parables.

To help clear the ground, I should note that I do not maintain that
there is a clear distinction between the fable and the parable. 1 Both
forms are didactic. They seek to establish the validity of a particular
moral truth by offering a brief story in which plot, character, and
setting are allegorical agents of a paraphrasable moral. But
historically, because of the association of fable with Aesop and of
parable with the Bible, each of the terms also has a more specialized
coloration. By fable is usually meant a work in which beasts (and
occasionally inanimate objects) both speak and represent human
qualities, and by parable is meant a work in which the principal agents
are human. Furthermore, the moral of a fable is apt to be far more
worldly than that of a parable. Fables deal with how men act on earth,
parables with how they should act to gain salvation.

Fables and parables are not fiction in our modern sense of the
distinctive nature of fiction. They simplify experience into useable
precept rather than render it as either complex or ambivalent. But in
that simplification lies a potential for artistic strength if artistry in this
instance can be said to be the restatement in pleasing form of what we
as a race or society wish to hear about ourselves. The special appeal of

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the beast fable is that it substitutes wit for insight; it expresses not
deep or fresh perception but rather a concise and clever recapitulation
of what everybody knows. In the beast fable foxes are always shrewd,
lions bold, hawks predatory, sheep silly, asses stupid, and so on.
Setting is nonexistent or minimal and when present is a condition of
the moral dilemma in which the beasts find themselves (a forest is
danger, a barn safety). And action is limited to that which renders
immediately and clearly the heart of the precept.

Much of the attraction of the fable lies not only in our pleasure in
finding clearly recognizable human characteristics confirmed in
animals but in the nature of the precepts which these characteristics
advance. For the wisdom of the fable is the ancient wisdom of the
world--that the shrewd and strong prevail unless blinded by pride, that
greed is a great equalizer, and so on. The lesson of the fable is that the
world is a place of seeking and grasping in which specific qualities of
human nature always receive their just dessert. In the fable, vanity is
always victimized by shrewdness, disappointment always seeks
rationalization, and desire for gain guides all life.

Parable often moves beyond the way we are to the way we should be.
While the precept of a fable is both concrete and expedient (be less
vain and you shall prosper more), that of a parable tends toward moral
abstractions (be charitable and you will be a better person). And since
the ability to frame and respond to moral abstractions is a distinctively
human attribute, the personae in a parable are almost always human.

By the late nineteenth century, whatever lines of demarcation that

might have existed earlier between fable and parable had for the most
part disappeared. In Kipling's The Jungle Book, for example, the
worldliness of the beast fable and the more programmatic moralism of
the parable join in clear allegories containing both animal and human
characters. It was to this blending of the fable/parable form that
London was powerfully drawn.

It seems strange today that the principal critical issue for many early
readers of the most obviously fabulistic of London's fiction, his dog
stories, was their problematical accuracy in depicting the conditions of

95
natural life. After the great success of The Call of the Wild and White
Fang (as well as the contemporary popularity of other nature fiction),
Theodore Roosevelt, in a famous controversy of 1907, attacked Lon
don (among others) as a "nature faker." Referring to the fight between
a lynx and a wolf in White Fang, Roosevelt commented, "Nobody
who really knew anything about either a lynx or a wolf would write
such nonsense." He then went on to reveal his misunderstanding of the
form in which London was writing. "If the stories of these writers
were written in the spirit that inspired Mowgli [the human figure in
Kipling's The Jungle Book],... we should be content to read, enjoy, and
accept them as fables.... But when such fables are written by a make-
believe realist, the matter assumes an entirely different complexion."2

Of course, criticism of London has advanced far beyond Roosevelt's

demand that animal fiction should announce itself clearly as either
fabulistic or realistic. For example, in a striking reading of The Call of
the Wild and White Fang, Earle Labor has suggested that the
permanent appeal of these works is that they are beast fables whose
endorsement of the myth of the hero and of the value of primordial
strength rings true in our collective unconscious. Labor's Jungian
reading of these works is the most useful which has yet appeared, but I
believe that a more immediate reason for the appeal and holding
power of London's best work lies in their form.

London's work falls roughly into three groups related to his "natural"
inclination to work in the fable/parable form. The first, which includes
The Call of the Wild and White Fang as well as such stories as "To
Build a Fire" and "The Chinago," reveals his ability to rely
unconsciously yet with great success on the underlying characteristics
of the fable/parable. The second, which includes The Iron Heel and
such stories as "The Apostate" and "The Strength of the Strong",
suggests that when London wrote consciously in the parable form--as
he did in these works--he sacrificed power for ideological
obviousness. And the third, which includes a large number of
London's novels and short stories, but most significantly The Sea-
Wolf, indicates that London's efforts to write conventional fiction were
usually handicapped by his inadequacies in this form, but that such
works are occasionally rescued by their fabulistic element. Finally, I

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will also suggest that much that is distinctive and valuable in London's
autobiographical writing--in The Road, Martin Eden, and John
Barleycorn--can be viewed as an extension into this form of his
penchant for the fable/parable.

The Call of the Wild and White Fang are companion allegories of the
response of human nature to heredity and environment. Both Buck
and White Fang begin their lives with a mixture of the primitive and
the civilized in their condition. Buck is raised in the Southland (
London's allegorical setting for civilization), but, like all dogs, has an
atavistic strain of wolf in his make-up. White Fang, though largely
wolf and though bred in the Far North, contains an element of the
civilized through his part-dog mother. The novels demonstrate the
effects of a change in environment on the two dogs. Buck, abducted
into a Northland world of the ruthless struggle for existence, calls
forth from his racial past the strength and cunning necessary to
survive in this world, and eventually becomes the leader of a wolf-
pack in a people-less wilderness. White Fang is drawn into
civilization, first by Indians, then by miners, and finally, in the
Southland, by upper middle class ranchers, and becomes doglike in his
loyalty and love toward his master.

What appeals in the two works is not London's dramatization of a

particular late nineteenth-century Darwinian formulation but rather his
powerful use of the principal ethical thrust and formal characteristics
of the fable, with an admixture as well of the parable. Characterization
is at a minimum in the two works; dogs and men are types and the
types themselves are moral in nature. In Call, Charles, Hal, and
Mercedes (the three "tenderfoot" Klondikers who buy Buck) are
Vanity and Ignorance, and John Thornton is Loyalty and Love. The
dogs in the story are even more clearly moral types--Laziness, Envy,
Fear, Honesty, and so on. In White Fang, Kiche is the Mother, Beauty
Smith (who exhibits White Fang) is Evil, and Weedon Scott is
Thornton's counterpart. Setting is allegorical in both works, with
London exaggerating for symbolic clarity both the "softness" of the
South and the competitive animality of the North. And action is
symbolic within the clear lines of thematic movement of Buck's return
to the primitive and White Fang's engagement by civilization. Perhaps

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most important of all, theme itself is essentially proverbial rather than
ideological. It is not so much Darwin and Spencer who supply the
thematic core of the two novels as Aesop and the Bible. For Call of
the Wild proposes the wisdom of the beast fable that the strong, the
shrewd, and the cunning shall prevail when, as is progressively true in
this story, life is bestial. And White Fang endorses the Christian
wisdom that all shall lie down together in peace when love
predominates.

Both Call and White Fang contain--to a degree not usually sufficiently
stressed--a strong element of the Christian parable within their beast
fable emphasis on the competitive nature of experience. Buck's
response to the kindness, justness, and warmth of Thornton is love; it
is only with the death of Thornton that he becomes the Ghost Dog of
the wilderness. And White Fang, when rescued from the brutality of
Beauty Smith by Weedon Scott and when "educated" in affection by
Scott, also responds with love. The moral allegory is clear in both
works. Man hovers between the primitive and the civilized both in his
make-up and in his world, and it is his capac ity for love which often
determines which direction he will take. Again, this theme is not so
much specifically ideological as it is racial wisdom, with that wisdom
embodied in a form which makes it pleasingly evident.

An obvious question, given the similarities in theme and form

between the two works, is why The Call of the Wild is generally held
to be superior to White Fang. An answer lies, I believe, in the greater
conformity of Call to the beast fable form in two significant areas.
First, White Fang makes greater pretentions to the range and fulness
of a novel. Fabulistic brevity and conciseness, and thus symbolic
sharpness, are sacrificed for lengthy development of each phase of
White Fang's career. And since we can anticipate from the beginning
the nature and direction of his evolution, the doldrums occasionally
set in. But also, as Earle Labor has pointed out, we are inherently
more interested in an account of a return to the primitive than one of
an advance into civilization. Labor suggests, as I noted earlier, that
this difference in attraction lies in the greater appeal which Call makes
to our unconscious longing for primitive simplicity and freedom. But
this greater holding power may derive as well--and more immediately-

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from the fuller endorsement in Call of the Aesopian wisdom that the
strong prevail. There is not much love in Aesop, but there is much
demonstration that it is better to be powerful in a world in which
power controls destiny.

London's best known and most admired story, "To Build a Fire", is
also a fable/parable in the sense that I have discussed The Call of the
Wild and White Fang. The story reveals London's ability to use the
conventions of the form not only in works centering on animals but
also in those in which human characters predominate. As in Call and
White Fang, London in "To Build a Fire" (as well as in such a firstrate
story as "The Chinago") involves us in a fable/parable without his
conscious awareness that he is exploiting an allegory to deliver a
message. In "To Build a Fire", the chechaquo, or "newcomer in the
land," is Ignorance, and the setting in which he finds himself, the
extraordinary frost of a Yukon cold snap, is Danger. From its opening
words, the fable moves toward its resolution of these two permanent
conditions of life. As in London's dog stories, the moral of "To Build a
Fire" rests more on racial wisdom than Darwinian ideology, just as in
"The Chinago"--a story in which a Chinese coolie in Tahiti is wrongly
executed for a murder--the fabulistic moral that men will destroy
rather than acknowledge and rectify a mistake is more powerfully felt
than any social protest theme arising out of the exploitation of coolie
labor in the South Seas. In "To Build a Fire", the success of the story,
as in the successful fable, stems from our acceptance of its worldly
wisdom while simultaneously admiring the formal devices used to
communicate it--in this instance, the ironic disparity between our
knowledge of Danger and the newcomer's Ignorance of it, and the
brevity and clarity of the story's symbolic shape.

Like many artists, London not only unconsciously exploited his own
best talent but also consciously overexploited it on the one hand and
neglected it on the other. Overexploitation occurs in a number of
stories in which London consciously used the fable/parable form. In
these works, of which "The Apostate" and "The Strength of the
Strong" are perhaps the best known examples, London the ideologue
is too fully in control of the mechanism of the story; that is, London as
parablist dominates London as fabulist. "The Apostate," for example,

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was subtitled A Child Labor Parable in its magazine appearance, 5 and
that is what it is--no more and no less. The story tells us, in its account
of a young man who has worked from childhood in various mills and
factories, that the effort to turn children and men into machines will
breed rebellion, that the human body and soul are incapable of being
fully mechanized. The parable is effective in its own right, but its
success is on a lower level than that of "The Chinago". In that story
the moralism inherent in the fable/ parable form is rendered wryly
rather than "preachingly." In "The Chinago", an innocent is also
destroyed by "the system"--the bureaucracy of a judicial process
which grinds to its conclusion even though the wrong man is being
guillotined. The "way of the world" fabulist irony of the story-that for
most men it is more important to get the job done and to do it well (the
executioners take pride in the guillotine they have constructed) than to
achieve justice--saves the story from the sermonizing effect of "The
Apostate". This is not to say that "The Chinago" and "To Build a Fire"
are not moral works; if their moralism were not preeminent, they
would not be fables/parables. Rather it is to say that their moralism is
less instructive (correct this evil) than informative (this is the way the
world is) and that their tone is less indignant and somber than wry and
detached.

London prefaced "The Strength of the Strong" with a brief epigraph:

"Parables don't lie, but liars will parable." He attributed this aphorism
to "Lip-King," and thus paid mock homage to the principal writer of
fables and parables of his day, Kipling. (Indeed, Kipling is also
present in the story itself in the figure of the "Bug," a poet and
parablist who endorses the imperialist, capitalistic ethic of the tribal
leaders.) Like "The Apostate," "The Strength of the Strong" has its
origin in London's socialist convictions. The narrator of the story is
one of the few survivors of a prehistoric tribe which was destroyed by
its own selfish bickering. His account of tribal history is thus a history
of civilization in which the par able moral is that when group interest
is sacrificed to selfinterest, the group is doomed. Whereas "The
Apostate" lacks vitality, "The Strength of the Strong" is enlivened by
the satiric edge of London's translation of various moments in Western
history into comically rendered incidents in the history of a specific
tribe. Nevertheless, the central thrust of the story is still that of a

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political sermon, of London offering a conscious rebuttal to the
"Bug's" view of man's social nature and destiny.

It is London's proselytizing for a cause which also vitiates his major

exercise in the fully conscious parable, The Iron Heel. Although the
novel is often described as an anti-Utopia, it can also be profitably
considered a parable despite its length. As in all of London's
intentional parables, the "lesson" of The Iron Heel is single-
dimensional: the forces arrayed against the achievement of social
justice in America are powerful and ruthless. The work has its
moments, particularly the Battle of Chicago conclusion, but its overall
failure illustrates the dangers inherent in extending ideological parable
beyond the brief narrative. Parable teaches best by example, but the
expansiveness of The Iron Heel permits London too much opportunity
to teach by argument in Everhard's lengthy explanations of the
rightness of his cause. "The Strength of the Strong" is by far the better
artistic rendering of London's social ideas because it is by far the
better parable.

But what of one of London's most widely read novels, The Sea-Wolf?
This compelling but seriously flawed work assumes its basic nature
from London's effort to combine characteristics of the fable/parable
with those of the conventional novel. The strengths of The Sea-Wolf
(and a number of similar works in London's canon) are those of the
fable/parable, the weaknesses those of the novel.

The Sea-Wolf contains a buried fable/parable which is the principal

source of its fictional energy--that of the overreacher. Wolf Larsen is
less a character than a type. He is the man-as-wolf who not only acts
and thinks wolfishly in his single-minded gratification of self but has
the mental equipment to attempt to justify his nature. But though we
may agree that there are many instances of wolflike behavior and
values in life, we also agree that we are not a civilization of wolves,
and we are thus more gratified than surprised when a parable element
of moral retribution enters the fable of a wolf among us. He who lives
by the code of animal strength will die by it, as Larsen indeed does
when his vigor and shrewdness are diminished by a brain tumor. We
find in the Wolf Larsen portion of The Sea-Wolf many of the

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characteristics which make The Call of the Wild so powerful a work:
distinct moral types, symbolic setting (the ship and the sea in The
SeaWolf), an allegorical narrative, and the whole mix pushing toward
a fable/parable combination of worldly wisdom (the strong rule) and
parable moralism (but not forever).

To this fable/parable core, London added some of the conventional

ingredients of the novel in the characters and experiences of
Humphrey Van Weyden and Maud Brewster. Unlike Larsen, who is
unchanging in his beliefs and values, they are intended to be
developing characters who undergo a significant transformation
through experience. Whatever their origin in the conventions of
popular initiation fiction of London's day, they are taken seriously by
him as "realistic" fictional characters--that is, figures whose natures
and motives are probable and believable. But London's effort to shape
figures of this kind fails completely, for in Hump and Maud he has in
fact created standard fictional types (effete and overrefined
intellectuals) who undergo standard fictional transformations (they
come to an understanding and use of strength in human affairs) and
who thereby receive their just reward (survival and love). In short,
whereas Wolf Larsen is acceptable and powerful because he is created
and functions as a fabulistic type, Hump and Maud fail because
London's inadequacies as a writer of fiction lead him to formulaic
constructs, including type characters. The difference between Larsen
on the one hand and Hump and Maud on the other, it should be clear,
does not lie in the inherent greater appeal of one kind of figure over
another. Characters undergoing initiatory experiences have been one
of the great staples of major world literature, while the tyrannical sea
captain has been a staple of superficial romance. The difference rather
lies in London's ability to depict Wolf Larsen within the conventions
of the fable/parable and his inability to deal with Hump and Maud
within the conventions of the novel.

Much of London's best writing is autobiographical, whether in the

form of autobiography with a considerable fictional element (as in The
Road and John Barleycorn) or in the form of fiction which is closely
autobiographical (as in Martin Eden). It is true that in these works the
brevity of the fable/parable is sacrificed to the fulness of detail

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characteristic of modern autobiography. But in all other significant
ways London adapts the conventions of the fable/parable to the needs
of autobiographical expression and thereby achieves some striking
successes. In each of his best autobiographies, London chooses a
specific area of his life for representation, and in each the material of
the experience is molded into a symbolic form which expresses a truth
characteristic of the worldly wisdom of the fable. So in The Road,
London's months as a hobo dramatize the process by which the
concrete experience of injustice will stimulate a rebellion against it, in
John Barleycorn his obsession with alcohol documents the limitations
of human control of desire, and in Martin Eden his efforts to become a
writer reveal that success, once gained, is not as sweet as it seemed.

Martin Eden suggests how London adapts one of the principal

impulses of autobiography--to give meaning to one's life by the
selective use of the material of one's life--to create a moral allegory
closely related to the form of the fable/parable. In London's account of
his attempt to become a successful writer, experience is good if it
contributes to this goal, evil if it hinders. The work contains little
complexity of characterization, even in such fully drawn figures as
Ruth Morse and Russ Brissenden, and there is no plot--only obstacles,
hazards, and momentary resting places in Martin's slow rise to
knowledge and competency. Ruth is Martin's False Guide in this
climb; he initially mistakes her for Truth because of her seeming
spirituality, but he eventually realizes her weak conventionality.
Brissenden is Truth--the truth that art must be rebellious--and also
Martin's Fate. Brissenden's early alcoholic death and his difficulty in
gaining acceptance dramatize the condition and destiny of the artist in
America. Other figures are even more programmatic. Martin's sister
and brotherin-law, for example, represent respectively family loyalty
and grubbing materialism, while Ruth's family embodies upper class
philistine smugness. Even ideas play a symbolic role in London's fable
of the artist in America, since Martin's infatuation with the thought of
Herbert Spencer signifies his need to find intellectual confirmation of
his sense of himself as an independent being in a conforming world.
Yet despite the blatancy of the allegorical mode in Martin Eden, the
work lives because blatancy in this instance is functional within the
fable/parable form of the work. Much of that which absorbs us in

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Martin Eden is attributable to its character as a fable of the American
artist at odds with his world, temporarily victoriously over it, and
finally defeated by it.

As in the best of his dog stories, London in Martin Eden (as well as in
The Road and John Barleycorn) writes powerfully in the fable/parable
form both because he is writing instinctively and unconsciously within
the conventions of this form and because he ignores most of the
conventions of the ostensible form he is writing in while drawing
profitably upon others. London's strength as a writer was not so much
to tell a story as to tell a story in order to demonstrate the truth of a
specific moral which revealed the way of the world but which also
often instructed in the way of the heart. (In Martin Eden, the
friendship of Martin and Brissenden plays this second role.) The
writer of fables and parables may not be either original or profound,
but as the history of world literature demonstrates, and as London's
reputation further illustrates, at his best he can engage us fully and
permanently.

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Theodore Dreiser's "Nigger Jeff"
THANKS TO THE work of Robert H. Elias and W. A. Swanberg, we
are beginning to have an adequate sense of Dreiser's life. But many
aspects of Dreiser the artist remain relatively obscure or unexplored--
in particular his aesthetic beliefs and fictional techniques at various
stages of his career. An excellent opportunity to study Dreiser's
developing aesthetic lies in the existence of several versions of his
short story "Nigger Jeff". The extant versions of this story reveal with
considerable clarity and force Dreiser's changing beliefs concerning
the nature of fiction.

Dreiser's first attempt to write a story about the lynching of a Missouri

Negro is preserved in an unpublished University of Virginia
manuscript called "A Victim of Justice." Although "A Victim of Justice
of justice" is clearly a work of the 1890s, it is difficult to date its
composition precisely. The narrator of the story begins by noting that
he has recently spent "a day in one of Missouri's pleasant villages. "
While visiting a Potter's Field, he recalls a rural Missouri lynching that
he had wit nessed "several years since." This opening situation is the
product of a number of events of the mid-1890s. Dreiser was a
reporter on the St. Louis Republic in the winter of 1893-94, and it was
during this period that he observed the lynching on which the story is
based. 2 In addition, on July 23, 1894, Dreiser wrote for the Pittsburgh
Dispatch an article entitled "With the Nameless Dead" in which he
described an Allegheny County Potter's Field. A few weeks later he
visited his fiancee, Sallie White, who lived in a small town near St.
Louis. 3 Dreiser's only attempts at fiction before the summer of 1899
occurred in the winter and spring of 1895 when he wrote several
stories after leaving the New York World and before becoming editor
of Ev'ry Month. In view of these facts, it is possible to speculate that
Dreiser wrote "A Victim of Justice" in early 1895 and that he
combined in the story his memory of the January, 1894, lynching, his
July, 1894, article (from which he quoted several passages verbatim),
and his visit to Missouri in the summer of 1894.

The next extant version of the story is a manuscript in the Los Angeles
Public Library entitled "The Lynching of Nigger Jeff". This manuscript
served, with minor changes, as the text for the November, 1901,

105
publication of "Nigger Jeff" in Ainslee's Magazine. Encouraged by his
friend Arthur Henry, Dreiser had begun writing stories in earnest
during the summer of 1899, and he later recalled that "Nigger Jeff"--
that is, the Los Angeles Public Library-Ainslee's version--dates from
this period. 5 The fourth version of the story is Dreiser's revision of the
Ainslee's version for inclusion in his Free and Other Stories,
published in August, 1918. Since the changes in this last version are
primarily additions to the Ainslee's text, and since this added material
is not in the Los Angeles Public Library manuscript, the revision can
be at tributed to the period shortly before the appearance of Free,
when Dreiser collected and revised his stories for republication. 6

There are thus three major versions of "Nigger Jeff". Although none of
these versions can be dated exactly, each can be associated with an
important segment of Dreiser's career. The Virginia manuscript of the
mid-1890s reflects the Dreiser depicted in A Book About Myself, the
young journalist who was viewing much of the tragic complexity of
life but understanding little of it. The Ainslee's publication represents
the Dreiser of Sister Carrie. The story has been rewritten by an author
with a characteristic vision of life and with a distinctive fictional style.
The 1918 publication suggests a writer whose ideas have become
increasingly self-conscious and polemical, the Dreiser of the essays of
Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub ( 1920) and the Dreiser who was eventually to
devote a large portion of his later career to philosophical inquiries.
The three versions, in short, span the principal periods of Dreiser's
career, and their differences can tell us much about Dreiser's
developing aesthetic.

Although the three versions of "Nigger Jeff" differ in a number of

important ways, all have the same basic outline. A young man is sent
in early spring to investigate reports of a possible lynching in a rural
Missouri community. 7 He discovers that a farmer's daughter has been
attacked by a Negro and that the farmer and his son are in pursuit of
the Negro in order to lynch him. The Negro is apprehended by a local
peace officer, however, and is taken to another village for safekeeping
until the arrival of reinforcements. A mob gathers, overpowers the
peace officer, and returns with the Negro to its own community,

106
where he is hanged from a bridge. The following day the investigator
visits the home of the Negro and views his body.

Dreiser's earliest version of this story, "A Victim of Justice ", is told in
the first person and uses a frame device. The story opens with the
unidentified narrator visiting a Potter's Field near a small Missouri
town. After much soulful lament over the "strange exigencies of life"
that have brought the denizens of the graveyard to their mournful fate,
the narrator is disturbed by the "grieving orisons" of an elderly
woman. Before he can question her, she departs. But she has
stimulated still further his moody reflections on the "wounding trials
of life," and it is on this note that he introduces his recollections of the
lynching. He begins by explaining that he was "commissioned to
examine into the details" of the incident, but he does not identify
himself as a reporter. Nor do we have a sense of his involvement in
the action of the story. His narrative "voice" is principally an
omniscient authorial voice, telling us about the lynching (often in
summary form) but devoid of personal participation. The story
concludes with the second half of the frame device. The narrator
describes the Negro's lonely grave on a hillside, a burial place marked
by a wooden cross. "Day after day it stands, bleak, gray, desolate, a
fitting emblem of the barren life now forgotten, wasted as sparks are
wasted on the night wind." Again the narrator broods over the
vicissitudes of life, though his melancholy is lightened somewhat by
the thought that nature is ever-beautiful even in this forsaken spot.

"A Victim of Justice" has three major themes. The first is suggested by
the ironic title of the story and by several authorial comments. The
Negro (named Jim in this version) is the victim of the "hasty
illegalities" and "summary justice" of the mob. The second theme
involves a more generalized sorrow over the fate of most men, a
theme which arises out of the narrator's "meditations" in the
graveyard. Dreiser's lugubrious exploitation of the conventional
rhetoric of injustice and melancholy suggests that both themes have
their source in the traditional literature of sentiment. Jim is a "poor
varlet, " and the graveyard scene echoes the diction and sentence
structure of a Hawthorne or an Irving. Life is sad, Dreiser says, and he
asks us to share this sentiment by imitating the prose of writers known

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for their ability to evoke melancholic moods. The third theme of the
story is that of the powerful human emotions that arise out of the
lynching itself--the quest for vengeance by the father, the resoluteness
of the peace officer, the terror of the Negro. In a sense these emotions
constitute a suppressed or unacknowledged theme, since they are
extraneous to the explicit themes imposed upon the story by the
narrator. The peace officer could have been a coward and Jim brave
and unflinching, and the narrator would still have been able to enclose
the story within his reflections on injustice and melancholy. These
reflections may be apt responses to a lynching, but Dreiser's failure to
integrate them into the account of the lynching itself implies that he
has indeed imposed them on his response. His "true" response is
"buried" within the narrative of the lynching, for Dreiser at this point
was unable to articulate his response-that is, he was unable to
recognize what moved him in the lynching. Thus, though he depicted
the lynching as a moving event, he confused the nature of his response
with those "deep" emotions readily available to him in traditional
literary forms.

The Ainslee's version of "Nigger Jeff" omits the frame sections. The
story, now told in the third person, focuses on the experiences of a
young reporter, Eugene Davies, 8 who has been sent to look into a
possible lynching. It is a beautiful spring day and the insouciant, self-
confident Davies undertakes his assignment with relish. Arriving in
Pleasant Valley, he is drawn into the events of the lynching as he
pursues his story. Davies is at first a passive observer of these events.
But when the blubbering, terrified Jeff is seized by the mob, the
reporter uncontrollably "clapped his hands over his mouth and worked
his fingers convulsively." 9 "Sick at heart" (373), he accompanies the
mob back to Pleasant Valley. The hanging itself stuns him into a deep
torpor. By the close of the story, when he encounters Jeff's weeping
mother, he has viewed a wide range of character and emotion--the
competent, strongwilled sheriff, the cowardly mob, the father intent on
vengeance, and above all the terrified Jeff and his heartbroken mother.

In A Victim of Justice Dreiser mentioned the grieving mother early in

the narrative but not afterward. In Nigger Jeff he reserved introducing
her grief until the final, climactic scene of the story, a scene which is

108
present only in brief summary form in the earlier version. As Davies
views Jeff's body, he hears a noise in the room.

Greatly disturbed, he hesitated, and then as his eyes strained he caught

the shadow of something. It was in the extreme corner, huddred up,
dark, almost indistinguishable crouching against the cold walls.

"Oh, oh, oh," was repeated, even more plaintively than before.

Davies began to understand. He approached lightly. Then he made out

an old black mammy, doubled up and weeping. She was in the very
niche of the corner, her head sunk on her knees, her tears falling, her
body rocking to and fro. (375)

On leaving the cabin, Davies "swelled with feeling and pathos.... The
night, the tragedy, the grief, he saw it all.

"'I'll get that in,' he exclaimed, feelingly, 'I'll get it all in'" (375).

Dreiser has thus shifted the axis of the story. Unlike A Victim of
Justice, in which the narrator presents us with a response to a
lynching, Nigger Jeff dramatizes a growth in emotional
responsiveness by the principal viewer of the action. The narrative is
now primarily an initiation story--the coming into knowledge of the
tragic realities of life by the viewer. And since the viewer is a reporter
who will attempt to "get it all in," the story is also the dramatization of
the birth of an aesthetic.

Briefly, the conception of the theme and form of art symbolized by the
"it" in the last sentence of Nigger Jeff contains three major elements,
each rendered in dramatic form within the story. These are: a belief
that two emotions in particular pervade all life; a belief that these
emotions are often found in moral and social contexts which lend
them a special poignancy; and a belief that these emotions adopt a
certain pattern in life and therefore in art. Let me discuss each of these
beliefs more fully, beginning with the central emotions of life as
Dreiser depicts them in this story.

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One such emotion is sexual desire. It is the first flush of spring, and
Jeff, a poor, ignorant Negro, attacks a white girl--a girl who knows
him and whom he meets in a lane. "'Before God, boss, I didn't mean
to.... I didn't go to do it," he cries to the mob (372). Although sexual
desire may not lead to the destruction of such figures as Frank
Cowperwood, it is nevertheless a dominant, uncontrollable force in
almost all of Dreiser's principal male characters. Hurstwood, Lester
Kane, Eugene Witla, and Clyde Griffiths are at its mercy. In addition,
the "it" of the final sentence includes the unthinking love and loyalty
which exist within a family and particularly between a mother and a
child. When Davies arrives at Jeff's home after the lynching, he asks
the Negro's sister why Jeff had returned to his cabin, where he had
been captured by the waiting sheriff.

"To see us," said the girl.

"Well, did he want anything? He didn't come just to see you, di he?"

"Yes, suh," said the girl, "he come to say good-by." Her voice
wavered.

"Didn't he know he might get caught?" asked Davies.

"Yes, suh, I think he did."

She stood very quietly, holding the poor battered lamp up, and looking
down.

"Well, what did he have to say?" asked Davies.

"He said he wanted tuh see motha'. He was a-goin' away." (374)

The son come back to say good-by to the mother, the mother
mourning over the son's body--here is emotion which in its over-
powering intensity parallels the sex drive itself. It is the force which
binds the Gerhardt family together, which is the final refuge of Clyde
Griffiths, and which creates the tragic tension of Solon Barnes's loss
of his children. In Nigger Jeff this force appears not only in the
relationship between Jeff and his mother but also in the figure of the

110
assaulted girl's father. Although Dreiser depicts the mob as cowardly
and sensation- seeking, he respects the motives of the father. Both
victim and revenger are caught up in the same inexplicable emotional
oneness which is a family.

Nigger Jeff thus contains two of the most persistent themes in all of
Dreiser's work--the power of desire and the power of family love and
loyalty. Davies's awakening to their reality can be interpreted as
Dreiser's declaration of belief in the dominance of these emotions in
human affairs. Indeed, in his later autobiographies Dreiser depicted
these emotions as two of the principal inner realities of his own youth.
His ability to identify himself with these emotions as early as Nigger
Jeff is revealed by a sentence omitted in Ainslee's but present in the
Los Angeles Public Library manuscript of The Lynching of Nigger
Jeff." Immediately following The night, the tragedy, the grief, he saw
it all, there appears in The Lynching of Nigger Jeff: "It was spring no
less than sorrow that ran whispering in his blood." The sensuality of
youth, the family love taking its shape in sorrow--these appear in
Dreiser's work as complementary autobiographical themes until they
coalesce most fully and powerfully both in Dawn and in An American
Tragedy.

The second major aspect of Dreiser's aesthetic contained in the final

"it" involves the moral and social context in which these emotions are
found. Like most of Dreiser's characters, the principal figures in
Nigger Jeff have little of the heroic about them. Even the sheriff loses
his potential for such a role once he is easily tricked by the mob and
complacently accepts its victory. Jeff himself is described at the
moment of his capture by the mob as a "groveling, foaming brute"
(372). But the major figures in Nigger Jeff, despite their often
grotesque inadequacies, feel and suffer, and the young reporter comes
to realize the "tragedy" of their fate. To Dreiser, tragedy arises out of
the realities that nature is beautiful, that man can desire, and that a
mother or father can mourn. These realities do not lend "nobility" to
Dreiser's figures; like Jeff, they are often weak and comtemptible
despite their fate. But their capacity to feel combined with their
incapacity to act wisely or well is to Dreiser the very stuff of man's
tragic nature. The realization which the young reporter must "get in"

111
thus involves not only the truths of lust and of mother love but also the
truth that the experience of these emotions gives meaning and
poignancy to every class and condition of man.

The third aspect of the aesthetic symbolized by the final "it" concerns
the pattern assumed by the two principal emotions of the story. Most
of Dreiser's novels involve a seeker or quester--sometimes driven by
desire, sometimes by other motives--who finds at the end of the novel
that he has returned to where he started: Carrie still seeking beauty
and happiness; Jennie once again alone despite her immense capacity
to love; Cowperwood's millions gone; Clyde still walled in; Solon
returning to the simplicity of faith. It is possible to visualize Dreiser's
novels as a graphic irony--the characters believe they are pushing
forward but they are really moving in a circle. Dreiser occasionally
makes this structural principle explicit by a consciously circular
symbol, such as the rocking chair in Sister Carrie and the street scene
in An American Tragedy. Nigger Jeff contains a rough approximation
of this pattern. The passions which have driven the narrative forward
in its sequence of crime and punishment are dissipated, and Jeff
returns to where he has started both physically and emotionally. That
is, the bleak room in which he rests and his mother keening over his
body represent the permanent realities of his life and his death. He,
too, has come full circle.

Despite his reputation as stylistically inept, Dreiser was capable of a

provocative and moving verbal symbolism. This quality appears in his
use of "beauty" in connection with Carrie at the close of Sister Carrie
and in his use of "life" in the next to last paragraph of The Bulwark ("'I
am crying for life'"). These otherwise banal abstractions represent the
complexity and depth of experience depicted in the novels concerned,
and they are therefore powerfully evocative. The word "it" at the close
of Nigger Jeff has some of the same quality. The word symbolizes a
deeply felt aesthetic which Dreiser never explained as well elsewhere,
just as he never discussed "beauty" and "life" in his philosophical
writings as well as he dramatized their meaning for him in his novels.

The Free version of Nigger Jeff omits almost nothing from the
Ainslee's text. Aside from stylistic revisions, the changes in the Free

112
version consist of additions, many of which merely flesh out particular
scenes. Some of the additions, however, extend the themes of the story
in two significant ways.

One such extension is revealed in Dreiser's addition to the first

sentence of the story (here and elsewhere the added material appears
in brackets):

The city editor was waiting for one of his best reporters, Elmer Davies
[by name, a vain and rather self-sufficient youth who was inclined to
be of that turn of mind which sees in life only a fixed and ordered
process of rewards and punishments. If one did not do exactly right,
one did not get along well. On the contrary, if one did, one did. Only
the so-called evil were really punished, only the good truly rewarded--
or Mr. Davies had heard this so long in his youth that he had come
nearly to believe it.] 10

By the next to last paragraph of the story, Davies has come to realize
that "[it was not always exact justice that was meted out to all and that
it was not so much the business of the writer to indict as to interpret]"
(111). In these and similar additions Dreiser has extended the nature
of Davies's initiation. In the Ainslee's version, Davies's growth is
above all that of his awakening to the tragic nature of human
experience. The Free version associates this awakening with his
conscious awareness that moral absolutes are based on naivete or
inexperience and are inapplicable to the complex realities of life. In a
sense even A Victim of Justice contains an aspect of this theme, since
Dreiser in that version noted the injustice of the "summary justice" of
mob rule. But in the Free Nigger Jeff this theme is both more overt
and more central. Its presence in this enlarged and emphatic form
suggests Dreiser's in

creasing tendency throughout the later stages of his career (beginning

about 1911) to associate the function of art with the explicit inversion
of conventional moral and social beliefs. It is during this period that
Dreiser the polemicist (as revealed in Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub) and
Dreiser the novelist combine to produce An American Tragedy, in
which the putative reader is placed in the position of Davies. Like the

113
naive beliefs of Davies, the reader's faith in the American dream of
success and in the workings of justice is destroyed by encountering
the reality of a tragedy.

A second major extension of theme in the Free "Nigger Jeff occurs in

the scenes following the capture of Jeff by the mob. As Davies
accompanies the mob on its way to hang Jeff, he reflects that "[both
father and son now seemed brutal, the injury to the daughter and sister
not so vital as all this. Still, also, custom seemed to require death in
this way for this. It was like some axiomatic, mathematic law--hard,
but custom. The silent company, an articulated, mechanical and
therefore terrible thing, moved on. It also was axiomatic, mathematic"
(103). After the hanging, Davies sits near the bridge and muses: "[Life
seemed so sad, so strange, so mysterious, so inexplicable]" (105).
These additions reflect two of the principal areas of Dreiser's
philosophical speculation during the last half of his career. On the one
hand, he believed that every phase of life is governed by law. During
the period from approximately 1910 to the late 1920s he often, as in
the Free Nigger Jeff, associated this law with the harsh extermination
of the weak. Dreiser the mechanist called this law an "equation
inevitable" in Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub. But by the end of his career
Dreiser the quasi pantheist had come to call it "design" in The
Bulwark and to associate it primarily with beauty and with cosmic
benevolence. His particular conception of law at various stages of his
later career, howev er, is perhaps less important than his enduring
search for a principle of meaning which would encompass the cruelty
and the beauty, the destructiveness and the continuity, which he found
in life. On the other hand, Dreiser affirmed throughout his later career
a belief in the essential mystery at the heart of life. Both attitudes--the
search for meaning and the belief in mystery--are present in Hey Rub-
a-Dub-Dub, in which the often doctrinaire mechanistic philosophizing
is counterbalanced by the subtitle of the work: A Book of the Mystery
and Wonder and Terror of Life. And both are present in The Bulwark,
in which Solon's discovery of the principle of design is inseparable
from his discovery of the mystery of life. In his Free version of Nigger
Jeff Dreiser has thus expanded his aesthetic to include not only an
explicit ironic reversal of moral certainties but also a dramatization of
the vast philosophical paradoxes underlying all life. Davies's

114
discovery of what art must do--"[to interpret]"--now has a conscious
philosophical element which was to play an ever increasing role in
Dreiser's career.

The various versions of Nigger Jeff which I have been discussing

incorporate Dreiser's principal beliefs about the nature of art. From the
imposed sentimentality of A Victim of Justice to the moral polemicism
and incipient philosophizing of the Free Nigger Jeff, the three
versions reflect much that is central in Dreiser's thought and in his
practice as a writer. No doubt there is room for qualification of some
of the generalizations about Dreiser's developing aesthetic which I
have drawn from this study of the three versions of Nigger Jeff."
Nevertheless, there is much to be said for the attempt to deduce a
writer's beliefs about art directly from a creative work dealing with the
nature of art rather than from his literary criticism. For Dreiser, there
is a special need for this kind of attempt, since most of his overt
comments about art are either vague or overpolemical. Moreover, we
have come to realize that Dreiser is not only a writer of stature (as
Alfred Kazin maintained) but also of finesse (as Ellen Moers
believed). 11 He is a writer, in other words, whose stories and novels in
their various revisions can often be explored for the complex
intertwining of permanence and change characteristic of the creative
work of a major literary figure.

115
Chapter 3: Modernism & its institutions.

Although we have lately been advised that "the days when one could
sit down with an easy mind to write an account of something called
modernism are over," (1) there nonetheless remains very little in our
experience of the arts even in this first decade of the twenty-first
century that can be separated from the traditions that were established
by what used to be called the modern movement but that nowadays
tend to be known collectively as modernism. As I shall be using the
term here--that is, modernism as a movement in literature as well as
the visual arts--it was never monolithic in style, ideas, or impact. It
encompassed a broad range of styles, from realism and symbolism to
pure abstraction, and a variety of anti-styles we associate with the
legacy of Marcel Duchamp and Dadaism.
In its heyday, which by my reckoning dates from the 1880s to the
1950s, it was as easily identified by the traditions it rejected as by the
innovations it embraced. What it mainly rejected in the pictorial arts
were the moribund conventions of nineteenth-century academic
instruction, which had elevated a narrowly conceived mode of
depicting the observable world to the status of an aesthetic and
cultural absolute. What modernism rejected in architecture was
ornament, decorative embellishments, and explicit references to
historical precedent. As far as painting and sculpture are concerned,
modernism introduced a radical revision in the very concept of
representation, the implications of which are admirably summarized in
George Heard Hamilton's introduction to his classic history, Painting
and Sculpture in Europe 1880-1940:

In the half-century between 1886, the date of

the last Impressionist exhibition, and the
beginning of the Second World War, a change
took place in the theory and practice of art
which was as radical and momentous as any
that had occurred in human history. It was
based on the belief that works of art need
not imitate or represent natural objects and

116
 events. Therefore artistic activity is not essentially
concerned with representation but instead
with the invention of objects variously
expressive of human experience, objects
whose structures as independent artistic entities
cannot be evaluated in terms of their
likeness, nor devalued because of their lack of
likeness, to natural things. (2)

What was most conspicuously embraced by modernism in the literary

arts were so-called free verse (vers libre) in poetry, which entailed an
abandonment of traditional rhyme and meter, and the "stream of
consciousness" technique in fiction, which was introduced to literature
in English by James Joyce but was made more accessible to public
comprehension by the popularization of Freudian psychoanalytical
therapy. These innovations entailed a rejection of nineteenth-century
narrative conventions in favor of more hermetic literary structures
based on myth, symbolism, and other devices more commonly found
in poetry, especially modern poetry, than in prose fiction. Moreover,
owing to the resolute and often vindictive resistance that such
innovations met with in the arena of public taste, it was probably
inevitable that ways would be sought to circumvent that resistance. It
was, in any case, in direct response to such prohibitions that the
modernist impulse was driven to create institutions of its own in order
to safeguard the survival and prosperity of its aesthetic initiatives. It
was probably inevitable, too, that in the early history of these
institutions, an attempt would be made to minimize the sometimes
controversial content of modernism--not only its sexual explicitness
but its political provocations as well. After all, in a period when even
as blameless a book of short stories as Joyce's Dubliners met with
refusal by its first printers on the grounds that certain passages were
deemed to employ improper language, and a masterpiece like Ulysses
was legally banned in the United States, there was ample reason to be
cautious about publicizing the content of certain modernist works.
On the large and thorny question of modernism's content and its
relation to modernist form, however, it must also be said that certain

117
modernists have themselves been complicit in minimizing its content
even under conditions where prudence was no longer required, as the
epigraphs quoted above from Georges Braque, Wallace Stevens, and
Willem de Kooning suggest. For anyone who was present on the New
York art scene in 1953, for example, when de Kooning exhibited the
first of his sensational Women paintings at the Sidney Janis Gallery,
the much quoted claim made ten years earlier, obviously in reference
to abstract painting, that the content in the creation of a work of art is
"very tiny" would have sounded absurd. The ferocity with which de
Kooning attacked his subject in the Women series left no one in doubt
about the importance of its content--both for the artist and viewer--and
the unraveling of de Kooning's talent in the aftermath of the Women
paintings, when he returned to a mode of abstraction that was sadly
depleted of both form and content, only underscored the point.
What, then, were the institutions that were either created or
commandeered to accommodate modernism's battle of the Absolutes?
Similarly, Wallace Stevens's observation that in the poetry of
Marianne Moore, "Subject ... is often incidental," may indeed apply to
some of the poet's minor later work, but elsewhere Moore's poetry
positively bristles with difficult subjects. In the early masterpiece from
the 1920s called Marriage--a work that, in my view, occupies a place
in Moore's literary oeuvre akin to that of The Waste Land in Eliot's-
the intensity, and indignation prompted by the subject of matrimony is
anything but "incidental." Its treatment is ferocious, as the poem's
opening lines attest:

This institution,
perhaps one should say enterprise
out of respect for which
one says one need
not change one's mind
about a thing one has believed in,
requiring public promises
of one's intention
to fulfill a private obligation:
I wonder what Adam and Eve

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 think of it by this time,
this fire-gilt steel
alive with goldenness;
how bright it shows--"
of circular traditions and impostures,
committing many spoils,"
requiring all one's criminal ingenuity
to avoid!

In a new edition of The Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by Grace

Schulman (Viking, 2003), Marriage runs to eight and a half pages, and
remains to its very last lines one of the most caustic poems in the
language--one of the scariest, too. Georges Braque was a far gentler
soul than either Willem de Kooning or Marianne Moore, and it was
characteristic of his moral delicacy to wrap his statement about the
artist's subject in a mantle of modesty, only to disclose in the end that,
like so many other modernists, his too had been a pursuit of the
Absolute. Braque's version of the Absolute no doubt differed from that
of the true firebrands of modernism--among them, Piet Mondrian,
Mies van der Rohe, Ad Reinhardt, and Donald Judd--yet where would
any of them have been without the prior existence of Cubism, the
creation of which was owed to Braque's collaboration with Picasso? It
might even be said that Braque created the foundation upon which
these firebrands were able to take their stand.
What, then, were the institutions that were either created or
commandeered to accommodate modernism's battle of the Absolutes?
Some of them have become so well established as fixtures of our
cultural landscape that we can hardly imagine a time when they didn't
exist--among them, the art galleries, with their one-man shows of new
art; the art museums that vie with each other for the privilege of being
the first to embrace what is certain to be controversial; the "little
magazines" literary quarterlies and small presses without which
modernist literature would never have prospered; the more
problematic writers' "workshops" which seem now to have
degenerated into an academic racket; and the Armory. Show-type of
large international exhibitions that grew out of the various

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"independent" and "secessionist" modernist movements of a century
or more ago.
Virtually all of these art institutions were created by artists working in
collaboration with amateur, non-institutional collectors, just as the
little magazines, small presses, and literary quarterlies were created by
poets and critics who understood that mainstream publishers were not
in a position to respond to the challenges of modernist literature
without the kind of spadework that only non-institutional amateurs
could provide. As Lionel Trilling wrote in his essay "The Function of
the Little Magazine":

To the general lowering of the status of literature and of the

interest in it, the innumerable "little magazines" have been a
natural and heroic response. Since the beginning of the
[twentieth] century, meeting difficulties of which only their
editors can truly conceive, they have tried to keep the roads
open. From the elegant and brilliant Dial to the latest little
scrub from the provinces, they have done their work, they
have kept our culture from being cautious and settled, or
merely sociological, or merely pious. They are snickered at
and snubbed, sometimes deservedly, and no one would
venture to say in a precise way just effect they have--except
that they keep the new talents warm until the commercial with
his customary air of noble resolution is ready to take his
chance, except that they make the official representatives of
literature a little uneasy, except that they keep a
countercurrent moving which perhaps no one will be fully
aware of until it ceases to move. (3)

Now, nearly sixty years after Trilling wrote "The Function of the
Little Magazine" to mark the tenth anniversary of Partisan Review, the
kind of "little magazine" he described in that essay is virtually extinct-
-as, of course, is Partisan Review. Some literary quarterlies have
survived, but diminished in number and--with the shining exception of
The Hudson Review--in quality as the blight of deconstructionist,

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post-structuralist, and other varieties of anti-literary "theory" has
triumphed over literary intelligence. When we look back today on the
much-maligned New Criticism, which was largely the creation of
modernist poets--among them, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound--it looks
like a Golden Age compared to the kind of academic obscurantism
and political shadow-boxing that have supplanted it. As for the fate of
literature itself in the hands of the mainstream book publishers, we
find that virtually all of the major houses in this country are now
wholly owned subsidiaries of foreign conglomerates whose standard
of achievement has less to do with literary quality or innovation than
with access to media promotion, movie and television tie-ins, prize-
winning, and other coefficients of high profitability. Mercifully, we
can still count on a number of smaller presses and some of the better
university presses to save the situation, but the downside of this
benefit usually entails significantly reduced royalties for the worthy
writers who do get published.

Exactly how it came to pass that a nation as prosperous as ours could

not summon the resources to resist the takeover of its book-publishing
industry" by an ailing Europe remains to be explained, but that
takeover is now a fait accompli, and we shall be obliged to suffer its
consequences for a long time to come.

In some respects, the institutions that now serve the visual arts--
especially the museums and the galleries--might seem to present a
much rosier prospect, for even in periods of low economic growth
they have continued to prosper. Indeed, headlong and often heedless
expansion of both collections and exhibition space and the funds
required to support them has been the rule in the art museums for
some years now. Modernist art of various persuasions has been the
driving force as well as the principal beneficiary of this very
expensive expansiveness as museums have hastened to respond to
new artistic developments while at the same time attempting to catch
up on the earlier innovations they missed out on. This museological
scenario is now so familiar to us that we sometimes forget that the
compulsion on the part of museums to keep abreast of radical
innovations in contemporary art--and even, when possible, to
anticipate and assist in creating a demand for them--was itself a

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momentous innovation in the way museums come to identify their
interests and responsibilities. For it obligated the museums to become,
in effect, not only collectors but promoters of the art in which they
were now seen to have a vested interest--a vested interest, that is, not
only in the objects acquired for their collections but in the careers and
celebrity of the artists who created them.

Hence the elements of hucksterism and entrepreneurial cynicism that

have coarsened the character and spirit of so much museum activity
today. When we enter a monstrosity like Tate Modern in London
nowadays, we are straightaway put on notice by the noise, the crowds,
the theatrical lighting, and the general atmosphere of vulgarity, and
tumult that art has been used as a bait to attract a segment of the
public--free-spending youth--for which aesthetic achievement is, if not
a matter of indifference, certainly not a compelling priority. And to
assure a steady supply of the only kind of new art that is guaranteed to
be a turn-on for this public, there are the proliferating productions of
Charles Saatchi's gang of YBA's--Young British Artists--and the
Tate's own atrocious Turner-Prize-winners, who can be counted upon
to maintain the requisite standard of titillation.

Unlike the old Tate Gallery, our own Solomon R. Guggenheim

Museum has not had to change its name but only its character to
adjust to the new entrepreneurial standard. I wonder how many of the
people who went to ogle Matthew Barney's freak show at the
Guggenheim have any idea that this museum, with its once
incomparable collection of paintings by Vasily Kandinsky, was
founded in 1930 as an institution devoted to the achievements of
abstract painting. (Its original name was the Museum of Non-
Objective Painting.) Yet, just as its influence in that respect was
contributing something important to the emergence of Abstract
Expressionist painting in New York--the young Jackson Pollock,
among other artists, worked as a guard in the Museum of Non-
Objective Painting in its early days--the Guggenheim initiated the first
of its ongoing efforts to reinvent itself--a project that has left the
museum stripped of anything that can be called an identity and
required, among other depredations, the sale of a great many of its
Kandinsky holdings and works by other modernist masters. Today it is

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an institution better known for its exhibitions of Norman Rockwell
and Harley Davidson motorcycles and its branch museums abroad
than for anything that advances an understanding of modernist art.

Two of the other New York institutions that were founded to serve the
interests of modernist art--the Museum of Modern Art and the
Whitney Museum of American Art--are also at a crossroads that will
determine their future course but for very different reasons. MOMA is
now in the throes of yet another of its periodic expansion plans, one of
the biggest in its history, and this is expected to provide the museum
with far more space for the showing of its permanent collection as
well as its temporary exhibitions program when the expansion is
completed in 2005. Meanwhile, the museum and its public are making
do with an abridged, unappealing facility in Long Island City,
MOMAQNS, for a reduced exhibition schedule, and a theater on East
Twenty-third Street in Manhattan for its popular film program.

At this point, we can only speculate about what this expansion will
bring in the way MOMA'S permanent collection--and thus modernism
itself--is to be presented to the public for the remainder of the twenty-
first century. If there is good reason to be hopeful about this outcome,
it is mainly because John Elderfield--no doubt one of the most
qualified senior curators in the field today--has been called upon to
head the curatorial committee that will oversee the installation of
MOMA'S permanent collection in its new building. If there is also
good reason to be anxious about the outcome, it is owing to the
debacle of the museum's MOMA2000 exhibitions, which radically
recast the history of MOMA's permanent collection to conform it to a
"new narrative" emphasizing social content at the expense of aesthetic
innovation. This was a shift in perspective that, among other losses,
had the effect of consigning the history of abstract art--one of the
central developments of modernist art--to the sidelines. Given the
theme-park character that governed the organization of MOMA2000,
there was no way that the aesthetics of abstraction could be given its
due. It thus remains to be seen whether Mr. Elderfield will have
sufficient authority to rectify such disastrous errors of judgment in the
newly expanded MOMA.

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About the future of the Whitney Museum, too, we can only speculate.
Its recent history, marked by a succession of incompetent directors
and a board of trustees that seemed at times to have lost its mind, has
been so dismal that almost any change is likely to be a change for the
better. The good news is that the Whitney's plan for a harebrained
expansion of its own has been cancelled for financial reasons, and the
appointment of Adam D. Weinberg, a former curator at the Whitney,
as the museum's new director gives us reason to expect significant
improvement. It will not be easy, however, for the Whitney to win
back the respect it has lost among artists as well as the critics and the
public. A good place to start would be either the overhaul or the
outright abandonment of the Whitney's Biennial exhibitions, which in
recent years have gone from being merely ludicrous to wholly
contemptible.

As for the international exhibitions like Documenta in Germany and

the monster Biennials in Venice and Sao Paulo, they have now
become the kind of cultural dinosaurs that have no useful functions to
perform and therefore no reason to exist. There was a period, of
course, when exhibitions like the 1910 Post-Impressionism exhibition
in London, the 1913 Armory Show in New York, and the 1938
International Exposition of Surrealism in Paris, really did bring the
public news of important avant-garde developments in modernist art.
But the age of the avant-garde is long gone. Its celebrated scandals
and audacities have passed into the possession of the academic
curriculum, to be catalogued, codified, and otherwise processed for
doctoral dissertations and classroom instruction. The pathetic attempts
at artistic insolence, mostly having to do with sexual imagery and
political ideology, that turn up in the Whitney's Biennial exhibitions
and the art departments of the colleges and universities are better
understood as efforts to attract publicity and what in the business
world is called market share than as anything that can be regarded as
avant-garde. In a culture like ours, in which, alas, everything is now
permitted and nothing resisted, the conditions necessary for the
emergence of a genuine avant-garde no longer exist. It doesn't change
anything, either, to adopt the term "transgressive" as a substitute for
"avant-garde" for where boundaries no longer exist it is impossible to
violate them.

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"Transgressive" is a term that belongs to the history of publicity rather
than the history of art. Today there is no avant-garde, and the big
international shows are mainly devoted to marketing and politics.
Modern systems of communication have, in any case, rendered the big
international shows irrelevant.

Far more important to sustaining the aesthetic vitality of modernist art,

however, has been the institution that we do not usually even think of
as an institution: I mean the commercial art gallery. The art gallery as
we know it today is, after all, a modern creation, barely a century old,
and it performs a service for art unlike that of any other institution. It
keeps the public in constant touch not only with current developments
on the art scene but also with revivals of the work of earlier artists that
the museums and the critics may have overlooked or underrated, and it
does so at no financial cost to the viewer. More often than not, it is the
gallery dealer, not the museum curator, who discovers significant new
talent, for nowadays most curators make their "discoveries" in the
dealers' galleries.
This is a cultural service more often enjoyed than acknowledged, but
for many of us the art galleries have been a fundamental part of our
aesthetic education. In this connection, it is worth recalling Clement
Greenberg's tribute to the late Betty Parsons, whose gallery introduced
Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and
Richard Pousette-Dart, among other artists, to gallerygoers of my
generation. In 1955, on the tenth anniversary of the Betty Parsons
Gallery, Greenberg wrote:

Mrs. Parsons has never lacked for courage. It is

not a virtue signally associated with art dealers
(or, for that matter, with art critics or museum
directors either), but then she is not, at least for
me, primarily a dealer. I have seldom been able
to bring her gallery into focus as part of the
commercial apparatus of art (I am not sneering
at that apparatus); rather, I think of it as
belonging more to the studio and production

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 side of art. In a sense like that in which a
painter is referred to as a painter's painter or a
poet as a poet's poet, Mrs. Parsons is an artist's--and
critic's--gallery: a place where art
goes on and is not just shown and sold. (4)

Just as modernist art in America was, initially, an extension and

appropriation of European modernism, so was a gallery like Betty
Parsons' in a tradition that grew out of the precedents set by Vollard
and Kahnweiler in Paris and Alfred Stieglitz's "291" gallery, which
introduced Cezanne and Matisse as well as Marsden Hartley and John
Marin to the New York public even before the Armory Show and long
before the museums awakened to the achievements of modernism.
The same could be said of the Weyhe Gallery's efforts on behalf of
Gaston Lachaise mad Alfred Maurer and the exhibitions devoted to
Stuart Davis at Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery. At every stage in
the history of modernism in America, it was the galleries that set the
pace in recognizing artistic achievement. This is not to suggest that all
of our art dealers are sainted figures, but merely to point out that in
New York, anyway, we are blessed with an extraordinary number of
galleries that are places "where art goes on," and they should be given
their due in any account of modernism and its institutions. Finally, it is
inevitable--or at least expected--in any discussion of modernism that
the question of "postmodernism" will rear its ugly head. Or should I
say, its wrong-headedness? For the entire concept of postmodernism is
based on a fundamental misconception--a belief that the modernist era
in art and culture is over and has been supplanted by something
radically different. What we find this usually means when we get
down to specific cases is a mode of art or thought in which some
element of modernist sensibility has been corrupted by kitsch, politics,
social theory, gender theory, or some other academic, pop-oriented,
anti-aesthetic intervention. Modernism has aged to be sure, as
modernity itself has aged, and in the process modernism has
undeniably lost its capacity to shock or otherwise disturb us. But
except for the short-lived antics of Dada and Surrealism, shock was
never the essence of modernism. It was, rather, an inspired and highly

126
successful attempt to bring art and culture into an affective and
philosophical alignment with the mindset of modernity as we know it
in our daily lives. Modernism endures, and does so, in part, anyway,
by virtue of the institutions it has created to serve the needs of a public
that is today more enlightened intellectually and aesthetically than at
any other time in our history. Postmodernism, in contrast, has created
no institutions of its own, largely because postmodernism is nothing
but a mindset of deconstructive attitudes in search of a mission.

Looking back on the history of modernism in the twentieth century,

what is especially striking is the violence that was directed against its
achievements by the most horrific totalitarian regimes in recorded
history: the Nazis in Hiders Germany and the Communists in Stalin's
Russia. And if we ask the question of what it was about modernist art
that prompted such a massively destructive response, I believe the
answer is clear: modernist art was seen to provide a spiritual and
emotional haven from the coercive and conformist pressures of the
societies in which it flourished. Modernism represented a freedom of
mind that totalitarian regimes could not abide. It is in this sense,
perhaps, that the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition that Hitler
devoted to modernist art in Munich in 1937 may now be seen to have
marked the beginning of the "postmodernist" impulse. And just as
modernism survived the determined efforts of Hitler and Stalin to
impugn and destroy its artistic achievements, so, I believe, will
modernism and its institutions continue to prosper in the face of the
nihilist imperatives of the postmodernist scam.

(1) Art in Its Time: Theories and Practice of Modern Aesthetics by

Paul Mattick (Routledge, 2003), page 9.
(2) Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880-1940 by George Heard
Hamilton (Yale University Press, 1967), page 15.
(3) The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society by
Lionel Trilling (Viking Press, 1951), page 97.
(4) "Foreword to the Tenth Anniversary Exhibition of the Betty
Parsons Gallery," in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and
Criticism (University of Chicago Press, 1993), Volume 3, page 256.

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Faulkner

In April, 1953, when Faulkner was trying to finish his ambitious novel
A Fable, he wrote a significant letter to his friend Joan Williams.
Working at the big book [he said]. . . . I know now--believe now--that
this may be the last major, ambitious work; there will be short things,
of course. The stuff is still good, but I know now that I am getting
toward the end, the bottom of the barrel. The stuff is still good, but I
know now that there is not very much more of it, a little trash comes
up constantly now, which must be sifted out. And now, at last, I have
some perspective on all I have done. I mean, the work apart from me,
the work which I did apart from what I am. . . . And now I realize for
the first time what an amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal
sense, without even very literate, let alone literary, companions, yet to
have made the things I made. I dont know where it came from. I dont
know why God or gods or whoever it was, selected me to be the
vessel. Believe me, this is not humility, false modesty: it is simply
amazement. I wonder if you have ever had that thought about the
work and the country man whom you know as Bill Faulkner--what
little connection there seems to be between them.
Faulkner's work, so different from the daily character of Bill Faulkner
the countryman, has been the subject of a vast and still growing body
of scholarship. It has been described, analyzed, explicated, diagramed,
concorded, indexed, praised, condemned, or exalted in an uncounted
number of monographs, dissertations, and scholarly papers, most of
which can be consulted in the Mississippi Room of the university
library. But there is one question, at least, to which this army of critics
and scholars has failed to give adequate answers-for of course there is
more than one answer. Why has Faulkner's work the power to call
forth this overwhelming response-not from all readers, of course, but
from a devoted body of readers and scholars? What is the source and
nature of Faulkner's magic?

Tonight I should like to offer one answer to that question. It is not, I

repeat, the only answer, but still it helps to explain one source of

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Faulkner's power. His work appeals to something deep in his readers
because he is a great mythopoeist, or mythmaker. He became a great
mythmaker because, more than any other American author since
Melville, he was able to use the rich resources of his unconscious,
while combining them with his sharp conscious observations and
retentive memory of everything he experienced.

A myth, according to Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, is "a usually

traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold
part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief or
natural phenomenon." That is a serviceable definition, but it omits
many elements of myths in a broader sense. Mythical characters seem
larger than ordinary people. They may be gods, heroes, ancestors,
villains, monsters; they may be holy fools, wise old men or women,
princesses, loyal retainers, or outcasts, but they always move against
the background of a human community, or of the sometimes inhuman
wilderness. The story often involves superhuman or magical elements,
but in any case it follows a ritual pattern, with the successive events
taking place, not by the usual laws of cause and effect, but because
they are preordained.

Myths all over the world have an astonishing similarity, possibly--or

so it is conjectured by many anthropologists--be cause they
correspond to patterns preexisting in the human unconscious. They are
almost always full of objects and incidents that have a symbolic value
of the sort that psychologists find in dreams. Trees, forests, rivers,
mountains, and strongholds keep recurring in them, as do wise
animals, dragons, invincible weapons, magic potions, witches,
fetishes, talismans, initiations, deadly perils, descents into the
underworld, flights, pursuits, atonements, and sacrifices. Often they
exert a powerful effect on their hearers, who feel that they are
participants in a sacred drama with an ending ordained since the
beginning of time.

The magical or mythopoeic side of Faulkner's work has been passed

over in silence by many of his critics. I cite for example Cleanth
Brooks, who is perhaps the best of them; surely his two books on
Faulkner are the most comprehensive and levelheaded. Nevertheless,

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in his long chapter on Absalom, Absalom!, he does not concede that
the novel has a mythical or legendary power. Instead he makes the
point that the herovillain, Colonel Sutpen, is not a representative
southern planter and that he embodies the Protestant ethic in a fashion
more likely to be found in the North. That is a valid observation, but it
leads the critic to what I feel is a false conclusion. Sutpen is an alien in
the Deep South, therefore--Brooks says in effect-the downfall of his
house cannot be interpreted as a tragic fable of southern history.
Brooks's implied "therefore" depends on a much too literal notion of
myths and symbols, especially of those suggested to an author by his
largely unconscious mind. Why should Brooks demand that symbols
must correspond at all points with events in the foreground of a story?
If Sutpen had been a representative southern planter, like General
Compson or Colonel Sartoris in the same novel, he would not have
been "the demon," as Miss Rosa Coldfield called him, and would
never have formed his grand design. There would have been no novel
and no myth. Oedipus, for example, was not a representative Theban.
In Absalom, Absalom!, we cannot doubt that Quentin Compson, as he
reconstructs the story of Sutpen's family (not merely of the colonel
himself), comes to regard it more and more as having an emblematic
meaning and as being essentially southern. So does his Canadian
roommate, Shreve McCannon, and so does the average perceptive
reader.

When I was reading Absalom, Absalom! for a second time, I puzzled

over that question of emblematic meanings and I wrote to Faulkner for
elucidation. "How much of the symbolism," I said, "is intentional,
deliberate?" To make the question more explicit, I quoted a paragraph
from an essay then under way. Here is part of the paragraph.
The reader cannot help wondering why this somber and, at moments,
plainly incredible story has so seized upon Quentin's mind that he
trembles with excitement when telling it and feels that it reveals the
essence of the Deep South. . . . Then slowly it dawns on you that most
of the characters and incidents have a double meaning; that besides
their place in the story, they also serve as symbols or metaphors with a
wider application. Sutpen's great design, the land he stole from the
Indians, the French architect who built his house with the help of wild

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Negroes from the jungle, the woman of mixed blood whom he married
and disowned, the unacknowledged son who ruined him, the poor
white whom he wronged and who killed him in anger, the final
destruction of the mansion like the downfall of a social order: all these
might belong to a tragic fable of Southern history. With a little
cleverness, the whole novel might be explained as a connected and
logical allegory, but this, I believe, would be going far beyond the
author's intention. First of all he was writing a story, and one that
affected him deeply, but he was also brooding over a social situation.
More or less unconsciously, the incidents in the story came to
represent the forces and elements in the social situation, since the
mind naturally works in terms of symbols and parallels. In Faulkner's
case, this form of parallelism is not confined to Absalom, Absalom!. It
can be found in the whole fictional framework that he has been
elaborating in novel after novel, until his work has become a myth or
legend of the South.
At this point I should like to say, after thirty years or more, that I too
was going beyond the author's intention. The truth is that Faulkner's
work embodies a number of myths or legends, usually a different one
in each of the novels published during his extraordinarily fertile period
from 1929 to 1942. Each of the myths has something to do with the
South, but is based on a different facet of southern society. But let us
see how Faulkner answered my question, in part of a long and
revealing letter:
Your divination (vide paragraph) is correct [he said]. I didn't intend it,
but afterward I dimly saw myself what you put into words. I think
though you went a step further than I (unconsciously, I repeat)
intended. I think Quentin, not Faulkner, is the correct yardstick here. I
was writing the story, but he not I was brooding over a situation. . . .
But more he grieved the fact (because he hated and feared the
portentous symptom) that a man like Sutpen, who to Quentin was
trash, originless, could not only have dreamed so high but have had
the force and strength to have failed so grandly. . . .

You are correct; I was first of all (I still think) telling what I thought
was a good story, and I believed Quentin could do it better than I in
this case. But I accept gratefully all your implications, even though I

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didn't carry them consciously and simultaneously in the writing of it.
But I dont believe it would have been necessary to carry them or even
to have known their analogous derivation, to have had them in the
story. Art is simpler than people think because there is so little to write
about. All the moving things are eternal in man's history and have
been written before, and if a man writes hard enough, sincerely
enough, humbly enough, and with the unalterable determination never
never never to be quite satisfied with it, he will repeat them, because
art like poverty takes care of its own, shares its bread.
Reading over those last lines, I could not help thinking of Emerson's
adjuration to the ideal poet:
Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say "It is in me and shall out." Stand
there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted,
stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power
which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all
limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the
whole river of electricity. Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, or
exists, which must not in turn arise and walk before him as exponent
of his meaning. Comes he to that power, his genius is no longer
exhaustible. All the creatures by pairs and by tribes pour into his mind
as into a Noah's ark, to come forth again to people a new world.
In our own century, Faulkner has been the great exponent of that
dream power. He dipped into his unconscious memories as into a
barrel, confident that he would find there all the moving stories since
the beginning of time, for he shared Emerson's confidence that all
human societies, as well as human souls, are cast in the same mold.
The barrel seemed inexhaustible, to follow Emerson's phrase, but
Faulkner was dipping into it deeper and deeper. First came his
childhood dreams or memories, then those of his family and those of
the Mississippi settlers, then the Gospel story, which appears several
times; then he entered a pre-Christian layer--not only that but
preliterate and prelogical as well, with touches of animism and
primitive magic--then finally, as he wrote to Joan Williams, he felt
that he was coming toward the end, the bottom of the barrel--"The
stuff is still good," he said, "but I know now that there is not very
much more of it, a little trash comes up constantly now, which must

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be sifted out." That was when he was writing A Fable, in which he
depended less on those subconscious feelings that had served him so
well in the novels of the 1930s. A Fable was willed as a parable,
whereas the true gifts of dream and the unconscious must be accepted
humbly and sincerely, as Faulkner accepted them in his earlier great
books. In these he created a whole series of myths, but the power and
magic of his achievement is most apparent in his 1942 book, Go
Down, Moses, and especially in that great legend of the wilderness,
"The Bear."

Let me apologize in advance for devoting so much of my attention to

"The Bear." It has been analyzed time and again and its symbolic or
mythical elements have been observed by many critics; I will mention
in particular John Lydenberg and Carvel Collins. It is in fact the
clearest example of Faulkner's mythmaking power, though it helps us
to find the same quality in other books--in Absalom, Absalom!, as
noted; in The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Sanctuary, As I
Lay Dying, and others as well.

Let me retell the story simply as a nature myth. The story (or chapter
of Go Down, Moses) is in five parts as we know, but we have
Faulkner's authorization to omit the long fourth part, which is
concerned with another myth, that of the black and white descendants
of old Carothers McCaslin. The nature myth is recounted in Parts I, II,
III, and V, and here I shall emphasize its magical or supernatural
elements, such as extrasensory perception, psychophysical
parallelism, reading the minds of animals (as do the old women in
fables who can understand the talk of birds), invulnerability to
weapons, the belief that objects are inhabited by spirits and that the
whole natural world is animate; and, as a special element, a concern
with events that happen, not by laws of cause and effect, but in
concordance with a ritual pattern preexisting in dreams. Here, then, is
the story retold as a myth of the wilderness and a myth of initiation.
Isaac McCaslin was first brought into the wilderness at the age of ten.
He had already inherited then, without ever having seen it, the big old
bear with one trap-ruined foot that in an area almost a hundred miles
square had earned for himself a name, a definite designation like a
living man:--the long legend of corncribs broken down and rifled, of

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shoats and grown pigs and even calves carried bodily into the woods
and devoured, and traps and deadfalls overthrown and dogs mangled
and slain, and shotgun and even rifle shots delivered at point-blank
range yet with no more effect than so many peas blown through a tube
by a child--a corridor of wreckage and destruction beginning back
before the boy was born, through which sped, not fast but rather with
the ruthless and irresistible deliberation of a locomotive, the shaggy
tremendous shape. It ran in his knowledge before he ever saw it. It
loomed and towered in his dreams before he even saw the unaxed
woods where it left its crooked print, shaggy, tremendous, red-eyed,
not malevolent but just big, too big for the dogs which tried to bay it,
for the horses which tried to ride it down, for the men and the bullets
they fired into it; too big for the very country which was its
constricting scope.
Here is the monster of legend: the dragon, the minotaur, the medusa of
innumerable legends, some of them going back to the Middle Ages
and others to preclassical times in Greece. In this case, however, we
note that the "shaggy, tremendous, red-eyed" creature is "not
malevolent, but just big." We read on:
It was as if the boy had already divined what his senses and
intellect had not encompassed yet: that doomed wilderness
whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by
men with plows and axes who feared it because it was
wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in
the land where the old bear had earned a name, and through
which ran not even a mortal beast but an anachronism
indomitable and invincible out of an old, dead time, a
phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old, wild life which
the little puny humans swarmed and hacked at in a fury of
abhorrence and fear, like pygmies about the ankles of a
drowsing elephant.
The bear, we note, is the "epitome and apotheosis" of the wilderness;
to use a simpler word, Old Ben is the god of the wilderness. As for the
hunters who pursue Old Ben, they are depicted almost as a band of
priests, each performing his sacerdotal part in a mystery. Ike McCaslin
at the age of ten is about to become one of the priestly band, not a full

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member, but a novice, an initiate. As such he will participate in what
Faulkner calls "the yearly pageant-rite of the old bear's furious
immortality."

Each novice, if he is fortunate, has a guide and mentor, a wise old

man. For the boy in this story, the mentor is Sam Fathers. We read:

He entered his novitiate to the true wilderness with Sam beside him as
he had begun his apprenticeship in miniature to manhood after the
rabbits and such with Sam beside him, the two of them wrapped in the
damp, warm, Negro-rank quilt, while the wilderness closed behind his
entrance as it had opened momentarily to accept him, opening before
his advancement as it closed behind his progress, no fixed path the
wagon followed but a channel nonexistent ten yards ahead of it and
ceasing to exist ten yards after it had passed. . . .

It seemed to him that at the age of ten he was witnessing his own
birth. It was not even strange to him. He had experienced it all before,
and not merely in dreams.

I shall not stress the sexual overtones of this passage. When the boy
enters the wilderness, it is almost as if he were entering the womb.
Initiation--so we read in the works of various anthropologists--is a rite
of death and rebirth. Did Faulkner read those anthropologists?
Possibly he may have done so, for he was a wide reader, but it seems
more likely that he discovered some of the same values and the same
images by exploring his own subconscious. That was part of his
mythopoeic genius.

Old Sam Fathers is the son of a Chickasaw chief by a Negro slave

woman. With the blood of the wilderness running strong in him, he
feels a mysterious affinity for the bear, and we find him, at points in
the story, even reading the bear's mind. Should we call that
extrasensory perception? Or should we think of all the fairy stories in
which someone is able to understand the language of animals? In
many respects, as I have suggested, "The Bear" is like a fairy story.

It is a characteristic of fairy stories that their plots move forward by

what we might call a graded series of actions or events, with each

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event being a little more intense than the one that preceded it.
Faulkner also made frequent use of the graded series and nowhere
more effectively than in "The Bear." The story contains three or four
of the series, but the one that is easiest to recognize is the series of
events that leads up to the decisive moment when the boy first catches
sight of the bear.

First event in the series: The hounds see the bear, and their baying
changes from a ringing chorus to "a moiling yapping an octave too
high and with something . . . in it which he could not yet recognize."
Later Ike and Sam find the dogs huddled under the kitchen and smell
an effluvium of something more than dog.

Second event: With his mystic knowledge of where the bear can be
found, Sam leads young Ike deep into the woods and shows him "the
rotted log scored 'and gutted with clawmarks and, in the wet earth
beside it, the print of the enormous warped two-toed foot. Now he
knew what he had heard in the hounds' voices in the woods that
morning and what he had smelled when he peered under the kitchen
where they huddled"; it was the sound and the smell of fear.

Third event: On the following morning Ike is on a new stand with his
loaded gun. "He heard no dogs at all. He never did certainly hear
them. He only heard the drumming of the woodpecker stop short off,
and knew that the bear was looking at him. He never saw it. He did
not know whether it was facing him from the cane or behind him. He
did not move, holding the useless gun which he knew now he would
never fire at it, now or ever, tasting in his saliva that taint of brass
which he had smelled in the huddled dogs when he peered under the
kitchen. . . . So I will have to see him, he thought, without dread or
even hope. I will have to look at him."

Each of these three experiences is more intense for Ike than the one
that preceded it. They are building toward a fourth event or experience
that will be still more intense, that will serve as a first climax of Ike's
novitiate as a priest of the wilderness. At this point Ike resembles an
Indian boy in search of a vision that will shape his future life. I quote

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from an account by two anthropologists reprinted in Bear, Man, and
God; they are describing the initiation rites of the Omaha tribe:
Four days and nights the youth was to fast and pray provided he was
physically able to bear so long a strain. No matter how hungry he
became, he was forbidden to use the bow and arrows put into his
hands by his father when he left his home for this solitary test of
endurance. When he fell into a sleep or a trance, if he saw or heard
anything that thing was to become a special medium through which
the youth could receive supernatural aid. . . . He passed through his
experience alone, and alone he returned to his father's lodge.
Young Ike McCaslin's special vision will be of the bear. The graded
series that leads up to it had started with the hounds' catching sight of
Old Ben. It had continued with Ike's seeing the bear's footprint and
then, as a third event, with the bear's looking at Ike. Now the boy,
alone in the wilderness, must see the bear for himself, but this fourth
event requires a lapse of time and a special preparation. It is
midsummer of the following year. Ike and his older companions have
returned to the camp in the wilderness. Each morning after breakfast
Ike leaves the camp with his shotgun, a watch, and a compass,
ostensibly to hunt squirrels; actually he is in search of Old Ben. For
three successive days he ranges farther and farther into the wilderness,
always alone, but always he comes back to camp without his vision.
As he returns on the third evening, he meets Sam Fathers, who says,
"You ain't looked right. . . . It's the gun."

He takes Sam's advice. On the fourth morning he leaves camp before

dawn, without breakfast (fasting like an Indian boy), and leaves the
gun behind. Ranging still farther into the wilderness, he searches for
nine hours without finding a sign of Old Ben. Then he decides that
leaving the gun behind isn't enough. He is still tainted; he still has the
watch and the compass. He hangs them both on a bush, and leans
against the bush the stick he has carried as a protection against snakes.
Empty-handed, he continues his search.

Slowly he realizes that, without watch or compass, he is completely

lost. He does what Sam had told him to do if lost; that is, he makes a
circular cast to cross his backtrack. He doesn't find the track, so he

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follows a second instruction of Sam's by making a wider cast in the
opposite direction. Once again failure; he finds no trace of his feet, or
of any feet. Close to panic now, he follows a third instruction by
sitting down on a log to think things over. Then comes one of the
finest passages in a superb story, a passage that must be quoted in full:
. . . seeing as he sat down on the log the crooked print, the
warped indentation in the wet ground which while he looked
at it continued to fill with water until it was level full and the
water began to overflow and the sides of the print began to
dissolve away. Even as he looked up he saw the next one, and,
moving, the one beyond it; moving, not hurrying, running, but
merely keeping pace with them as they appeared before him
as though they were being shaped out of thin air just one
constant pace short of where he would lose them forever and
be lost forever himself, tireless, eager, without doubt or dread,
panting a little above the strong rapid little hammer of his
heart, emerging suddenly into a little glade, and the wilderness
coalesced. It rushed, soundless, and solidified--the tree, the
bush, the compass and the watch glinting where a ray of
sunlight touched them. Then he saw the bear.
That is the vision for which he has searched and fasted, losing himself
in the wilderness. The vision has been vouchsafed because he has
followed the instructions of Sam Fathers, the priest of the wilderness,
and has even gone beyond those instructions by abandoning watch and
compass as well as gun. He has performed the magic ritual and it has
produced its magical result, without the least taint of science or logic,
but in accordance with patterns that seem to lie deep in the
unconscious and that Faulkner has embodied in this story. We read on:
[The bear] did not emerge, appear; it was just there, immobile, fixed
in the green and windless noon's hot dappling, not as big as he had
dreamed it but as big as he had expected, bigger, dimensionless
against the dappled obscurity, looking at him. Then it moved. It
crossed the glade without haste, walking for an instant into the sun's
full glare and out of it, and stopped again and looked back at him
across one shoulder. Then it was gone. It didn't walk into the woods. It
faded, sank back into the wilderness without motion as he had

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watched a fish, a huge old bass, sink back into the dark depths of its
pool and vanish without even any movement of its fins.
The bear at this moment is more than a flesh-and-blood creature; it is
a vision touched with elements of the supernatural. It does not emerge,
but is simply there. It does not walk away, but sinks back into the
wilderness without motion. The whole passage is full of magic in the
proper sense of the word, that is, of effects produced, not by natural
causes, but by spells and rituals. At the same time it seems profoundly
right to the reader because, I suspect, it appeals to feelings and
patterns existing in his mind below the level of conscious thinking.

Young Ike McCaslin's vision of the bear is not the only episode in the
story that illustrates these prelogical patterns of feeling, in the manner
of a medieval legend or a fairy tale. Another is the death of Old Ben,
an event toward which everything else has been building. At last the
hunters have found a huge dog, another mythical creature, that can
bay and hold him. With the new dog, Lion, leading the pack, they set
out after Old Ben on the last hunting day of three successive autumns.
Here we note another graded series. On the first autumn, seven
strangers appear in camp to watch the proceedings. Old Ben escapes
by swimming down the river. On the second autumn, more than a
dozen strangers appear. Old Ben escapes once more, but this time with
buckshot and a slug in his hide from General Compson's double-
barreled shotgun. The third autumn will be the climax. Some forty
strangers appear to watch the hunt, "so that when they went into the
woods this morning Major de Spain led a party almost as strong,
excepting that some of them were not armed, as some he had led in
the last darkening days of '64 and '65." In the frantic chase that
follows, most of the hunters are left behind. Old Ben swims across the
river, pursued by Lion and most of the other dogs, but now by only
three hunters, who have also crossed the river. (Incidentally, Carvel
Collins was the first to point out the mythical significance of their
crossing water.)

The moment has come for Old Ben to die, and his death is
accomplished in a ritual fashion, against all the laws of scientific
probability. Among the three hunters who are eligible to kill him,
having crossed the river, old Sam Fathers is a priest of the wilderness

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and cannot kill his own god (not to mention that Sam is unarmed).
Young Ike has decided that he will never, in any circumstances, shoot
at the bear. The third eligible hunter is Boon Hogganbeck, who has
never been known to hit anything he aimed at; his gun is useless. But
Boon also has a more primitive weapon, a knife. As reported by
anthropologists, there was a widespread feeling among woodland
Indians that bears, being a special sort of animal connected with very
old tribal ceremonies and traditions, should be killed only with
primitive weapons such as a knife or an axe. Had Faulkner read about
that feeling or did he, once again, recapture it instinctively?

The story reaches its climax. The hounds swirl around the bear as it
stands on its hind legs with its back against a tree. Lion dives in and
sinks his teeth in the bear's throat. The bear holds Lion in both arms,
"almost loverlike," and then begins raking the dog's belly with his
foreclaws. To save his dog, Boon Hogganbeck throws away the
useless gun, flings himself astride the bear's back, and plunges his
knife into the bear's throat. ". . . then the bear surged erect, raising
with it the man and the dog too, and turned and still carrying the man
and the dog it took two or three steps toward the woods on its hind
feet as a man would have walked and crashed down. It didn't collapse,
crumple. It fell all of a piece, as a tree falls, so that all three of them,
man dog and bear, seemed to bounce once."

The death of the bear leads magically to a series of catastrophic

events. Old Sam Fathers collapses; after the loss of his wilderness god
he has no more reason for living. Lion dies of his wounds. Major de
Spain sells the wilderness to a logging company, saving out only the
acre of land where Sam and Lion are buried (with one of the bear's
paws in an axle-grease tin near the top of Lion's grave). Major de
Spain will never go back to the hunting camp, and there will be no
more November hunting parties.

But the boy goes back two years later, as an act of piety. That is the
episode beautifully presented in the fifth and last section of "The
Bear," once again with overtones of primitive ritual and magic. Ike
digs up the axle-grease tin, inspects the dried remains of the bear's
mutilated paw, then puts the tin back again. He does not even look for

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Sam Fathers's grave, knowing that he had stepped over it, perhaps on
it. "But that is all right," he thinks to himself. "He probably knew I
was in the woods this morning long before I got here." Instead he goes
to the other axle-grease tin, the one he had nailed to a nearby tree; on
the morning of Sam's burial he had filled it with food and tobacco. It
was empty now--
. . . as empty of that as it would presently be of this which he drew
from his pocket--the twist of tobacco, the new bandanna handkerchief,
the small paper sack of the peppermint candy which Sam had used to
love; that gone too, almost before he had turned his back, not vanished
but merely translated into the myriad life which printed the dark mold
of these secret and sunless places with delicate fairy tracks, which,
breathing and biding and immobile, watched him from beyond every
twig and leaf until he moved . . . quitting the knoll which was no
abode of the dead because there was no death, not Lion and not Sam:
not held fast in earth but free in earth and not in earth but of earth,
myriad yet undiffused of every myriad part, leaf and twig and particle,
air and sun and rain and dew and night, acorn oak and leaf and acorn
again, dark and dawn and dark and dawn again in their immutable
progression, and, being myriad, one: and Old Ben too, Old Ben too;
they would give him his paw back even, certainly they would give
him his paw back: then the long challenge and the long chase, no heart
to be driven and outraged, no flesh to be mauled and bled.
What should we call the beliefs implicit in that passage: animism?
pantheism? panpsychism? a sacrifice to the spirits of the dead? the
myth of eternal recurrence translated into spiritual terms? All those
primeval notions are suggested, and Ike himself has become part of
them. He has replaced Sam Fathers as a priest of the wilderness,
which, though destroyed by lumbermen, will live on in his mind.

As Ike walks down from the graves on the knoll he has one more
experience that evokes a feeling of the supernatural. He almost steps
on a huge rattlesnake, "the head raised higher than his knee and less
than his knee's length away . . . the old one, the ancient and accursed
about the earth, fatal and solitary and he could smell it now: the thin
sick smell of rotting cucumbers and something else which had no
name, evocative of all knowledge and an old weariness and of pariah-

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hood and of death." Ike stands there transfixed, one foot still raised
from the ground, until at last, without striking him, the snake glides
away. Then he puts the other foot down and, "standing with one hand
raised as Sam had stood that afternoon six years ago . . . speaking the
old tongue which Sam had spoken that day without premeditation
either: 'Chief,' he said: 'Grandfather.'"

The reader does not stop to question how Ike had come to remember
those two words of Chickasaw that Sam had spoken six years before,
or how he came to know that one of them meant "Chief" and the other
"Grandfather," those two words of high respect to be spoken with one
hand raised. We are ready to believe that Ike himself, at this point, has
acquired magical powers. "The Bear" is more than a story; it is a myth
that appeals, like other great myths, to feelings buried deep in the
minds of its readers.

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Hemingway

HEMINGWAY’S JOURNALISM
Ernest Hemingway’s work as a journalist at the Kansas City Star from
October 1917 to April 1918 helped forge his distinctive writing style,
particularly his reliance on short, declarative sentences. Michael
Reynolds suggests that Hemingway’s experience as a journalist had
both positive and negative effects on his writing:
The newspaper game taught him the necessity for exact and believable
facts, a lesson reinforced by [American poet Ezra] Pound. It taught
him to avoid passive voice, long sentences, and polysyllabic words.
But it also taught him the reporter’s passive role of being witness to
the event without participating in it…. In Hemingway’s early fiction,
the reporter’s stance produced oddly passive characters to whom
things happened but who seldom took action on their own. (Paris, 97)
Hemingway himself told an interviewer that on the Star he learned
how to write simple declarative sentences, a skill that would be
helpful to any young writer (Plimpton 116). The paper’s style sheet
gave reporters 110 straightforward rules to follow to improve their
writing, and many of them are reflected in Hemingway’s work. The
first paragraph stated, “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs.
Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative” (qtd. in Fenton 31).
Other guidelines included the recommendation that slang is effective
only if it’s new and a caution against using adjectives (Fenton 32–33).

“Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing,”
Hemingway said in 1940. “I’ve never forgotten them. No man with
any talent, who feels and writes truly about the thing he is trying to
say, can fail to write well if he abides with them’’ (“Back to His First
Field” 21).

Hemingway’s writing owes its terseness in part to his extensive

experience with “cablese.” As a foreign correspondent in Europe for
the Toronto Star, Hemingway often sent his stories in by telegrams,
for which the newspaper was charged by the word. To keep costs

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down, he had to convey his messages by cable in as few words as
possible, creating a dense, information-packed style jokingly termed
“cablese.”
LITERARY INFLUENCES ON HEMINGWAY’S STYLE
Besides influencing his writing style, Hemingway’s early experience
as a journalist exposed him to experiences that later became subject
matter for his fiction. But Hemingway also benefited from the counsel
of older, more experienced writers. Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude
Stein became two of the earliest and most important literary influences
on Hemingway’s writing style. Anderson was a well-known and
respected novelist when Hemingway met him in Chicago in the fall of
1920 and soon afterward followed his sage advice to go to Paris.
Anderson was also the author of Winesburg, Ohio, a 1919 work which
like Hemingway’s In Our Time is a collection of interrelated short
stories. Because of its setting in the horse-racing world, its colloquial
language, and its focus on the father-son relationship, Hemingway’s
short story “My Old Man” is generally recognized as the work most
closely resembling Anderson’s work, specifically his short story “I
Want to Know Why.” In a backhanded acknowledgment of his debt to
Anderson, Hemingway later wrote the brief novel Torrents of Spring
to parody what he saw as Anderson’s comically bad writing later in
his career.

Gertrude Stein influenced Hemingway to experiment with automatic

writing and free association to stimulate his writing, techniques
similar to the freewriting taught today in composition classes. When
he first brought her some poems and the beginning of a novel to read,
she responded bluntly, as she reports in The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas: “There is a great deal of description in this, she said, and not
particularly good description. Begin over again and concentrate, she
said” (Stein 262). After reading a draft of “Big Two-Hearted River,”
she told Hemingway, “remarks are not literature” (Stein 270) and
wisely advised him to cut the introductory material (published after
his death as “On Writing”) from the beginning of the story. She also
strongly encouraged him to give up his job as a reporter for the sake of
his art.

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His contemporary F. Scott Fitzgerald recommended Hemingway’s
work to the attention of Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s own editor at
Scribner’s. He wrote a favorable review of In Our Time for Bookman
and counseled Hemingway to cut the first two chapters of The Sun
Also Rises. He also advised him to cut a joke from the short story
“Fifty Grand.” Hemingway complied, although he still regretted the
decision years later. The two corresponded off and on for years.
Although Hemingway was less than kind in his characterization of
Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast, he respected Fitzgerald’s work, and
The Great Gatsby made a lasting impression on him.

Other contemporaries who influenced Hemingway’s writing included

Ezra Pound, whom he once called “the man who taught me to distrust
adjectives” (AMF 134); T.S. Eliot, from whom he claimed to have
learned the art of allusion (DIA 139); D.H. Lawrence, who shared his
mysticism about the spirituality of heterosexual love, and whom in
True at First Light he specifically mentioned regretting never having
met; and James Joyce, whom he did meet, and whose work he
consistently admired and praised. Perhaps because Hemingway spent
his twenties in Paris at a time when it was the vibrant center of the art
world, he developed a passionate love for art, especially the works of
Modernist artists such as Picasso, Miro, and Cezanne. He also claimed
other kinds of artists as influences, including Bach, Mozart, and the
sculptor Rodin.

Hemingway read extensively all his life. Although he was not college-
educated, he was extraordinarily well read, particularly in nineteenth-
and twentieth-century European literature. He read newspapers
everywhere he went, packed boxes of books to take with him even on
his African safaris, and frequently drew up lists of literature he
recommended to would-be writers. Even in his later years, when his
health was failing, he subscribed to more than a dozen magazines and
read 200 to 300 books a year (Reynolds, Final 202–03).

In interviews and in his Esquire articles he mentioned many authors

and other artists whose work had influenced his, including French
authors Gustav Flaubert, Stendhal, Guy de Maupassant, and Marcel
Proust; Russians Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy,

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and Anton Chekhov; the German writer Thomas Mann; British
authors Andrew Marvell, Henry Fielding, W.H. Hudson, Emily
Brontë, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, and Shakespeare; and the
medieval Italian poet Dante. Two other important influences on his
work include the King James Version of the Bible and the Oxford
Book of English Verse, two works that gave him some of his best
titles.

“All modern literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called
Huckle-berry Finn,” Hemingway writes in Green Hills of Africa (22).
Hemingway himself may have owed his use of vernacular American
English to Twain. From Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage,
he learned how to write about war in an honest, naturalistic way rather
than in the overblown, sentimental Victorian style. He also learned
from Crane’s well-researched historical Civil War novel (published in
1895) that it was possible for an author to describe with convincing
accuracy a battle he had never seen—a feat of which Hemingway later
proved himself capable in A Farewell to Arms. Crane, who was not
born until 1871, well after the American Civil War ended in 1865,
nevertheless wrote so perceptively about war that Hemingway
included the whole text of The Red Badge of Courage in Men at War:
The Best War Stories of All Time, an anthology he edited.

Rudyard Kipling, now best known for his children’s books, Just So
Stories and The Jungle Book, was also an important influence on
Hemingway’s work. Although Kipling is sometimes dismissed by
contemporary readers as an apologist for British imperialism in India,
the Nobel Prize-winning poet and novelist was highly respected
during Hemingway’s youth, and the themes of his work—action and
adventure, brutality and human responses to it, and the difficulty of
becoming a man—turn up in Hemingway’s work as well. Hemingway
praised Kipling’s work in his private letters, mentioned it favorably in
Green Hills of Africa and his magazine articles, and included a
Kipling story in the collection Men at War.

Hemingway also drew inspiration from his boyhood reading of

Captain Frederick Marryat, a British naval officer and author of
adventure stories and children’s literature. Literary critic Mark Spilka

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suggests that what Hemingway found so compelling in Marryat’s
writings were depictions of boys rebelling against conventional
parents, the representation of the man of action with masculine values,
themes of vengeance and reprisal, and the emphasis on the “stiff upper
lip” a gentleman was expected to maintain. From American novelist
Jack London, author of the 1903 book The Call of the Wild,
Hemingway took a naturalistic outlook, rugged subject matter, and a
tough, macho attitude towards suffering.

Hemingway was also interested in Theodore Roosevelt’s commitment

to wilderness preservation and his advocacy of a vigorous masculinity
typified by soldiering and hunting. Hemingway was drawn to Africa
in part as a result of reading Roosevelt’s account of his own safari.
Hemingway himself acknowledged that he learned from popular short
story writer O. Henry, author of the famous Christmas tale “Gift of the
Magi,” how to end his stories with what Hemingway called a
“wow”—a tactic Hemingway later prided himself on having
eventually unlearned (DIA 182).
WRITING PROCESS
In his articles, nonfiction, and interviews, Hemingway described his
development as an artist in unusual and extensive detail. In his early
twenties, as he recalled decades later in A Moveable Feast,
Hemingway often wrote at Paris cafés. In the 1950s Hemingway told
George Plimpton of the Paris Review that he stood while he wrote. He
typically wrote his first drafts in handwriting. He tried to write daily,
generally beginning early in the morning and working until early
afternoon, and kept track of his progress by counting the words
written each day. He tried to stop each afternoon while he knew what
would happen next in the story, so that when he returned to the work
the next day, he would have an idea already in mind of what to write.
In the meantime, he consciously tried to avoid thinking about his work
because he believed that putting it out of his mind both enabled his
subconscious to work and made him a better observer of what went on
around him. Before he began drafting, he would reread and edit what
he had written the previous day, marking up the pages with
handwritten corrections. He made further changes when the drafts
were typed and sometimes continued to tinker with the work even

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after it was typeset and he received the galleys to proofread before
publication.

Once his work was published, Hemingway paid close attention to his
publisher’s marketing efforts, writing frequently to his editor,
Maxwell Perkins, to criticize a book’s cover art or to complain about
the way his books were advertised. Although money was never his
chief concern, he was nevertheless demoralized when his early work
was repeatedly rejected, especially when the editors reviewing his
short stories persisted in calling them anecdotes or sketches rather
than stories. He later paid close attention to his books’ sales figures
and was always aware of what his work was worth in economic terms.

Hemingway avoided talking about his writing before it was published

because he believed that talking would rob him of the need to write
and ruin his enthusiasm for the project. In A Moveable Feast he recalls
reading parts of A Sun Also Rises aloud to friends, and it’s clear he
came to despise himself for what he later perceived as a deplorable
lack of professionalism. He writes with scorn of the pleasure he took
in his audience’s favorable reactions, and it is apparent that he
believed he should have been writing for his own satisfaction as an
artist rather than pandering to an audience whose tastes he later came
to distrust.

In his first drafts, Hemingway tended to overwrite—that is, to give too

much extraneous background information, to repeat himself, to
pontificate. He often revised by cutting, sometimes extensively. On
Fitzgerald’s recommendation, Hemingway cut 15 pages (more than a
chapter) from the beginning of The Sun Also Rises manuscript; when
Gertrude Stein acerbically observed that “remarks are not literature,”
he cut nine pages from “Big Two-Hearted River” (Stein 270). He
worked especially hard on the endings to his stories and once told an
interviewer he had revised the last page of A Farewell to Arms 39
times before he was happy with it (Plimpton 113)—a claim that his
manuscripts substantiate.

Hemingway hated to be interrupted while he was working and later in

life frequently complained about the telephone calls and visits from

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fans that came with fame. He expected his wives to manage the
household and his children while he worked and deeply resented his
third wife, Martha, because she rejected this traditional wifely role,
believing her writing was as important as his.

Hemingway saw his talent as a moral responsibility and wrote often in

his work about artists who perverted, squandered, or abused their
talent—for example, in To Have and Have Not, “The Snows of
Kilimanjaro,” and A Moveable Feast. He believed that “a writer
should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God”
(“Introduction” xiii). As he explained in his conclusion to Death in the
Afternoon, “The great thing is to last and get your work done and see
and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something
that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after” (278).

In the short story “Fathers and Sons,” the story’s autobiographical

protagonist, Nicholas Adams, thinks to himself, “If he wrote it he
could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing about
them” (SS 491). There is some evidence that Hemingway, Nick’s
creator, felt the same way. He once told F. Scott Fitzgerald that
whenever he was hurt he should use his pain in his work. According to
a memoir by one Hemingway associate, the movie star Ava Gardner
once asked Hemingway if he had ever had a psychoanalyst. “Sure I
have. Portable Corona number three,” he responded, referring to his
typewriter. “That’s been my analyst” (Hotchner 152). He sometimes
used his writing to exorcise painful emotions. Both in interviews and
in his written response upon receiving the Nobel Prize, Hemingway
emphasized the writer’s loneliness and isolation. Yet decades earlier,
he had once written, of Nick Adams’ writing, and probably of his own
as well, “It was really more fun than anything. He had never realized
that before. It wasn’t conscience. It was simply that it was the greatest
pleasure” (NAS 238).
GENRES
Ernest Hemingway wrote published and unpublished works in an
astonishingly broad range of genres. His published work includes
newspaper articles, poetry, short stories, novels, a parody, a play,
magazine articles, a memoir, and book-length nonfiction. He also

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corresponded extensively with his friends, relatives, and ex-wives,
writing letters when he could not write fiction. Biographer Carlos
Baker conservatively estimated that Hemingway wrote some six or
seven thousand letters during his lifetime, and after discussion with
scholars, Stephen Plotkin, the former curator of the Hemingway
Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, believes that
the actual number could be as high as twice that many. Hemingway
also wrote a documentary film script, edited a book of writings on
war, contributed introductions to the books of other writers, and once
wrote a beautifully moving eulogy at the request of a friend’s widow.

Although his novels The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms
regularly appear on lists of the best works of American literature,
Hemingway’s short stories are on the whole regarded even more
highly than his novels, and it would be difficult to find an anthology
of twentieth-century short stories that does not include one of his
works. His poetry is less highly regarded, and it is generally
acknowledged that he wrote his best poetry in the lyrical prose of his
novels and short stories.

Despite his obvious productivity as a writer, however, Hemingway

suffered increasingly throughout his life from severe bouts of writer’s
block. In his worst moments of artistic doubt, deepened by his
depression, Hemingway sometimes nearly despaired that he would
ever write again. Writing was rarely easy for him. “The hardest thing
in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings.
First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to
write. Both take a lifetime to learn …”he wrote in one of his columns
for Esquire magazine in 1934 (By-Line 159).

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway, although plagued by self-doubt,

tells himself, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you
will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write
the truest sentence that you know” (12). David Bourne offers himself
a similar reminder in the posthumously published novel The Garden
of Eden, telling himself, “it is all very well for you to write simply and
the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply.
Know how complicated it is and then state it simply” (37). That

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emphasis on one true sentence—that apparent simplicity, so difficult
to achieve—characterized his best and most memorable work.
HEMINGWAY’S LITERARY INNOVATIONS
The strength of Hemingway’s writing is his style, which is so
distinctive that it has inspired the ultimate backhanded tribute: an
annual Bad Hemingway Contest, in which entrants vie to write the
funniest parody of Hemingway’s work. Before Hemingway, much
popular American fiction was written in a sweetly sentimental late-
Victorian prose that seemed stale and laughable after the horror and
disillusionment of World War I. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1886
classic Little Lord Fauntleroy is typical of this flowery style. By
contrast, the characteristics of Hemingway’s style include short
declarative sentences, a preference for simple, often one-syllable
words, and an emphasis on the concrete rather than the abstract.

In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explained the importance of

the concrete: “I was trying to write then and I found the greatest
difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than
what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to
put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were
which produced the emotion that you experienced” (2). Hemingway
wrote something very similar in a letter to his father from Paris in
March 1925, explaining passionately that he was trying not to depict
life but to make an experience come alive for the reader (Selected
Letters 153). In 1942, in his introduction to Men at War, he wrote, “A
writer’s job is to tell the truth. His standard of fidelity to the truth
should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should
produce a truer account than anything factual can be” (xiv).

Apart from his style and his emphasis on the concrete detail, perhaps
Hemingway’s most noteworthy contribution to literature is his theory
of omission, which he practiced even in his earliest work: “I always
try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it
underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can
eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that
doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it
then there is a hole in the story” (qtd. in Plimpton 125). “I sometimes

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think my style is suggestive rather than direct,” he wrote in an article
not published until after his death. “The reader must often use his
imagination or lose the most subtle part of my thought” (qtd. in
Wagner-Martin, Six Decades 275). In A Moveable Feast Hemingway
recalls that in writing the short story “Out of Season” (published in In
Our Time), he had described an actual fishing trip that went wrong
because of a drunken guide, but had left out the real-life aftermath, the
guide’s suicide after he was fired as a result of Ernest’s complaints:
“This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if
you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the
story and make people feel something more than they understood”
(75). The chief disadvantage of this theory is that it opens the door to
all sorts of rather frightening misreadings by people who insist that
they know what Hemingway “left out.”

One of Hemingway’s most famous omissions occurs in “Hills Like

White Elephants,” where neither of the characters ever names the
action—a proposed abortion—about which they are arguing. Part of
what he omits in many of his writings is the emotion. At the end of A
Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry expresses so little of the grief he
feels that some imperceptive critics have erroneously called him
emotionally stunted.
MODERNISM
Hemingway’s writings are associated with the literary movement
called modernism. A decided break with the Victorian and Edwardian
periods that preceded it, modernism is generally associated with
literary works produced between 1914, the beginning of World War I,
and 1939, the beginning of World War II. As Virginia Woolf writes in
her essay on character, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,… in or about
December, 1910, human character changed” (320).

In some ways, modernism was a response to the changes created by

startling new theories about human life and behavior. According to the
theory of evolution proposed by the British naturalist Charles Darwin
(1809–1882), human beings, rather than being the center of a divinely
created universe, were little better than animals at the mercy of their
own biology. Russian economist Karl Marx (1818–1883) theorized

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that economic forces controlled human beings and determined their
actions and even their beliefs. With his theories of the unconscious,
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the Austrian father of psychoanalysis,
argued that human beings were not even in full control of their own
minds. If those theories weren’t enough to discourage faith in
humanity, the carnage of World War I destroyed any lingering doubts.

As scholar Paul Fussell has shown in The Great War and Modern
Memory, the young men England sent off to fight in World War I
envisioned a picturesque war involving heroism and chivalry. Instead
they found themselves mired in mud-filled trenches, fighting
desperately for weeks to gain a foot of ground. Bitter and
disillusioned, the surviving members of the younger generation came
to blame the older generation—and specifically their fathers—for
what was perceived as the pointless sacrifice of so many young lives.

Modernist writers responded to the culture’s destruction of faith in

humanity by dropping the notions of heroism espoused by their
parents and turning instead to a sometimes savage irony. A classic
example occurs at the end of the first chapter of A Farewell to Arms:
“At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain
came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven
thousand died of it in the army” (4). Modernist writing is also
characterized by aesthetic innovation and radical experimentation,
including the stream-of-consciousness novels of James Joyce, Virginia
Woolf, and William Faulkner; the new, nonrhyming verse forms of
h.d. and Ezra Pound; and the fragmentation of Hemingway’s In Our
Time, John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy of novels, and T.S. Eliot’s
poem “The Waste Land.”

In part as a result of World War I, gender roles began to change

dramatically in Western culture during the 1920s. Thanks to tireless
campaigning by count-less suffragists, American women became
eligible to vote when the 19th Amendment to the United States
Constitution was ratified on August 26, 1920. Women began to wear
shorter skirts and cut their hair short, an action F. Scott Fitzgerald
memorialized in the short story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” Thus was
born the “flapper,” also sometimes referred to as the “New Woman.”

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Unlike her predecessors, the New Woman smoked, drank, and used
birth control. She might go to college, although few women went on
to work, and she enjoyed an unprecedented new sexual freedom.
These changes made many men uneasy and uncomfortable, and those
feelings are reflected in the literature written by male modernist
writers. In Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, for example,
Jake Barnes’ sexual incapacity and oddly feminized role with respect
to Lady Brett Ashley (he is passive, chaste, and long-suffering)
perhaps reflect Hemingway’s masculine anxiety about the New
Woman and her effect on his own gender role.

Also significant in the rise of modernism is the corresponding

development of new technologies in the early twentieth century,
including the radio, the airplane, and the relatively inexpensive
automobile produced by Henry Ford’s newly invented assembly-line
process. These technologies made the kind of global travel we
associate with Hemingway easier, which helps explain why so many
Modernist writers—Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, James
Joyce, Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, and T.S. Eliot, for example—
became expatriates. Inventions first created decades earlier also
became more readily available to the general public, including the
camera, the typewriter, the phonograph, the telegraph, and the
telephone. Yet technology also created increasing alienation and
culminated in the machine guns and poison gas of World War I. Partly
in response to the dehumanizing and alienating effects new
technology could have on human civilization, writers like D.H.
Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats espoused a return to primitivism
or drew on mythic traditions. For example, Lawrence called for a
return to what he called the dark blood knowledge of human sexuality,
Eliot evoked ancient Greek myths in his poetry, and Yeats encouraged
interest in the traditional Celtic folklore of his native Ireland.
Especially influential were works like Sir James Frazer’s The Golden
Bough and Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, which traced the
influence of ancient fertility cults upon early Christianity.

Many modernist writers chose to become expatriates in part because

Paris offered them a much more stimulating intellectual climate than
America did. They could also associate with other writers and artists

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in a freer social environment in which unorthodox behavior—
including eccentricities, irregular work schedules, homosexuality,
alcoholism, and creativity—was tolerated and sometimes even
encouraged rather than condemned. Vital in the establishment of
modernism were small communities of writers who encouraged each
other, provided free editorial help and advice, and promoted and
sometimes published each other’s work, communities such as the
Bloomsbury Group in London or the loosely associated Parisian
expatriates of whom Hemingway was a part. So-called “little
magazines,” literary magazines such as transition and The Dial that
often operated on shoestring budgets, published modernist fiction and
poetry when no other magazines were interested in such difficult,
experimental writings.
THEMES
Modernist writings were often difficult to publish because of their
content as well as their style. Modernist writers wrote with relative
openness about homosexuality, abortion, and prostitution—topics that
the American public saw as immoral and disgusting. World War I and
the younger generation’s revulsion at its cost in human lives comprise
an important theme of many modernist works, including Wilfred
Owen’s poetry, Hemingway’s In Our Time and A Farewell to Arms,
and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway.
Hemingway’s work is also typical of modernism in its fragmentation
(In Our Time), its irony, and its characters’ rejection of religious belief
(for example, Brett in The Sun Also Rises, Catherine in A Farewell to
Arms and the waiter in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”).

But the chief theme of Hemingway’s writing concerns how best to

cope with suffering and defeat, how to live with dignity in a world that
is racked with violence and loss. Hemingway described this theme in a
succinct and memorable phrase that his friend Gerald Murphy recalled
him first using on a ski trip they took together with John Dos Passos in
March 1926. Murphy, a novice skier, was in over his head on the
slopes but did not want to let his friends down, even though
Hemingway was a much more experienced skier. Murphy later wrote
of Hemingway, “[W]hen we got to the bottom, about a half an hour
later, he asked me if I’d been scared. I said yes, I guess I had. He said

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then that he knew what courage was, it was grace under pressure. It
was childish of me, but I felt absolutely elated” (qtd. in Donnelly and
Billings 22). Hemingway often included the expression in his letters
and mentioned it to Dorothy Parker, who cited it in her 1929 Vanity
Fair profile of Hemingway. President John F. Kennedy borrowed the
phrase “grace under pressure” in his 1956 essay collection, Profiles in
Courage, and it has remained a hallmark of Hemingway’s work for
decades.

Also a hallmark of Hemingway’s work is its persistently elegiac

quality, which is neatly captured in an online joke. In a twist on the
old riddle, “Why did the chicken cross the road?,” answers are given
in the style of various writers. The response in the Hemingway style
is: “To die. In the rain.” As a writer, Hemingway has a nostalgic
preoccupation with loss, sometimes even to the extent of painfully
anticipating the loss before it occurs, as for example when he is
homesick for Africa even before he leaves it: “All I wanted to do now
was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet, but when I would wake
in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for it already” (GHOA
72). Most of his novels end bleakly, often with a death. As the narrator
of Death in the Afternoon points out to his listener, “Madame, all
stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story
teller who would keep that from you” (122).

On the brighter side, Hemingway’s richly evocative descriptions of

places—particularly Paris and Pamplona—are a strength of his
writing, one on which he prided himself: “For we have been there in
the books and out of the books—and where we go, if we are any good,
there you can go as we have been” (GHOA 109). His detailed
descriptions of European cities—their cafés, hotels, cathedrals, works
of art, public squares, and religious festivals, and the natural beauty of
the surrounding countryside—are so vividly compelling that some
readers have used his books as travel guides, prompting Hemingway
aficionados to create coffee-table books like Hemingway’s Paris and
Hemingway’s Spain, complete with color photographs of locations
mentioned in his novels. His writings on food have inspired the
creation of a seven-page glossary defining the dishes mentioned in A
Moveable Feast alone, various articles on food and eating in

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Hemingway’s writings, and even a cookbook of recipes for the dishes
featured in various Hemingway works.

He repeatedly emphasized that writing should be based on personal

experience: “You throw it all away and invent from what you know. I
should have said that sooner. That’s all there is to writing. That, a
perfect ear (call it selective absolute pitch), the devotion to your work
and respect for it that a priest of God has for his, and then have the
guts of a burglar, no conscience except to writing, and you’re in,
gentlemen. It’s easy” (“Art” 134).
PERCEPTIONS OF HEMINGWAY’S WORK
Hemingway’s books were unevenly received by both reviewers and
the public. Both In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises were very
successful, although as Hemingway scholar Susan F. Beegel observes,
neither could compete with a blockbuster like Margaret Mitchell’s
1936 novel, Gone with the Wind.His short story collections were well
received, but To Have and Have Not was published to mixed reviews.
His nonfiction works, Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of
Africa, sold less well and were largely panned by the critics. His
reputation revived first with the 1940 publication of For Whom the
Bell Tolls and again, after the disappointing Across the River and Into
the Trees, with The Old Man and the Sea in 1952. However, both of
these initially acclaimed works have declined in reputation somewhat
since their first enthusiastic reception. Many of his novels and short
stories have been made into films, and his works are regularly taught
in high school and college classrooms around the world. His
posthumous works, although heavily edited, have sold well, and
although Islands in the Stream and True at First Light are inferior to
his best work, their publication seems to have done little harm to his
reputation. Because of its sensational subject matter concerning sexual
transformation, The Garden of Eden has provoked perhaps the most
interest, although A Moveable Feast is arguably the best of the
posthumously published works.

Because in his fiction Hemingway employed the language people used

in everyday conversation, he had trouble with censorship of his
language all his life. The first story in In Our Time, “Up in Michigan,”

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had to be replaced because its sexual content might have caused the
publisher a legal battle on obscenity charges. The first paragraph of
the short story “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” was revised to remove the
repetitive and potentially offensive references to how the couple “tried
very hard to have a baby” (Reynolds, Paris 292). When Scribner’s
Magazine published A Farewell to Arms, it replaced some of
Hemingway’s language with blanks, but the magazine was still
banned in Boston because of moral objections to the sexual content of
the story. “Condom” was cut from Green Hills of Africa when it was
published in Scribner’s Magazine (Reynolds, 1930s 205–6). To
twenty-first-century readers the censorship seems oddly focused,
however. As Michael Reynolds points out with respect to the
publication of “White Man, Black Man, Alphabet Man,” one of the
stories that later made up To Have and Have Not,“Esquire, not
allowed to say that a person was ‘kicked in the ass,’ had no trouble
printing this story’s numerous references to Wesley as ‘the nigger’ ”
(1930s 217).

Contemporary readers of the last three decades have objected to

certain elements in Hemingway’s work that they deem immoral or at
least troubling. Feminist literary critics such as Judith Fetterley and
Millicent Bell have complained of what they perceive as
Hemingway’s hostility toward women. Toni Morrison, the African-
American novelist who, like Hemingway, has won both the Pulitzer
and the Nobel Prize, has criticized the way in which Hemingway has
constructed an Africanist presence in his writings, specifically in To
Have and Have Not and The Garden of Eden. Scholar Debra
Moddelmog has pointed out the obliviousness of Harry’s protagonist
to his own privilege in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Hemingway’s
attitudes toward homosexuality can also be disturbing. When Jake
Barnes wants to punch one of the gays who enter the dance club with
Brett, it is difficult to tell whether Hemingway sympathizes or
disapproves. Finally, environmentalists and animal rights supporters
have objected to the hunting, fishing, and bullfighting scenes in
Hemingway’s work on the grounds that they glorify cruelty to animals
and the destruction of species.

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Some of these charges have arisen in part because most of the critics
who have studied Hemingway’s work have been white heterosexual
men of European descent, and they have emphasized the presence in
Hemingway’s work of the elements that most interested them: “When
potential readers reject Hemingway as indifferent to minorities and
hostile to women, they are often responding not to Hemingway’s
fiction, but to the indifference and hostility of some of his early critics,
and a negative image of the author those influential first admirers
unintentionally projected” (Beegel, “Conclusion” 277).

Hemingway’s attitudes are more complicated than has generally been

appreciated. In his work he often couples ugly expressions of sexism,
racism, or anti-Semitism, on one hand, with an imaginative and
sympathetic depiction of the effects of such cruelty on the other. That
schizophrenic tension between Hemingway’s own worst impulses and
his empathy for another’s suffering explains why he is his best and
most ethical self in his work as an artist.

One of Hemingway’s oldest published short stories, for example, “Up

in Michigan,” describes a date rape from the point of view of the
female victim, a young waitress named Liz Coates. The fact that he
originally wanted this story to appear as the first story in In Our Time
suggests that he believed that the trauma of rape paralleled the trauma
of combat. Many of the other women characters in his writings are
more complex than earlier critics would have readers believe. For
example, the heroic Catherine of A Farewell to Arms understands
what Frederic never learns until after her death, and Pilar of For
Whom the Bell Tolls is one of the strongest characters, male or female,
in any of Hemingway’s works.

Lesbian critic Debra Moddelmog has observed that critics have

overlooked or dismissed as inferior such intriguing stories as “The
Mother of a Queen,” “The Sea Change,” “The Simple Enquiry,” and
The Garden of Eden because of their own discomfort with
Hemingway’s depictions of gay and lesbian characters and
homosexual themes. Environmentalist critics have noted that
Hemingway sometimes expresses eco-friendly sentiments as, for
example, in Green Hills of Africa when he describes the damage

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caused by human exploitation of the earth (284). More than once
Hemingway writes from the point of view of the hunted animal or the
bull in the ring, an approach that suggests that Hemingway possessed
a more nuanced view of these activities than is generally
acknowledged. For example, in “The Short Happy Life of Francis
Macomber,” he describes the lion’s shooting from the lion’s point of
view, and in Chapter X of In Our Time he presents the suffering of the
horse in the bullring in horrifying detail. He closes “On the Quai at
Smyrna” with the cruelty of the Greeks toward the mules they had
used as pack animals, and his sympathy for the abused animals is
clear.

Nevertheless, it’s too facile to simply dismiss these charges of sexism,

homophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, and cruelty to animals as biased
and unfounded.

Hemingway once scolded his wife for using the term “nigger” and
was less overtly anti-Semitic than many of his contemporaries,
including T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. But it would be foolish to argue
that Hemingway was free of the prejudices endemic in twentieth-
century Europe and America (any more than we, his readers, are free
of the prejudices of our own twenty-first century society). It is perhaps
more useful to ask if knowing that he sometimes demonstrates
disturbing prejudices and disappoints modern-day expectations makes
his art unworthy of appreciation or renders readers unable to
appreciate it. By that standard, Hemingway’s work continues to
maintain its place in the literary canon.

It has been suggested that true art lends itself to interpretation and
reinter-pretation. By that standard as well, Hemingway’s writings
belong in the canon. Critics have examined Hemingway’s work for its
biographical parallels, applied psychoanalytic techniques to explicate
its meaning, dissected the various literary and artistic influences that
contributed to the final product, and criticized it from feminist,
lesbian, ecocritical, and postmodern perspectives. Philip Young, one
of the first scholars to publish a book-length study on Hemingway’s
fiction, established an important tradition in interpreting Hemingway’s
work. Young developed the notion that most of Hemingway’s writings

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featured what he called a “code hero” and a “Hemingway hero.” The
Hemingway hero, often the story’s protagonist, has much to learn
about how to live in the world, while the code hero, who has the
wisdom to know how to live properly, is—because of his adherence to
an unspoken code of behavior—a mentor and example to the usually
younger Hemingway hero. In The Old Man and the Sea, for example,
Manolin is the Hemingway hero learning how to live from Santiago,
the code hero. In A Farewell to Arms, Frederic is the Hemingway hero
who is learning the Hemingway code from Catherine. Hemingway
scholars Earl Rovit and Gerry Brenner further developed this notion,
labeling these characters the tutor and the tyro.

Young defined the Hemingway code as “made of the controls of

honor and courage which in a life of tension and pain make a man a
man and distinguish him from the people who follow random
impulses, let down their hair, and are generally messy, perhaps
cowardly” (63). Unfortunately, the sexism inherent in his definition
made it harder to see Hemingway’s women characters—such as
Catherine, or Liz Coates of “Up in Michigan”—as exemplars of the
code. Some of Hemingway’s protagonists—Jake Barnes of The Sun
Also Rises, for example—behave in ways that seem inconsistent with
the code as Young defined it. Furthermore, Young’s influence was so
pervasive that it sometimes obscured other possible readings of
Hemingway’s work and caused works that did not fit readily into this
framework (e.g., stories like “A Canary for One” or “The Sea
Change”) to suffer unjust neglect. The concept of the “code hero,”
although historically important in Hemingway studies, is no longer as
influential as it once was.

Young also argued in 1952 that Hemingway’s 1918 war wound had so
traumatized him that he returned to it again and again in his
writings—for example, by giving Frederic Henry a similar injury,
depicting Nick Adams as traumatized by the war, having Colonel
Cantwell of Across the River and Into the Trees return (as Hemingway
did) to the site of his own wounding, and focusing so relentlessly on
death in so many stories and novels. As early as 1952, Young
presciently suggested that Hemingway concentrated on shooting
animals to avoid shooting himself.

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Aware of Young’s “wound theory,” Hemingway resisted and opposed
Young’s work, granting permission for Young to quote his writings
only begrudgingly. He was similarly uncomfortable with the work of
other early scholars of his writings, such as Carlos Baker and Charles
Fenton. Hemingway despised critics and scholars of his work, calling
them “the lice who crawl on literature” (GHOA 109). He hated to
discuss the symbolism in his own writings, arguing facetiously that
the professional explainers of literature needed work and that he
would hate to deprive them of a living. He believed his work should
stand by itself. As he once advised an interviewer, “Read anything I
write for the pleasure of reading. Whatever else you find will be the
measure of what you brought to the reading” (Plimpton 120).
HEMINGWAY’S INFLUENCE ON OTHER WRITERS
Asked upon Hemingway’s centennial about his influence on other
writers, novelist Russell Banks commented, “If you want to write in
American vernacular English—and most of us do—then you have to
turn to Hemingway. It was his invention” (qtd. in Paul 116).
Hemingway’s influence is particularly associated with minimalism, an
American literary movement that began in the 1970s. Best represented
by writers like Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie, minimalism is
characterized by ordinary subject matter, an effaced authorial
presence, a passive and affectless protagonist, very little plot in the
traditional sense, the use of the historical present tense, and a spare,
emotionally restrained writing style.

Hemingway’s terse, impassive prose in works like “The Killers” and

To Have and Have Not inspired later crime writers such as Raymond
Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and other authors of hard-boiled
detective novels. The famous American novelist Norman Mailer, with
his direct prose and sometimes intensely masculine subject matter, is
generally considered one of American literature’s chief inheritors of
the Hemingway tradition.

“Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were

obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads,
the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates,” Frederic
Henry thinks to himself in one of the most famous passages from A

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Farewell to Arms (185). In his emphasis on the concrete, especially in
wartime settings, Hemingway influenced writers like Heinrich Böll,
the German author whose writings about Germany during and after
World War II garnered him the 1972 Nobel Prize, and Tim O’Brien,
the American author whose Vietnam war novel Going After Cacciato
received the National Book Award in 1979. O’Brien’s brilliant short
story “The Things They Carried,” in which he lists and describes in
heartbreakingly specific detail the various personal items the
American soldiers carried with them into the war in Vietnam, is
particularly indebted to Hemingway.

“He was a genius, that uneasy word, not so much in what he wrote
(speaking like an uncertain critic) as in how he wrote; he liberated our
written language,” Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third wife, wrote
of Hemingway in a 1981 article for the Paris Review (301). “All
writers, after him, owe Hemingway a debt for their freedom whether
the debt is acknowledged or not.”

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Fitzgerald

When E Scott Fitzgerald died in December 1940, his reputation was

that of a failed writer who had squandered his talent in drink and
excess. He may have written the novel that defined a decade, This Side
of Paradise ( 1920), and an other that exposed the dreams and
illusions of a nation, The Great Gatsby (1925), but his achievement
had been overshadowed and largely blighted by his life. Writing to his
wife Zelda in March 1940, Fitzgerald described himself as "a
forgotten man" ( Life in Letters439), and his friend and fellow novelist
John O'Hara recalled that at the end of his life Fitzgerald was "a
prematurely little old man haunting bookshops unrecognized"
(Bruccoli, Grandeur 489).

His last royalty statement from Scribner's, in August 1940, listed sales
of forty copies of his books earning the princely sum of $13.13. Yet a
half century later, Fitzgerald's stature as a major twentieth-century
American novelist rests se cure, and The Great Gatsby is generally
considered a quintessential American novel. From the vantage point of
time, readers and critics now acknowledge what Fitzgerald rather
wistfully said of himself in a letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, "in
a smallway I was an original" ( Dear Scott/Dear Max261). However
flawed the life, however imperfect the novels, Fitzgerald's greatness
lies as much in the conception as in the achievement. In this way
Fitzgerald and his fiction capture some essential quality of the
American myth and dream that were the focus his lifetime of personal
and literary effort.

Without doubt, Fitzgerald's art was a response to his life. He

immersed himself in his age and became its chief chronicler, bringing
to his fiction a realism that gives it the quality of a photograph or,
perhaps more appropriately, a documentary film. With the clothing,
the music, the slang, the automobiles, the dances, the fads -- in the
specificity of its social milieu-Fitzgerald's fiction documents a
moment in time in all its historical reality. Yet Fitzgerald captures
more than just the physical evidence of that time. He conveys with

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equal clarity the psychology (the dreams and hopes, the anxieties and
fears) reflected in that world because he lived the life he recorded.
Autobiography thus forms the basis of the social realism that is a
hallmark of Fitzgerald's fiction, but it is autobiography transmuted
through the critical lens of both a personal and a cultural romantic
sensibility, a second defining characteristic of his art. These two
strands help to place Fitzgerald within American literary history.
FITZGERALD AND THE MODERN MOMENT
Fitzgerald came to prominence as a writer in the 1920s, a period
dominated by the postwar novel, and thus his fiction reflects all the
contradictions of his age. World War I was a defining event for
Fitzgerald and the writers of his generation whether or not they saw
action in the field. "I was certain that all the young people were going
to be killed in the war," Fitzgerald recalled in describing the genesis of
his first novel, This Side of Paradise ( 1920), "and I wanted to put on
paper a record of the strange life they had lived in their time" (
Bradbury 77). World War I had demolished fundamental truths (for
instance, the ideal of heroism) and notions of culture as a body of
established beliefs and values, leaving in its aftermath disillusionment
and anxiety. The modern world had been severed from its past.
Images of fragmentation, waste, sterility, and castration permeate the
literature of the 1920s, from Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley"
( 1920) and T. S. Eliot The Wasteland ( 1922) to Ernest Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises ( 1926) and Fitzgerald's own The Great Gatsby (
1925). Hemingway's genitally wounded hero, Fitzgerald's Valley of
Ashes, Eliot Fisher King were all evidence of the modern moment and
the existence of what Gertrude Stein would christen "a Lost
Generation."

Postwar developments on the homefront contributed as well to the

sense of purposelessness, decay, political failure, and cultural
emptiness that pervades the literature of the 1920s. A new
conservatism dominated America. Increasingly isolationist, the U.S.
Senate failed to ratify support for the League of Nations. The "Red
Scare" in 1920, during which thousands of suspected Communists and
anarchists throughout the United States were arrested, ushered in a
period of immigration restriction. Prohibition signalled the rise of a

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new Puritanism. Teapot Dome, a notorious government scandal over
the leasing of government-owned oil reserves, and widespread
speculation in the stock market announced a renewal of capitalism. A
shift from idealism to materialism led to a boom in personal income
and the development of new technologies that made possible the mass
production of automobiles, radios, telephones, and refrigerators.
Conservatism, however, sat uneasy in the modern moment, for it was
being challenged by flappers, jazz music, films, the new science of
psychology, and the teaching of evolution. In the midst of
conservatism, in other words, the Jazz Age was evolving. Traditional
views about proper behavior and styles of dress, as the title character
in Fitzgerald's 1920 story "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" learns all too well,
were giving way to public displays of affection and speakeasies, to
short skirts and the Charleston dance, to whole new notions about
manners and mores. As America modernized in the 1920s, its citizens
clearly faced a new set of challenges to the meaning of their national
life, and they struggled to reconcile often conflicting views of what
had once seemed so certain, so clearly defined.

Fitzgerald's fiction of the 1920s reveals the tensions inherent in this

mixture of anxious longing for the old certainties and heady
excitement at the prospect of the new, just as his fiction of the 1930s
captures the human cost -- the wasted potential and psychic
dislocation -- of the gay, gaudy spree and its subsequent crash. His
critics argue that he is no more than a stylish chronicler of his age, a
mere recorder of the fashions and amusements, the manners and
mores of his postwar generation, and he is certainly that. Yet
verisimilitude, the truthful rendering of experience, is a distinguishing
feature of realistic fiction, and particularly of the novel of manners, a
literary form that examines a people and their culture in a specific
time and place and a category into which much of Fitzgerald's fiction
fits. Thus, Fitzgerald's ability to convey accurately his own generation
is not necessarily a weakness. In fact, it helped to account for the
tremendous success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise; readers
were intrigued to see themselves and their world mirrored in its pages.
When the best writers pen them, novels of manners both record and
respond to the worlds they examine, as the fiction of Edith Wharton,
for instance, clearly demonstrates.

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Fitzgerald's fiction must be granted this same doubleness of recording
and responding. His first novel may have been too enthusiastically a
report from the trenches; it was so full of daring, excitement, and
flamboyant excess that it became the text for the postwar generation.
The title of his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned ( 1922),
however, indicates that his youthful passion for his age was already
being tempered by a knowledge of its contradictory realities. Already
he was developing the double consciousness of which he would write
in "The Crack-Up" essays more than a decade later, "the ability to
hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain
the ability to function" ( The Crack-Up69). No mere recorder, then, of
his time, Fitzgerald examined and measured its cost. He knew it, and
lived it, but like Nick Carraway, the semi-detached narrator of The
Great Gatsby, he did indeed develop a critical perspective on both
himself and his age. In that way, he was also a product of the modern
moment.
FITZGERALD AND THE SYMBOLIC IMAGINATION
Despite Fitzgerald's affinity for and understanding of the modern
world, his fiction bears few of the characteristics of literary
modernism, perhaps because his works are grounded in their social
realism. As a literary movement, Modernism, which developed and
reigned in the period between World Wars I and II, was itself a
reaction to and an expression of the social, political, cultural, and
technological changes that were transforming Fitzgerald's world. Such
a world demanded a new mode of expression. New realities could not
be dressed in outmoded fashions, and writers everywhere responded to
Ezra Pound's cry of "Make it New." It was a period of experimentation
in the arts, and novelists such as Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos,
Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner were challenging
traditional forms of narrative structure and point-of-view. They were
seeking, for instance, through montage and repetition and stream-of-
consciousness, to get beneath the surface of life in order to render its
moral, intellectual, and psychological realities.

Fitzgerald's fiction generally lacks this experimental quality. Granted,

This Side of Paradise is a mix of literary styles, even containing a
comedy of manners. The novel's stylistic features, however, seem to

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have less to do with purposeful literary experimentation than a sort of
adolescent showmanship; the first novelist is announcing his ability to
master the skills of established writers. Fitzgerald also uses a semi-
detached first-person narrator in The Great Gatsby to achieve critical
distance from his subject, but the technique is hardly innovative. In
fact, he credited novelist Joseph Conrad for the strategy. What
Fitzgerald brought to his fiction, however, was a poetic sensibility and
a symbolic imagination that made him a remarkable prose stylist and
invested his best writing with an evocative sense of felt experience. As
novelist John O'Hara put it to his contemporary John Steinbeck,
"Fitzgerald was a better just plain writer than all of us put together" (
Bruccoli, Grandeur478).

Fitzgerald's symbolic imagination achieves its most sustained and

controlled expression in his masterwork, The Great Gatsby. The
Valley of Ashes, the vacant eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, the green
light at the end of Daisy's dock, the rainbow cascade of Gatsbys shirts
-- these and many other elements of the novel Fitzgerald invests with
symbolic meaning far beyond their physical reality, and the poetic
intensity of his prose even heightens his evocation of the mythic. In
the novel's final backward look at the American Dream, the authorial
voice makes clear that what in its achievement may have been
diminished to the tawdry and vulgar by crass materialism is in its
conception a grand and glorious affirmation of the human capacity for
hope. The poetry in effect redeems the dream.

Such artistry, although less sustained, highlights other Fitzgerald

novels as well; it is especially pronounced in his incomplete final
novel, The Last Tycoon ( 1941). There Fitzgerald captures the
otherworldliness of the Hollywood dream factory in the sharp images
of a shawl-draped Abraham Lincoln nobly eating a slice of pie in the
studio commissary (48-49) and a beautiful young woman sitting atop a
studio prop -- the severed head of the Indian goddess Siva as it floats
down an "impromptu river" (26) following an earthquake. In the
haunting image of a man and a woman perched on high stools at the
counter of an American drugstore, eating tomato soup and
sandwiches, he evokes as well the pathos of loneliness, the intimacy
of anonymity in the modern American landscape as surely as Edward

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Hopper's 1942 painting "Nighthawks." Close examination of and
personal experience with the largely urban landscape of the modern
world helped Fitzgerald understand the significance of its bright
surfaces, and his poetic sensibility gave symbolic expression to their
meanings.
FITZGERALD AND THE ROMANTIC SENSIBILITY
Fitzgerald's lyricism and symbolist mode of writing reveal an
essentially romantic sensibility that not only gives shape to his
worldview, linking it to some traditional attitudes about the individual
and human existence, but also supports his thematic preoccupations.
That Fitzgerald felt deeply the poetry of the British Romantic John
Keats, using a phrase from "Ode to a Nightingale," in fact, as the title
of his fourth novel, Tender is the Night, is not insignificant. Like
Keats and other Romantic philosophers and poets British and
American, Fitzgerald held a firm belief in the primacy of the
individual and his or her responses to life. For the Romantics, truth lay
in felt experience and is thus to some extent an individual construct, a
synthesis of each person's unique perceptions of and thoughts about
the world. Others' experiences may be equally sincere, but are
nevertheless open to question because they arise from their own
unique sensibilities and perceptions. The Romantics also held a
corollary conviction that the meaningful link between consciousness
and the external world is the association of strong personal emotion
with the particularities of object and place. In other words, the
intensity of an individual's feelings endows the external world with
significance and thus makes it real. Without the sensate and
perceiving consciousness, the external world is mere dross,
meaningless forms and shapes of existence.

The Romantic egotism that forms the basis of Fitzgerald's worldview

arises from other influences as well, many of which are distinctly
American. Puritanism, for instance, had provided Americans with a
seminal myth about their nation and helped to shape beliefs about the
relationship between the human and the divine that would form the
backbone of nineteenth-century transcendentalism, a visionary
idealism. From the time of its first settlement, America was conceived
as a virgin land waiting for a people to realize opportunities denied

169
them in Europe. Both the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony and the
Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony sustained this
view with religious conviction. Convinced that a providential act had
brought them to the barren shores of a new world to fulfill a divine
purpose, they established what Puritan John Winthrop called their
"city on a hill" in the full belief that they were creating a "New Eden,"
a kingdom of heaven on earth where, uninhibited by the restraints of
older societies, they would be free to control their individual and
political destinies. In the fullness of time, they would thus redeem
history by beginning it again.

The Puritan belief in the providential nature of their endeavor

extended to their understanding of the relationship between the human
and the divine, the real and the ideal. For the Puritans, the world was a
shadowing forth of divine things, a revelation of God, and thus its
interpretation could provide a coherent system of transcendent
meanings, a way of understanding the ideal and the spiritual. In effect,
the "real" world of daily experience offered up the signs and symbols
of an ideal world of spirit, and these signs and symbols essentially
connected humankind to divine truth. This aspect of Puritan thought
anticipated many elements of Romanticism, especially the American
expression of Romantic ideology known as transcendentalism.

For the transcendentalists, whose views were given most eloquent

expression in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David
Thoreau, God had made material nature not as a mere commodity but
as a hieroglyph, or symbol, of the spiritual world. Like the Puritans,
then, the transcendentalists reasserted a belief in the ideal, but that
ideal was apprehended not through piety, as it had been for the
Puritans, but through the imagination. Nature, they believed, spoke
directly to the individual, and through this potent combination of self
and universe, humankind knew and participated in the divine.
Advocating an original relation with the universe, the
transcendentalists celebrated individualism, self, and consciousness
much as the Romantics did before them.

All of these beliefs and attitudes helped to establish the foundation of

American national consciousness and shaped Fitzgerald's own

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romantic response to life. Certainly, romanticism is reflected in his
tendency to view the world symbolically, to find in the "real" evidence
of the ideal. It surfaces as well in his privileging of experience, in his
conviction that individuals must experience life in order to understand
its reality. Thus he and his fictional protagonists, especially those of
his early novels, This Side of Paradise's Amory Blaine and The
Beautiful and Damned's Anthony Patch, spend themselves in motion,
sensation, and phenomena in a restless search for authenticity.
Nobody else's experience will do. This romantic sensibility also gives
Fitzgerald a heightened sensitivity to the possibilities of life that
manifests itself as an aspiration to, and even a longing for, some sort
of perfect moment that encapsulates the ideal. The Great Gatsby's
Daisy Buchanan, for instance, is as much, if not more, a projection of
Gatsby's consciousness, of his desire to make real a dream of success,
than a living being fraught with human imperfections. Fitzgerald also
shares the romantic anxiety about time, the desire to preserve the ideal
by clinging to the moment of perfection and thus redeeming history:
"Can't repeat the past," Gatsby cries incredulously. "Why of course
you can!" ( Gatsby 116). Fitzgerald's romantic response to life also
made him a perceptive interpreter of the ultimate myth of national
longing, the American Dream.
FITZGERALD AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
In its very conception, the American Dream encapsulates a romantic
ideal. With its emphasis on a kind of rugged individualism that is
frequently associated with the frontier, that symbol of the new and the
unsullied, the American Dream is a promise, a number of promises, to
those who are willing to seize the opportunity and expend the effort to
attain it. For many, one of the promises of the American Dream is
material success of the sort that Jay Gatsby and his mentor Dan Cody
epitomize. In The Great Gatsby the set of directions for self-
improvement James Gatz sets down for himself on the last fly-leaf of
a book called Hopalong Cassidy are the keys to that success. Through
discipline and industry a poor boy from the Midwest could rise to
fortune and fame. In a new world, he could reinvent himself, thus
becoming his own ideal.

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Jay Gatsby and The Last Tycoon's Monroe Stahr testify to Fitzgerald's
understanding of this aspect of the American Dream. Yet as the
concluding paragraphs of The Great Gatsby make clear, Fitzgerald
recognized something more than material success in the dream's
promise. Because it encompasses the American myth of a New Eden,
the dream also offers the hope of freedom and equality. In a world
uncorrupted by political tyranny and social divisions, by the
prejudices of privilege, in the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness and the founding of a republic dedicated to these ideals,
according to Fitzgerald, were "the history of all aspiration" ( Bruccoli,
Grandeur493). It was the aspiration rather than the trivializing
commercial element to which Fitzgerald, the romantic idealist, most
responded.

Recognizing these two strands of the American Dream (in part

because he was himself torn between them), Fitzgerald became one of
its chief chroniclers. He admired his Jay Gatsbys and Monroe Stahrs
not merely because they epitomized the rag-to-riches strand of the
dream, but primarily because they desired so much more than money
and position. They sought to make real an ideal with all the naive
good faith of the original settlers, and that desire enobled them and
their efforts. Thus, Nick Carraway can indeed tell Gatsby, who has
earned his money from bootlegging and other illegal enterprises,
"You're worth the whole damn bunch put together" ( Gatsby162). Yet
Gatsby falls short of his dream, and so, too, does Monroe Stahr, not so
much because they had the wrong dream but because the corollary
dream of material success has corrupted and even overwhelmed the
original. Humankind, in all its fallibility, simply lacks the ability to
create a world "commensurate to [its] capacity for wonder"
(Gatsby189).

America for Fitzgerald is an idea. It stands in opposition to European

civilizations, as he observed in his Notebooks: "France was a land,
England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of
the idea, was harder to utter. . . . It was a willingness of the heart" (
The Crack-Up197). Yet for all its promise, it has somehow failed, so
Fitzgerald's commentary on his nation and the idea of America that is
the American Dream is ultimately a chronicle of failure.

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THE OUTLINE OF A LITERARY CAREER
The mature novelist who would eventually bring to bear on his fiction
all of these various influences and sensibilities is only just in evidence
in E Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise ( 1920). In the
story of Amory Blaine, a "romantic egotist" (23), the largely
autobiographical novel chronicles the efforts of one young man to
realize his conception of himself in a world that is, like its central
character, in process of enormous change. Written, Fitzgerald said, for
"my own personal public, that is. . . the countless flappers and college
kids who think I am a sort of oracle" ( Dear Scott/Dear Max59), This
Side of Paradise captured the flamboyant style of a youth culture set
free by war from the strictures of previous generations and virtually
created the idea of the Jazz Age. The novel has all the naive
exuberance, in both style and substance, of youth. It celebrates the
bonds of friendship, the excitement of ideas, the appeal of beauty, and
the exhilaration of life lived but also hints at the decade's dark
contradictions and moral uncertainties. In Amory's quest to establish
his essential self is a desperate knowledge of transience and flux, of
the ways in which time and change erode the stability of self and
society, that ever threatens his brash self-confidence by an over-
expenditure of daring and bravado, a futile waste of passionate
idealism. A huge popular success, the novel not only launched
Fitzgerald's career but also created his public image, forever
connecting his name to the 1920s decade in ways that both served and
hampered his subsequent literary life.

Just two years after the publication of a novel celebrating the modern
generation, Fitzgerald published The Beautiful and Damned ( 1922), a
novel that, as its title suggests, makes clear the cost of a life lived on
the promise of brilliance. Anthony Patch, the novel's central character,
is a slightly older version of Amory Blaine, and like his predecessor,
he, too, believes in the inevitability of a singular and exalted destiny.
When he marries Gloria Gilbert, the ideal of youth and beauty, they
vow to make their marriage a "live, lovely, glamourous [sic]
performance" (147). Their pledge, however, soon falls victim to the
vicious realities of time and change, the perverse necessities of wealth
and style, and, above all, the sad degradations of moral carelessness.

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Like his stories, which now, Fitzgerald observed, had "a touch of
disaster in them" ("Early Success," The Crack-Up87), The Beautiful
and Damned also reflects an increasingly pessimistic tone of postwar
despair and conveys without doubt Fitzgerald's acute understanding of
the inevitable price of the modern.

Critics who complain of Fitzgerald's inability to evaluate the world

that he so brilliantly records (and the life that he so intensely lived)
need look no further than his third novel, The Gre at Gatsby ( 1925),
for proof of his double consciousness. Increasingly aware of the
complex social, psychic, and economic forces that were driving his
generation to excess and emptiness, Fitzgerald found the literary
forms to give them expression in a novel that is now considered a
modern masterpiece. Through his indirect, often ironic first-person
narrative, Fitzgerald was able to give the story of Jay Gatsby, a man
who reinvents himself to capture a dream, a sad nobility, and the
novel's complex symbolic landscape reinforces this view. Gatsby may
initially be just another corrupt product of his material world, but
through the eyes of Nick Carraway, readers gradually come to see him
as a romantic idealist who has somehow managed, despite his
shadowy past and equally shady present, to remain uncorrupted.
Fitzgerald's complex symbolic landscape also elevates Gatsby's quest
to the realm of myth, the myth of the American Dream, and thus the
novel offers a critical perspective on a nation and a people as well as
on a generation.

Fitzgerald's most perfectly controlled novel, The Great Gatsby, rather

ironically, marked the end of his popular success. The novel that
followed it, Tender is the Night ( 1934), was on the surface a bleak
postwar love story about the idle rich set amid expatriate life on the
French Riviera and in Paris, hardly the sort of reading a Depression-
wearied public desired. Yet it is also a perceptive analysis of the
historical forces that gave shape to that violent, disordered, despairing
postwar world, conflating personal and public histories to expose the
consequences, both social and psychic, of such disintegration. Its
central couple, Dick and Nicole Diver, typifies a generation at swim in
the sea of historical change. Seduced by the lure of material wealth,
Dick, trained as a Freudian psychoanalyst, sinks slowly but inexorably

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into obscurity when he abandons his good intentions and high ideals
to minister to a mind diseased by marrying his beautiful patient
Nicole. Cocooned by Nicole's money, they shuffle restlessly and
aimlessly throughout a Europe no longer the bastion of culture, of
shared beliefs grounded in tradition and order, but rather a Europe
transformed into a vulgar carnival of chaos. Fitzgerald struggled to
find an appropriate form for his tale, which took nearly a decade to
write, and even at its publication he was dissatisfied with it. Indeed,
the novel exists in two different versions because Fitzgerald began to
revise it almost upon publication, and it lacks the lyricism and the
symbolic framework of The Great Gatsby. Yet despite its
imperfections, Tender is the Night is a major work of fiction, greater
in some ways, especially its thematic reach, than his masterpiece, and
it testifies to Fitzgerald's artistic seriousness and his ability to
transmute autobiography into a universal.

Fitzgerald's final novel, The Last Tycoon, published posthumously in

1941, gives every indication of being another major work of fiction,
and despite its incompleteness, it is certainly one of the best
Hollywood novels. Monroe Stahr, the novel's central character, is one
of the last great producers, a man of vision and industry who has
virtually created the Hollywood dream factory. Yet all about him the
world is in process of change as men with lesser vision and greater
interest in profit seek to maximize their investments and writers and
directors begin to demand more autonomy over their work. Stahr, the
epitome of the self-made man, resists such efforts, and his struggle,
complicated by his desire to find fulfillment in love, pushes him to
ever greater, but ultimately futile, expenditures of self. In its narrative
design and symbolic structure, The Last Tycoon challenges some of
the central precepts of the American Dream by asking readers to
admire the habits of mind and being that Stahr embodies but to
recognize -- and regret -- that such men are a dying breed. The new
America is simply inimical to them.

Taken together, the pattern of Fitzgerald's five novels reveals a certain

symmetry of theme and composition of which the novelist himself
was quite aware. The novels of his bright young men in pursuit of
their singular and exalted destinies that characterize his early career --

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This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned -- reach their
culmination and achieve their most complex expression in his last
completed novel, Tender is the Night. There, Fitzgerald places within
the context of historical processes Dick Diver's own efforts to achieve
greatness and thereby deepens the significance of his failure. It is a
summing up of the boom of the 1920s from the perspective of the
crash in the 1930s, a recognition and understanding of the inevitable
price of splendor and excess. Similarly, Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The
Great Gatsby, and his final (and incomplete) novel, The Last Tycoon,
his tales of the west, offer poignant meditations on the national myth:
its function, its veracity, its viability. They are tales of failure, and yet
their heroes' valiant struggles and, most important, the greatness in the
conception of their dreams and visions ultimately affirm their lives.
FITZGERALD AND THE SHORT STORY
Fitzgerald punctuated the publication of his four completed novels
with the release of a collection of short stories: Flappers and
Philosophers in 1920, following publication of This Side of Paradise;
Tales of the Jazz Age following publication of The Beautiful and
Damned in 1922; All the Sad Young Men in 1926, following
publication of The Great Gatsby; and Taps at Reveille in 1935,
following publication of Tender is the Night. While the tactic was
obviously designed to capitalize on the success of the novels, the
stories themselves attest to Fitzgerald's prolific career as a writer for
popular magazines. In fact, he earned a substantial income, which he
quickly spent, and frequently wrote himself out of debt by producing
formulaic romances, primarily for the Saturday Evening Post. At the
height of his popularity he earned as much as $4,000 for a story.
Typical of these popular romances was "The Popular Girl," published
in the Saturday Evening Post in February 1922 and never reprinted in
his lifetime. In the story, two young men, a handsome and charming
Yale undergraduate who represents Eastern values and a poor but
worthy Midwesterner, pursue a seventeen-year-old beauty who uses
all her wiles to capture the hero. The romance plot turns on a series of
complications and reversals: Her drunken father dies, leaving her
penniless. Yet inevitably, all is resolved, as it must be given the
demands of the form, when the wealthy heir saves the popular girl
from the circumstances that nearly bring her to ruin.

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Fitzgerald was a master at writing such stories, but many of his friends
feared that he expended too much energy and talent in their
production. Novelist Charles Norris, for instance, warned Fitzgerald
that he would ruin himself as a writer if he continued to satisfy the
pedestrian tastes of the Post's readers. "You can re-christen that
worthy periodical 'The Grave-Yard of the Genius of F. Scott
Fitzgerald,'" he wrote to the author, "if you go on contributing to it
until [editor George Horace] Lorimer sucks you dry and tosses you
into the discard where nobody will care to find you" ( Meyers80).
Fitzgerald justified his efforts with the argument that the money he
earned from writing magazine stories would buy him the freedom to
pursue his serious fiction, but eventually he found himself disgusted
by his own trivialities and unable to produce them, despite his need
for the income they would have provided. In May 1940, he confessed
in a letter to Zelda that he could no longer write the commercial short
story. "As soon as I feel I am writing to a cheap specification," he
noted, "my pen freezes and my talent vanishes over the hill" ( Life in
Letters444).

The majority of his 164 published short stories are indeed forgettable,
written, as Fitzgerald eventually acknowledged, at great cost to both
his emotional life and his professional career. "I have asked a lot of
my emotions -- one hundred and twenty stories," he wrote in his
Notebooks of the 1930s. "The price was high, right up with [ Joseph
Rudyard] Kipling, because there was one little drop of something not
blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in
every story, it was the extra I had. Now it is gone" (131). Yet many of
his stories are among the masterworks of the genre, tales that attest to
his artistic control of both form and content. Perhaps the best of the lot
is his 1931 story "Babylon Revisited." All of his best stories are
connected thematically to his novels. In fact, several seem to
anticipate or repeat not only thematic concerns, but also plot elements
and figurative motifs that are integral to the novels. "Babylon
Revisited," for instance, like Tender is the Night, explores the price of
disorder and moral carelessness by tracing the efforts of Charlie
Wales, a man who lost everything that mattered in the boom, to regain
custody of his daughter Honoria. Similarly, "Winter Dreams" ( 1922),
which focuses on Dexter Green's idealistic love of and subsequent

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disillusionment about the beautiful but shallow Judy Jones, anticipates
some of the themes and motifs of The Great Gatsby. Because this
study focuses on Fitzgerald's novels, his most significant literary
contribution, the connections between representative major stories and
the novels will be drawn in the appropriate chapters, not to diminish
the stories' achievements but to emphasize the genesis and
development of his art. It was, after all, as a serious novelist that
Fitzgerald staked his reputation. Yet a brief analysis of several of his
best stories gives some indication of both the range and depth of
Fitzgerald's short fiction.

In "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" ( 1920), for instance, one of his most
anthologized stories, Fitzgerald explores one of his characteristic
subjects -- the competitive nature of social success -- in a witty tale of
jealousy and revenge. Based on a detailed memo in which Fitzgerald
advised his younger sister Annabel on strategies to achieve popularity
with boys ( Correspondence15-18), "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" focuses
on the unexpected rivalry between Marjorie Harvey, the self-absorbed
representative of the new generation, and her cousin Bernice from Eau
Claire. Bernice is the sort of "womanly woman" whose "whining
cowardly mass of affectations" ( Short Stories34) Marjorie holds in
contempt. During a month's visit with her cousin, Bernice, an
attractive but dull young woman, enjoys anything but the social
success that her wealth and status have granted her in her hometown,
and a brutally honest Marjorie offers to transform her into a "gardenia
girl" ( Short Stories31) like herself, the sort of woman who can glide
no more than three or four feet on the dance floor before a new partner
cuts in. Under Marjorie's tutelage, Bernice discovers the appeal of wit
and verve and inadvertently steals her cousin's best beau, Warren
McIntyre, a man for whom Marjorie has never really cared until he
directs his attentions to another. Then, a jealous Marjorie, who has
been feeding Bernice her lines, calls her cousin's bluff by challenging
her to bob her hair, the chief source of her beauty, as she had promised
to do. To refuse, Bernice realizes, will expose her to ridicule by
revealing the superficiality of her new image. After submitting to the
barber's shears, she realizes "that her chance at beauty had been
sacrificed to the jealous whim of a selfish girl" ( Short Stories45) and
exacts her own revenge. While Marjorie lies sleeping, Bernice takes

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the scissors to her cousin's blond plaits and tosses them on the front
porch of the McIntyre house as she flees to Eau Claire in the middle of
the night.

The clever twist of the story's ending certainly demonstrates the truth
of Marjorie's assertion to her mother that "these days it's every girl for
herself" ( Short Stories30) and underscores the competitiveness of
social success. Yet the central conflict embodied by the two cousins
also makes clear the changing manners and mores of Fitzgerald's
social world. Bernice is the dutiful daughter of her mother's
generation. Sweet and virtuous, she believes that women are "beloved
because of certain mysterious womanly qualities, always mentioned
but never displayed" ( Short Stories30). Marjorie, in contrast,
understands that men find boring such a woman, who is little more
than a "beautiful bundle of clothes" ( Short Stories34); they prefer her
sort of toughness because it makes life anything but tiresome and
colorless. This new woman, Fitzgerald's fiction makes clear, embodies
the age, and she served as the model for all of his central women
characters.

In 1926 Fitzgerald published his most important novelette, "The Rich

Boy," which includes his famous and usually misquoted line about the
rich: "They are different from you and me" ( Short Stories318). As the
story's title suggests, Anson Hunter, the rich boy, is a singular
example of a type. His money has made him hard and cynical; it has
instilled in him a sense of superiority and selfishness. It is, in other
words, the source of the emptiness and loneliness that are the
consequences of such qualities. "The Rich Boy" is, then, a cautionary
tale of the corruptive power of great wealth, one that in both its form
and its theme is clearly connected to The Great Gatsby.

Told, like The Great Gatsby, from the perspective of an observer-

narrator who occasionally participates in the action and whose
judgments provide a moral frame for the story, "The Rich Boy"
focuses on Anson Hunter, a man whose life begins rather than ends "a
compromise" ( Short Stories320). The product of two conflicting
generations, Anson is at once solid and conservative, extravagant and
self-indulgent. The contradictions inherent in his personality

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eventually create a rift between him and Paula Legendre, the woman
he loves but to whom he cannot commit. When Paula marries another
man, Anson compensates for his own emotional emptiness by
engaging in an empty affair with Dolly Karger, who he casually
abandons. He then drives his aunt's lover to suicide by assuming the
role of moral censor, even though he is "more concerned for the
maintenance of outward forms" ( Short Stories328) than he is for the
spirit of them. Some years later, Anson encounters Paula, who,
following an unhappy first marriage, is happily pregnant by her
second husband. When he learns of her death in childbirth, Anson is
incapable of response. Grief and sympathy seem unable to penetrate
the shell of his self-absorption, and the story ends not with a climax,
but with a trailing off of interest. Because Anson is incapable of
growth and change, his life, as the story's final paragraph makes clear,
is doomed to vacuous repetition. After all, what he wants from life is
nothing more than to attract and to be loved by a woman who will
"nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart" ( Short
Stories349). What he wants from life is nothing more than what the
Patches in The Beautiful and Damned, the Buchanans in The Great
Gatsby, and the Warrens in Tender is the Night also want; their wealth
ensures, Fitzgerald makes clear, that all are doomed to disappointment
and disillusionment.

One of Fitzgerald's most poignant stories, "The Last of the Belles" (

1929), examines one of his most pervasive themes -- the losses that
result from the inevitabilities of time. Andy, the story's retrospective
narrator, regretfully recalls the loss of his youthful hopes and dreams
as he tells the tale of his unrequited love for Ailie Calhoun, the object
of so many men's desire during a long, hot summer of basic training in
Tarleton, Georgia, in the waning days of World War I. Ailie, like
Marjorie Harvey in "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," is as flirtatious as any
modern young woman, but she is also a belle, redolent of magnolia
flowers, her charm and grace linked in "a Northern man's dream of the
South" ( Short Stories460) to its "heroic age" ( Short Stories450).
Indeed, the poetry of the South that she embodies is a great part of her
appeal.

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During that summer of hopes and dreams, Andy finds himself Ailie's
confidant rather than her beau. He watches as she becomes hopelessly
smitten with an inappropriate suitor, Earl Schoen, a man whose
uniform has admitted him into a world not his own. When Schoen
returns to claim her following the war, Ailie quickly realizes her
mistake. Without his uniform, Schoen is nothing more than a streetcar
conductor, and Ailie, who has been deceived by her own desire to
escape the South's provincialism and has thus misunderstood this
Northerner, breaks their engagement.

Six years later, a Harvard-educated Andy returns to Tarleton himself,

compelled by a glimpse of a girl dressed in pink organdy in a small
Indiana town to recapture "the lost midsummer world of my early
twenties" ( Short Stories460). Seeking out Ailie, he confesses his love
for her, but she is not the same girl whose soft drawl once contained
the "secrets of a brighter, finer ante-bellum day" ( Short Stories460).
In fact, in her breathless banter Andy now hears the desperation of
defeat. When she refuses his marriage proposal, Andy asks her for one
favor -- that she accompany him to the former site of the training
camp. There, with the embodiment of one illusion, he searches for the
remnants of others, "looking" especially, he confesses, "for my youth
in a clapboard or a strip of roofing or a rusty tomato can" ( Short
Stories462), but that youth, like the South of his dreams, is lost to him
forever.

These representative stories, which are among his best, go far beyond
the generic conventions of the popular romance that Fitzgerald
ultimately came to despise and found unable to write. Superficial in
neither form nor content, they bear the marks of Fitzgerald's
distinctive style: the sophisticated wit, the poetic language, the ironic
or elegiac tone. They also develop his distinctive subjects and explore
his typical themes: the personal and moral consequences of great
wealth; the sustaining illusions, perhaps the most important of which
is love, that give meaning and significance to human life; the
inevitable losses wrought by time. Fitzgerald's best stories are, then,
like his novels, anything but forgettable.

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THE ELEMENTS OF THE FITZGERALD NOVEL:
CHARACTER, THEME, STYLE

The links between Fitzgerald's stories and novels and indeed between
the novels themselves make clear some of the defining characteristics
of his work. His central characters, for instance, generally represent a
privileged class, both socially and economically. Insulated by their
wealth from the brutal realities of hard physical labor, stultifying
occupations, and the anxieties of want and need, they have the time
and leisure to pursue, and even to be bored by, pleasure. Privilege has
also made them selfish and morally careless. Someone, they know
from experience, will step forward, as Nick Carraway says of Daisy
and Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby (187-188), to clean up their
messes, to assume responsibility for their benign neglect and
calculated cruelties. Even Anthony and Gloria Patch, mere shadows of
their former brilliant selves, believe themselves triumphantly validated
by the legal victory that restores Anthony's long-anticipated
inheritance at the end of The Beautiful and Damned. Their lives are
golden, as they were meant to be.

From within this privileged class, Fitzgerald draws his central female
characters: This Side of Paradise's Rosalind Connage, The Beautiful
and Damned's Gloria Patch, The Great Gatsby's Daisy Buchanan,
Tender is the Night's Nicole Diver. Beautiful and self-absorbed, they
move through the world with the ease and assurance of a lifetime of
wealth and social position taken as a matter of course and full
knowledge of their power to conquer all. Thoroughly modern and
protected by their status, they flaunt convention and enjoy their
pleasures, yet in spite of their experience of the world, they seem to
have managed to retain their essential innocence. Their physical
beauty in some way insulates them from corruption. It is just this
innocent self-assurance that transforms them for Fitzgerald's male
protagonists into ideals of truth and virtue. To possess them is to enter
this world of the ideal, to know its secrets, and to share its brilliance.
Fitzgerald's women are thus less fully realized characters than
embodiments of desire. For the Fitzgerald male, even their self-

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absorption and aloofness are proof of their innate superiority and
worth; they are a connection to some universal greatness.

Fitzgerald's male protagonists, as their idealization of his women

suggests, tend to stand just on the periphery of the golden world of
wealth and status that confer on their members' ease and happiness.
Whether they are like This Side of Paradise's Amory Blaine, whose
fortune and credentials make him ever aware of his second-best status
in the world's eyes, or The Great Gatsby's James Gatz, who must earn
a fortune and reinvent himself in order to be worthy of the woman he
loves, Fitzgerald's male protagonists do not by right belong in the
world of privilege. Yet they aspire to it, not for materialistic reasons
but as confirmation of their self-conceived destiny and their sustaining
visions. To a certain extent, they are all romantics, possessed of
dreams and visions that they seek to make real. While Amory's
dreams, as might be expected of an undergraduate, are rather vague,
incoherent longings to achieve his destined greatness, Gatsby's are
wedded to a concept, to the recreation of a perfect moment in time.
The Last Tycoon's Monroe Stahr, as the ultimate dream purveyor,
intends to give cinematic life to his visions of the world. Whatever the
aim, however, the dream itself constitutes the central fact of the life of
each of Fitzgerald's male protagonists. Their pursuit of the dream
serves as the vehicle by which Fitzgerald develops the thematic
concerns in his novels.

Fitzgerald's recurrent themes tend toward the tragic and certainly

evoke the pathos of the human condition. His central characters, those
romantic idealists, begin life with high hopes and lofty aspirations, but
they inevitably fall far short of their dreams. They are defeated by the
fact of time, the vagaries of love, and the human frailties that bedevil
our own best selves. "All the stories that came into my head had a
touch of disaster in them," Fitzgerald observed of his fiction, noting
the sadness that pervades his work. "The lovely young creatures in my
novels went to ruin, the diamond mountains of my short stories blew
up, my millionaires were as beautiful and damned as [English
novelist] Thomas Hardy's peasants" ("Early Success," The Crack-
Up87). This "touch of disaster" springs from Fitzgerald's
understanding of lost hopes and defeated aspirations, of the passage of

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time and its attendant losses, of the conflict between art and life, of the
meaning of America and its unfulfilled history -- the recurrent themes
of his fiction.

A poet of lost hopes and defeated aspirations, Fitzgerald locates such

circumstances in two different sources, the fact of time and the
conflict between art and life, between the spiritual and the material.
Both are realities that cause his romantic idealists to falter and thereby
experience disillusionment with the world and, in his most fully aware
characters, disappointment with the self. Time, for instance, robs
human beings of youth and all its promise as well as the wonders of
beauty. Youthful heroes such as This Side of Paradises Amory Blaine
and The Beautiful and Damned's Anthony Patch see age as one of
their primary assets. The world is all before them, not behind, and
they are secure in the knowledge that they have the energy, stamina,
talent, and desire to conquer it. Armed with this certainty, Amory
especially rebounds from every setback with renewed hope and vigor,
propelled by yet another dream. Yet if we see Anthony Patch as the
logical extension of Fitzgerald's first protagonist, then we understand
the disillusionment that he will inevitably face when he can no longer
shrug off the physical toll of endless nights of drunken excess, when
he feels every one of his thirty years and knows that time robs him
daily of even more of this youth. Gloria Patch may wail, "I don't want
to live without my pretty face!" ( Beautiful404), but the beauty that
she and Fitzgerald's male protagonists so value is as transient as their
youth. To Nick Carraway's assertion "You can't repeat the past," Jay
Gatsby may counter in utter disbelief, "Can't repeat the past. . . why of
course you can!" ( Gatsby116), but the truth is that Daisy does indeed
have a daughter. Time and change are inevitable. The perfect golden
moment is an impossibility. Thus there is in Fitzgerald's fiction the
elegaic tone of loss. His characters dream big, but time-bound reality
can never correspond to the ephemeral ideal; only the dream dreamed,
not the dream materialized, can bring them happiness. Even on that
golden afternoon of their reunion, "Daisy tumbled short of [ Gatsby's]
dreams" ( Gatsby101), and for all Kathleen's physical resemblance to
Minna, The Last Tycoon's Monroe Stahr cannot escape the fact of his
wife's death.

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Fitzgerald deepens the disillusionment of self-aware characters such
as Stahr and especially Tender is the Night's Dick Diver by placing
their personal stories within the context of historical processes. When
Dick tours World War I battlefields, where the dead had lain "like a
million bloody rugs" ( Tender57), he confronts the reality of social
and moral changes that have also been wrought by time. In their
efforts to fling off what seem to be the empty and outmoded values of
the past, which had led to such tragedy, a new generation embraces
the promise of freedom and personal satisfaction, only to find itself
aimless, rootless, and in a state of perpetual change that denies them
the stability of any lasting truths or values. Within the context of
historical process, Dick's personal tragedy is thus symptomatic,
reflecting the forces of time and change against which he is powerless.
These forces eventually defeat all of Fitzgerald's central characters.

Time is not alone, however, in working against the attainment of

hopes and dreams. Equally powerful is the internal conflict between
art and life, between the spiritual and the material, that undermines the
quests of Fitzgerald's protagonists. This conflict is most pronounced in
Tender is the Night, where Dick Diver, who begins his career as a
psychiatrist dedicated to his patients and his profession and with the
hope that he can achieve some personal greatness from his work, finds
himself seduced away from his best intentions by the ease and beauty
made possible by wealth. Increasingly bent on the pursuit of pleasure,
which brings him no real joy, Dick without purpose or a dream
becomes a mere shadow of his former brilliant self. When he finally
begins to analyze himself, he is filled with self-disgust and loathing
for what he has become -- a man who has allowed himself to be
purchased and who has betrayed his own dream of self.

Dick's conflict is to some extent characteristic of all Fitzgerald

protagonists. They long for some ideal, sometimes just an ideal of self,
but they confuse its attainment with wealth, not money itself, but the
ease and beauty that money can buy. In their minds, the rich are
indeed different. Their money frees them from an anxious, grubbing
existence; it makes possible happiness and confers on them virtue.
The monied tones of Daisy's voice convince Gatsby of her perfection.
In This Side of Paradise Rosalind Connage has purchased ease and

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self-assurance, Amory knows, with her fortune. Fitzgerald's
protagonists desire these same intangibles, and so they fill their
wardrobes with a rainbow array of shirts and inhabit villas in the south
of France, believing that the trappings of wealth will satisfy their
longings. Thus they are doomed to disappointment and
disillusionment, for no thing, not even the embodiment of the ideal,
can match the conception of the thing. Because Fitzgerald's
protagonists only vaguely intuit this truth or are reluctant to
acknowledge it if they do, they persist to the end to mingle their
dreams with the things of this world, which inevitably fall short of the
mark.

This conflict between the real and the ideal and this confusion of
virtue or happiness with wealth merge with Fitzgerald's anxieties
about time and loss and lie at the heart of his questioning of the
meaning of the American Dream. From the beginning of his career,
Fitzgerald was a writer grounded in the American scene. From small
midwestern towns to cosmopolitan clubs, from the halls of ivy at
prestigious seats of learning to the manufactured perfections of the
Hollywood dream machine, Fitzgerald's fiction focuses on American
manners and mores. Even Tender is the Night, a novel set in Europe,
is a tale of expatriate Americans who, rather like the Fitzgeralds
themselves, choose not to enter into the lives of the locals but to
fashion their own native enclaves, their Villas America, on a pristine
spot of foreign soil. Fitzgerald responded to the promise inherent in
the national myth and lived its contradictions, and his fiction reflects
his understanding of it. His evocation of American heroes such as
Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, moreover, and of the early
settlers who sought in the New World to realize their own dreams and
aspirations makes clear his intention to invest his tales with symbolic
meaning. America, with its vast promise; America, with its high
idealism; America, with its bounty and richness; America, a concept
defeated before it is begun by the forces of time and human nature;
America is thus Fitzgerald's overarching subject, his greatest theme.

Fitzgerald was not the first novelist to write of lost hopes and defeated
aspirations, to lament time and change, or to make America his
subject. Indeed, he was not the only novelist of the Lost Generation, a

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group of expatriate American writers residing mainly in Paris in the
1920s and 1930s. Yet readers respond to his characters and themes
through the beauty of the prose itself. Through language vivid and
immediate Fitzgerald renders experience with an emotional intensity
that conveys understanding. His is a prose of intimate involvement,
drawing readers into his characters' lives, responding to the narrative
voice, whether earnest or disillusioned, naive or matter-of-fact.
Always, too, are the images, which evoke and define without ever
explaining. Nick Carraway's first glimpse of Daisy Buchanan and
Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby, for instance, utterly fixes them as
representatives of their class. Similarly, Carraway's description of
Gatsby's car is an evocation of the owner's psyche rather than a
recitation of make and model: "It was a rich cream color, bright with
nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant
hatboxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a
labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns" ( Gatsby68). In
the end, Fitzgerald's style -- the rhythm of his sentences, the precision
of his language, the intensity of his poetic prose -- is an elegant
signature that defines his fiction as distinctly as his characters and
their social world, as precisely as his themes.

These elements of a literary career have confirmed Fitzgerald's status

as one of the major American novelists of the twentieth century and
sustained his reputation for the more than half century since his death.
They testify to his seriousness as a writer who, at his best in novels
such as The Great Gatsby and, for all its flaws, Tender is the Night,
fulfilled the promise of his own grand conception of his art. They put
into perspective as well the swirl of ideas and images, of influences
and experiences from which he fashioned a fictional world that
expressed his vision of his own.

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Sinclair Lewis

IN 1936, when the bibliophiles' magazine Colophon asked its readers

to name the living American authors they considered to have the best
chance of being thought "classics" in the year 2000, Sinclair Lewis
easily led the list. In a similar poll conducted in 1948, Lewis was
ranked second to Eugene O'Neill. Yet Lewis's reputation has declined
to such an extent that Mark Schorer, toward the end of his
monumental biography, seems to doubt whether it was all worth
while; and his rather sour final judgment is "He was one of the worst
writers in modern American literature . . . ." 1 This conclusion is not
prepared for, since Schorer treats Lewis's books chiefly as events in
his life; we could hardly wish for a more comprehensive view of
Lewis's deficiencies, but we are left wondering how many other recent
American writers did what E. M. Forster attributed to him: lodged a
piece of a continent in our imagination. Schorer takes Lewis as "a
prime example of that characteristic phenomenon of American
literature--the man who enjoys a tremendous and rather early success
and then suffers through a long period of decline and deterioration . . .
." 2 The success and the decline are admirably described in Schorer's
book, but after we have finished it we may still be left pondering the
nature of the achievement. 3

There is a remarkable range of opinions concerning what Lewis did or

tried to do. "Main Street is the climax of civilization," begins the
ironic prefatory note to the book which made Lewis famous; the note
concludes, "Would he not betray himself an alien cynic who would
otherwise portray Main Street, or distress the citizens by speculating
whether there may not be other faiths?" The position of the author
seems clear enough: here is the ageold appeal of the satirist asking his
reader to adopt an "enlightened" perspective. The man whom Main
Street would regard as an alien cynic is, of course, only an ordinary
reasonable man who has not suffered from the limitations of a small-
town environment, an ordinary man who sees it as his duty to expose
the foolish and the vicious. So Lewis has been seen by Vernon L.
Parrington as an American Diogenes, by Carl Van Doren as a man of

188
outspoken courage telling the true story of the American village, and
by Robert Spiller as an honest man crying out against the blindness
and hypocrisy which destroy elemental human values.

But it is not easy to determine what really was Sinclair Lewis's

attitude toward America, and especially toward the Middle West,
which was his favorite subject. T. K. Whipple saw him as a Red
Indian stalking his foes; J. Donald Adams denied that there was acid
in his satire and called attention to his prodigal love for mankind.
Edgar Johnson has described him as out to bring down the whole of
modern America from Gopher Prairie to the glittering pinnacles of
business; Alfred Kazin has stressed his boisterous good fellowship
with the very people he caricatured. He has been seen by many critics
as primarily an anatomist of society, an anthropologist, a collector of
specimens; Frederick J. Hoffman, however, refutes the notion that
Lewis gives an exact and mimetic transcription of American life, and
for James Branch Cabell the pleasure of reading Lewis was that "of
seeing a minim of reality exaggerated into Brobdingnagian
incredibility." To Edward Wagenknecht he was primarily a satirist, to
Percy Boynton an expositor, to Constance Rourke a fabulist in the
American tradition. For Carl Van Doren he was the voice of the
liberal decade before 1929, and for Henry Seidel Canby the standard-
bearer of a code of individualism coming from the heroic age of the
frontier; for Maxwell Geismar, on the other hand, he was a writer who
mistook a small arc for the entire circle of human experience and
therefore was truly the last provincial of American letters. Finally, for
Mark Schorer he was a novelist trapped in his own hallucination of the
world as a trap, with no concept of realizable values toward which he
or his society might aspire.

How did Lewis see himself? Variously, as the mood took him. He
could even describe himself as a yearner after quaint ivy-clad cottages
and a "romantic medievalist of the most incurable sort."

Lewis's examination of American society in the 1920's was so

vigorous and impressive that he gave " Main Street" and "Babbitt"
special meanings which these terms continue to possess; confirmed
Europeans in their worst prejudices about the United States--indeed

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gave them a new stereotype for the American; and taught Americans a
new way of looking at themselves and their country. If the story of his
life is a pathetic one, it is not entirely a story of failure; he cannot be
dismissed as a writer of meretricious best sellers who had his decade
of popular success and is now best forgotten along with his books.
Even if we were to accept Schorer's judgment that he was one of the
worst writers in modern American literature, we would have to accept
the accompanying opinion that we cannot imagine modern American
literature without him. If we can no longer be certain that his novels
will be regarded as classics in the year 2000, they do possess their
literary merits; furthermore, they are worth examining partly because
of their strengths and partly because of their curious weaknesses--
weaknesses which can be traced sometimes to the writer's paradoxical
personality and sometimes to the middle-class milieu of which he was
the chronicler and perhaps the prisoner.

The present study does not pretend to be exhaustive or definitive; it is

an introduction to Lewis and a contribution to the continuing debate
over his place in American letters. The critical opinions which have
already been mentioned, plus a number of other assessments of
individual novels or of Lewis's career as a whole, will come in for
examination, either as evaluations which are noteworthy in themselves
or as starting points for further critical discussion. Van Wyck Brooks
said of an early Lewis novel, The Trail of the Hawk, that it
foreshadowed Lewis's later work in certain ways, for one saw in it the
kind of world that he was to measure society by and the kind of man
that he was to choose as a hero. Such considerations justify a
chronological approach here, even though this approach has already
been used in a number of studies of Lewis: the more important novels
of the 1920's need to be read in the light of the themes discussed and
the techniques employed in their less important predecessors. For the
sake of placing the novels in their biographical context and of telling a
connected story, I have related briefly the events of Lewis's life. There
is a great deal of biographical material on him to be found in From
Main Street to Stockholm, the collection of letters between Lewis and
his publisher during the 1920's; in The Man from Main Street, the
Sinclair Lewis reader edited by Harry E. Maule and Melville H. Cane;
in the reminiscences by Lewis's two wives, Grace Hegger Lewis, who

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told of her life with Lewis in With Love from Gracie, and Dorothy
Thompson, who wrote two very revealing articles for the Atlantic
Monthly, in addition to the letters and diaries which provide the basis
for Vincent Sheean Dorothy and Red; as well as in many other books
and articles. Consequently, though I have looked to Schorer as a
guide, I have not relied on him as much as may be thought; and my
view of Lewis is not precisely his.

In an excellent review of Dorothy and Red, Steven Marcus, reflecting

Schorer's opinion, describes Lewis as "that remarkable modern
phenomenon, a man who had apparently no inner life; he was
incapable of reflection or self-examination . . .," and, after observing
that Lewis's endless suffering and the fact that he was a writer were
the two most authentic things about him, goes on to say, "It was
altogether typical . . . that the suffering did not get into the writing,
that he was quite unable to express his anguish in the one form of
expression available to him." 5 In reply, one might first question
whether Lewis's anguish could have been so intense if he had had no
inner life. Second, does not the comment indicate (as Schorer does
toward the end of his book) a wish that Lewis had been not merely a
better writer but a different kind of writer--a novelist of the subjective
life? Sometimes one feels that Lewis is being tried, as Johnson said of
Shakespeare, by the laws of some country other than his own. Third,
would it not have benefited Lewis to look outside himself to some
external source of value? Paradoxically, the only myths for which he
had any reverence kept him firmly locked within the prison of self.

Main Street and Babbitt soon became standards of judgment, so that it

became the task of every literate American to prove that there was
nothing of Main Street, nothing of the Babbitt, about him. Yet Lewis
the "alien cynic" was also a local patriot and even a local booster; an
ardent rebel who distrusted most of the revolutionary literary, social,
and political movements of his day and sometimes longed for a return
to pioneer, even Puritan, virtues; a man unwilling to profess the faith
of Main Street and yet uncertain whether any other faith was adequate
to judge it or supplant it. It soon became clear that in his novels he
was not really setting western naiveté against eastern sophistication,
not ridiculdng the standards of the small town or medium-sized city

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according to the standards of the metropolis, and certainly not
attacking America by European or cosmopolitan standards. When he
was asked for some indication of his standpoint, he responded by
giving his readers an example of heroic behavior, the dedication of a
scientist to his science. But his example raised as many questions as it
answered; his heroic soul had to free himself not merely from
restrictive conformity and corrupting commercial pressures, but
virtually from human values and society itself. In Martin Arrowsmith
rugged American individualism reached its apogee: he lived as a
hermit in the woods.

For Lewis the freedom of the 1920's became the freedom to ignore
family responsibilities, to go wherever fancy or alcoholic whim took
him, and to praise or blame the Babbitts and the Gantrys according to
the caprice of the moment. It became the despairing flight from place
to place, each sanctuary becoming a prison as soon as attained, which
Schorer describes so vividly. Holding to no standard but this
unchartered freedom, Lewis became erratic and unpredictable in his
personal behavior, and inconsistent in the handling of the themes,
characters, and situations in his books. The ambiguities in his novels,
therefore, have a connection with his conception of liberty. The story
of Sinclair Lewis's futile endeavor to find satisfaction for his spirit by
rushing from somewhere to nowhere, until he died alone and unknown
in an alien land, is a parable for our times.

One aspect of his concept of freedom was an Alice-in-Wonderland

carelessness about words: occasionally he made them mean what he
wanted them to mean. Satire he called "one of those back-attic words
into which is thrown everything for which no use can be found." 6 But
this did not prevent him from writing a whole series of satirical novels
and presenting a whole gallery of satirical characterizations, almost
invariably belonging to the class which he considered enslaved by
conformity. Many critics have pointed out that his middle-class world
was a nightmare world; at times his vision resembles that in The
Waste Land of people walking meaninglessly around in a ring, or the
Orwellian image of drawn and cowed people in an Airstrip One. But
his florid, loud-mouthed representatives of the class which spins not
and toils chiefly at salesmanship proved to be richly varied and full of

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life and gusto. Lewis was never happier than when a Marduc or a
Pickerbaugh, a Windrip or a Blausser, had sprung fullblown into
existence in the world of his imagination and begun to wax eloquent.
These were characters to be treated with satiric humor; some of them
were menaces, some of them were conspiring to destroy all freedom
and all individuality, but except in his gloomier moments, Lewis never
believed that they would succeed. He kept his faith in the American
Dream.

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Chapter 4: American Postmodernism

'Landmarks' in postmodernism - Habermas, Lyotard and Baudrillard.

A major 'moment' in the history of postmodernism is the influential

paper 'Modernity—an Incomplete Project' delivered by the
contemporary German theorist Jürgen Habermas in 1980. For
Habermas the modern period begins with the Enlightenment, that
period of about one hundred years, from the mid-seventeenth to the
mid-eighteenth century, when a new faith arose in the power of reason
to improve human society. Such ideas are expressed or embodied in
the philosophy of Kant in Germany, Voltaire and Diderot in France,
and Locke and Hume in Britain. In Britain the term 'The Age of
Reason' was used (till recently) to designate the same period. The so-
called Enlightenment 'project' is the fostering of this belief that a break
with tradition, blind habit, and slavish obedience to religious precepts
and prohibitions, coupled with the application of reason and logic by
the disinterested individual can bring about a solution to the problems
of society. This outlook is what Habermas means by 'modernity'. The
French Revolution can be seen as a first attempt to test this theory in
practice. For Habermas this faith in reason and the possibility of
progress survived into the twentieth century, and even survives the
catalogue of disasters which makes up this century's history. The
cultural movement known as modernism subscribed to this 'project', in
the sense that it constituted a lament for a lost sense of purpose, a lost
coherence, a lost system of values. For Habermas, the French post-
structuralist thinkers of the 1970s, such as Derrida and Foucault,
represented a specific repudiation of this kind of Enlightenment
'modernity'. They attacked, in his view, the ideals of reason, clarity,
truth, and progress, and as they were thereby detached from the quest
for justice, he identified them as young conservatives.
The term 'postmodernism' was used in the 1930s, but its cur-
rent sense and vogue can be said to have begun with Jean François
Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
(Manchester University Press, 1979). Lyotard's essay 'Answering the
question: What is Postmodernism?', first published in 1982, added in
1984 as an appendix to The Postmodern Condition and included in

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Brooker's Modernism/Postmodernism, 1992, takes up this debate
about the Enlightenment, mainly targeting Habermas, in a slightly
oblique manner. Lyotard opens with a move which effectively turns
the debate into a struggle to demonstrate that one's opponents are the
real conservatives (a familiar 'bottom line' of polemical writing on
culture). From every direction', he says, 'we are being urged to put an
end to experimentation', and after citing several other instances he
writes (obviously of Habermas):

I have read a thinker of repute who defends modernity against

those he calls the neo-conservatives. Under the banner of
post-modernism, the latter would like, he believes, to get rid
of the uncompleted project of modernism, that of the
Enlightenment.
(Brooker, p. 141)

Habermas's is simply one voice in a chorus which is calling for an

end to 'artistic experimentation' and for 'order ... unity, for identity, for
security' (Brooker, p. 142). In a word, these voices want 'to liquidate
the heritage of the avant-gardes'. For Lyotard the Enlightenment
whose project Habermas wishes to continue is simply one of the
would-be authoritative 'overarching', 'totalizing' explanations of things
- like Christianity, Marxism, or the myth of scientific progress. These
'metanarratives' ['super-narratives'], which purport to explain and
reassure are really illusions, fostered in order to smother difference,
opposition, and plurality. Hence Lyotard's famous definition of
postmodernism, that it is, simply, 'incredulity towards metanarratives'.
'Grand Narratives' of progress and human perfectibility, then, are no
longer tenable, and the best we can hope for is a series of
'mininarratives', which are provisional, contingent, temporary, and
relative and which provide a basis for the actions of specific groups in
particular local circumstances. Postmodernity thus 'deconstructs' the
basic aim of the Enlightenment, that is 'the idea of a unitary end of
history and of a subject'.
Another major theorist of postmodernism is the contemporary
French writer Jean Baudrillard, whose book Simulations (1981,
translated 1983) marks his entry into this field. Baudrillard is
associated with what is usually known as 'the loss of the real', which is

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the view that in contemporary life the pervasive influence of images
from film, TV, and advertising has led to a loss of the distinction
between real and imagined, reality and illusion, surface and depth.
The result is a culture of 'hyperreality', in which distinctions between
these are eroded. His propositions are worked out in his essay
'Simulacra and Simulations' reprinted in abridged form in Brooker,
1992. He begins by evoking a past era of 'fullness', when a sign was a
surface indication of an underlying depth or reality ('an outward sign
of inward grace', to cite the words of the Roman Catholic Catechism).
But what, he asks, if a sign is not an index of an underlying reality, but
merely of other signs? Then the whole system becomes what he calls a
simulacrum. He then substitutes for representation the notion of
simulation. The sign reaches its present stage of emptiness in a series
of steps, which I will try to illustrate by comparing them to different
kinds of paintings.
Firstly, then, the sign represents a basic reality: let's take as an
example of this the. representations of the industrial city of Salford in
the work of the twentieth century British artist L. S. Lowry. Mid-
century life for working people in such a place was hard, and the
paintings have an air of monotony and repetitiveness—cowed, stick-
like figures fill the streets, colors are muted, and the horizon filled
with grim factory-like buildings. As signs, then, Lowry's paintings
seem to represent the basic reality of the place they depict.
The second stage for the sign is that it misrepresents or distorts
the reality behind it. As an example of this let's take the glamorized
representations of cities like Liverpool and Hull in the paintings of the
Victorian artist Atkinson Grimshaw. These paintings show the cities at
night, wet pavements reflecting the bright lights of dockside shops, the
moon emerging from behind clouds, and a forest of ships' masts
silhouetted against the sky. Life in these places at that time was
presumably grim, too, but the paintings offer a romantic and
glamorized image, so the sign can be said to misrepresent what it
shows.
The third stage for the sign is when the sign disguises the fact
that there is no corresponding reality underneath. To illustrate this,
take a device used in the work of the surrealist artist Rene' Magritte,
where, in the painting, an easel with a painter's canvas on it is shown
standing alongside a window: on the canvas in the painting is painted

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the exterior scene which we can see through the window. But what is
shown beyond the window is not reality, against which the painting
within the painting can be judged, but simply another sign, another
depiction, which has no more authority or reality than the painting
within the painting (which is actually a representation of a
representation).
The fourth and last stage for the sign is that it bears no rela-
tion to any reality at all. As an illustration of this stage we have simply
to imagine a completely abstract painting, which is not
representational at all, like one of the great purple mood canvases of
Ed Burra, for instance. I should emphasize that I'm not suggesting that
these four paintings are examples of the four stages of the sign, merely
that the four stages can be thought of as analogous to the four different
ways in which these paintings signify or represent things.
The first two of these stages are fairly clear, the second two
perhaps less so. Baudrillard's own example of the third stage (when
the sign hides an absence) is Disneyland. In one way, of course, it is a
sign of the second type, a mythologized misrepresentation of the
United States:

All its [the USA's] values are exalted here, in miniature and
comic-strip form. Embalmed and pacified ... digest of the
American way of life, panegyric to American values,
idealized transposition of a contradictory reality.
(Brooker, Modernism/ Postmodernism, p.
154)

But Disneyland is actually a 'third-order simulation' (a sign which

conceals an absence):

Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the 'real'

country, all of 'real' America, which is Disneyland (lust as
prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its
entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral.
Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us
believe that the rest is real.

In a word, Disneyland has the effect of 'concealing the fact that the

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real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle'. Within
postmodernism, the distinction between what is real and what is
simulated collapses: everything is a model or an image, all is surface
without depth; this is the hyperreal, as Baudrillard calls it.
The grand sweep of this kind of rhetoric has a strong appeal. One
might see it as a kind of latter-day Platonism, its devotees enjoying the
mystical insight that what is normally taken as a solid and real world
is actually just a tissue of dreamlike images. If this second aspect of
the postmodern condition, this loss of the real, is accepted as a fact,
then it is hard to see a ground for literary theory to occupy, since all
methods of literary interpretation—Marxist, feminist, structuralist, and
so on—depend upon the making of a distinction between surface and
depth, between what is seen in the text and some underlying meaning.
Once we accept that what we see is all we get, then there is, clearly,
very little which a literary critic or theorist can claim to be doing.
More generally, for postmodernism there are certain ever-pre-
sent questions and provisos. In this extreme Baudrillardian form, the
'loss of the real' may seem to legitimize a callous indifference to
suffering. In a now notorious pronouncement Baudrillard maintained
that the Gulf War never happened, that what 'really' took place was a
kind of televisual virtual reality. (See the hook by Christopher Norris
in the Selected reading section.) Likewise, if we accept the 'loss of the
real' and the collapsing of reality and simulation into a kind of virtual
reality, then what of the Holocaust? Could this, too, be part of the
reality 'lost' in the image networks? In other words, without a belief in
some of the concepts which postmodernism undercuts—history,
reality, and truth, for instance—we may well find ourselves in some
pretty repulsive company.

ATTENTION:

The crucial category in Baudrillard's four-stage model is the third one,

the sign which conceals an absence, which conceals the fact that the
supposedly 'real' which it represents is no longer there, that beyond the
play of surfaces there is nothing else.
It is not easy to achieve a precise understanding of this
concept. It may help in doing so if you try to think of examples other
than Disneyland. The idealized images of masculinity or femininity

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presented in advertisements, for instance, may be helpful: these also
are copies or representations for which no original exists - no actual
people are quite like these, though people might strive to become like
them. In this way the image tends to become the reality, and the two
tend to become indistinguishable.
Further, if we agree that the real has indeed been lost then we
need to decide how we react to this fact. If we are to revel in the
boundary-free zone which results, we will need to be sure that the
'real' is a concept we can do without. Perhaps recent events suggest
otherwise. In the television coverage of the Gulf War we saw
computer-image film of high-tech 'smart' weapons homing in on Iraqi
targets, while the commentary spoke of 'surgical strikes' which could
'take out' key enemy installations. News bulletins also included
footage of pilots who spoke of what they were doing in the same
'unreal' terms, using the terminology of video combat games, for
instance. Perhaps these things are symptomatic of what can happen
when the category of the real is eroded. Likewise, could we condemn
the Holocaust without the category of the real, or campaign against
(say) racial discrimination or environmental pollution?

What postmodernist critics do

I. They discover postmodernist themes, tendencies, and attitudes

within literary works of the twentieth century and explore their
implications.
2. They foreground fiction which might be said to exemplify the
notion of the 'disappearance of the real', in which shifting postmodern
identities are seen, for example, in the mixing of literary genres (the
thriller, the detective story, the myth saga, and the realist
psychological novel, etc.).
3. They foreground what might be called 'intertextual elements' in
literature, such as parody, pastiche, and allusion, in all of which there
is a major degree of reference between one text and another, rather
than between the text and a safely external reality.
4. They foreground irony, in the sense described by Umberto Eco,
that whereas the modernist tries to destroy the past, the postmodernist
realizes that the past must be revisited, but 'with irony' (Modern

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ism/Postmodernism ed. Peter Brooker, p. 227.
5. They foreground the element of 'narcissism in narrative tech-
nique, that is, where novels focus on and debate their own ends and
processes, and thereby 'de-naturalize' their content.
6. They challenge the distinction between high and low culture, and
highlight texts which work as hybrid blends of the two.

SUMMARY

Postmodernity vs. the Postmodern vs. Postmodernism

Differentiations:

• the idea of the postmodern or postmodernity as a historical

(political/economic/social) condition (an era we're still
supposedly in whether we know it not)

• vs. an intentional movement in arts, culture, philosophy, and

politics that uses various strategies to subvert what is seen as
dominant in modernism or modernity.

What was Modernism? Po-Mo theory constructs a specific image of

modernism. Was there a pre-Po-Mo consensus about history, identity,
core cultural values? A discourse with a constructed historical object?
A dispersed, intentional cultural movement? Why is Pollock a
modernist and Warhol a postmodernist?

Jean-François Lyotard: The postmodern as a historical/cultural

"condition" based on a dissolution of master narratives or
metanarratives (totalizing narrative paradigms like progress and
national histories), a crisis in ideology when ideology no longer seems
transparent (see The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge)

Frederic Jameson: Postmodernism as a movement in arts and culture

corresponding to a new configuration of politics and economics, "late
capitalism": transnational consumer economies based on global scope
of capitalism. (See Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism)

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Post-Modern Artists' views: Po-Mo as a phase of knowing and
practice, abandoning the assumptions, prejudices, and constraints of
modernism to embrace the contradictions, irony, and profusion of pop
and mass culture. "High" and "low" culture/art categories made
useless and irrelevant, art from outsider and non-Western cultures
embraced, consumer society turned inside out.

Ways of working with the idea of the "postmodern"

Uses of the term "postmodern"

1. after modernism (subsumes, assumes, extends the modern or
tendencies already present in modernism, not necessarily in
strict chronological succession)

2. contra modernism (subverting, resisting, opposing, or

countering features of modernism)

3. equivalent to "late capitalism" (post-industrial, consumerist,

and multi- and trans-national capitalism)

4. the historical era following the modern (an historical time-

period marker)

5. artistic and stylistic eclecticism (hybridization of forms and

genres, mixing styles of different cultures or time periods, de-
and re-contextualizing styles in architecture, visual arts,
literature)

6. "global village" phenomena: globalization of cultures,

races, images, capital, products ("information age"
redefinition of nation-state identities, which were the
foundation of the modern era; dissemination of images and
information across national boundaries, a sense of erosion or
breakdown of national, linguistic, ethnic, and cultural
identities; a sense of a global mixing of cultures on a scale
unknown to pre-information era societies)

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Postmodernity, History, Mediation, and Representation

Postmodern historians and philosophers question the representation of

history and cultural identities: history as "what 'really' happened"
(external to representation or mediation) vs. history as a "narrative of
what happened" a "mediated representation" with cultural/ideological
interests.

Art works are likewise caught up in the problem of representation and

mediation--of what, for whom, from what ideological point of view?

Jameson: "history is only accessible to us in narrative form". History

requires representation, mediation, in narrative, a story-form encoded
as historical.

Dissolution of the transparency of history and tradition: Can we get to

the (unmediated) referents of history?

Multiculturalism, competing views of history and tradition.

Shift from universal histories, from the long durée (long time-span of
historical periods), to local and explicitly contingent histories. History
and identity politics: who can write or make art? for whom? from
what standpoint?

Walter Benjamin's recognition of the non-neutrality of history:

"Where are the empathies [of traditional historicism?] The answer is

inevitable: with the victor. Hence empathy with the victor invariably
benefits the rulers. Historical materialists know what that means.
Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the
triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who
are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are
carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and
a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment... They
owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and
talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their
contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at

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the same time a document of barbarism... [A historical materialist]
regards it as his task to brush history against the grain."

"For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as
one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably."

(From "Theses on the Philosophy of History" in Illuminations, ed.

Hannah Arendt)

Working with Frederic Jameson's categories ("Postmodernism

and Consumer Society")
(1) "the transformation of reality into images" (cf. Debord and
Baudrillard)

(2) "the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents"

• "the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and
so-called mass or popular culture" (Jameson).

• Pastiche and parody of multiple styles: old forms of "content"

become mere "styles"

• stylistic masks, image styles, without present content: the

meaning is in the mimicry

• "in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible,

all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the
masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary
museum" (Jameson).

• No individualism or individual style, voice, expressive

identity. All signifiers circulate and recirculate prior and
existing images and styles.

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 • The postmodern in advertising: attempts to provide illusions
of individualism (ads for jeans, cars, etc.) through images that
define possible subject positions or create desired positions
(being the one who's cool, hip, sexy, desirable,
sophisticated...).

• "our advertising...is fed by postmodernism in all the arts and

is inconceivable without it" (Jameson)

• [Understood by Warhol, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Kruger,

Ruscha]

• Po-Mo as late capitalism: transnational capitalism without

borders, only networks and info flows.

Some features of postmodern styles:

• Nostalgia and retro styles, recycling earlier genres and styles

in new contexts (film/TV genres, images, typography, colors,
clothing and hair styles, advertising images)

• "History" represented through nostalgic images of pop

culture, fantasies of the past. History has become one of the
styles; historical representations blend with nostalgia.

• "the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our

entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to
lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a
perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates
traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have
had in one way or another to preserve... The information
function of the media would thus be to help us to forget, to
serve as the very agents and mechanisms of our historical
amnesia" (Jameson).

• Jameson's own nostalgia? Did this ever exist?

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 • Culture on Fast Forward: Time and history replaced by speed,
futureness, accelerated obsolescence.

The Modern and the Postmodern: Contrasting Tendencies

The features in the table below are only often-discussed tendencies,
not absolutes. In fact, the tendency to see things in seemingly obvious,
binary, contrasting categories is usually associated with modernism.
The tendency to dissolve binary categories and expose their arbitrary
cultural co-dependency is associated with postmodernism. For
heuristic purposes only.

Modernism/Modernity Postmodern/
Postmodernity
Master Narratives and Suspicion and rejection of Master
metanarratives of history, culture Narratives for history and culture;
and national identity as accepted local narratives, ironic
before WWII (American-European deconstruction of master narratives:
myths of progress). Myths of counter-myths of origin.
cultural and ethnic origin accepted
as received.
Faith in "Grand Theory" (totalizing Rejection of totalizing theories;
explanations in history, science and pursuit of localizing and contingent
culture) to represent all knowledge theories.
and explain everything.
Faith in, and myths of, social and Social and cultural pluralism,
cultural unity, hierarchies of social- disunity, unclear bases for
class and ethnic/national values, social/national/ ethnic unity.
seemingly clear bases for unity.
Master narrative of progress Skepticism of idea of progress, anti-
through science and technology. technology reactions, neo-Luddism;
new age religions.

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Sense of unified, centered Sense of fragmentation and
self; "individualism," unified decentered self; multiple, conflicting
identity. identities.
Idea of "the family" as central unit Alternative family units, alternatives
of social order: model of the to middle-class marriage model,
middle-class, nuclear family. multiple identities for couplings and
Heterosexual norms. childraising. Polysexuality,
exposure of repressed homosexual
and homosocial realities in cultures.
Hierarchy, order, centralized Subverted order, loss of centralized
control. control, fragmentation.
Faith and personal investment in Trust and investment in
big politics (Nation-State, party). micropolitics, identity politics, local
politics, institutional power
struggles.
Root/Depth tropes. Rhizome/surface tropes.
Faith in "Depth" (meaning, value, Attention to play of surfaces,
content, the signified) over images, signifiers without concern
"Surface" (appearances, the for "Depth". Relational and
superficial, the signifier). horizontal differences,
differentiations.
Crisis in representation and status Culture adapting to simulation,
of the image after photography and visual media becoming
mass media. undifferentiated equivalent forms,
simulation and real-time media
substituting for the real.
Faith in the "real" beyond media, Hyper-reality, image saturation,
language, symbols, and simulacra seem more powerful than
representations; authenticity of the "real"; images and texts with no
"originals." prior "original".
"As seen on TV" and "as seen on
MTV" are more powerful than
unmediated experience.

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Dichotomy of high and low culture Disruption of the dominance of high
(official vs. popular culture). culture by popular culture.
Imposed consensus that high or Mixing of popular and high cultures,
official culture is normative and new valuation of pop culture, hybrid
authoritative, the ground of value cultural forms cancel "high"/"low"
and discrimination. categories.
Mass culture, mass consumption, Demassified culture; niche products
mass marketing. and marketing, smaller group
identities.
Art as unique object and finished Art as process, performance,
work authenticated by artist and production, intertextuality.
validated by agreed upon Art as recycling of culture
standards. authenticated by audience and
validated in subcultures sharing
identity with the artist.
Knowledge mastery, attempts to Navigation through information
embrace a totality. Quest for overload, information management;
interdisciplinary harmony. fragmented, partial knowledge; just-
The encyclopedia. in-time knowledge.
The Web.
Broadcast media, centralized one- Digital, interactive, client-server,
to-many communications. distributed, user-motivated,
Paradigms: broadcast networks and individualized, many-to-many
TV. media. Paradigms: Napster and the
Web.
Centering/centeredness, centralized Dispersal,
knowledge. dissemination, networked,
distributed knowledge
Determinacy, dependence, Indeterminacy, contingency,
hierarchy. polycentric power sources.
Seriousness of intention and Play, irony, challenge to official
purpose, middle-class earnestness. seriousness, subversion of

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 earnestness.
Sense of clear generic boundaries Hybridity, promiscuous genres,
and wholeness (art, music, and recombinant culture, intertextuality,
literature). pastiche.
Design and architecture of New Design and architecture of LA and
York. Las Vegas
Clear dichotomy between organic Cyborgian mixing of organic and
and inorganic, human and machine. inorganic, human and machine and
electronic.
Phallic ordering of sexual Androgyny, queer sexual identities,
difference, unified sexualities, polymorphous sexuality, mass
exclusion/bracketing of marketing of pornography, porn
pornography. style mixing with mainstream
images.
The book as sufficient bearer of the Hypermedia as transcendence of the
word. physical limits of print media.
The library as complete and total The Web as infinitely expandable,
system for printed knowledge. centerless, inter-connected
information system.

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Saul Bellow

Perhaps the best introduction to Bellow's world-to its themes,

characters, and images-is his first piece of fiction, "Two Morning
Monologues," which appeared in the May-June, 1941 issue of
Partisan Review.

Mandelbaum, the first speaker, tells us how he spends his day

"without work." He disposes of this day -- and, we assume, every day-
by fruitlessly looking for a job, "pulling the marrow out of a
cigarette," taking an "extravagant boat ride," or reading in the library.
The second speaker muses about the "angles" of the day's race, the
first cigarette, and breakfast. These men are less concerned with
physical action than meditation and conversation.

What characteristic themes are stated? Mandelbaum and the gambler

live in a completely alien society. In the opening paragraph we read
that Mandelbaum, the unemployed son, is "driven": he cannot stay at
home because he refuses to accept the compelling, self-centered
designs of his parents, especially those of his father. He does not want
to work just to earn money and please everybody. He wants more than
the "fat gods." 1 The gambler, on the other hand, goes along with the
system, but even he thinks it's a "sour loss" -- the workaday routine is
meaningless because it doesn't satisfy his soul: "The sucker scraping
the griddle, turning the eggs, paddling the bread with wet butter. I
couldn't put in his twelve hours."

Must such alert men accept the patterns of society?

Must they be mere worshippers of fact and figures? Must they love
money? Mandelbaum thinks: "Total it any way, top to bottom, reverse
the order, it makes no difference, the sum is always sunk." The
gambler agrees with him: "To get around it counts. Slipping through."
They both rebel against the fundamentally destructive system; at the
same time they find that they have no values of their own. Thus they

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feel guilty or depressed. Although "Two Morning Monologues"
stresses the "literal" social fact, it is almost "metaphysical." The
system is, after all, the world we know-the world we did not make but
adopted. The speakers are concerned with more than functions of
money; they want to know themselves in relation to universals-the
gambler asks: "Who picks us out?" The world itself is presented as the
necessary, inescapable design which challenges individual identity:
"Here we are. What'll it be today, the library? museum? the
courthouse? a convention?"

Bellow emphasizes painful irresolution: rebellion versus submission;

narcissism versus communion; and fear versus courage. Because the
speakers are torn by such "double" values, they are, in the end, on the
"edge of being." The gambler knows that even this edge may be an
illusion, another appearance which hides reality. He counsels himself:
"Walk on the edge without falling." At the same time he knows that he
can fall. He wants, at times, to close his eyes. So does Mandelbaum:
"Eventually it will be settled, but the space between eventually and the
present is long enough to stretch my legs in."

Bellow suggests that "time is of the essence." This day must be

confronted, understood, and mastered. The speakers have to seize it,
knowing that it carries the burdens of past and future. Again there is
ambivalence: this day resembles other days, but it is unique. How can
they live in the system of time? How can they be in and out of history?
I take these questions to be crucial in both monologues. Mandelbaum
knows that his father bought the house -- the symbolic burden -- long
ago. The gambler also thinks of the past he carries-not of his father's
house but of his childhood: "When you come to it there's a lot that has
to do with what remains of it from childhood." Gambling is a fitting
symbol of time's ways: we are handed cards; we must act now; but we
don't know what cards we will choose.

Bellow gives us family relationships as he does in his novels.

Mandelbaum's father is not a "monster," but he does seem to be full of
self-love. When he says that his son is a "good boy, a smart boy," he
demonstrates that he is proud of him, yet he also feels that he is better
than this smart boy: he, after all, is working. The father creates an

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atmosphere of competition; he proclaims by all of his deeds-by
advertising for a job, by making him feel "wrong and guilty," by
mentioning the other smart boys-that he commands his son.

Mandelbaum gets little help from his mother. Although she is "much
gentler" than the father, she is clumsy in her affection,

Ordinarily she is as strange to me as though she were dead or

nonexistent. But then, when I recognize that she is alive-not only that
she lives, but that she prepares my orange juice before I leave and
hands me my lunch -- it gives me an extraordinary twist. I am the only
son.

The mother offers orange juice-little else. It is characteristic that

Bellow's speaker regards her with more love than he does his father-at
least she won't scold him! But I think she is as "dangerous" as her
husband. The family ties-muted though they are-suggest that
Mandelbaum learns to dangle at home.

And his view of the "outside" world is corrupted. He knows that

society resembles -- or projects -- his father's absurd conceptions, and
he reacts toward the people he encounters, especially prospective
employers, in the same immature way. He is a son unsure of his
identity; he is treated as such by those who have "purpose and money
and influence."

The gambler also regards society as a "conventional" parent, but

unlike his alter ego, he reacts as a "mean" boy. He is a hostile name-
caller: the others are "fall guys," "suckers," enemies. It is interesting
that he is superstitious:

When you come to it there's a lot that has to do with what remains of it
from childhood. . . . Kids think they can control the world. Walk from
one side of the room to the other and a bell will ring; throw a stone at
the sky and wait for it to rain. Next time it will rain. I remember that.

The gambler, like "uncivilized" natives, is awed by worldly tricks. He

sees many mysterious strangers.

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Both speakers are more concerned with their conflicts, with ideas of
power, than with sex. We don't see much of Mandelbaum's mind, but
it is safe to say that he finds no comfort with women, who, perhaps,
mirror his gentle, "dead" mother; he knows that they don't count-they
can't help him assert his strength. He is a bachelor. The gambler,
similarly, doesn't mention girls -- not even Lady Luck. They are not
important in his "will to power" because he probably thinks of them as
conventional or honest. Men he can "fight back with a stick."

There are several images in "Two Morning Monologues" which recur

in the novels: "rooms," voyages, and "mirrors." Bellow does not go
far; he does not create exotic images to represent the plight of his
heroes. The "room" is the prison of spirit. Mandelbaum continually
finds himself confined: the "stairs have become darker, more buckled
and gap-jointed"; he waits at the agency, "sitting on benches, crossing
and recrossing [his] legs with the others, reading the signs forbidding
smoking and stating the rates of the agency"; he thinks of the "closely
curled leaves" of his identity; he hopes to strike "the secret panel of
the sliding door." The gambler wants to "get around it"; he wants to
open the door, to "slip through." He also is "squeezed" by the
condition in which he finds himself.

Bellow opposes movement to confinement. But the movement is

erratic, violent, or non-purposeful. The unemployed son is "driven"
from the house. He takes a "long ride," paying "little attention" to the
sights. He likes to "lounge several hours in one place," rather than take
an "extravagant boat ride." The gambler's motion is more violent: the
cigarette "dizzies" him; he wants to go "through the cracks"; he thinks
of planes "colliding in all the room in the world," of skyscrapers
toppling, of cards falling. He hears, finally, the "swishing in the heart
like a deck riffled."

Bellow also uses often-inverted reflections to express the ambiguities

of life. He characteristically gives us two monologues, juxtaposing the
docility of Mandelbaum to the anger of the gambler. Indeed, these
heroes -- "good boy" and gambler, lounger and racer, innocent and
con-man -- prefigure the doubles in all of his novels. Nor does he
neglect other kinds of reflection. Consider Mandelbaum thinking of

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Bobby Poland, the neighbor's son, who is the same age. This "brother"
is an accountant. Earlier he sees himself in those who are out of work,
but his father thinks that he is "different." The gambler refers to
contrasts, inversions, reflections: "You have to be able to recognize
them." He recognizes that he is unlike the fall guys; he is disturbed by
those who don't look and step where they "shouldn't"; he glances at
the eyes of the other players. But his vision of reality is as clouded as
the mirror touched by his cigarette smoke.

The style of "Two Morning Monologues" prefigures later

developments. Mandelbaum and the gambler speak. Immediately we
feel that they are communicating directly to us; no "author" interrupts
their monologues. Bellow suggests that "style is the man," that fiction
embodies personal truth. We respond to sincerely expressed troubles.
Listen to Mandelbaum: "It's my father's fault that I'm driven from the
house all morning and most of the afternoon. I'm supposed to be
looking for a job. I don't exaggerate when I say driven. That's what it
is." He speaks urgently, simply, often uncontrollably. Rarely does he
use imagery: "This morning [the descending sun] makes me think of
nothing more important than a paper seal on a breakfast food box.
Yank it and the box opens. You will find a toy prize on top; a toy
plane, crossed snowshoes, a tiny loving cup." This typical image
expresses his "practical," down-to-earth view of nature, his concern
with food and prizes which await him. When Mandelbaum becomes
poetic, he still remains close to home: he mentions the "closely curled
leaves" of identity, but he juxtaposes this image to the sandwich he
carries in his pocket. Bellow mediates between the literal and the
symbolic, understanding that this linkage is often amusing.
Consequently, Mandelbaum refers to finding "unusual resources" --
learning to "suck a maximum from each straw and pull the marrow out
of a cigarette."

The gambler speaks distinctively:

What does it amount to? Close my eyes and pick, I may as well. It
turns out the same; mostly sour loss. System is nothing and to try to
dope them is just wasted. It isn't a matter you reach into yourself for,

213
bringing it up and showing it to the eyes, open proof. The card is dark,
always, the dice to the last roll.

His monologue is rapid, sincere, and practical, but it is more "poetic"

than Mandelbaum's -- almost visionary: "That's it, you see, the verge,
the edge, the crumb of a minute before when any one of twelve, fifty,
eight, thirty-seven comes out." The vision, however, is full of
"crumbs." Again Bellow is able to show the doom of "money owing,
rent postponed, hole in your glove, one egg, cheap tobacco." His lists
convey the puzzling density of life.

Bellow views contemporary society as a threat. Everywhere there are

things-goods, appliances, and false information -- which "distract" us:

The shops are filled with goods and buyers. In the fields were the
newest harvesting machines; in the houses washers, dryers, freezers
and refrigerators, air conditioners, vacuum cleaners, Mixmasters,
Waringblenders, television and stereophonic high-fi sets, electrical
can openers, novels condensed by the Reader's Digest and slick
magazines. In the yards, glossy cars in giddy colors, like ships from
outer space. 1

Because we are surrounded by such attractive things, we don't realize

that they can be destructive. The "reign of the fat gods" is not simply
dull: "It destroys and consumes everything, it covers the human image
with deadly films, it undermines all quality with its secret rage, it
subverts everything good and exalts lies, and on its rotten head it
wears a crown of normalcy." Bellow believes that our "Pig Heaven"
contaminates human dignity-we no longer have a sense of uniqueness.
We become another "commodity, " relinquishing not only our ability
to rebel against the system but our insight. We misrepresent ourselves:
we assume "false greatness" if we accept the values and gain success;
we assume "false insignificance" if we don't accept the values and find
failure. "On either side we have the black and white of paranoia."
There is really no free choice-we yield to social drives.

The terrifying density of society is always suggested in Bellow's

novels. In Dangling Man Joseph muses:

214
I . . . settle down to read the paper in the rocker by the window. I
cover it from end to end, ritualistically, missing not a word. First come
the comic strips . . . , then I read the serious news and the columnists,
and finally the gossip, the family page, the recipes, the obituaries, the
society news, the ads, the children's puzzles, everything.

The newspaper-with its crowded, paralyzing columns -- perfectly

reflects the "sameness" of everything: recipes, puzzles, serious news,
and gossip are equally valuable or important. Erich Fromm puts the
matter of lost distinctions this way: "Newspapers tell us trite thoughts
or breakfast habits of a debutante with the same space and seriousness
they use f or reporting events of scientific or artistic importance." He
also realizes that this condition is not to be laughed at: We are no
longer able to think critically; "eventually our attitude to what is going
on in the world assumes a quality of flatness and indifference."

Not only does Bellow use the newspaper list -- he constantly offers
lists of food, furniture, and clothing to create the "thinginess" we
encounter daily. Here is food in The Adventures of Augie March:

The meals were of amazing character and of huge quantity-Anna was

a strong believer in eating. Bowls of macaroni without salt or pepper
or butter or sauce, brain stews and lung stews, calves' -- foot jelly with
bits of calves' hair and sliced egg, cold pickled fish, crumbstuffed
tripes, canned clam chowder, and big bottles of orange pop.

Again there are no qualifications -- only food.

Bellow, of course, knows that our society has more luxuries than past
societies, but he sees an "eternal" opposition of moha to the spirit. In
The Adventures of Augie March Kayo explains that these finite things
which "overshadow" us-meat on the table, newspaper columns, heat in
our pipes -- are "all external and the same." The only redemption from
moha is love. But we cannot redeem ourselves or escape from moha
because we ourselves are transformed.

Look, for example, at Dangling Man. Joseph rereads the lists and
stares so much at solitary objects in his closed room that he finally
studies himself as a thing. Even he has more humanity than his friend,

215
Morris, who hypnotizes Minna and uses her for a malicious
experiment -- she becomes "less specifically . . . a woman than a more
generalized human being-and a sad one, at that." Later Joseph pictures
the body in a grotesque way: "There was a Parisian cripple in the days
of John Law, the Scottish speculator, who stood in the streets renting
out his hump for a writing desk to people who had no convenient
place to take their transactions." The Farsons, Joseph's friends,
disregard their baby's humanity-they send her to their parents, while
they themselves go to California.

The metaphysical concern with moha is apparent in The Victim.

Leventhal meditates:

Man is weak and breakable, has to have just the right amounts of
everything -- water, air, food; can't eat twigs and stones; has to keep
his bones from breaking and his fat from melting. This and that.
Hoards sugar and potatoes, hides money in his mattress.

He regards the body as an egg; life becomes an "egg race." It is easy

to succumb to such a distracted, materialistic view of oneself. Augie
March realizes that even art objects in the past were "dangerous";
however, they were still related to but different from humanity. Now
"it's the things themselves, the products that are distinguished, and the
individual man isn't equal to their great sum." And Henderson, as
Marcus Klein indicates, "abandons things and people to make the trip
to Africa." Although the future rain king rages against "junk, " he
continues to think in metaphors of things -- "nameless, faceless, " non-
spiritual.

Of course, Mr. Klein is right in asserting that the things are equated
with city life: "in the city there is much more to contend with. Things
and others both are close and thick in Bellow's novels." The one thing-
merely a scrap of green paper -- which acquires ultimate significance
is the dollar. If we look "innocently" at the meaning of money, we can
see that it is absurd for us to want such uninteresting paper-paper
without beauty and quality. We don't have to go as far here as does
Norman O. Brown in his brilliant psychoanalytical explanation --
"Filthy Lucre" in Life Against Death -- to claim that money is

216
"excremental." Some of his comments, however, demonstrate the
"truth" of Bellow's concerns: money, things in general, "cover the
human image with deadly films." Or as Brown puts it, "possessive
mastery over nature and vigorously economical thinking are partial
impulses in the human being (the human body) which in modern
civilization have become tyrant organizers of the whole human life."

In his essays Bellow is fascinated by the problem of money. He writes

an early "Spanish Letter":

For middle-class families without enchufes, the difficulties are

terrible. One must wear a European suit, a shirt that costs two hundred
pesetas, a tie. . . . One must cling to one's class. The fall into the one
below is measureless. Its wretchedness is an ancient fact, stable,
immemorial, and understood by everyone. The newer wretchedness,
that of keeping one meager suit presentable, of making a place in the
budget for movies in order to have something to contribute to polite
conversation when The Song of Bernadette is discussed, of persisting
to exhaustion among the stragglers in the chase after desirable things,
the casual American, is nevertheless not the wretchedness. That you
see in the tenements and the inhabited ruins, old kilns and caves, the
human swarms in the dry rot of Vallecas and Mataderos.

But "the wretchedness" is a first step toward selfknowledge. Poverty

at least forces human beings to return from moha to their own real
image:

Human history can fairly be described upon one level as the history of
scarcity, and now that technology extends the promise of an increase
of wealth we had better be aware of a poverty of the soul as terrible as
that of the body. The lives of the poor move us, awaken compassion,
but improvement of their lot merely by the increase of goods and
comforts deprives them of the sense of reality based upon their
experience of scarcity. (my italics)

Poverty equals reality. How simple an explanation!

Now we can see the importance of money for Bellow's fiction. In

Dangling Man, Joseph, and Iva, his wife, find it difficult to endure

217
poverty -- especially because he does not work. But, ironically
enough, Joseph is thrown back on himself, learning that money is
merely a thing, not so valuable as his feelings. He is different from
Mr. Frink, the banker, who looks upon the poor as children or idiots.
When Joseph tries to cash a check, he discovers that because he is out
of work, he doesn't exist for Mr. Frink. The entire incident is "foolish"
-- to use his word-but so is the assumption that a piece of paper gives
another person the right to regard him as a "suspicious character."

This scene resembles one meaning of Asa's plight in The Victim. He is

persecuted by Allbee, who insists that he lost his job as a result of
Asa's blustery, nonbusinesslike replies to Rudiger. Allbee hounds him;
he wants him, at one point, to find him another job. In this
"suspicious" situation the poor Allbee again demonstrates occult
knowledge; the well-fed Asa doesn't know how to cope with
threatening reality.

Augie March, raised in a poor home, is very conscious of the falseness

of money; at the same time he desperately needs it. Perhaps the
following remarks indicate his unwilling attraction to it.

I saw anew how great a subject money is in itself. Here was vast
humankind that meshed or dug, or carried, picked up, held, that
served, returning every day to its occupations, and being honest or
kidding or weeping or hypocritic or mesmeric, and money, if not the
secret, was anyhow beside the secret, as the secret's relative, or
associate or representative before the peoples.

In Seize the Day Tommy Wilhelm finds himself in debt to his wife
(alimony payments), and the hotel (rent). He gives his last savings to
Dr. Tamkin, a charlatan psychologist, for investment in stocks. "
Tamkin's Folly, " he hears his father say, and the phrase captures him,
for as he admits, "When it comes to women and money, I'm
completely in the dark." But the very fact that he fails to understand
the "money-flow" makes him close to reality. He is not so aggressive
or "insane" as the psychologist, who says (with unsuspecting irony?):
"Money-making is aggressive. That's the whole thing . . . People come
to the market to kill . . . Only they haven't got the genuine courage to

218
kill, and they erect a symbol of it. The money. They make a killing by
a fantasy." Tommy understands the system's madness.

So does Clarence Feiler in "The Gonzaga Manuscripts." Like the

"childish" Tommy he believes in poetry, spirit, and ideals, but he
discovers that the money-flow has corrupted European traditions and
disfigured poetry. When he attempts to locate the Gonzaga
manuscripts, he finds that the Spanish relatives and friends of the dead
poet consider poetry as "worthless" and Clarence's quest as a con-
game. They act accordingly:

"Is this -- It can't be. You've given me the wrong thing." His heart was
racing. Look in your pocket again."

"The wrong thing?"

"It looks like shares of stock."

"Then it isn't the wrong thing. It's what it's supposed to be; mining
stock. Isn't that what you're interested in?"

"Of course not! Certainly not!"

The husband in "The Wrecker" (a one-act play) doesn't value money.

He refuses to accept the bonus given to him by the city, which intends
to build on his property. He believes, in fact, that he should be allowed
to destroy his own home -- without pay. The city employee merely
regards him as a lunatic or criminal. Henderson, the rain king also
refuses to accept money. Although he is worth "three million dollars"
after taxes, he becomes a "bum." He regards his wealth as an
unnecessary burden from which he must escape. He travels to Africa,
where the dollar is less meaningful than cows or lions. There it is,
once more, only paper, lacking natural mystery.

Bellow stresses the "madness" of contemporary society. In "The

Sealed Treasure" he writes: "On either side we have the black and
white of paranoia." "Disorder and disharmony" are discussed in
"Distractions of a Fiction Writer" What exactly is the madness? How
does it arise? The key components are narcissism, abstractionism, and

219
compulsion. Because our society "does not do much to help the
American come of age, " it "provides no effective form." We are
always thrown back upon ourselves to establish the form to fight
moha. But we are so anxious, that we become self-absorbed, afraid to
leave our "deaf, . . . mutilated and peculiarly ignorant" self. Gradually
we begin to love our form, despite the fact that it is "cracked."
Narcissism arises from impotence. Or as Fromm writes: "economic
conditions . . . [make] for increasing isolation and powerlessness."

The powerlessness (loved and hated) can force two reactions:

this powerlessness leads either to the kind of escape that we find in the
authoritarian character, or else to a compulsive conforming in the
process of which the isolated individual becomes an automaton, loses
his self, and yet at the same time consciously conceives of himself as
free and subject only to himself.

Because ee regard ourselves as "giddy cars, " we become nonhuman

and "automatic." We consider others as objects or stereotypes to be
manipulated so that we can assert the power we lack. Mr. Frink, in the
scene from Dangling Man, loves his position of power, but at the
same time, feels threatened: he treats Joseph as a name, not as a
human being. The weak narcissist must always regard others as
abstractions; he cannot accept them as being as important as himself --
such acceptance could shatter his self-image. Thus compulsion enters.
The narcissist is caught in a neverending process. He can no longer
choose freely -- any choice which is made is likely to be absurd,
grandiose, childish.

Although Bellow does not give us this analytic picture, he is very

aware of narcissism, abstractionism, and compulsion. Here are typical
statements from his essays and reviews. In "Distractions of a Fiction
Writer" he says that "the writer has no connection with power, and yet
he keeps thinking about it." He goes on to discuss impotence as a
characteristic theme of modern literature, finding it in such works as
Moby Dick, "The Beast in the Jungle" Oblomov, and Ulysses. It is
clear that Ahab, John Marcher, Oblomov, and Leopold Bloom are all
"mad." Marcher, for example, waits for the Beast to spring out at him,

220
but this waiting becomes compulsive-so much so that he falls in love
with It and cannot love May Bartram. The same kind of relationship
destroys Captain Ahab. In an article on Dostoyevsky, Bellow distrusts
the selfcenteredness of the French (and of the Russian writer's
characters). Reviewing Philip Young's book on Hemingway, he
elaborates on the "self-absorption" of Hemingway and his attempt to
come to terms with it: Hemingway shows in his fiction a "need for
liberation from dominance of the mind, " a need, that is, to break out
of his self-imposed circle of abstractionism.

Other critics have noted madness in Bellow's fiction, but they have not
defined it in terms of the three components. Herbert Gold has written:
"All of Saul Bellow's novels have contained intensely personal visions
of desire at the dark limits of the soul where desire becomes
obsession." Dan Jacobson echoes this: "It is worth noting that in all
the books the consciousness of the hero is the consciousness of the
book." This consciousness is often obsessive. Mr. Jacobson continues:
"if we are to go back into American literature to find parallels for one
of the strongest elements in Mr. Bellow's work there are darker figures
. . . to be named. Ahab and Bartleby the Scrivener are solitaries too,
even monomaniacs." Edmund Bergler writes about the masochism in
The Adventures of Augie March: "The missing link consists of frantic
avoidance of the most decisive human motivation: unconscious
masochism. He complains that Bellow doesn't explain why Augie is
an "unconscious seeker of the pleasure-in displeasure pattern." Leslie
Fiedler refers to the "hysteria and catalepsy" of Bellow's style.

In Dangling Man Joseph notes the compulsive way people assert

toughness or-as he calls it -- "harboileddom." Because of this "code, "
they inhibit "serious" feelings. He does not want to succumb to this
madness, but the very fact that he keeps a journal means that he is
probably as compulsive as the others. He also adopts a rigid pattern
which soothes his troubled spirit; he resembles Oblomov, rarely
leaving his room.

Bellow extends the range of madness. The Army regards Joseph as an

abstraction -- 3A or IA -- not as an individual. The maid smokes as
she cleans his room because she views him objectively. Mr. Vanaker,

221
the "werewolf" neighbor, proclaims his power by slamming doors,
"snooping through the house, " and viewing the other roomers with
contempt. When Joseph visits his in-laws, he finds the same mad
reactions. Mr. Almstadt has submitted to the self-centered designs of
his wife, who shrewishly commands him (and Joseph). Joseph thinks
that all these people -- relatives or strangers -- have lost their sanity.
Moha and madness are inextricably bound:

There must be a difference, a quality that eluded me, somehow, a

difference between things and persons and even between acts and
persons. Otherwise the people who lived here were actually a
reflection of the things they lived among. I had always striven to avoid
blaming them. Was that not in effect behind my daily reading of the
paper? In their businesses and politics, their taverns, movies, I tried
continually to find clear signs of their common humanity.

Ironically enough, he regards the others as "common humanity, " but

this consideration is slightly dangerous because the others become an
abstraction. Joseph wants desperately to see himself in them; he wants
them, moreover, to mirror his plight. Most critics see Joseph as a
"lover, " but I wonder how an "unwilling" narcissist can trust others
enough to accept individual differences. It is very easy to love
humanity, groups, organizations, more difficult to love individuals. At
least Joseph is human because he is ambivalent; the people he meets
are not because they refuse to acknowledge "split" attitudes. And he
does not hurt anyone -- except himself.

The party Joseph and Iva go to becomes a ritual of inhuman madness;

someone says: "they come when everybody's high so that they can
stand around and watch us make fools of themselves." People are
"grouped together indistinctly." Robbie Stillman "was under a
compulsion to finish [a joke] no one wanted to hear finished . . ." -- a
joke repeated "any number of times." Morris Abt "objectifies" Minna.
This hypnosis emerges as the "objective correlative" of all the
preceding madness. The girl is treated as a thing to be manipulated; by
asserting his power, Morris loves himself a bit more.

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Dangling Man also contains the "ideal construction." Joseph thinks
that we are anxious creatures who establish a "form" by which we
live-the form is usually "insane" because we find no proper, flexible
patterns around us. The ideal construction is restrictive; other people
must fit into it. Bellow has already given us characters -- Morris, the
maid, Myron -- who live with unconscious, half-formed constructions.
Joseph, however, is extremely aware of his own. Looking back at his
"older self" of a year ago, he says: "He does not have what people call
an 'open' look, but is restrained-at times, despite his amiability,
forbidding. He is a person greatly concerned with keeping intact."
Joseph plays roles, working "everything out in accordance with a
general plan." He adopts friends if they fit. But the plan-because it is
so rigid-inhibits "strangeness in the world." It strangles curiosity.

Joseph shapes his idea into a universal principle. Reasoning with

himself, he says:

An ideal construction, an obsessive device. There have been

innumerable varieties: for study, for wisdom, bravery, war, the
benefits of cruelty, for art; the Godman of the ancient cultures, the
ecclesiastic, the despot, the ascetic, the millionaire, the manager. I
could name hundreds of these ideal constructions, each with its
assertions and symbols, each finding-in conduct, in God, in art, in
money-its particular answer and each proclaiming: 'This is the only
possible way to meet chaos.'

The ideal construction often "exhausts the man. It can become his
enemy. It often does."

Now Bellow is not merely interested in Joseph's rationalization -- he

also believes in this universal principle, as is clear from the essays I
have already mentioned. Morse Peckham, author of Beyond the Tragic
Vision, agrees with him: cultural history, religion -- all orientations --
are rooted in our desire to subject chaos into ideal constructions, but
these constructions often disregard reality:

Since man cannot deal with his environment unless he experiences

sufficient internal equilibrium to observe what goes on around him,
one drive is toward perfect orientation; but if he devotes himself too

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wholeheartedly to orientative activity, he will neglect the genuinely
threatening aspects of the external world.

The characters in Dangling Man have submitted to "perfect

orientation, " thereby neglecting their own "threatening aspects." They
have, in effect, killed themselves; they have failed to admit a
"continuous restructuring of orientations."

We have to live in ordered ways, but we must be flexible. Joseph

quotes from Goethe: "All comfort in life is based upon a regular
occurrence of external phenomena. The changes of the day and night,
of the seasons, of flowers and fruits and all other recurring pleasure
that come to us . . . -- these are the mainsprings of our earthy life." But
this very regularity becomes dull; it is viewed as "inflexible." Goethe
reminds his reader of the Englishman who hanged himself so that he
might no longer have to dress and undress himself every day. Joseph
cannot resolve his ambivalence. At the end of the novel he accepts
another ideal construction, the "regimentation" of the Army.

We find madness in The Victim. Even before we meet Allbee and his
ideal construction, we see narcissism, compulsion, and abstractionism
in isolated incidents. Mr. Beard says that Asa"takes unfair advantage
like the rest of his brethren." This cold, inhibiting abstractionism
opposes the "distraction or even madness" of Elena's chaotic
movements. ( Asa likens his sister-in-law to his mother, who had died
in an insane asylum when he was eight and his brother six.) Later he is
disturbed by the bell. He dreams of mice darting along the walls. He
feels threatened, "unwell, " per haps because he believes he carries
seeds of madness.

Allbee enters. Immediately we see that he treats Asa as an object of

play; he knows about his wife's trip and his departure from work
earlier in the day. He believes that Asa as few is evil; he is to blame
for everything wrong in the world. To fight chaos he accepts this
paranoid view; it enhances his self-image by giving him "secret"
knowledge. Of course, Bellow does not give us a black and white
picture. Asa is equally prepared to consider Allbee as evil-an evil
Gentile. He sees the other's constant play as "some freakish, insane

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process." It's the only way he can keep himself intact -- at all
powerful. The two constructors oppose each other.

Schlossberg is one of the few sane people in New York. Unlike the
others-Allbee, Asa, Rudiger -- he understands that ideal constructions,
cruel abstractionism, and self-centered values rob men of their
humanity. Schlossberg begins his discussion by remarking that a
certain actress is not human -- merely "lame." She does not show in
her face "fear, hate, a hard heart, cruelness, fascination." She is
mechanical-so much so that "she is not a woman." Her actions parallel
the mad actions of the main characters. Then Schlossberg generalizes:
"Everything comes in packages. If it's in a package, you can bring the
devil in the house." Humanity itself has become a commodity,
something wrapped up, not allowed to flourish. Madness takes away
our potentialities. There is brutal irony: Asa and Allbee are "less than
human" because they have tried -- especially Allbee -- to be "more
than human, " to be godlike in their constructions. Schlossberg returns
to his opening remarks: "Good acting is what is exactly human."

The Adventures of Augie March also presents madness. On the very

first page we see that Grandma Lausch governs Augie, Simon,
Georgie, and Mama, informing them that they must act craftily at the
Charities office. Although Grandma proclaims that she is merely
helping them -- "You see how it is -- do I have to say more? There's
no man in the house and children to bring up." -- she is taking away
their ability to choose, their risk-filled humanity. Miraculously Augie
remains "larky and boisterous." But he finds other "mad crusaders."
Anna Coblin says: "I'll treat you like my own boy . . . , my own
Howard." "Love" again comes into focus, but Anna's love regards
Augie as an abstraction-a substitute-son. After all, anyone would do.
Einhorn, like the two mothers, adopts Augie: he had a "teaching turn
similar to Grandma Lausch's, both believing they could show what
could be done with the world, where it gave or resisted, where you
could be confident." Later Mrs. Renling too has a "mission, " seeing
that "there was something adoptional" about Augie-she offers him
new clothing.

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Bellow takes a new view of madness. He looks at it with humor. Here
are two related examples. Einhorn decides that he will teach Augie
about women; he takes him to a cat-house. The humor arises from the
fact that crippled Einhorn has to be carried by Augie; teacher and
student, "constructor" and "thing, " play reverse roles. Bellow implies
by this upside-down view that the "strong" lovers are slaves of
compulsive narcissism. Thus the description of Mrs. Renling's
mission:

But all the same I was not going to build into Mrs. Renling's
world, to consolidate what she affirmed she was. And it isn't
only she but a class of people who trust they will be justified,
that their thoughts will be as substantial as the seven hills to
build on, and by spreading their power they will have an
eternal city for vindication on the day when other founders
have gone, bricks and planks, whose thoughts were not real
and who built on soft swamp.

Mrs. Renling is an "eternal" builder. The juxtaposition of her silliness

and Roman greatness-of two different constructions -- makes Augie
laugh. Of course, Mrs. Renling is not so "paranoid" as Allbee, but her
madness reflects the madness of the entire system.

And Augie himself is tinged by it. Although he wants to rest in his

"own specific gravity, " sitting in his "own nature" -- "free even of
[his] own habits" -- he begins to form ideal constructions. He tells
Clem that he will get a piece of property, settle down on it, set up a
home, and teach school. He doesn't want the "Happy Isles, " he says,
but we should not accept his calm statements. Now Augie does want
to build something "eternal" -- after rebelling against other patterns, he
wants to impose his own upon others -- upon children. Clem sees
through the project: "You'll give them their chance in life and rescue
them, so you'll be their saint and holy father." He adds: "You do too
want to be a king." Defending himself by screaming that Clem
searches for "bad motives, " Augie can't face his own madness.
Afterwards he does. He views his "foster-home and academy dream"
more realistically as a "featherhead millenarian notion."

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It is surprising that most critics mention Augie's lack of commitments,
without underlining the tension he has between remaining free and
building ideal constructions. Robert Gorham Davis discusses his
"involvement and detachment" but neglects the fosterhome dream-an
involvement of self. Robert Penn Warren explains that Augie is the
"man with no commitments." This kind of remark is "easy, " robbing
Bellow of irony. Not only does he present the ideal academy-he shows
us that Augie is "obsessively" aware of freedom. This "faithfulness to
his image of himself as free" -- to quote Chester Eisinger -- becomes
ideal, abstract, and compulsive. When Augie talks at great length
about freedom, he reminds us of Isabel Archer, who proclaims her
independence but marries Gilbert Osmond. But Bellow somehow
seems less detached than James. He favors Augie's ideal, without
completely noting its inadequacies. Surely there is truth in Bergler's
remarks about the novel: Bellow does avoid explaining the reason for
obsessive involvement with no commitments. Augie remains a
curious, shadowy figure who runs away from himself and us.

There is madness in Seize the Day. Dr. Tamkin maintains that he

knows how to beat the system-his investment scheme (which he
compels Tommy to join) is based on the fact that he has more sense
than other investors. He is a complete narcissist, who regards poor
Tommy as a kind of sport. Again Bellow is ironic. This mad crusader
is "calm and rational, " but he loses this rationality because he
constantly thinks of it-it becomes something over which he has no
control. His first words to Tommy are: "You have a very obsessional
look on your face." His statement is true-at least we know it applies to
almost all of Bellow's characters -- but it is true only because Tamkin
always sees "obsessional looks" -- except on his face. He thinks:
"every public figure had a character-neurosis. Maddest of all were the
businessmen, the heartless, flaunting, boisterous business class who
ruled this country with their hard manners and their bold lies and their
absurd words that nobody could believe." The doctor regards the
world as a patient, projecting his own illness. His designs, theories,
and games help to make Tamkin feel important. At the same time they
take away his power and freedom. When he speaks about the world,
we should listen carefully. Regard this statement: "all suicide is

227
murder, and all murder is suicide." Most critics have discussed his
murder of Tommy, but they have not seen his suicidal constructions.

Of course, there is some truth in Tamkin's remarks. Dr. Adler,

Tommy's father, is also imprisoned in his own designs. He believes
that money or "style" means more than love. Because his son is a
failure, he cannot accept him -- in fact, he rejects him at every turn.
This is done to assert correctness, knowledge, and power. But Dr.
Adler praises his children to outsiders-after all, the outsiders don't
know his true feelings. Thus he says that his daughter, now married,
once had an "important position in Mount Sinai." Miraculously
Tommy becomes a success. Underneath his smile, Dr. Adler has lost
the "family sense." Tommy, caught between two constructors, wants
to shape some ideal construction. He is in love with failure. It is
wonderfully ironic that Tommy courts successive losses-in marriage,
in his occupation, in his family -- in the midst of other crusaders for
success. His construction objectifies the actions of Dr. Tamkin and Dr.
Adler; his masochism reflects their sadism. But he learns that failure is
not the only ideal. He gains self-knowledge.

The transformation of madness in the novel emphasizes again that

Bellow's views have changed. Joseph and Asa are more passive
constructors than their friends or relatives. They succumb to social
regimentation. There is little comedy in their adventures. But Augie
and Tommy recognize their potentialities for madness, and they
almost miraculously survive. Their opponents-say, a Mrs. Renling or
Dr. Tamkin -- are funny, less likely to horrify them. Bellow makes
madness less Gothic, more humorous.

Look at "The Wrecker" Here the husband is "mad, " but his madness
is comic. He is obsessively concerned with destroying his home
before the city does so. By exaggerating the kind of construction the
madman has, Bellow transforms it into humor. The husband is saner
than his mother-in-law and the city employee-the others who restrict
their behavior. His madness is neither narcissistic, compulsive, nor
abstract. The husband knows why and what he must do. We are for
him -- for his "poetry, " his legendary power, and his magic: "I am a
magician. This joint is enchanted, you see. I'm getting rid of a lot of

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past life, dangerous to the soul." And his wife finally agrees with him:
"The best way to preserve the marriage is to destroy the home."

Henderson's madness is similar. He also believes that he is

"considered crazy -- and with good reason -moody, rough, tyrannical,
and probably mad." Even before his African expedition he does odd
things: he speaks to his dead father; he wallows in the mud with his
pigs; he screams that the land of Connecticut is contaminated. His
expedition becomes obsessive, but the obsession is "good" -- he wants
to live; he hears his own inner voice saying "I want." Each of his
adventures becomes a willed act. He must help others (as the earlier
madmen had to hurt others). There are several "ideal constructions" in
the novel, but one can serve as an example. Henderson discovers that
the water, full of frogs, is no longer good. He decides to get rid of the
ugly creatures; unfortunately, his dynamite only blasts out the
retaining wall as well as them -- the project is destructive. Even so, it
is necessary for self-knowledge. (Destruction and construction are
linked as in "The Wrecker") Henderson's madness -benevolent, heroic,
but still obsessive -- somehow makes him become great.

It is possible to look at the themes of moha and madness in terms of

time. In order to live nobly or even properly, we must not be
constrained by the past or the future. We must fight the constructions
of our ancestors and Utopian visions. We must seize the day to live
"eternally." But even this ideal construction should be flexible-living
today implies respect for the wheel of time.

In Dangling Man we can see time as a major theme (and image).

Joseph suggests that "once upon a time" people kept journals to record
their feelings -- they "felt no shame." But "nowadays" people are
different. He sees a split between the contemporary world and History.
Somehow he must fix it. The only way he can do so is by embracing
the "eternal return, " by living with an awareness of myth. Myth,
ritual, eternity-all these heal a restrictive, sick view of time. Because
Joseph wants to live "eternally, " he keeps a journal (as people once
did). In it he uses many mythical references. He likens himself to
Siva, hoping that he can have as many mouths as the god has arms, so
that he can really talk about his problems. Although he doesn't think

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of himself as the biblical Joseph, he resembles his ancient "brother"
while he lives in a pit (his room), away from his countrymen. When
he and Iva go to the party, he says:

The party blared on inside, and I began to think what a gathering of

this sort meant. And it came to me all at once that the human purpose
of these occasions had always been to free the charge of feelings in the
pent heart; and that, as animals instinctively sought salt or lime, we,
too, flew together at this need as we had at Eleusis, with rites and
dances, and at other high festivals and corroborees to witness pains
and tortures, to give our scorn, hatred, and desire temporary liberty
and play. Only we did these things without grace or mystery, lacking
the forms for them and, relying on drunkeness, assassinated the Gods
in one another and shrieked vengefulness and hurt.

Joseph thinks of the relationship of ancients and moderns, helping him

to establish some deep meanings. He sees proper mystery missing-the
absence of "high festival" -- but the very fact that he does suggests
that he understands the mysterious cycle of time.

But Joseph cannot hold this "eternal" view. Later he returns to a

broken conception when he talks to Amos, his brother. Amos looks
only at future success, and believes that everyone else should. The
future becomes time. Joseph cannot accept one aspect -- especially the
future-as the sole meaning. He cries out: "There is no personal future
any more." War, moha, madness -- these destroy the cyclical flow of
time.

So does the neglect of specific moments. Although it may seem that

Joseph's neglect of the fleeting days -- all days are now
"undistinguished, all equal, and it is difficult to tell Tuesday from
Saturday" -- helps him to regain his eternal view, it destroys this very
view. We must be aware of differences within similarities, parts within
the whole. In his party description Joseph is closer to the truth. He
sees present and past, lines in the circle-as he does when he notes: "I
always experience a rush of feeling on the twenty-first of March.
"Thank heaven, I've made it again!" This is deep knowledge: we must
experience the season of change.

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The Victim contains the same oppositions of time and eternity,
abstractionism and mystery. Allbee and Asa don't have any whole
view of time because they don't impose proper order on their lives.
They see the past, the present, or the future in one-sided,
discontinuous ways. They break "connections" -- as the phone
connection on the first page is broken or the bell of Elena's house is
disconnected. The past is the one aspect of time respected-and feared-
by the "victims." Allbee is haunted by his lost job, claiming that he
was fired because of Asa's "crazy" replies to Rudiger. This past event
has assumed overwhelming importance, fragmenting time; it destroys
his future. The "original sin, " which he cannot understand or accept,
also confronts Asa. He discovers dark meanings in the past,
disregarding the present and the future. He begins to be haunted by the
"curse" of the past. First he remembers the interview with Rudiger,
then his dead mother. The fears of inherited madness constantly
pressure him.

Bellow relates this fear of the past to a deterministic philosophy.

Allbee thrusts the philosophy at Asa: "You don't agree that people
have a destiny forced on them? Well, that's ridiculous, because they
do. And that's all the destiny they get, so they'd better not assume
they're running their own show." He constantly repeats the idea of
destiny, compelling Asa to think "there was a wrong, a general
wrong." Both see currents drowning them -- drowning everyone.

One of Asa's dreams emphasizes horrifying determinism. He finds

himself in a train station, carrying a heavy suitcase, pushing through
the crowd. He has missed the train -- the past "overshadows" the
present! -- but he has another chance to board the train because a
"second section of it" is due to leave in three minutes. Asa can still
change things and impose order. But when he tries to enter through a
certain gate, two men tell him: This gate isn't open to the public. "You
can't go back the way you came, either." Asa is pushed into the alley;
his face is covered with tears. It seems that "missing the train" is
irrevocable.

Because he can see the split between generations, Asa is moving

towards an understanding of change, but he sees change as erratic or

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violent. He thinks of his father once saying how many foreign
children, Italian or Irish, died. How strange if his father "could know
that his own grandson was one of these, buried in a Catholic
cemetery." The last scene suggests that the problem of time remains.
Asa sees Allbee no longer depressed, poor, or mad but now
"successful." He engages him in a metaphoric conversation about the
train. Allbee claims that he is the type that "comes to terms with
whoever runs things." He hasn't missed the train; he has adjusted to its
scheduled movement. Asa asks: "what's your idea of who runs
things?" There is no reply. Bellow suggests that we must accept the
past as controlling us-but we should come to terms with it by seizing
the day. Only this recovers our freedom.

One way of approaching The Adventures of Augie March is by noting

"eternal return." Here we find many references to reincarnation,
archetypes, frozen movements. These tell us that Augie is not stunted
-as are Allbee and Asa, or the various characters in Dangling Man-by
adherence to one aspect of time. The pattern is set in the first few
pages. Augie mentions Heraclitus (a "man's character is his fate"),
Timur, Cornwallis. These references broaden the scope-from Chicago,
that "somber city, " to Greece and revolutionary America. But they
also suggest that Augie as narrator considers the human condition, not
simply his own problems. By seeing the ancients in his Chicago
relatives and friends, he recognizes that although times have changed,
people remain the same. This insight gives him courage and
flexibility.

Most critics quote the following passage:

I'm thinking of the old tale of Croesus, with Einhorn in the unhappy
part. First the proud rich man, huffy at Solon, who, right or wrong in
their argument over happiness, must have been the visiting Parisian of
his day, and condescending to a rich island provincial. I try to think
why didn't the warmth of wisdom make Solon softer than I believe he
was to the gold-andjewel-owning semibarbarian. But anyway he was
right. And Croesus, who was wrong, taught his lesson with tears to
Cyrus, who spared him from the pyre. This old man, through
misfortune, became a thinker and mystic and advice-giver. Then

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Cyrus lost his head to the revengeful queen who ducked it in a skinful
of blood and cried. "You wanted blood? Here, drink!" And his crazy
son Cambyses inherited Croesus and tried to kill him in Egypt as he
had put his own brother to death and wounded the poor bull-calf Apis
and made the head-and-body-shaved priests grim. The Crash was
Einhorn's Cyrus and the bank failures his pyre, the poolroom his exile
from Lydia and the hoodlum Cambyses, whose menace he managed,
somehow, to get round.

The passage is funny, of course, but it is also wise. Augie recognizes

that Einhorn is "heroic" -- like his ancestor, Croesus. He elevates him
by the comparison, and lowers the ancient. Perhaps it is better to say
that Augie mediates between past and present, recognizing that all
times are "wacky" and sad. Thus he echoes Bellow's remark in "The
Sealed Treasure": "human greatness can still be seen by us. And it is
not a question of the gnat who sees the elephant. We are not members
of a different species." By living "eternally, " we reclaim greatness
from the incredible present.

There are other uses of time in the novel. Bellow not only gives us the
eternal return of ancient figureshe presents rituals which suggest a
solution to time-a return to the roots of human nature. The rituals stop
the flow, helping the characters to achieve a "still point." Anna
Coblin, for example, gains pleasure by washing the floors on Friday
afternoon. She works carefully, wading barefoot after the strokes of
the mop and then spreading papers on the floor. Augie describes this
meticulous, stylized "dance" with love -- he says that the house is "as
regular as a convent parlor or any place where the love of God is made
ready for on a base of domestic neatness." Things and human beings
are properly related; things don't dominate the "undefended will."
Anna asserts the order of the universe, cyclical regularity. (She thus
reflects Joseph's attempts in Dangling Man to ritualize his daily
routine. He polishes his shoes, feeling as "tranquil" and deeply
satisfied as he did in the past. The ritual meaningfully connects past
and present.)

The Adventures of Augie March is, in effect, one heroic initiation-a

massive preparation for "service in the temple." When he and Einhorn

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go to the brothel, Augie "begins" his sex life. Einhorn becomes the
"old wise man" introducing him to the mysteries. Later Augie
discovers the natural scene. Sitting in the park, he soaks in the "heavy
nourishing air, " a "state that lets you rest in your own specific gravity,
. . . where you are not subject matter but sit in your nature, tasting
original tastes as good as the first man." Initiation also takes the form
of the "criminal act" -- stealing becomes a ritual with its own forms
and mysteries. Augie steals books (as he stole earlier from the
department store). He also sees new countries -- France, Mexico. All
of these initiations reinforce the idea that the "only possessing is of the
moment." Initiation never stops, unless one submits to madness and
moha.

Time plays an important part in Seize the Day (as is obvious from the
title). Tommy Wilhelm is, at first, a nonbeliever in myth or ritual --
the eternal return. He thinks of the past as obsessively as do Joseph
and Allbee. He was once successful: he made a decent living; he was
happily married; he was close to his father. Because he defines
himself in relation to a "wonderful past, " he has no real future. Like
the old men and women in the hotel, he has "nothing to do but wait
out the day." Of course, I have simplified the conception. Tommy
does have a "future" in the speculation schemes of Dr. Tamkin.
Money, success, selfrealization-all these wait for him in the stock
exchange. But time is not seized by the hero; it is fragmented and
idealized. It is actually a hole for him.

Dr. Tamkin offers a solution: "The spiritual compensation is what I

look for. Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe.
That's the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full
of anxiety." Although this solution appears to be vital, it is different
from a whole view of time-the one found in Augie's concern with
Einhorn as Croesus. Tamkin is also breaking time: the present
becomes all-important -- which is as bad as Tommy's "backward"
vision. We should of course, seize the day, but we should see it as
linking all days, as part of a neverending cycle.

The end of Seize the Day suggests that Tommy discovers the "eternal
return." After his loss on the stock exchange, he wanders into a funeral

234
parlor. Here it is "dark and cool" -- time is forgotten. Only the terrible
fact of the human condition is present. Tommy is "past words, past
reason, coherence" -- past entrapment. He has a vision of all men in
the coffin and when he sobs incessantly, he is cleansed of his
problems. He suffers ecstasy.

In "A Father-to-Be" Rogin sits on the subway seat, thinking of his

future son as anonymous, conformist, self-satisfied. Rogin is overly
concerned with his vision; he neglects to seize the day until he sees
Joan, the woman he loves and hates. The end of the story con tains a
ritual of cleansing -- baptism. Joan, in effect, washes away his
sickness by shampooing his hair: "it seemed to him that the water
came from within him, it was the warm fluid of his own secret loving
spirit overflowing into the sink . . . , and the words he had rehearsed
he forgot, and his anger at his son-in-law disappeared altogether." The
ritual cleansing-like Joseph's polishing of his shoes or Anna Coblin's
polishing of her kitchen -- establishes a relationship of individual and
environment-a relationship which is "still" and "pure."

The Wrecker concentrates on the same sort of ceremony. We first hear

the hammering of the husband, and we think that he is completely
destructive -- he doesn't seem to seize the day. But when he speaks,
we know that he is cleansing himself and his wife -- in fact, the whole
"universe" -- by looking at the future in the present: "When there's no
demolition there's no advancement. The old must go down. You only
see what is built. You forget what had to be taken away, and yet it is
the same process. Man does not wait for time to do his work for him."
This is the point: we must always rebuild-even rebuild time, imposing
our will and intelligence in flexible ways. Then, like the wrecker, we
are no longer obsessed by past life, "dangerous to the soul." We fly
like the hummingbird he worships.

Now we can appreciate the various rituals in Henderson the Rain

King. Henderson tries, at first, to accept the past -- the money he has is
a trophy of history. He uses the money, but it contaminates him. Then
he throws it away, ridding himself of the unreal past. He also tries to
get in touch with his dead father by playing "Humoresque" on the
violin. But again the connection is broken: he gets cramps in his neck

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and shoulders. Actually the past is death, "So for God's sake make a
move, Henderson, put forth effort . . . Because nothing will have been
and so nothing will be left. While something still is-now!" Finally he
tries to get in touch with the "real" past-one different from history or
junk. In Africa, past, present, and future have no false meanings; time
is lifted for sacred messages. Henderson is near the "original place."

Of course, the simple expedition will not do wonders. When the future
rain king attempts to cleanse the water of the frogs, he destroys
everything in sight. (The destruction is not as constructive as the
Wrecker's ritual.) But he does get closer to the truth. He sees the
"strangeness" of things-that strangeness which disrupts benevolent
projects. Before Henderson participates in a completely meaningful
ritual -- embracing eternity-he begins to have more inklings of cyclical
movement. He thinks of himself as acting out Daniel's prophecy of the
beasts. (Actually Henderson, himself, as Daniel J. Hughes writes,
"calls up, either directly or in a parodic mode, Oedipus, Moses,
Joseph, Jacob, Falstaff, Lear, etc., and his entire quest has a familiar
mythic pattern.") Like Augie thinking of Cornwallis, Croesus, or
Columbus, he embraces a view of recurring, ever-present meaning.

The rainmaking ritual is especially important in this context. Why

does Bellow use rain? Henderson himself explains: He used to "sing a
song in school, 'O Marianina. Come O come and turn us into foam.' "
Rain-like the polish of Joseph or Rogin's shampoo -is a cleansing
agent; it washes away distractions, various elements of madness. That
Henderson is able to lift the god-figure indicates that not only does he
embrace divinity, he assumes a new role-he is a rain king, the Sungo.
He plays a deep "historical" role -- a role which exalts him, lifting him
out of time.

Henderson carries back this vision to the States. He takes with him
Dahfu's lion cub because "the king would want me to take it along. . . .
he's got to survive in some form." Dahfuexists in the cub as his father
exists in the lion. And the new cub is linked to his old bear. When
Henderson was younger he loved a bear, Smolak, who-like himself-
was an Ishmael – a castaway. He holds the lion cub, seeing in it not
only Dahfu but also Smolak. Again time becomes eternal. As he

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thinks, "You could never convince me that this was [for the first
time."

If Bellow is constantly aware of the dualities of existence -- of moha

versus spirit, madness versus sanity, time versus eternity -- he is
"obsessed" with appearances. He suggests that the quest for truth is a
difficult, ever-present task-one which must take into account various
deceptions. Moha does not only fight spirit -- it hides it. Madness
pretends sanity. The typical quest in Bellow's fiction encounters tricks,
acts, confidence games -- it can only be successful by engaging in
"serious play."

We would expect masquerade from a close reading of Bellow's essays.

His "Literary Notes on Khrushchev" suggests: "It's hard to know
whether the Khrushchev we saw banging with his shoe at the U.N.
Assembly is the 'real' Khrushchev." The Soviet leader is likened to an
actor-the "charmer" who doesn't give up the "center of the stage." His
politics is "theatre." The West cannot understand Khrushchev's
performance because it is not used to play. It remains confused by
such "brutal and angry comedy." Other Bellow essays suggest the
same theme. In an earlier theatre chronicle he writes: "The actors seem
to have no notion of play. I don't know why. Is it too frivolous to play
in the theatre? Does it lead to disrespect of their theories? The
behavior of the actors is very businesslike." Playgoing should not be
for ideas; it should engage us with deception-with what Harold
Clurman (quoting Picasso) calls "lies like truth." In an article in The
New York Times Book Review ( February 11, 1962) Bellow suggests
again that we Americans devote ourselves to the literal fact, without
recognizing the deceptive quality of life. Truth is, after all, more than
"objectivity." If we don't see our limitations, we will be like the miner
in Alaska: "I have read somewhere that in the early days of the movies
a miner in Alaska rushed at the screen to batter down the villain with
his shovel." One reason for Bellow's "curious and festive" interview
with Joe "Yellow Kid" Weil, an old Chicago confidence man, is now
clear: the Yellow Kid delights in play-in the mixture of lies and truth.
He is an actor (like Khrushchev) who confounds the system by his art.
In fact, Bellow implies that by recognizing the pretender -- by being
the pretender -- we can see Truth more easily.

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Dangling Man contains many references to masquerades. Joseph tells
us that people now hide their true feelings -- contemporary society
admits only a "limited kind of candor, a close-mouthed
straightforwardness." His own marriage is characterized this way:
"We no longer confide in each other; in fact there are many things I
could not mention to her." Perhaps the neighbor, Vanaker, functions
as the "god" of this false, dark world-like the Army, the entire society
outside of the boarding house, he lurks in the hall-half-man, half-wolf.
Joseph cannot understand his actions-are they sick or purposeful?

Bellow suggests that conversations only introduce more confusion.

People pretend to say one thing; their remarks are ambiguous or
malicious. Thus Joseph asks his father-in-law how he has managed to
remain married to a shrew. The father-in-law recognizes the deep
concern expressed, but dodges the question by asking him what he
means. Question answers question. Joseph himself should know. We
learn that when he worked he had to play different roles -- he was a
"Machiavellian, " "keeping his roles successfully distinct." Father-in-
law, son-in-law -- all play; all are pretenders of some sort: "Now, he
says, all human beings share this to some extent. The child feels that
his parents are pretenders; his real father is elsewhere and will some
day come to claim him."

Joseph desperately wants to lift the veil; he forces others to do the

same. He "conducts a poll" -- remember the temporary job Myron
offers him. When he sees Burns, an old party friend, who refuses to
recognize him, Joseph screams: "Don't you know me? I know you."
Although Burns admits recognition, nothing is really accomplished.
The lies persist. We now have the party -- all the masquerades
continue with greater subtlety. Morris Abt's eyes are "quizzical,
concealing." He compels Minna to accept his lies when he hypnotizes
her. Most critics have disregarded the "party" at Amos' house, but it
underlines the pattern I have been tracing. Joseph acts violently: he
starts to spank Etta, his niece, after she talks rudely to him. Amos and
his wife enter just in time to see the spanking. Etta claims one reason
for her uncle's nastiness, which is contradicted by him, but Amos
accepts the untruth. Joseph has "additional proof of my inability to
read people properly." Or even himself. In his later questioning he

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inwardly sneers: "You're two-faced. You're not to be trusted, you
damned diplomat, you cheat!"

The Victim also contains masquerades -- lies, deception, and masks. In

the first paragraph we are introduced to the notion of "seems." New
York is said to be as hot as Bangkok -- the continent "seems to have
moved from its place." In this "mysterious" world we have other
appearances. Asa cannot understand Elena's remarks about her sick
child. Mr. Beard says one thing, meaning another. (The entire business
world is filled with pretense. Harkavy, Rudiger, and Williston lie for
various reasons.)

Allbee is the chief masquerader. When Asa first sees him, he thinks
that he recognizes him: "He has never liked this Allbee, but he had
never really thought much about him. How was it, then, that his name
came to him so readily?" The appearances increase. Allbee claims to
have written a letter asking his "victim" to meet him -- Asa doesn't
believe him, until he later discovers the letter in his box. Now he must
discover the meaning of these various "stunts." How much is
coincidence? How much is planning?

But he forgets that the world is a stage. Allbee, the actor, performs:
"He carried on, giving imitations." Not only does he burlesque Jews at
parties; he acts every day with the "usual false note, the note of
impersonation in what he did." Perhaps the most "comic" display
occurs when he decides to move into his victim's apartment. "You're a
lousy counterfeit, " says Asa. To which the other replies:

"Why, you have the whole place to yourself. You can put me up. . . . I
wouldn't be inconveniencing you. But if you want me to do this in the
right spirit . . ." And to Leventhal's astonishment -- he was too
confounded when it happened to utter a sound-Allbee sank out of his
chair and went to his knees.

Is the performance still going on? Later Allbee wants him to get him a
job-not acting but some kind of "movie work."

Even Asa begins to "act." He hides his true feelings -- even to himself.
Aboard the Staten Island ferry he gazes out on the water "with an

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appearance of composure, he [does] not look as burdened as he
[feels]." He continues to assume a balanced air, fighting the anxiety
Allbee's off-centered views give him. He is not the only observer of
theatricality. I have already mentioned Schlossberg, who commands
the devoted attention of his listeners by equating life and theatre. A
good actress, he says, should be a good woman; she cannot merely
wear a mask. The mask should be like the face. "Good acting is what
is exactly human." Here Schlossberg offers a clue to the many
masquerades in the novel. Asa, Allbee, and the others are not exactly
human; they neglect their true feelings so much so that they no longer
know they are acting. The mask wears them! This is not to deny that
life -the stage -- will always play with us, challenge us to identify it.
The Victim ends "with a theatrical hush; the houselights went off. An
usher showed them to their seats."

The performance continues in The Adventures of Augie March. When

we first meet Gramma Lausch, she is instructing the March's to "act"
in the dispensary-they must not tell the truth about their financial
condition; they must be as delicate as Machiavelli. (Bellow once
thought of entitling the novel Life Among The Machiavellians.)
Grandma Lausch "masked herself up as usual" when she gives advice
of any sort-even to Five Properties on getting married. Augie is so
used to deception at home that he practices it against society. He
becomes a con-man. (Remember Joe Weil!) It is easy for gangsters to
take him as an equal.

But Augie doesn't only see -- and practice -- deception for financial
gain. He is an "imposter" when he loves. Before "falling for" Thea, he
believes -- indeed, forces himself to believe-that he loves Esther
Fenchel, her sister. But he has "forged credentials" -- he knows he isn't
what he seems. He is poor, larky, pathetic, weak. Later Mimi tells him
to stop deceiving himself: "You try to look more simple than you are,
and it isn't honest." Know your capacities for love! Love is, of course,
the closest relationship Augie can embrace, and the fact that he is an
imposter-as are those around him-brutalizes it, robbing it of its value.
Does Thea really love him or herself? Does he really love her or
Esther? Does Mimi love Frazer or him? Such questions-are they ever
answered? -- reverberate throughout the novel. Augie screams at one

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point: "Dissembling! Why, the master-dissemblers there are around!
And if nature made us live and do as worms and beetles do, to escape
the ichneumon fly and swindle other enemies by mimicry, and so
forthwell, all right!! But that's not our problem." But it is-as the many
masquerades demonstrate.

Some critics have discussed in a general way Bel low's concern with
masquerades, but they have not looked at the texture of the concern.
Consequently, they single out the "artful" con-men, Mintouchian,
Kirby Allbee, Einhorn, without recognizing Bellow's use of
"theatrical" images in The Victim or the "party" performances in
Dangling Man. I take the masquerade to be a unifying principle in the
individual novels.

Consider, for example, Seize the Day. The first sentence introduces
the idea of concealment -- Tommy Wilhelm, we are told, is not less
capable than the next fellow in "concealing his troubles." He had once
been an actor -- like Allbee? -- and he continues to act as if he is not in
the pit. He smokes a cigar because it is harder to "find out how he
feels." Tommy's duplicity-his concern with appearances-is "mainly for
his old father's sake." Dr. Adler, as we learn later, insists on hiding his
son's failure-and Tommy joins the act.

The idea of masquerade is established by the imagery. The landscape

itself changes its appearance. The Hotel Ansonia looks this morning
"like the image of itself reflected in deep water, white and cumulous
above, with cavernous distortions underneath." Tommy gazes at his
reflections in the "glass cupboard full of cigar boxes, among . . . the
gold-embossed portraits of famous men, Garcia, Edward the Seventh,
Cyrus the Great."

We are now ready for the great duplicity of Dr. Adler and Dr. Tamkin.
Dr. Adler tells Mr. Perls that Tommy-or Wilky, his real name-is
waiting for a good proposition to equal his successful, past job. Adler
lies throughout the novel-he refuses to face his own loss of "family
sense" -- indeed, any idea of failure. Style -- deceptive, flashy-counts.
But Dr. Tamkin is an even more stylish masquerader. He is the
"heroic" Machiavelli. Everything about him is mysterious. When we

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first see him, we note his concern with appearance. He claims Tommy
has an "obsessional look." Because we never know what he really
thinks, we are as mystified as the hero, who tries to look at him
closely but "gains nothing by the effort." Dr. Tamkin's appearance-as
well as attitude-is odd. He uses a "false, disheartening" green ink for
his check; he writes in a "peculiar, even monstrous" way. He stands
pigeontoed, a sign perhaps that "he was devious or had much to hide."

And when Dr. Tamkin theorizes, he becomes even more mysterious.

He says, for example, that the human bosom contains two souls, the
"real soul and the pretender soul." We feed the pretender soul by our
lust for material goods. Society, itself, thrives on pretense: "the
interest of the pretender soul is the same as the interest of the social
life, the society mechanism." Dr. Tamkin maintains that the pretender
soul takes away "the energy of the true soul and makes it feeble, like a
parasite." Again the charlatan sees the truth -- at least partially -- of
the world, but the very fact that he is himself a pretender towards
Tommy (and others) indicates the many appearances around us: True
statements by a pathological liar! Tommy, however, accepts the
theory, seeing "Tommy" as the pretender soul and "Velvel" as the real
soul. Although our poor "slob" is "divided," he gropes toward unity.
In the subway, the "dark tunnel," he suddenly sees the "imperfect and
lurid-looking people" in a new way. He loves them. And despite his
dark vision of the stocks-we are told that he, like old Mr. Rappaport,
can't see the meaning of the board-he continues to have insight. When
he finally stumbles into the funeral parlor, he sees the corpse, and
cries for the real soul of everyone.

The masquerade also functions in Bellow's short stories. In "Looking

for Mr. Green," which appears in the Seize the Day collection, George
Grebe looks for Mr. Green so that he can give him his relief check.
His expedition symbolizes, in effect, his quest for the real soul. But he
discovers that many people in the poor Negro neighborhood consider
him as a pre tender, a "stranger" because he is white. They don't give
him information about Mr. Green's whereabouts, even refusing to
acknowledge the man's existence. At last George comes close to the
real man, although he doesn't actually see him. He meets a woman

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who seems to be Mrs. Green; her husband seems to live upstairs. But
he is convinced that there is a Mr. Green:

it was important that there was a real Mr. Green whom they could not
keep him from reaching because he seemed to come as an emissary
from hostile appearances. And though the self-ridicule was slow to
diminish, and his face still blazed with it, he had, nevertheless, a
feeling of elation, too. "For after all," he said, "he could be found!"

Before he travels to Africa, Henderson lives in a world of

masquerades. Although Lily loves him, she must still lie -- she tells
him in France that her mother is dead. Later she admits that now her
mother is really dead. Such "con-games" -- and there are many
moreirritate him. He wants only to capture deep truth. In Africa
Henderson discovers at first that if one looks properly, he can see
reality under appearance -- indeed there is no significant difference
between the two. The body is always true. Queen Willatale informs
him that he has a great "capacity" for life, indicated by [his] largeness,
and especially [his] nose." Henderson kisses her middle, finding the
embrace a "significant experience." This unity of body and soul is also
suggested by the spiritualization of things: object-world holds spirit-
world. Henderson claims that he hears the "voices of objects and
colors"; he loses himself (and finds himself) in "practical tasks."
(Remember the cleansing rituals in Dangling Man and The Adventures
of Augie March.) He "tricks" life by disregarding dualities. These
tricks continue. He speaks more and more about his physical
appearance. His face, he tells us, is "always undergoing
transformations," but these transformations -- these various
expressions -- are real. They don't hide his spirit; they reveal it. And
death, the final end, is revealed by corpses which lack transforming
power.

Now Dahfu joins Henderson in dialogues about truth. The same ideas
are stressed as before, but they are more "substantial." When
Henderson encounters the ruler of the Wairiris, he believes that his
previous insights have not yet captured truth. He is assailed by many
doubts. Dahfu hints at his "unrest," although his body seems at ease.
He is pleasant, but he is savage. Henderson thinks: "But my purpose

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was to see essentials, only essentials, nothing but essentials, and to
guard against hallucinations. Things are not what they seem anyway."
Dahfu may be a "con-man."

The savage ruler offers advice: "The world of facts is real, all right,
and not to be altered. The physical is all there, and it belongs to
science. But then there is the nournenal department, and there we
create and create and create." The imagination, he instructs
Henderson, can see truth everywhere. But it can also create lies. There
is, consequently, no easy solution to masquerades. They are within us
at all times. But this fact is not "hopeless." Henderson sees that reality
is never grasped without hallucinations. One term presupposes the
other. Becoming is the vision of both terms.

Dahfu continues: "Men of most powerful appetite have always been

the ones to doubt reality the most." Henderson acknowledges the truth
of this remark, largely because he is more overwhelmed by Dahfu's
tales of the lion-father which he -- as ruler -- must capture. Is Dahfu
real? he asks. His question plagues him, especially after his dark
teacher says: Man "is the master of adaptations. He is the artist of
suggestions." (We have come a long way from the masquerades of
The Victim. Bellow seems here to be saying that masquerades exalt
and debase us.)

The body-spirit unity which was implied earlier is reemphasized.

Dahfu says: ",Disease is a speech of the psyche." According to this
aphorism, tics reveal inner disturbance; missing teeth reveal missing
knowledge, and so on. Such occult knowledge makes Henderson act
like a lion-if he can roar, he can be brave! So he is "the beast,"
assuming the voice and gestures of the lion. Dahfu even partially
convinces Henderson that "inanimate objects might have a mental
existence." But our rain king still doubts the truth of this astounding
remark.

Dahfu has probably read Wilhelm Reich. Reich insists-as do the

Christian mystics, at least according to Norman O. Brown -- that body
and soul are one. The body reveals inner tensions. Here are some
typical remarks by Reich: "Emotion is an expressive plasmatic

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motion." "We work with the expressive language. Only when we have
felt the facial expression of the patient are we also in a position to
understand it." 54 It is interesting to note that both Reich and
Dahfuwho claim that there are no appearances, merely realities-are
regarded as "con-men," who further their own truth by masquerade.

Henderson learns, after these "conflicting truths," that reality is never

grasped. The lion that Dahfu and he assume is the old king, turns out
to be another "person." Thus it kills Dahfu. Hypocrisy is very close to
Henderson-the consorts desire his life when he becomes king. We can
consider Henderson's flight from Africa-before they kill him-as
another attempt to find truth, despite "the bad stuff . . . coming back."
There is no pure truth-without masqueradeas there is no eternal courts
of heaven. Becoming doesn't cease-it is always "leaping, leaping,
pounding, and tingling."

Many critics have commented on Bellow's Jewishness. Leslie Fiedler

insists that we must see it in the larger context: "the Jews for the first
time [have moved] into the center of American culture."

It is the final commentary on our age and on the place the Jew
occupies in its imagination, that Huck Finn, when he returns to our
literature not as an item of nostalgia but as an immortal archetype,
returns without his overalls, his fishing pole and his freckles, as a
Chicago kid making his way among small-time Jewish
Machiavellians.

Augie March, for him, is the "most satisfactory character every

projected by a Jewish writer in America." Maxwell Geismar, on the
other hand, thinks that Bellow has not faced his heritage: "Judaism in
[his] work is a source of nostalgia, but also of guilt and anxiety rather
than an enlarging or emancipating force." Theodore J. Ross echoes
this charge when he states that Bellow by "equating" Jew and Gentile
in The Victim, refuses to acknowledge basic inequalities and thus
remains false to his heritage. Charles I. Glicksberg also notes Bellow's
ambivalence.

Bellow himself says very little about Jewishness in his essays. He

notes the oddity of David Daiches being a "rabbi's boy in Edinburgh"

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in his review of Two Worlds. He applauds Philip Roth's view of the
"swamp of prosperity" that American Jews inhabit. Perhaps his most
interesting remarks about his heritage are found in a review of The
Adventure of Mottel the Cantor's Son. Here he writes: "The Jews of
the ghetto found themselves involved in an immense joke. They are
divinely designated to be great and yet they were like mice. History
was something that happened to them; they did not make it." The
Jews, he continues, "[decline] to suffer the penalties the world
imposes on [them]."

Let us look closely at these two remarks. Bellow is less interested in

religion as such-he does not mention laws or rituals -- than in vision.
For him this vision is ironic. Bellow asserts that the ghetto inhabitants
were always aware of Janus-faced nature: they were "Chosen" and yet
"Rejected" -- Chosen By God, Rejected by their society. They learned
to value jokes and absurdities. Their own humor reflected the
"immense joke of their existence." (In The Victim Asa hears a Jewish
joke which exemplifies the beautiful absurdity of things: In a little
town of Jews, afraid that the "Messiah" would come and miss them,
the people build a tower and hire one of the town beggars to sit in it
the whole day. "A friend of his meets this beggar and he says, 'How
do you like your job, Baruch?' So he says, 'It doesn't pay much, but I
think it's steady work.' ") The humor is said, expressing a longing for
elevation; underneath, it asserts a glad acceptance of divine justice.

We are here dealing with double irony. Bellow's view of his heritage
is as ambivalent as he claims the heritage itself is. In his fiction he
may use Jewish vision-or irony-but he never confronts it, at least until
Herzog, except by indirection. Often he avoids it -- by masquerading
it as something else.

Consider Dangling Man. Joseph's predicament is treated as a

"personal" situation. We are never really told that he is Jewish or that
he has old-world vision. But it is possible to view him as an archetypal
Jew who, like Sholom Aleichem's characters, regards existence as the
work of a "Religious Humorist." (The phrase is used by Thomas Mann
to describe Kafka.) 67

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Joseph thinks of his American society as hardboiled, whereas he
suffers. It rejects him because he is "different." (Or is it the other way
around?) His journal becomes his sole occupation-it is his Talmud; he
is a scholar who studies himself rather than divine laws. He tells us
little about his appearance, but what he does indicates that he looks
Jewish -- dark eyes, black hair, straight nose. When Joseph broods
about existence, he is more typically Jewish. He wants the Messiah to
come in the guise of a "colony of the spirit"this colony will have
"covenants" forbidding "spite, bloodiness, and cruelty." It will be a
blessed countryperhaps like the "Israel" of his ancestors. But like
Sholom Aleichem's characters (at least according to Bellow), Joseph is
trapped.

Joseph's sense of the family is Jewish. Although I consider this aspect

of the novel more fully in the next chapter, I want here to note its
existence. Family closeness has always been important in Jewish
literature-especially the father-son relationship. Joseph tries at all
times to be close to his family, but he cannot achieve this little colony
of the spirit. He says very little about his own parents -- they are
"missing" -- but he does describe the pomposity and false guidance of
his brother, Amos, who instructs him in the ways of the world. Amos
is the Jew who has succumbed to the materialistic world-to exile;
Joseph remains true to "the craters of the spirit," but he does this with
deep skepticism.

Joseph, unlike the ghetto inhabitants, has lost his faith in God. He says
at one point: "No, not God, not any divinity. That was anterior, not of
my own deriving. I was not so full of pride that I could not accept the
existence of something greater than myself." Joseph wants to believe
in divinity, but he is so trapped that he can only see it dimly -- in a
Haydn divertimento. What would his grandfather think of this? Joseph
looks for messages not in the Old Testament but in Goethe, Walden,
Jacob Boehme, Marx, and his own journal.

The hints of Jewishness I have cited-the "alienation," the "Messianic

vision," the almost-suffocating family ties, the physical appearance-
are less significant than the Jewish humor-sad and hard-pervading the
novel. Perhaps this example will suffice: Joseph thinks of his

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grandfather's photograph, which shows an old man of faith, "his eyes
staring and his clothing sbroudlike." He remembers that at fourteen he
suddenly saw that he would resemble him: "I was upright on my
grandfather's bones and the bones of those before him in a temporary
loan." Joseph longs for the old faith-the "real Jew" -- at the same time
that he fears it. When he grows up he meets the "others" who -like Mr.
Harscha, the German-stare at him. They also chart resemblances. Thus
the grandfather's head -- "his streaming beard yellow, sulphurous" --
hangs over Joseph, threatening to "devour" him. This example not
only holds the Jewish themes-it gives us a clue to Bellow's tensions
about his heritage.

The Victim brings these tensions to the surface. Here Bellow

emphasizes the various problems he avoided in his first novel. Thus in
the first few pages Asa knows that no matter what his beliefs are-is he
a believer in God? -- he is a Jew to the others. Mr. Beard claims that
he is "like the rest of his brethren." Whether he likes it or not, he joins
his fellow "victims." The facts that his wife is named Mary and his
sister-in-law is Italian no longer matter. There is no real assimilation.
He is trapped in his heritage. Allbee constantly reminds him of this
doom. You Jews aren't violent, he says, but he doesn't use the word
"Jew." He knows that Asa will be more upset by guilt-by betrayal-than
by anything else. (The Jew, with his belief in colonies of the spirit, his
desire to help victims, will always blame himself.) He gives him
something to brood about by suggesting that he has victimized a
Gentile. Mr. Geismar is surely correct in indicating that Allbee is
more Jewish than Asa-more aware of victimization, of blame. 68 He
even "delights" .in old-world customs, festivals, songs etc., constantly
referring to them.

Asa discovers his Jewishness, enacting Sartre's definition in Anti-

Semite and jew:

What is it, then, that serves to keep a semblance of unity in the Jewish
community? To reply to this question, we must come back to the idea
of situation. It is neither their past, their religion, nor their soil that
unites the sons of Israel. If they have a common bond, if all of them
deserve the name of Jew, it is because they have in common the

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situation of a Jew, that is, they live in a community that takes them for
Jews.

He remembers the "old" ways of his parents-of the Jewish past-only

after he is placed into his situation. What is ironic is this: New York-
the place of aliena tion-is, to quote Allbee, a "very Jewish city."
Bellow suggests that once a Jew is so reminded-can he remind
himself? -- he assumes a historic role; he acts in the way his
countrymen have always acted. Asa, for example, suffers more; he
feels more guilt; he is more alone. Now we can see one reason for
Bellow's ambivalence towards his own Jewishness: like Asa, he seems
to resent enacting a role thrust upon him. Being a Jew means for him
that he is an "ideal construction" -- if not of the Lord, then of the
community. Bellow finds it difficult to grow within "anterior" limits.

Because Asa has no real belief in God, he must assert that his present
position is the result of chance: "And what more was there for him to
say than that his part in it was accidental? At worst an accident,
unintentional." He thrusts responsibility onto fate, feeling relieved in
being helpless and dumb. Only gradually does he accept universal
order-but he doesn't see it as divinely ordained. Things seem to be
"exactly human." All men react as he does when placed in such a
situation-there are no values in a type-be it Jew or Gentile. When
Allbee suffers, he resembles Asa; this means that everybody is Jewish
(or that nobody is). Bellow does not offer a comforting message in
The Victim. By showing that Allbee and Asa are exactly human, he
implies that Jewishness is less significant than universal truth. He has
written a plea for assimilation. But he has not solved the tensions of
being a Jew; he has "escaped" from them by loving the world.

The Adventures of Augie March continues this escapist pattern.

Although we get a close view of Jewish customs, foods, and proverbs
-- especially in the early chapters-we don't completely understand the
nature of Jewishness.

Perhaps Bellow implies that the March family merely accepts

historical typecasting-it becomes another masquerade for them. Here
is Grandma Lausch: "But she never went to the synagogue, ate bread

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on Passover, sent Mama to the pork butcher where meat was cheaper,
loved canned lobster and other forbidden food, she was not an atheist
and free-thinker." But is she Jewish? Why is she Jewish? Bellow
suggests that the family knows that it is "different" only when the
"others" say so: "And sometimes we were chased, stoned, bitten, and
beat up for Christ-killers, all of us, even Georgie, articled, whether we
liked it or not to this mysterious trade." We would expect Augie to
resemble Asa Leventhal, but in this "carefree" world he simply
admits: "I never had any special grief from it, or brooded, being by
and large too larky and boisterous to take it to heart." Anti-sernitism.
needs no more explanation, he continues, than other juvenile
delinquency. He even laughs at Anna Coblin's orthodox beliefs: she
"had the will of a martyr to carry a mangled head in Paradise till
doomsday, in the suffering mothers' band led by Eve and Hannah."
She is "silly," directing Augie to the "great eternal things."

Despite the fact that Augie doesn't care about antisemitism or

orthodox rituals, he looks at the world with Jewish irony. Almost any
passage indicates his skeptical admiration of greatness. (Rember
Bellow's remarks about the immense joke.) When he thinks of
Einhorn, for example, he says that he "isn't kidding" as he enters him
in the list of great men-along wit Caesar, Machiavelli, and Ulysses.
Einhorn is great because he is able to endure the onslaughts of
existence -- endurance is a quality always admired by Jews living in
exile. But Augie knows that even endurance can be laughed at:
Einhorn, after all, achieves greatness by) means of trickery. Endurance
and wisdom are not accepted as solemn truths-they are viewed as
"cheap items," even by the great men themselves. Think of Augie's
attitudes toward Einhorn (and the other great men) in relation to the
following "Tale of Chelm":

In Chelm there once arrived a rich German Jew, a skeptic, who would
deliberately ride in his coach each Sabbath, to enrage the villager by
his open violation of the Law.

So Chelm sought ways to teach the rich skeptic a lesson. They thought
and thought and decided that every Sabbath, when the German skeptic
rode through the streets, a few Jews of Chelm would lie down beneath

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the wheels of his coach, so that it would turn over and he would break
his ribs.

The tale suggests that suffering itself can be mocked. Realizing that he
cannot achieve greatness for himself, Augie wants only to go his own
erratic way. He is a "trader dealing in air," facing life with an "ironic
shrug." He is an "anti-hero." Although I have claimed that Bellow
doesn't explain Augie's passivity in psychological terms, he does
suggest that his hero is "archetypal," dos kleine menschele. The little
man! How fitting the phrase is! Augie resembles the Jewish folk-
character who is "long-suffering, persistent, lovingly ironic." 73 The
following description of the "central figure of Yiddish literature" helps
us to see Bellow's hero in an old-world way:

From this central figure of Yiddish literature -- one might call him the
Representative Man of the shtetl -there emerges a number of
significant variations and offshoots. One extreme variation is the wise
or sainted fool who has often given up the householder's struggle for
dignity and thereby acquired the wry perspective of the man on the
outside. Another is the ecstatic wanderer, hopeless in this world
because so profoundly committed to the other.

The great sense of the "sanctity of the insulted and the iniured" 75 is
always present in Augie's remarks. Here too he follows his Jewish
countrymen. He is for the poor versus the silly materialist; he is for his
brother, George (the imbecile), his blind mother, and all the crippled.
(Indeed, George resembles the child of Yiddish literature: "deprived,
yet infinitely loved," as well as foolish -- saintly. ")

The Adventures of Augie March, then, escapes from confronting many

problems Jews must face -- how to live in a new world; the right way
to approach God-at the same time that it is infused with Jewish humor
and legend. It is a strange mixture-perhaps more than any other of
Bellow's novels-because it sees Jewishness in a nostalgic, folksy way,
disregarding the tensions of The Victim. It is dangerous to call it either
an American novel or a Jewish one. (Perhaps this explains Leslie
Fiedler's high regard for it.) It is, paradoxically, unprovincial as it
exalts provincial feelings.

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Seize the Day is a much more Jewish work, if such a phrase has any
meaning; it suggests that Bellow removes his rose-colored glasses and
scrutinizes the tensions of Jewish life. He uses the same devices as
before, but he is concerned, in part, with probing the identity of the
Jew in America. Seize the Day asks as does The Victim: What is a
Jew? Why is someone a Jew?

Tommy Wilhelm is torn by, his three selves: "Tommy," "Wilky," and
"Velvel." Tommy is his desired American self -- the good-looking
actor who, unfortunately, discovers that he has no real talent and turns
to selling products. He is "inauthentic," running away from the old-
world. "Wilky" is the name his father calls him-his real name-to
control him. Wilky is the bleak, "inescapable self." Bellow reminds us
that these names represent two conflicting aspects of Wilhelm's
personality -- freedom and determinism:

Wilhelm had always had a great longing to be Tommy. He had never,

however, succeeded in feeling like Tommy and in his soul had always
remained Wilky. . . . He had cast off his father's name, and with it his
father's opinion of him. It was, he knew it was, his bid for liberty,
Adler being in his mind the title of the species, Tommy the freedom of
the person. But Wilky was his inescapable self.

Wilky knows that he looks like his ancestors-that he has some of their
beliefs in the family sense, the sanc tity of the insulted and injured, the
Messianic vision. When Wilhelm prays, he resembles the suffering
ghetto inhabitants. But even Wilky may not be his true soul. He
remembers that his grandfather called him Velvel. Velvel represents
the cozy affection of his heritage. What is interesting, then, is that
Bellow uses three names to symbolize the Jew -- Tommy (the
assimilationist), Wilky (the inescapable heritage), and Velvel (the
loved heritage).

Wilhelm chooses to be Velvel. More and more he thinks in Jewish

terms, finding "power and glory" in rituals. Old Rappaport asks him at
one point whether he has reserved a seat in the synagogue for Yom
Kippur. Although he answers that he hasn't, he expresses his longing
to pray for his dead mother. (He realizes that he doesn't know the

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Hebrew words. In the family structure Grandfather is orthodox, Father
has no religion, Mother is "reformed," and he is ambivalent.) At last
he thinks of the Hebrew memorial service-he begins to resemble his
grandfather. And this resemblance is strengthened when he stumbles
into a funeral parlor, where a Jewish ceremony is in progress: "Men in
formal clothes and black homburgs strode softly back and forth on the
cork floor . . . The white of the stained glass was like mother-of-pearl,
the blue of the Star of David like velvet ribbon." Here he identifies not
only with the corpse but with all his countrymen. He cleanses himself.
I assume that his name is Velvel when he cries.

The surprising thing in Bellow's fiction is that he does not approach

his Jewishness in any consistent way. Seize the Day confronts it more
than does The Adventures of Augie March; it is his most forceful
acceptance of his heritage-or most loving acceptance. The Victim is, of
course, another acceptance, but its message in effect is an escapist
one. We would expect Bellow's progress to offer another view of the
Jewish theme in his Henderson the Rain King. But Henderson is
Gentile. He even has a dispute with a Jewish friend-which compels
him out of crazy spite to start raising pigs.

The only Jewish vision in Henderson the Rain King is indirect --

perhaps it lies hidden in the flaming love expressed throughout the
novel. Bellow, like his friend Isaac Rosenfeld, seems to accept
Reichianism which as Theodore Solotaroff writes, resembles
Hassidism. The following statements hold not only for Rosenfeld but
for Bellow in Henderson the Rain King:

Rosenfeld was obsessed for many years by the familiar Jewish theme
of salvation -- or what Harold Rosenberg, in a brilliant reading of
Jewish character, has called "the Jewish vertigo." Naturalist that he
was, Rosenfeld saw the way out of the underground not through
Jewish faith in another, redemptive place, but through the satisfaction
of his natural desires. But he was a mystic for all that-and a Jewish
one. He tried to bridge the gap between alienation and connection,
depression and joy, secularism and transcendence, through the flesh
rather than through religious experience, and he found his mentor in
Wilhelm Reich. However, Rosenfeld's Reichianism, under the

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inevitable conditioning of his character, often reads much like
Hasidism. "To love all love," he writes at one point in his journal,
"even the beloved partner's love for another. For then we see the world
spelled out in letters of flame."

What irony! Bellow uses a wealthy Protestant to express a boundless

love for the universe. He has come a long way from Asa's
victimization. In the wilds of Africa he (as his hero) feels no longer
trapped in assuming an historical or cultural role; he expands his
Jewishness until it reminds us of Malamud's remark: "All men are
Jews." Is such a remark an escape from -- or a confrontation of -- his
heritage?

Bellow's themes are, of course, not so distinct as I have made them.

They interact subtly. Masquerades are part of Jewishness; eternity
fights moha and madness.

Although they are "one," their interaction produces great tensions not
only in the characters but in the novels themselves. The final effect,
despite Bellow's "larky" tone in The Adventures of Augie March and
Henderson the Rain King, is that of powerful ambivalence.

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Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut is one of the most prolific and popular writers of the
twentieth century. His career has spanned fifty years and brought him
prestigious awards and honorary degrees from many universities.
Although his novels have sometimes come under savage attack from
professional critics, an impressive and ever growing list of academic
studies suggests that his reputation as one of the most important
American novelists of the twentieth century is secure. Since the late
1960s, he has been a public figure, speaking out on issues ranging
from politics to censorship, from science and technology to the role of
the artist in modern society. His face has become familiar, even to
those who have never read his books or heard him give a
commencement address, from his appearances in movies and
television advertisements. Readers often become “addicted” to
Vonnegut, devouring his books one after another and becoming
curious about the man who wrote them. Vonnegut has provided plenty
of clues about the connection between his life and work by weaving
autobiographical details into his fiction and discussing the process of
writing novels in the novels themselves. In countless interviews he has
examined the major influences that shaped his life and career. In
addition, three collections of shorter works, Wampeters,
Foma,&Granfalloons; Palm Sunday; and Fates Worse than Death,
contain many interesting and revealing anecdotes that help readers
understand the man behind the novels. This chapter will draw on
interviews and Von negut’s own autobiographical essays to provide a
brief overview of his life and explore the connections between his
experiences and his writing.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was born to Kurt Vonnegut, Sr., and Edith Lieber
Vonnegut in Indianapolis, Indiana, on November 11, 1922, the fourth
anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I. The coincidence
is as significant as any that Vonnegut ever contrived in his fiction.
Although his parents were third-generation Americans, they
maintained close ties to Germany until the outbreak of the First World
War. Vonnegut’s father attended school in Germany. Both of his
parents were fluent in German, and before the war they made frequent
trips to Europe. In Indianapolis they were prominent members of the

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German-American professional and artistic elite. Vonnegut’s mother
Edith was born into one of the wealthiest families in town, the
Liebers, who owned a successful brewery. His father was the son of a
prominent architect who designed impressive buildings that still stand,
including Das Deutsch Haus, the center for German culture in
Indianapolis. Now known as “The Atheneum,” it is included in the
National Register of Historic Places. Before World War I, Vonnegut’s
parents lived in a world of German literature, music, and tradition, but
when the United States entered the war, this world was destroyed. The
United States allied itself with Britain against Germany, and almost
overnight, all aspects of German culture were regarded with suspicion.
German Americans were called upon to give up their ties to Germany
in order to prove their patriotism. Although his parents continued to
speak German to each other at home, they never taught the language
to Kurt, Jr., nor did they introduce him to “the literature or the music
or the oral family histories which my ancestors had loved” (Palm
Sunday 20). This decision left Vonnegut feeling “ignorant and
rootless,” and throughout his work, characters suffer from a lack of
connection to a vital culture and community. Both of his parents were
deeply saddened by the loss of the rich cultural heritage that had
sustained them before the war.

During the 1920s Vonnegut’s father designed several important

buildings, including a large department store, a theater, and the
Indiana headquarters of the Bell Telephone Company. He also
designed the telephone company’s branch offices, and young Kurt
sometimes rode with him to check the progress of buildings around
the state (Allen, Conversations 243). However, the Great Depression
of the 1930s put a halt to building, and Kurt, Sr., had no work from
1929 to 1940. He retreated from life and became “a dreamy artist”
(Allen, Conversations 227). Although Kurt, Jr., defends his father’s
“decision to disengage” from a world that he found brutal and ugly, he
regrets that his father’s retreat left “very little for a son to relate to”
(Allen, Conversations 227–28). The fathers depicted in Vonnegut’s
novels are all distant and uninvolved with their children’s lives,
reflecting Vonnegut’s relationship with his own father. His first novel,
Player Piano, explores the dehumanizing effects of a lack of

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meaningful work—observing his father’s deepening depression during
the 1930s may have suggested this theme.

Although the Vonnegut family never suffered the severe hardships

that plagued many families during the Depression, they were no
longer wealthy, and in 1930, Kurt, Jr., was taken out of private school
and placed in Public School #43. Although Vonnegut considers this a
positive development that brought him into contact with “interesting”
people, his mother never recovered from the loss of the family fortune
(Allen, Conversations 270). She became depressed and withdrew from
her children’s lives. For a while she tried writing short stories for
popular magazines and dreamed of moving to Cape Cod, but her
stories were rejected, and she became increasingly bitter and abusive.
“Late at night, and always in the privacy of our own home, and never
with guests present, she expressed hatred for Father as corrosive as
hydrofluoric acid” (Fates Worse than Death 28). Although she was
never diagnosed or treated, her son is convinced that she suffered from
mental illness. She ended her own life with an overdose of sleeping
pills on Mother’s Day in 1944, while Kurt was home on leave from
the army before being shipped overseas. Edith Vonnegut had voiced
her strong opposition to the war, and the timing of her suicide must
have burdened her son with an extra share of guilt. In Vonnegut’s
fiction, mothers are either distant or absent. Eliot Rosewater feels
responsible for killing his mother in a sailing accident. Howard
Campbell’s mother is morbid and crazy before she drops out of her
son’s life entirely. Celia Hoover, who resembles Edith Vonnegut in
several ways, commits suicide by swallowing Drano. Taken together,
these fictional mothers reflect the sadness, anger, and guilt that Kurt
Vonnegut has struggled with since his mother’s suicide. He has tried
to cope with her legacy in his life as well, fulfilling her unrealized
dreams by becoming a successful short-story writer and living on
Cape Cod. As he pointed out in an interview, “It’s probably very
common for sons to try to make their mothers’ impossible dreams
come true” (Allen, Conversations 178).

As the youngest of three children, Kurt, Jr., had to compete for

attention. He soon discovered that being funny was a sure way to be
noticed. His brother Bernard was nine years older and a scientist, his

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sister Alice was five years older and a sculptress. Along with his
architect father, “they had really big time stuff to argue about” (Allen,
Conversations 69).

But young Kurt was determined to join the conversation. “I wanted to

talk in order to learn how to do it, to engage in give and take, and I
must have made accidental jokes at first. Everyone does....And I
understood the terms under which I could buy my way into the
conversations, small as I was” (Allen, Conversations 69). Encouraged
by his success at making jokes, Kurt studied the radio comedians who
were so popular during the 1930s, emulating their techniques and their
timing. His ability to make jokes eventually contributed to his success
as a writer. Vonnegut describes his novels as “mosaics made up of a
whole bunch of tiny chips; and each chip is a joke” (Allen,
Conversations 91).

Although his parents were distant, there were two adults who were
close to Vonnegut in his childhood and helped shape his character. He
describes his father’s younger brother Alex as “responsive and
amusing and generous with me,...my ideal grown-up friend” (Palm
Sunday 53). During the 1930s, Uncle Alex was a socialist, and he
introduced young Kurt to Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure
Class. Kurt “loved it, since it made low comedy of the empty graces
and aggressively useless possessions which my parents, and especially
my mother, meant to regain some day” (Palm Sunday 54). The
influence of Veblen’s harsh critique of the idle rich is obvious in most
of Vonnegut’s work, but especially in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
Ida Young, the Vonneguts’ African American cook and housekeeper
during Kurt’s first ten years, was also an important influence on him.
Vonnegut gives Ida Young most of the credit for raising him and
describes her as “humane and wise” (Allen, Conversations 245). He
adds that she “gave me decent moral instruction and was exceedingly
nice to me. So she was as great an influence on me as anybody”
(Allen, Conversations 245). Even the most despicable characters in
Vonnegut’s novels are capable of arousing the reader’s sympathy
because they are presented as vulnerable human beings struggling to
cope in a difficult world. Ms. Young also nurtured Vonnegut’s

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capacity for sympathy. “The compassionate, forgiving aspects of my
beliefs came from Ida Young.”

Most high schools are lucky to produce a student newspaper several

times a year, but when Vonnegut attended Shortridge High School in
Indianapolis in the 1930s he worked on a daily paper, the Shortridge
Echo. Working first as a reporter, and then as a columnist and editor,
Vonnegut discovered his talent for writing. “Each person has
something he can do easily and can’t imagine why everybody else is
having so much trouble doing it. In my case it was writing”
(Wampeters, Foma&Granfalloons 260). Writing for a daily student
newspaper made Vonnegut aware of his audience at an age when most
people are writing only for their teachers.

“I started out writing for a large audience. And if I did a lousy job, I
caught a lot of shit in twenty-four hours” (260). A strong sense of
audience has shaped Vonnegut’s writing style. He is aware that most
people are not good readers, and if he hopes to hold their interest, he
needs to write in a simple style with short sentences and paragraphs.
“I avoid sentences where the reader could get lost…. I have made my
books easy to read, carefully punctuated, with lots of white space”
(Allen, Conversations 48).

When Vonnegut finished high school, he wanted to stay in

Indianapolis and become a reporter for a local paper, but his father
insisted that he go to college and study chemistry. Kurt began his
freshman year at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1940 as a
biochemistry major. Although by then his older brother Bernard was
well on his way to a promising career as a scientist, Kurt soon realized
that he had little scientific ability. He spent most of his college years
writing for the Cornell Daily Sun, a student-run newspaper. As
managing editor of the Sun, Vonnegut wrote three columns a week
that he describes as “impudent editorializing,...college-humor sort of
stuff” (Allen, Conversations 114). Vonnegut enjoyed the opportunity
to express his opinions in an amusing way in his editorials, and he has
continued this practice in his novels. “I’ve always had to have an ax to
grind in order to write” (Allen, Conversations 114). After three years
at Cornell, Vonnegut had polished his prose style, but he was flunking

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most of his science classes. Although he never received a degree from
Cornell, his scientific training proved valuable to his career as a
novelist. He learned enough about science to discuss it intelligently, to
admire the work of scientists, and to assess technology’s impact on
society. He even adopted a modified “scientific” approach to his
writing. Vonnegut points out that scientists like his brother Bernard
are always asking “what if” questions and then designing experiments
to answer them. Vonnegut does the same thing in his fiction by
creating unlikely situations to see what they reveal about human
nature. These mind experiments challenge readers to think more
deeply about the world around them and their place in it.

Because he was about to flunk out of Cornell in his junior year,

Vonnegut was “delighted to join the Army and go to war” (Allen,
Conversations 181). He was trained to fire the army’s largest piece of
field artillery, the 240 mm howitzer, an enormous cannon that shot a
300-pound shell. But before he was shipped overseas, he was
transferred to the 106th Infantry Division as a battalion scout.
Vonnegut received no infantry training, because “nobody was very
sure” about what battalion scouts were supposed to do (Palm Sunday
76). When he found himself at the front, he “imitated various war
movies [he] had seen” (77). During the Battle of the Bulge, the largest
American defeat of the Second World War, Vonnegut was captured
by the Germans. Although he could not speak German well, he knew a
few words from listening to his parents, and he tried to speak to his
captors. They asked him if he was of German heritage and then
wanted to know why he was fighting against his “brothers.” Vonnegut
found the question “ignorant and comical. My parents had separated
me so thoroughly from my Germanic past that my captors might as
well have been Bolivians or Tibetans, for all they meant to me” (78–
79).

As a prisoner of war, Vonnegut was shipped to Dresden, a beautiful

city that had so far been spared by the Allied bombing. As the son and
grandson of architects, Vonnegut was impressed by the ornate
buildings and the city’s harmonious design. He and his fellow
prisoners were quartered in a slaughterhouse and put to work in a
factory making malt syrup as a vitamin supplement for pregnant

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women. Dresden was considered an “open” city, meaning there were
no war industries or large troop concentrations there, so its residents
believed that they would not be bombed. However, on the night of
February 13, 1945, the air raid sirens wailed, and Dresdeners retreated
to their cellars. Vonnegut and the other prisoners descended to an
underground meat locker, where the carcasses of animals hung in the
cool air. When they emerged a few hours later, the beautiful city of
Dresden had been reduced to a pile of smoking rubble, and 135,000
people were dead. It was the largest massacre in European history.
British and American planes dropped thousands of incendiary devices
on Dresden and created a firestorm that destroyed the entire city and
suffocated the Dresdeners in their cellars. Vonnegut and his fellow
prisoners survived because they were far enough under ground that the
air was not sucked out of their shelter by the firestorm. Afterward,
Vonnegut was put to work as a “corpse miner,” excavating the cellars
of Dresden to remove the dead and bring them to the city’s parks
where enormous funeral pyres burned the bodies to prevent the spread
of disease. Vonnegut’s wartime experiences provided the basis for his
most famous and important novel, Slaughterhouse-Five.

After the war, Vonnegut returned briefly to Indianapolis and married

his high-school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox, on September 1, 1945.
When he first got home, she was engaged to another man, but
Vonnegut persuaded her to go for a walk with him and then convinced
her to marry him instead. This incident later became the basis for one
of Vonnegut’s first published stories, “Long Walk to Forever,” which
appeared in the Ladies Home Journal and was later included in a
collection of Vonnegut’s stories, Welcome to the Monkey House.
Vonnegut later described the story as “sickeningly slick” and
lamented, “Shame, shame, to have lived scenes from a woman’s
magazine” (Welcome to the Monkey House xv). In December, the
Vonneguts moved to Chicago where Kurt worked as a police reporter
for the Chicago City News Bureau, a company that supplied local
news stories to the Chicago newspapers and the national wire services.
He also began studying for a master’s degree in anthropology at the
University of Chicago. For the first time since high school, Vonnegut
enjoyed his studies. He specialized in cultural anthropology, which he
describes as the study of “every object and idea which has been

261
shaped by men and women and children” (Palm Sunday 222). His
choice of anthropology reveals that he was still under the influence of
his father’s advice to study a science, even as he gained a clearer idea
of his real talents. For Vonnegut, anthropology was “a science that
was mostly poetry” (90). Cultural anthropology showed Vonnegut that
people in other parts of the world had worked out patterns for living
that were quite different from anything he had been exposed to in his
first twenty-three years of life. Although he found his studies
interesting, and he eventually put his new knowledge to good use in
his novels, the anthropology department rejected his master’s thesis,
and he left Chicago without a degree in 1947. Twenty-five years later,
a professor read Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle and showed it to his
colleagues in anthropology, who voted to accept it as Vonnegut’s
master’s thesis. He was awarded a Master of Arts degree in
anthropology by the University of Chicago in 1971. The rejected
thesis, “Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales,” later
became a regular feature of his public lectures, and a summary of it
was finally published in Palm Sunday (1981). Writing it helped
Vonnegut understand some simple but important truths about
storytelling that he was soon to put to good use.

In 1947 Vonnegut was broke, he had only a high school diploma, and
he needed to find work to support his wife and his young son Mark.
By now his older brother Bernard was working in General Electric’s
research laboratories in Schenectady, New York, and he got Kurt a job
in public relations. Because he had some training in science, Vonnegut
was assigned to write articles about the research being done in GE’s
labs. Although he found the company of the scientists interesting, he
hated his job and felt out of place at GE. He began writing short
stories at night, and after a few rejections, he sold his first story,
“Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” to Collier’s for $750, which was
the equivalent of six weeks’ pay at GE. His next story brought him
$950, and he decided to quit his job to write full time. Vonnegut
regards the four years he spent at GE as a period of apprenticeship,
during which he received instruction in the craft of writing stories
from the magazine editors who purchased his work. In Schenectady he
was surrounded by engineers and machinery, and they became the
focus of his first novel, Player Piano. Cat’s Cradle is also based on

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Vonnegut’s experiences at GE, and throughout his career, Vonnegut
has written about the role of science and technology in the modern
world.

After quitting his job at GE in 1951, Vonnegut moved to West

Barnstable, Massachusetts, a scenic coastal town on Cape Cod. There
he continued to write short stories to pay the bills as he worked on his
novel Player Piano, which was published in 1952. As his family
continued to grow with the births of Edith in 1951 and Nanette in
1955, Vonnegut needed to supplement the income he received from
his stories. He taught English for one year at the Hopefield School in
nearby Sandwich, Massachusetts, worked for an industrial advertising
agency, and opened the second Saab automobile dealership in the
United States. In the late 1950s he even created a large metal sculpture
that was on display in the lobby of a hotel at Logan airport in Boston
for over ten years (Todd 17).

In 1957 Vonnegut’s father died alone in a small cottage in the woods

of southern Indiana. Although he and Kurt, Jr., had never been close,
his death marked a decisive severing of Vonnegut’s Indiana roots.
Although Indianapolis is mentioned in all of Vonnegut’s novels, since
his father’s death he has returned to his hometown only for funerals
and an occasional speaking engagement. He laments the loss of the
city’s distinctive culture, complaining that now it is no more than “an
interchangeable part in the American machine” (Slapstick 8). Yet the
city of his youth remains an important influence on Vonnegut’s
writing. “I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others
seem to trust it most too, when I sound like a person from
Indianapolis, which is what I am” (Palm Sunday 70).

Less than a year after his father’s death, Vonnegut’s beloved sister
Alice died of cancer, leaving behind four young boys. The day before
she died, her husband, James Carmalt Adams, was killed in a train
wreck on the way to visit her in the hospital. Although Vonnegut has
not said much about his relationship with his sister, she was certainly
an important influence on his life and work. “I...never told her so, but
she was the person I had always written for. She was the secret of
whatever artistic unity I had ever achieved. She was the secret of my

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technique” (Slapstick 16–17). His novel Slapstick “depicts myself and
my beautiful sister as monsters” whose parents have abandoned them
in a house full of books (20). The “monsters” are described as
“specialized halves of a single brain,” suggesting the close, creative
relationship that Vonnegut enjoyed with his sister. After her death, he
and his wife Jane adopted her three oldest boys, James, Steven, and
Kurt Adams.

Now there were six children between the ages of nine and fourteen in
the Vonnegut household on Cape Cod, and Kurt was faced with the
dual challenge of providing for them and guiding them through their
teenage years in the 1960s. Unfortunately, the magazines that
Vonnegut relied on to buy his stories were going out of business, so he
began selling his novels to paperback publishers, who would give him
a $3,000 advance based on an outline and a first chapter. The money
enabled him to feed his large family, but paperback originals are
rarely reviewed and are sold mostly in bus stations and drug stores, so
they did little to enhance Vonnegut’s reputation as a writer. The Sirens
of Titan, Mother Night, and Canary in a Cathouse, a collection of
stories, were all published first in paperback. “Cat’s Cradle was
written with that market in mind,” Vonnegut recalls, but it was
published in hardcover in 1963. Before the success of Cat’s Cradle,
Vonnegut felt that his work was being ignored. “I wasn’t even getting
reviewed. Esquire published a list of the American literary world back
then and it guaranteed that every living author of the slightest merit
was on there somewhere. I wasn’t on there...[and] it made me feel
subhuman” (Allen, Conversations 107). Vonnegut’s frustration with
being relegated to the “sleazo” world of paperback originals is
reflected in one of his most memorable characters, Kilgore Trout, the
prolific science fiction writer whose novels can be found only in
pornographic bookstores.

When his novels began to appear in hardcover, Vonnegut received the

critical recognition he desired, but he still struggled to make ends
meet. In spite of the fact that both Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You,
Mr. Rosewater received favorable reviews, they soon went out of
print, and by 1965, Vonnegut was having difficulty supporting his
large family. He was offered a teaching position at the prestigious

264
University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, so he moved his family to
Iowa City for two years between 1965 and 1967. For the first time in
his life, Vonnegut was part of a community of writers, and he found
the experience exhilarating yet intimidating. Because his education
was in science, he had not read many of the great novels that his new
colleagues were fond of discussing, so he went on a crash course in
reading. For the first time in his life, he was expected to talk about
writing, which forced him to think more deeply about his own creative
process. During these years, Vonnegut was struggling to write about
his wartime experiences in Dresden, and he found it helpful to be able
to discuss his work with other writers. His training as a journalist had
taught him to keep himself out of his writing as much as possible, but
the fiction writers at Iowa told him that this rule does not apply to
fiction. Vonnegut found this advice liberating. He wrote an
autobiographical introduction to the hardcover reissue of Mother
Night and began to write first-person accounts of his wartime
experiences for Slaughterhouse-Five, signaling a new direction in his
work.

In 1967 Vonnegut was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship

to travel to Dresden to do research for Slaughterhouse-Five. Of
course, the city bore no resemblance to the architectural treasure that it
had been before the war. It reminded Vonnegut of Dayton, Ohio. The
Germans Vonnegut met were not eager to recall their wartime
experiences, nor were his fellow prisoners. Most found they could
recall little about the period, and Vonnegut faced the same problem
when he sat down to write a book about Dresden. He felt he had to do
it, but he did not know how. Only after years of struggle and many
abandoned drafts did he finally succeed in completing
Slaughterhouse-Five. The novel was a bestseller, and it brought
Vonnegut financial security and praise from the critics. Published at
the height of the Vietnam War, it demonstrated that aerial
bombardment is a purposeless slaughter of innocents with no military
justification. Vonnegut became a hero of the anti-war movement. He
was invited to speak at rallies, to teach at Harvard, and to give
commencement addresses at colleges all over the country.

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At the same time, his twenty-five-year marriage was falling apart.
Vonnegut described the break-up as a “terrible, unavoidable accident
that we were ill-equipped to understand” (Palm Sunday 172). Five of
their six children were grown and out on their own, and this meant
that “[w]e were both going to have to find other sorts of seemingly
important work to do.” Vonnegut and his wife Jane also fought about
religion. She was becoming a born-again Christian, and Vonnegut, a
life-long atheist, found this “painful” (175). So in 1971 he left their
home on Cape Cod and moved to New York City, although he and
Jane remained friends until the end of her life.

The combination of financial security and emotional distress took a

toll on Vonnegut’s writing. “I am in the dangerous position now
where I can sell anything I write,” he explained to an interviewer in
1971 (Todd 17). Yet he was deeply disappointed with his progress on
his next novel, Breakfast of Champions. He abandoned it for a while
and began to think seriously of a new career as a playwright. Staging
plays gave him a chance to join an interesting community and leave
behind the loneliness of the solitary writer. “I write for the stage in
order to get to know more people and to become intimately related to
them” (Allen, Conversations 71). Happy Birthday, Wanda June
opened at the Theatre de Lys in New York on October 7, 1970, and
ran until March 14, in spite of mixed reviews. Vonnegut thoroughly
enjoyed the experience of working with the actors, but he soon
realized that his true talent was for writing fiction.

Throughout the 1970s, Vonnegut received many honors and awards.

He taught at Harvard and at City University of New York, where he
was the Distinguished Professor of English Prose. He was elected vice
president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and he received
honorary degrees from Indiana University, Hobart and William
College, and Bennington College, among others. In 1972 Universal
Pictures released a film adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five that
Vonnegut called “flawless” (Between Time and Timbuktu xv). Yet in
spite of his growing fame, Vonnegut was facing an artistic crisis.
Slaughterhouse-Five was a book that he felt compelled to write, but
after it was finished, he did not know what to do next. When Breakfast
of Champions appeared in 1973, critics viciously attacked it, and

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Vonnegut’s reputation continued to slide with the publication of
Slapstick in 1976. Critics were not content to say that these were bad
books. They felt compelled to attack the author and suggest that he
had no business writing at all. “All of a sudden critics wanted me
squashed like a bug” (Palm Sunday 93). Vonnegut had never been part
of the literary establishment. He had not attended a prestigious East
Coast prep school and gone on to study literature at an Ivy League
college, as many of his critics had. Although he always felt like an
outsider, the interviews he gave in the 1970s reveal that he was deeply
hurt by the personal nature of the critics’ attacks. “The hidden
complaint was that I was barbarous, that I wrote without having made
a systematic study of the great literature, that I was no gentleman,
since I had done hack writing so cheerfully for vulgar magazines”
(93–94).

The seventies were also a difficult decade in Vonnegut’s personal life.

His son Mark suffered a mental breakdown in 1972, and Vonnegut
had to put him in an institution. Although Mark recovered and wrote a
book about the experience, The Eden Express, his illness was deeply
troubling and contributed to Vonnegut’s own chronic depression. For
a while he took Ritalin, a prescription anti-depressant, and was
amazed that a little pill could do so much to change his mood. In the
mid-seventies, he stopped taking it and began having weekly talks
with a psychologist. These talks helped him put an end to the
“periodic blowups” that had afflicted him since childhood
(Wampeters, Foma&Granfalloons 253). Vonnegut also considers his
writing important therapy. “Writers are very lucky people, they can
treat their neuroses every day” (Abel A11). Lawrence Broer has
argued convincingly that in his novels of the seventies and eighties,
Vonnegut attempted to come to terms with the psychic pain that his
parents had inflicted on him as a child.

In the early 1970s, Vonnegut met Jill Krementz, a photojournalist who

was working on a series about writers at work. They lived together in
New York and were married in 1979. Vonnegut has had less to say
about his personal life in the last twenty years, but he seems pleased to
be a grandfather and to have all of his books in print. Two novels that
he published in the 1980s, Galapagos and Bluebeard, have helped to

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restore his reputation as a major writer. Vonnegut played himself in
the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield movie Back to School, making his face
familiar to a whole new generation of readers.

Vonnegut still loves to stir up controversy, especially when he

suspects that people are in danger of taking themselves too seriously.
Recently he completed a year as writer-in-residence at Smith College
in Northampton, Massachusetts. In a public lecture he confessed his
lust for an Indian woman and wondered aloud if she soaks the jewel
she wears on her forehead at night, like a set of dentures. The remark
prompted an angry editorial in the school newspaper, claiming that
students “would have walked out on anyone else who uttered the same
things” (quoted in Abel A11). By now Vonnegut is used to such
criticism, and he laughs it off easily. The remark is another Vonnegut
mind experiment, intended to make people think more deeply about
who they are and how they see the world. He knows full well that his
statement is not “politically correct,” but he insists that we must be
able to speak frankly about sensitive subjects without becoming too
afraid that we will offend someone else in the process. “I’ll say
whatever I want; that’s the price of my freedom. If it hurts someone’s
feelings, too bad! That’s the way it goes” (Abel A11).

As he approaches his eightieth birthday, Vonnegut is still writing full

time and seeking other outlets for his creativity. While in
Northampton he has given poetry readings, done some stand-up
comedy, sung with a band he called “Special K and his Crew” and
presented his visual art in a local gallery. The working title for his
novel-in-progress is If God Were Alive Today. He still chain-smokes
Pall Mall cigarettes, as he has since the age of fourteen, but now he is
contemplating a lawsuit against the tobacco companies. “They
promised to kill me on the package, and they haven’t done it yet”
(Abel A11). He still believes that laughter is the best response to a
world filled with pain and horror. In spite of all he has been through,
he feels that he “got off so light” (Reed&Leeds ix). In 1999 he insisted
that he still wants his gravestone carved with the words that appealed
to Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five: “Everything was beautiful,
and nothing hurt.”

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Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers is quite possibly the most controversial living
American writer. The controversy began in 1940, with the publication
of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and has continued ever since: it has
recently received fresh stimulus from the publication of her fifth
novel, Clock Without Hands.

Reviewing this controversy, one notices that, with one or two

exceptions, the censure has come from professional book reviewers
while the praise has come either from other novelists (and a few poets
and playwrights) or from a group of critics whom, for want of a better
label, I shall call academic—that is, men whose profession is teaching
and whose avocation is scholarly criticism. There is therefore some
evidence for believing that Mrs. McCullers is both a "writer's writer"
and one whose work requires, or at least lends itself to, a considerable
amount of explication—more, at any rate, than the popular reviewer,
either for reasons of space or because he lacks the proper literary
background, is prepared to supply. I think this is emphatically the
case, though I am by no means certain that it explains the controversy.
The truth, I suspect, is that Mrs. McCullers's is a very special
sensibility with which many readers, even highly cultivated readers,
are, for some reason, simply unable to establish a rapport. Mrs.
McCullers is not unique among authors in this respect (the case of
Ford Madox Ford, a very different kind of writer, is somewhat
similar), and in a sense the phenomenon is proof of her individuality
and originality as an artist.

It is impossible to understand Mrs. McCullers's work unless one

realizes that she conceives of fiction chiefly as parable. The reader
who concerns himself exclusively with the realistic level of her stories
will never fully appreciate them, though he may be momentarily
diverted. The narrative burden of her work is always secondary to the
allegorical: she is in this sense a didactic writer, for she does not write
to entertain but to teach, and what she has to teach are those truths
about human nature that she has learned from her experience, which is
profound, and from her observation, which, at the same time that it is
compassionate, is penetrating to the point of clairvoyance. It is in no
narrower sense than this that she may be thought of as being didactic,

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for she has no particular ax to grind, no program to push, no specific
reforms to recommend: her concern is with nothing less than the soul
of man.

These truths with which Mrs. McCullers has been concerned in her
writing do not always flatter the reader; on the contrary, they are—as
we shall see—of a generally melancholy nature, and here is perhaps
another reason why many readers have been unwilling to
acknowledge them. (The reluctance with which they have viewed
them, however, may well be the measure of their suspicion that they
are sound.) Be that as it may, the point I should like to make here is
that though Mrs. McCullers's truths may not be comfortable to live
with, and though they may not even be truths, they are nevertheless
the convictions at which she has arrived out of her experience, and it
is with them that she is primarily concerned in her narratives, which
are to that extent allegories and parables.

Now the method of allegory involves a certain sacrifice: in proportion

as the characters are abstracted, they tend to lose their humanity,
becoming symbols rather than people, so that perhaps the commonest
complaint against allegory is that the characters do not seem like "real
people." Readers should bear in mind, however, that this is a criticism
of the method rather than of the particular work which employs it: one
either approves of abstraction or disapproves of it, likes allegory or
dislikes it. The mutilations and aberrations of Mrs. McCullers's
characters are not gratuitous but are essential to the dramatization of
her thesis, and she is not attempting to create a "true picture" of life in
the realistic sense at all, but in another, more indirect and possibly
more artistic (to the extent that calculation is involved in a work of
art) sense: that is, the symbolic.

I would be embarrassed to stress so obvious a point if it did not seem

to me the best way both of accounting for the peculiar difficulty of
Mrs. McCullers's work and of assessing her achievement as an artist.
The fact is that this writer is so gifted technically, so thoroughly in
command of the devices of realism (her dialogue is a good example),
that it is a constant temptation to read her largely on that level,
overlooking the allegorical scheme of which one must be everywhere

270
conscious in her work. It is Mrs. McCullers's ambiguous achievement
that no other living American writer of allegorical fiction has mastered
the techniques of realism quite so well: I say ambiguous because I am
not at all certain that it has worked to her aesthetic advantage, since
even the most discriminating reader can be distracted from the proper
subject of a book by a display of surface brilliance—especially if it
occurs in flashes, some brighter than others.

The relationship, in allegory, between the literal and symbolic levels

constitutes one of the most delicate problems in literary art, as there
are innumerable failures—some of them magnificent failures—to
testify, and it is the only problem that, for all her astonishing
virtuosity, Mrs. McCullers has not yet finally solved. Granted the
difficulties that inhere in the abstraction process, the most successful
allegories are those in which the literal level, however simple, is
coherent but is never permitted to triumph at the expense of the
allegorical. In Kafka, for example —a pure allegorist —the realistic
level is negligible; it is there, but the reader understands from the first
that it is not to be taken as seriously as the symbolic, and though
Kafka's characters do not have the human interest that Mrs.
McCullers's often do, they are nevertheless more effective, for that
reason, as symbols. The same is true, to a somewhat less extent, of
Camus.Only the very greatest artists can succeed, at the same time
they are concerned primarily with allegorical meanings, in creating
characters who are interesting in their own right. Hawthorne did it in
The Scarlet Letter, in the character of Hester Prynne, but in his other
work even Hawthorne was by no means invariably successful.
Melville did it in Billy Budd, an otherwise badly written book, the
product of his senescence, and failed to do it in Moby Dick, the
product of his prime. Mrs. McCullers herself has done it—once, in
The Member of the Wedding, which I do not think is on that account
her best novel—and I can think of no other living American author
who has, unless it be Paul Bowles in that remarkable little story that
almost no one seems to have read more than once, " The Fourth Day
Out from Santa Cruz."

But in some of Mrs. McCullers's work—I will not say all—one is

uneasily aware of a struggle between the two levels, and I think this

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explains the unevenness that many readers have found in it. I am
particularly conscious of this struggle in her first novel, The Heart Is a
Lonely Hunter, and her latest, Clock Without Hands. It is as though
Camus were attempting to write, here and there, in the style of
Flaubert—and succeeding. ( Flaubert, by the way, is one of Mrs.
McCullers's favorite authors.) The novels of what we may term her
"middle period" do not suffer from this defect, or suffer from it so
slightly that we are scarcely conscious of it: the literal levels in
Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Ballad of the Sad Café, while
coherent, are so improbable that few readers have any difficulty
separating them from the allegorical. I should say that, as pure
allegory, The Ballad of the Sad Café is Mrs. McCullers's most
successful book, and I quite agree with Mr. Irving Howe when he calls
it "one of the finest novels ever written by an American" ( New York
Times Book Review, September 17, 1961). If I admire it more than The
Member of the Wedding, and I believe I do, it is in spite of the fact that
in the latter work Mrs. McCullers has wrought the miracle of creating
a character that is as effective humanly as she is symbolically —
Frankie Addams.

The themes with which Mrs. McCullers was mainly concerned in the
first decade of her career are the spiritual isolation of the individual
and the power of love to free him from this condition. Ordinary verbal
communication results in failure; it is only through ideal
communication, or love, that men can hope to escape from their cells.
In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, she dramatizes this idea by causing
her protagonist, Singer, to be a deaf mute, and it is not in spite of this
limitation but because of it that his experience in love is the only one,
of the several which are depicted in the novel, that is satisfactory—
and it is only relatively so, since the object of his love, the half-witted
Antonapoulos, does not reciprocate it and soon dies. The melancholy
message here is that, while love is the only force that can unite men,
love is never completely mutual and is subject to time, diminishing
with the death of the love object. The single consolation is that love,
while it lasts, is beneficial to the lover, affording him temporary relief
from his solitude.

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This same idea was presented, somewhat more obliquely, in the
second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, where spiritual isolation is
symbolized in the character of Captain Penderton, who is a
homosexual, a sadist, a kleptomaniac, and a drug addict; and in The
Member of the Wedding, whose protagonist is an adolescent girl,
Frankie Addams, who feels herself too old to associate with children
and too young to mingle confidently with adults: she is "an unjoined
person who hangs around in doorways"—that is, on the threshold of
things, never really inside nor out. But it was in The Ballad of the Sad
Café that the related themes of spiritual isolation and the nature and
function of love received their fullest and most mature treatment. It is
the saddest of Mrs. McCullers's novels at the same time that it is the
most nearly perfect, with something of the formal beauty of a Bach
fugue, for in it she reaches the profoundly pessimistic conclusion that
"The state of being beloved is intolerable to many.... The beloved
fears and hates the lover." Her protagonist here is a lonely manlike
giantess, Amelia Evans, who falls in love with a dwarf who is also
homosexual, hunchbacked, and tubercular, thus illustrating yet another
thesis of the author, that "The most outlandish people can be the
stimulus for love.... The value and quality of any love is determined
solely by the lover." Instead of returning her love, however, the dwarf
maliciously solicits the attentions of Amelia's former husband, an ex-
convict, and the two revenge themselves upon her by running off
together—but not before they have wrecked her place of business,
stolen her belongings, and attempted to poison her.

There is a terrible finality about the vision of life set forth in The
Ballad of the Sad Café, and one wondered if the author had not said
all she had to say on the theme of human love and loneliness. Seven
years of silence seemed to confirm this suspicion, and when the play,
The Square Root of Wonderful, finally appeared, her admirers read it
eagerly to see if she had chosen another theme— or rather to see if
(Mrs. McCullers being the kind of writer she is) another theme had
chosen her. They were encouraged in this expectation by a statement
in the preface:

In The Square Root of Wonderful I recognize many of the

compulsions that made me write this play. My husband wanted to be a

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writer and his failure in that was one of the disappointments that led to
his death. When I started The Square Root of Wonderful my mother
was very ill and after a few months she died. I wanted to recreate my
mother—to remember her tranquil beauty and sense of joy in life. So,
unconsciously, the life-death theme of The Square Root of Wonderful
emerged.

The play's protagonist is a young woman, Mollie Lovejoy, who has

been twice married to and divorced from the same man, a once-
famous writer who, after the failure of his latest play, has attempted
suicide and is convalescing in a rest home. Mollie has meanwhile
fallen in love with an architect, John, and is on the point of marrying
him when Philip, her ex-husband, returns. The two men are opposites:
John is dull but strong, and he worships Mollie; Philip is weak and has
learned to use his weakness to advantage with women, but he is
charming and perceptive. He does not love Mollie—it is made clear
that he is incapable of loving anyone—but he needs her desperately
and insists that she love him. In a moment of weakness she yields to
him once more, but repents almost immediately, and when Philip
realizes he has lost her for good he drowns himself; Mollie is then free
to marry John. Other characters are Mollie's thirteen-year-old son,
Paris; Mother Lovejoy, a fatuous but domineering woman whose
mismanagement of Philip's childhood is responsible for many of his
problems (he loathes her, calling her to her face a "babbling old
horror"); and Sister, her daughter, a homely spinster who compensates
for the drabness of her situation by inventing fantasies involving Latin
lovers.

The play, it will be seen, ends on a "positive" note, even if it does not
have the conventional happy ending (Mrs. McCullers in her preface
calls it a tragicomedy), and is generally different from her earlier
work. There are, to be sure, certain correspondences: the irrationality
of love is again insisted upon ("Love is very much like witches and
ghosts, and childhood," Mollie says. "When it speaks to you you have
to answer, and you have to go wherever it tells you."); so also is the
loneliness that springs from an incapacity for love ("I feel surrounded
by a zone of loneliness," Philip complains); and Sister's fantasies
remind us of Mick's, in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and of Frankie's

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in The Member of the Wedding. But the life—death theme, obviously
related to that of loneliness and love, is here the important thing.
Philip, in his inability to love, personifies the death principle, or, in
Freudian terms, the death wish (it is significant that he takes his own
life), and Mollie, who is capable of loving more than one man
simultaneously, personifies the vital principle. Life triumphs over
death in the play, and in a sense it is the triumph of the mediocre over
the exceptional, for Philip is certainly the most interesting character in
the play: the healthy vulgarity of Mollie reminds one of Stella, in A
Streetcar Named Desire, and indeed the two plays have very similar
conclusions.

A preoccupation with the meaning of time is also evident in The

Square Root of Wonderful. The relation of time to love is obvious: it is
the Great Enemy of love as it is of life, of which love is the surest sign
and the happiest manifestation. In as early a story as "The Sojourner" (
1950), Ferris presses his little boy close to him "as though an emotion
as protean as his love could dominate the pulse of time," and it is time,
and time alone, that enables Singer to forget his powerful love for
Antonapoulos in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. But in relation to
loneliness, time takes on another significance. Thus, in The Square
Root of Wonderful, Mollie remarks, apropos of the grandfather clock,
"It reminds me of peace and family," and Philip replies: "It puts me in
mind of time. You were winding it when I came back. Busily, busily
winding time. I hate clocks." Mollie merely says, "It has a lovely
chime." Philip does not dislike clocks because they remind him that
time is running out; he dislikes them for the opposite reason, because
they remind him of how much time he will have to kill before he finds
release from his loneliness: for him, as for all unhappy people, clocks
do not run too fast but too slow. Time passes quickly for the lover, and
in that sense may be thought of as a traitor and an enemy, but it is an
even greater enemy to the loveless.

As a play, The Square Root of Wonderful has a good many faults:

there are too many "gag lines" on a rather low level of humor; the
characterization of John is thin, and that of Paris inconsistent (imagine
a twelve-year-old, normal in other respects, saying: "Mother, you
eavesdrop and read diaries. I don't respect anybody who reads diaries.

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Sly people."); and Mother Lovejoy bears too obvious a resemblance to
Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie—she boasts of the many
gentlemen callers she received before marrying her husband, who
(like Amanda's) later walked out on her, and her relationship to Sister
is identical with Amanda's to Laura, just as her relationship to Philip is
identical with Amanda's to Tom. (Mrs. McCullers's friendship with
Tennessee Williams, as she observes in the preface, has profoundly
affected both her life and her work.) But it is a better play than the
reviewers, by and large, gave her credit for—they were merely
courteous, and very few of them bothered to look beneath its surface.
And it is important in that it represents a widening of the author's
perspective to include other metaphysical problems than those with
which she had previously been occupied.

Clock Without Hands has four main characters: J. T. Malone, a forty-

year‐ old pharmacist; his friend, Judge Clane, a militant white
supremacist, age eighty‐ five; the Judge's grandson, Jester, who is
nineteen; and a blue-eyed Negro youth named Sherman Pew.When the
novel opens, Malone has been told by his physician that he has
leukemia; though he knows he must die he does not know when, and
is thus like a man watching a clock without hands. Malone is a
sheeplike man who has allowed his life to be managed for him by
other people, and, in a flash of self-knowledge born of the realization
of his approaching death, he realizes that he has never really lived:
how then, he wonders, can he die? He is determined to acquire an
identity in the few months remaining to him so that his life, before it
ends, will have some meaning. Jester, likewise, is in search of an
identity: he has not yet decided what he wants to be in life; though he
has many passing interests he feels no "call" for any particular
vocation, and the anonymity of his situation is symbolized in the fact
that he has never known either of his parents, his father having
committed suicide shortly before his mother died in giving him birth.
Still a third character, Sherman, is seeking to know himself, and in his
case the fact coincides directly with the symbol, as he was a foundling
who received his surname from the circumstance of his having been
abandoned in a church.

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The mystery surrounding Sherman's parentage adds much to the
interest of the plot on a realistic level, and it is connected with the
mystery surrounding the suicide of Jester's father. Jester finally learns
from the Judge that he and his son had not seen eye-to-eye on the race
problem (neither do Jester and the Judge, incidentally), and that his
father, a lawyer, had fallen in love with one of his clients, a white
woman whose Negro lover was on trial for murdering her husband.
Jester's father tried to convince the jury that the killing was in self
defense (which it was), but the trial, at which the Judge presided,
proved a mockery of justice: the Negro was hanged, and the woman,
who had refused to testify against him, cursed Jester's father on her
deathbed—she died in childbirth shortly after the trial—for losing the
case. Maddened by his failure, by the injustice of the incident, by the
frustration of his love, and by the death of his client, who never
guessed that he took more than a professional interest in the case,
Jester's father shot himself. Sherman Pew was this woman's son by her
Negro lover.

Jester's inherent liberalism is strengthened by the knowledge that

social injustice has been partly to blame for the tragedy of his father's
life, and he resolves to become a lawyer himself and take up the battle
where his father left off: his life thus achieves moral direction.
Sherman is not so fortunate; he is to find his identity in martyrdom,
for when he moves into a white neighborhood his house is bombed,
and, though he has been warned by Jester, he refuses to flee and loses
his life. As for Malone, who has taken orders all his life, his
opportunity comes when, at a drawing of lots to determine who shall
bomb Sherman's house, the job falls to him and he refuses it. Shortly
after this he dies with the consolation of having made a moral choice
for himself and thus of having lived at last, however briefly.

In all of Mrs. McCullers's earlier work—even in The Square Root of

Wonderful—she was concerned with the loneliness that results from a
lack of rapport with other individuals; in Clock Without Hands she is
concerned with the loneliness that results from a lack of rapport with
the self. The search for self is the theme of her latest novel, and in its
insistence upon the necessity for moral engagement and upon the
importance of choice one recognizes the impact of existential doctrine:

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the "existential crisis," indeed, is at the very center of the book. (The
book that Malone chooses to read in the hospital is Kierkegaard's
Sickness Unto Death, and the sentence in it that most impresses him
is: "The greatest danger, that of losing one's own self, may pass off
quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg,
five dollars, a wife, etc., is sure to be noticed.")

I have shown how the theme of identity is related to that of loneliness,

and they are both related to the time phenomenon: loss of identity
results in loneliness, and when one is lonely time, as we have noted,
passes with maddening slowness. It is for this reason that Malone,
while he is waiting for his death—or rather for the moment of free
engagement which will give meaning to his life— complains of a
"zone of loneliness" (the same phrase that Philip uses in The Square
Root of Wonderful); that the summer seems interminable to Jester,
lounging in his grandfather's big house; and that Sherman, in spite of
the job the Judge gives him as his "private amanuensis," is horribly
bored and haunted toward the end by a feeling that he must "do
something." The old Judge is lonely also, not because he lacks identity
but because when his wife, whom he loved sincerely, died, his
capacity for love died with her. He does not love his grandson so
much as he is hurt by the knowledge (which he tries to conceal from
himself) that Jester can no longer love him.

The theme of identity is also related to that of ideal love. Like Frankie
in The Member of the Wedding, both Jester and Sherman yearn to
identify themselves with something bigger than themselves and
outside themselves, which is merely another way of saying that they
are unconsciously seeking a love object. This is symbolized on the
literal level by the fact that Jester cannot love his grandfather and that
Sherman, longing for a mother, invents a fantasy that she is Marian
Anderson.The same is true of Malone, of whom it is significant that he
cannot love his wife: he is seeking an ideal love, not a physical one
(like Frankie, he does not wish to be joined to any particular person
but to that which joins all people—as Frankie puts it, "the 'we' of
me.") It is by thus identifying themselves with something larger than
themselves—in this case the ideal of social justice— that all of them
become conscious of their individual identities.

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The search for identity parallels the search for ideal love, but in Clock
Without Hands, as elsewhere in Mrs. McCullers's work, love on the
physical level is doomed to disappointment: Malone's daughter, Ellen,
loves Jester, who is scarcely aware of her existence; Jester is secretly
in love with Sherman, who constantly mistreats him; and Sherman
worships another Negro, Zippo, whose "house guest" he is and who
mistreats him. The pattern is even carried back to an earlier
generation, for it will be remembered that Jester's father was in love
with his client, who cursed him with her dying breath. Here, as in The
Ballad of the Sad Café, the beloved "fears and hates" the lover: when
Jester attempts to kiss Sherman, the caress is returned with a blow,
and when Malone's wife makes advances to him he is repelled and
rushes from the house. And just as Mrs. McCullers in her other novels
was careful to select characters between whom any physical union
was out of the question (like the manlike Amelia and the homosexual
dwarf), she has here been at pains to depict another impossible
situation, since Sherman is not only of the same sex as Jester but is
also a Negro. There is also in this novel the same peculiar mixture of
love and pity that characterized the relationship of Singer and
Antonapoulos in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter of Mrs. Langdon and
Anacleto in Reflections in a Golden Eye; of Martin Meadows and
Emily in the short story "A Domestic Dilemma"; and of Amelia and
the dwarf in The Ballad of the Sad Café. For Mrs. Malone's ill‐
timed advances are made in the knowledge that her husband has not
long to live, and Jester feels sorry for Sherman because of his race.
Yet another familiar idea in Clock Without Hands is that illusions are
necessary to enable men to endure their existence. Just as Mick
dreams of becoming a concert pianist in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
and Frankie dreams of traveling around the world in The Member of
the Wedding, and just as Sister in The Square Root of Wonderful
chooses her lovers from the Mediterranean area, so here Jester dreams
of saving Marilyn Monroe from an avalanche in Switzerland and
riding down Broadway in a blizzard of ticker tape, while Sherman
convinces himself that his real mother is Marian Anderson and writes
her letters that are never answered. Even the old Judge has his dreams,
which center about the restoration of Confederate currency by the
federal government. As for Malone, bored with his wife and work, he

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daydreams constantly, and his situation reminds us of Frankie
Addams's: it is, in fact, the situation of most men, forced into an
unhappy compromise between the ideal romantic relationships for
which they long and those humdrum and unsatisfactory substitutes
which are available to them. Malone, indeed, is Everyman, with
Everyman's share of faults but also with his dignity and capacity for
the moral life. And of course the shadow of his impending death is the
same shadow under which all men labor: to this extent we are all
watching a "clock without hands."
I have only hinted at the extraordinary richness of this novel, which is
full of incidental meanings and of the wonderful insights and
observations that we have come to expect of its author ("The laughter
of disaster does not stop easily, and so they laughed for a long time,
each for his own disaster"). It is full, too, of her powerful compassion,
a compassion that embraces even the dishonest old Judge, who reads
the Kinsey Report behind the covers of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire but sees that it is banned from the public library.
The Judge is marvelously real; he is Mrs. McCullers's best character to
date, and I almost wish that this were not the case, for in no sense is he
the protagonist of the book. The author has allowed herself to be
carried away in the process of creating a character who, for all his
lifelikeness, is minor to her essential purpose. The realistic level of the
novel is concerned with his activities, and they are so engrossing in
themselves that they detract from the primary themes, which are
expressed in terms of allegory. The chief defects of Clock Without
Hands are thus defects of emphasis and proportion.
I do not think I overstate the case when I say that Carson McCullers is
probably the best allegorical writer in America since Hawthorne and
Melville.Her writing is almost never peripheral, as Faulkner's often is;
it goes straight to the heart of its subject, and it rarely fumbles. It is
ironical that her gift for realism, especially in dialogue and
characterization, has operated in her case less as a blessing than as a
curse. As I see it, Mrs. McCullers is now faced with the choice of
returning to pure allegory like The Ballad of the Sad Café or of
writing a straight realistic novel. There is still a third alternative—of
creating a main character who, like Frankie Addams, will be as
convincing as a human being as she is effective allegorically.

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E. L. Doctorow

The political content of Doctorow's fiction has often been commented

upon by reviewers and authors of short articles. Yet there is no
booklength scholarly study of how politics informs Doctorow's work.
This gap compromises our ability to appreciate Doctorow's fiction,
which is best understood by apprehending his political vision in
combination with the specific genre choices he makes in each work,
with his stylistic experimentation, with his continual revision of
American myths.

Presently there is such excitement over some socially conscious

fiction, such as Don De Lillo's Underworld and Toni Morrison's
Beloved, that it may be difficult to recall how disparaged political
writing has been as recently as the 1980s, when what some have
described as more insulated fiction was far more popular. To
understand Doctorow's pull toward political fiction, as well as the
particular contours of politics in his fiction, it is useful to review his
biography. E. L. Doctorow was born in the Bronx (New York City) in
1931 to lower-middle-class Jewish-American parents. His paternal
grandfather was an intellectual, a socialist, and an atheist.

His family's and to some extent Doctorow's own political and

religious views have been characterized by critic John Clayton as
radical Jewish humanism, “It is the heritage of Jewish writers to deal
with suffering, especially suffering as a result of some essential
injustice in the human or divine world, suffering to which they offer a
response of compassion and yearning for a life modeled on human
kindness” (in Trenner 109). Furthermore, Clayton argues that the
politics of Jewish immigrant culture was largely radical—anarchist,
socialist, communist, Zionist, or some amalgam of these with faith in
the labor movement (110). Religious practice need not play a critical
role in defining oneself as a Jew; rather, one's sensibility and ideals
might.

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As an undergraduate in the 1950s Doctorow attended Kenyon College,
majored in philosophy, and studied with John Crowe Ransom, one of
the New Criticism's foremost critics at a time when this approach
reigned. The New Criticism perceived of a literary work as a “well-
wrought urn, ” a self-contained artifact that could be understood by
examining its formal techniques, not by examining the context in
which it was written. The insular approach of this criticism, coupled
with the conservative political climate of the 1950s, made many critics
wary of political novels, ready to dismiss them as propaganda. In a
conversation with me years ago Doctorow acknowledged the tension
between his upbringing in a New York progressive Jewish home and
his schooling in a college stressing formalism, but emphasized that the
tension was ultimately productive, enabling him to avoid the excesses
of both formulaic political writing and the academic dandy novel. He
navigates between these extremes through his adaptation of popular
and literary genres as well by his insistence on certain themes.

Unlike some contemporary authors who seem to glow in celebrity

status, Doctorow is predisposed to privacy. Certainly he has inserted
himself into public debates, having written numerous essays that
critique government policy or public sensibility in matters such as
nuclear weapons. But unlike some other writers, such as Amiri
Baraka, who boldly assert their political views, Doctorow is wary of
direct statements. Consider his words in the introduction to his
collection of essays Jack London, Hemingway and the Constitution,
“With one exception the pieces in this book were written because
someone asked me to write them. Left to my own devices I will write
fiction. I will choose the thrown voice and its tropes” (ix). The image
of the novelist as ventriloquist evokes Bakhtin's concept of indirect
discourse and prompts me to describe Doctorow's politics as a politics
of indirection. It is a politics borne out of a combination of a private
personality, a particular upbringing, and coming of age at a particular
historical moment.

Certainly Doctorow shies away from direct political involvement in

part because he is afraid of taking too much time away from his
writing. But more importantly, he adheres to a vision of the artist as
detached witness, similar to the filmmaker in Rent, who chronicles his

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friends' lives while remaining at a distance from them. Part of this
distance may be attributed to Doctorow's skepticism about the
possibility of affecting change, a suspicion that takes many forms.
First, it may manifest itself in novels such as Welcome to Hard Times
by expressing distrust of progress and Enlightenment ideals, a
skepticism commonly associated with postmodernism. Alternatively,
it may take the form of distrust of political processes, a particular
concern of The Book of Daniel. In his introduction to Jack London,
Hemingway, Doctorow reflected on his experience of coming of age
during the McCarthy era, a time when many politicians shamelessly
jumped on an anti-Red bandwagon and blacklisting destroyed many
lives. Dissent was dangerous; conformity was enforced. It was also a
time during which news of Stalin's atrocities and other revelations
about Russian communism shattered the vision of some leftists that
communism was an extension of democratic ideals. Doctorow and
other members of the so-called Silent Generation reacted to these two
phenomena with detachment and withdrawal from the political
process. As Doctorow himself once explained in an interview with
Larry McCaffery, “It's the fate of my generation that we've never
shared a monumental experience. We think of ourselves as loners”
(37).

While he may not identify a collective experience that has shaped his
generation, Doctorow constantly seeks to re-envision the familial,
social, and historical forces that have shaped his life and inform his
fiction. The resultant stance, manifested differently in various works
but present throughout Doctorow's fiction, I have termed skeptical
commitment. The postmodern vein in Doctorow's fiction and in essays
such as “False Documents, ” widely commented upon, might be seen
as a skeptic's position— the belief that true knowledge or knowledge
of a particular area is uncertain; hence, one adopts an attitude of doubt
or disposition toward incredulity. For Doctorow absolute certainty of
one's position or the possibility of definitively answering questions is
itself a danger. Yet while he remains suspicious of definite answers
and, more importantly, of the possibility of knowing with certainty, he
is also suspicious of radical uncertainty and passionately committed to
certain idea and causes. In an interview with Richard Trenner,
“Politics and the Mode of Fiction, ” Doctorow refers to being

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characterized as someone with a primitive sense of justice, of what's
fair and what's not (52). There is, I believe, a very keen perception of
Doctorow's political vision in this assessment. Throughout his fiction
he depicts inequality in what we have come to call the “trinity of
oppression”—especially race issues in Ragtime; class issues in
Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Loon Lake, Billy
Bathgate, and The Waterworks; and gender issues in Ragtime and
World's Fair.

Doctorow's fiction is particularly sensitive to class issues, often

suggesting sympathies with the underclass while critiquing individual
greed and its concomitant lack of community values. This fiction does
not, however, address only this “trinity” of inequities. Rather, his
vision of the just society is one which would enable people to self-
actualize. According to Doctorow, in a truly just society, “... everyone
[would] be able to live as he or she is endowed to live; that if a person
is in his [sic] genes a poet, he be allowed to practice his poetry”
(Trenner 55). It is a yearning that is particularly expressed through the
artist figures in Ragtime, Loon Lake, and Lives of the Poets: A Novella
and Six Stories.

This vision of personal fulfillment has ramifications far beyond an

individual's life, for in Doctorow's fiction the personal is indeed
political. In part, this equation stems from Doctorow's suspicion of
organized politics; in part, it is the logical outgrowth of his aversion to
political sloganeering typical of the 1960s and 1970s, and perhaps an
awareness of the futility of leaders trying to change countries when
they could not change themselves. To quote Doctorow advocating a
view he attributes to Wilhelm Reich, “there is no hope for political
progress until people can be freed from their neurotic character
structures”(Levine “Writer” 64).

Hence, the quest for personal fulfillment, or at least for some personal
resolution, is a crucial part of the “commitment, ” that is, the word
“commit” means to oblige or bind, to carry into action deliberately, to
assign or pledge to some particular course. Essentially, “commitment,
” even if it begins on a micropolitical level of work on the self,
suggests attachment, and often some form of public action.

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American literature has, since the time of the Puritans, featured the
jeremiad as a prolonged complaint, a prophet's indictment of his
society characteristic of work such as the muckrakers' novels or Allan
Ginsberg's “Howl.” Doctorow struggles to accommodate this form to
his artistry (as successful practitioners of the work have always done).
To this end, he has repeatedly adapted genres such as the Western, the
romance, and the detective novel, often playing with accepted
conventions, and thus avoiding didacticism. Rather than having an
omniscient narrator report on situations, Doctorow's novels often
feature narrators who agonize about their ability to comprehend and
render events, but who nonetheless “bear witness.” For many
contemporary authors, the idea of the writer bearing witness is indeed
important. Consider the poem “It Was My First Nursing Job” in Dark
Blond by Belle Waring. Here she describes a doctor's indifference to a
patient, which results in a stillbirth. Reflecting on how she told a
father of his newborn's death, she ponders that today, “I would say, I
am your witness./ No. I have never told the whole truth./ Forgive me”
(7—9). Waring's speaker does not tell the truth because, in part, she is
a nurse and her loyalties are to the institutions and the doctors with
whom she works as well as to the patients. To be effective witnesses,
writers must be, according to Doctorow, “independent witnesses ... not
connected to the defense of any institution, whether it be the family or
the Pentagon or God” (Levine “Writer” 69). The echoes of Stephen
Dedalus here reinforce the notion of the artist's detachment, but for
Doctorow the detachment is from official institutions, not from ideals
such as justice, equality, and the like. Cynical detachment is one
possible response, suggested particularly by Daniel in the earlier parts
of The Book of Daniel, but ambivalent involvement represented in the
figures of Jonathan at the end of the novella Lives of the Poets or
McIllvaine in The Waterworks is another, more desirable one.

Each of Doctorow's major novels raises questions about the artist's

relation to political and social issues, whether it is possible to
progress, and what it means to be committed. None do so as directly,
however, as his two autobiographically based works: Lives of the
Poets: A Novella and Six Short Stories (1985), and World's Fair
(1986). Hence, it is useful to begin close examination of Doctorow's
fiction with these works. Lives of the Poets: A Novella and Six Short

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Stories (1984) contains stories, presumably by the writer of the
novella that follows, Lives of the Poets. This metafictional element is
virtually the only experimental feature of this volume. Critics Carol
Harter and James R. Thompson in E. L. Doctorow have pointed out a
common theme of dereliction in these works (105). “The Leather
Man” depicts a person who grotesquely dresses in layers of coats and
shawls, topped with a leather outer armor and a pointed leather hat.
His bizarre attire is not to be taken as a mark of individual
maladjustment; rather, “You remember your Thoreau. There's a
definite political component of avoiding all other human beings and
taking on the coloration of your surroundings” (69). His detached,
alienated stance, and that of so many Doctorow characters, may be
partially explained by reference to the theories of political theorist
Peter Sloterdijk on cynical detachment. According to Sloterdijk, the
cynic is often a cutting-edge figure on the urban landscape. The cynic
is distinguished by his/her enlightened false consciousness,
Sloterdijk's revision of this Marxist concept. In Marxist theory,
citizens in bourgeois cultures often develop a false consciousness that
identifies with ruling class interests rather than their own. People
might, for example, vote for politicians whose tax policies benefit
only the rich. In contrast to this false consciousness that naively
embraces reigning ideologies, enlightened false consciousness
recognizes a futility in many activities such as voting in elections,
trying to become upwardly mobile, and so forth, but nonetheless goes
through the motions because doing so is necessary for economic, and
to some extent emotional, survival. If, as Sloterdijk claims,
enlightened false consciousness characterizes the modern period, there
is a certain typicality to The Leather Man's bizarre behavior; his
behavior is in fact common to those who are unable to commit to a
political or even a personal belief system.

Alternatively and somewhat paradoxically, “The Leather Man” may

be seen as a grotesque. The term “grotesque” here is one Doctorow
has adapted from Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. In
Anderson's work, an elderly writer (a frequent Doctorow narrator)
observed hundreds of truths that were all beautiful, but “the moment
one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it the truth,
and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth

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became a lie” (4—5). Notice here the suggestion that the nature of
truth is constantly shifting.) “The Leather Man” may be seen as a
grotesque of an often revered American type, the rugged individual.
Indeed, The Political Fiction argues that extreme individualism at the
expense of community values is often depicted as grotesque in
Doctorow's fiction.

A sense of disconnection inherent in “The Leather Man” also runs

through other stories such as “The Water Works” in which the body of
a young boy who has drowned in a water tower is found. Here and
throughout the stories in this volume Doctorow questions whether
there is a possibility of community. In “The Writer in the Family”
Doctorow more directly represents some of the choices writers must
make as they bear witness to their subjects. The narrator is a boy
whose father has recently died and who has fine writing skills.
Unwilling to break the news of the man's death to a frail grandmother,
the boy's family goads him into pretending to be his father and writing
letters to the elderly woman. In the course of narrating his subject the
boy comes to understand his father, a failure by many standards.
Realizing that his father's dream was to go to sea, the boy finally
writes a letter stating he [the father] is dying and wishes to have his
ashes scattered in the ocean. In the act of writing the boy recreates his
father's life and memory, effectively bearing witness to the man's
dreams and giving him an appropriate death.

The theme of the writer's isolation and responsibilities is more

extensively developed in the novella Lives of the Poets. The main
character, Jonathan, a middle-aged New York City writer, is suffering
various minor physical ailments and a general sense of dissatisfaction
with his life. His cohorts are other successful writers whose lives
might be described as typical Updike lives: living in comfortable
ennui, married for the second or third time. Jonathan is still married to
his first wife, but the two of them live apart; she in their suburban
home, he in New York City. Although a recognized writer with a
seemingly comfortable life, he is obviously estranged—from other
people, his wife, and himself. In stating that each book he writes took
him further away from himself, he is suggesting the alienation that a
writer's isolation can bring, as well as the separation that accompanies

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success, suggested in his friends' having uniformly stopped taking
public transportation in favor of taxis. Many of the male behaviors and
attitudes in this novella might be understood by considering theories
by feminists such as Carol Gilligan and Nancy Chodorow; the men
privilege individuation and autonomy at the expense of connection. As
a result, they often feel alienated and detached. In his restless,
dissatisfied state Jonathan perhaps needs only the impetus to connect
with others, an impetus provided by a woman who asks him to shelter
illegal aliens. The image of his teaching the alien boy to type is one of
father-son nurturance strikingly different from the strained father-son
relationships that permeate much of Doctorow's work. It is an image
of activism that only half succeeds because it is only half-believable
that Jonathan would involve himself in such a risky project. Still, the
novella is one of the earlier works that suggests Doctorow is striving
to develop an appropriate praxis. As represented in this novel, the
praxis is local and specific to the writer; the writer will nurture
someone who will perhaps bear witness to his own experience with
oppression. The commitment is qualified (Jonathan teaches one boy to
type) yet definite.

World's Fair (1985) is a künstlerroman about a New York Jewish boy

developing into a writer in the 1930s, a pivotal decade for many
Americans on the left and one that is the frequent setting of Doctorow
novels. In keeping with the themes of connection expressed in Lives of
the Poets, World's Fair includes the voices and perceptions of
narrators other than the boy Edgar—his mother, brother, and
grandmother. For example, his mother Rose says, “Phil admired your
father very much. We had wonderful friends. Only now do I see that
our lives could have gone in an entirely different direction” (29).
World's Fair thus continues the experimentation Doctorow began in
his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times, and reflects his interest in
language's oral quality.

Edgar has much in common with typical künstlerroman protagonists,

notably Stephen Dedalus from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man: while Stephen has poor eyesight, Edgar is asthmatic; both boys'
families experience downward mobility; Stephen is bullied by
classmates, Edgar threatened by anti-Semites. Yet as the latter

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example suggests, World's Fair, far more than most bildungsromane,
suggests Edgar coming of age in his society by finding his place in
it—not rejecting it as Dedalus did. In addition to resolving his feelings
about his somewhat dreamy father and detached, critical mother,
Edgar must come to terms with consumer culture represented by the
World's Fair. This fair ironically holds out the promise of progress at a
time when Hitler is gaining control in Europe, and America is
struggling for economic recovery; as in so much of Doctorow's fiction
the definition and possibility of progress itself is questioned.

But most importantly, Edgar's prize-winning (albeit second prize)

essay on “The Typical American Boy” suggests the necessity of a
writer's stating his/her Jewish identity in a public document. Written
in the aftermath of the confrontation with anti-Semitic thugs whom
Edgar escapes only by telling he is not Jewish, the essay states that the
typical American boy should hate Hitler. Furthermore, “if he is Jewish
he should say so. If he is anything he should say what it is when
challenged” (244). This is the impetus, the voice that will inform the
young boy's fiction.

Unlike many novelists, Doctorow did not publish autobiographical

pieces early in his career. Indeed, his first novel Welcome to Hard
Times (1960) is a western, and Doctorow had not yet been west of
Ohio. As critics have noted, Welcome to Hard Times is an inverted
Western, a genre that dates back to Stephen Crane's “The Blue Hotel.”
These revisions of popular westerns emphasize the region's dark side
and complicate notions of good and evil. Welcome to Hard Times also
bears the mark of the very recent memory of the Holocaust and the
existentialist philosophy that so influenced Doctorow and other
intellectuals in the 1950s. In this first novel Doctorow establishes the
political themes that would in various ways be expressed throughout
his work—the responsibility of the artist as historian and witness, the
destructiveness of greed in a community, the problematic notions of
history and progress.

Significantly, the Bad Man who destroys the town is named Clay
Turner; Frederick Jackson Turner's The Frontier in American History
forms a background for many of the ideas and actions in this novel. In

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a sense, the Bad Man, who indeed appears larger than life, is a
grotesque of Turner's rugged individual. According to Turner, frontier
society created a primitive organization based somewhat on the
family, but fundamentally antisocial. The survivors of the Bad Man's
carnage—Blue, the prostitute Molly, and the orphan Jimmy Fee—
form a loose family that unfortunately mirrors its society. Both Blue's
family and the town of Hard Times evolve out of self-interest and
greed rather than a sense of community.

After surviving a harsh winter, Blue, Molly, and Jimmy Fee become
what is the first of many blended families in Doctorow novels. On a
personal level, the blended family represents issues of dealing with the
past, for their coming together suggests a hope in the future despite
their having been traumatized by past wounds. Blue is optimistic
when new settlers arrive and economic activity flourishes.
Significantly, he resumes the record-keeping he maintained before the
conflagration, but with an important change. Rather than simply
logging deaths and births, he writes down events. The latter record is
much more problematic, for Blue constantly questions the accuracy of
his memory as well as the possibility of recording what occurred.
Welcome to Hard Times indeed articulates many of the concerns that
have preoccupied historians, historiographers, and literary critics—the
relationship between history and interpretation, between history and
memory, and the role of contingencies in history. The uncertainty
about history and interpretation is a key component of the
“skepticism” that marks Doctorow's skeptical commitment.

Within Welcome to Hard Times the “commitment” is best suggested

in the fable-like tale of a town that cannot recover from its past. While
Blue glories in the town's prosperity, Molly grows increasingly
anxious that the Bad Man will return. Ironically, Blue tells her that the
town is ready to stand up to the Bad Man, failing to recognize that
Hard Times is a typical gold rush town whose only institutions are
brothels and saloons: the antithesis of a community. Because the town
fails to balance individual gain with community welfare, it is indeed
vulnerable to scoundrels. When the boom dies, the people who have
overextended themselves are ruined and become vicious. In a
multiplication of evil, two Bad Men ride into town. The cycle is fully

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repeated when the town is not only burned to the ground, but when
Jimmy Fee, trying to defend Molly, kills her and the Bad Man, and he
himself becomes an outlaw. Jimmy Fee is the first of many Doctorow
children whom society fails to nurture. Witnessing such destruction,
the dying Blue hopes only that the wood remains may be useful to
someone. Blue could not fight against the Bad Man, but perhaps his
works and remnants could. Barbara Foley, discussing proletarian
fiction and praxis, would say, suggest a “way out, ” an end to impasse
for future generations.

Doctorow has described his next novel, Big as Life (1966), a science
fiction book, as his Mardi, a book that, despite years of effort, did not
work. The plot is far-fetched, and the style not up to Doctorow's usual
quality. In speculating as to why this second novel failed, Doctorow
suggested that it is not dark enough and he did not take enough risks
in writing it. If this is so, perhaps what he learned from the
shortcomings in Big as Life facilitated his writing his brilliant third
novel, The Book of Daniel (1971). As Doctorow would say, this novel
was “occasioned” by, or we might say inspired by, the Rosenberg
Case. In “False Documents” Doctorow articulates how a controversial
case such as the Rosenberg could be an inspiration to him: “Facts are
buried, exhumed, deposed, contradicted, recanted. There is a decision
by the jury and, when the historical and prejudicial context of the
decision is examined, a subsequent judgment by history. And the trial
shimmers forever with just the perplexing ambiguity characteristic of
a true novel” (in Trenner 23). In The Book of Daniel Doctorow finds a
way to further explore and complicate questions concerning the
possibility of actually recording and knowing history. Far more than
any other Doctorow novel, The Book of Daniel engages the central
tenets of postmodernism. The novel's style is boldly experimental,
frequently shifting chronology and point of view, seemingly
combining genres as diverse as the dissertation, history text,
travelogue, and memoir. It is also metafictional, suggesting the
difficulty of writing and interpretation themselves. The continuing
controversy surrounding the Rosenberg case upon which the Isaacson
Case is closely modeled suggests important questions about the
relationship between indeterminacy and commitment. The Book of
Daniel walks a line between representing that, as Daniel says after

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meeting the long-sought Selig Mindish, “the truth is irretrievable” and
demonstrating that certain events, such as infringements on individual
liberty during the McCarthy era, are true, verifiable, and must be
acknowledged. For example, during her trial Rochelle Isaacson
logically assesses factors affecting the trial—the nature of the jury and
the prosecution, the news coverage, the Korean War—and soundly
concludes that they will be judged guilty. In a novel in which there is
so much indeterminacy, the fact that some things are apparent and can
be objectively assessed is striking. Because it walks the line between
indeterminacy and verification so well, The Book of Daniel can be
seen as an example of what critic Alan Wilde calls “midfiction”—
fiction that uses postmodern techniques and accepts the primacy of
surface, but nonetheless tries to be referential and establish truths.

Daniel's difficulty in understanding political oppression as well as his

parents' and other communists' complicity in it are graphically
represented in the novel's structure. Three of its sections are named for
holidays, and the fourth is titled “Starfish.” The obviously disjunctive
section refers to the starfish's points, all converging at the center, and
indeed this section takes us to “the heart of the matter” in the book—
the actual trial, Susan's catatonic state, the March on the Pentagon.
Such material can never be completely integrated into the book.

In this novel Doctorow further develops the connection between the

personal and the political suggested in Welcome to Hard Times. He
has moved back to the urban setting that repeatedly energizes his work
as well as heightens the apparent alienation of characters. In The Book
of Daniel the protagonist Daniel's depiction as a cynical, bitter, and
often sadistic man undercuts sentimental caricatures of survivors,
particularly orphan children. As a detached urban figure going through
motions of getting a degree, marrying, and having a child, Daniel fits
Sloterdijk's profile of a modern cynic. Daniel is so thoroughly
disillusioned and cynical in part because there are no heroes in the
Isaacson case—Jews, communists, the left, and the Isaacson
themselves are shown to be complicit. Daniel perpetuates the resultant
political wounds on a personal level, being a cruel spouse and parent.
He cannot embrace any social institution because his own
participation in the society that killed his parents not only rankles him,

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but also raises questions as to his own complicity in his society's
wrongdoing. In many respects, The Book of Daniel is an effective
political novel because it not only portrays complicit characters, but,
in accordance with Barbara J. Eckstein's theory of the characteristics
of good political fiction, it makes readers feel complicit in the wrongs
about which they read and thus prompts them to reevaluate their
relationship to power structures in their society.

The Book of Daniel is the most obviously political Doctorow novel

because it represents an espionage trial. It also depicts a time of post-
war hysteria when outgroups—Jews and communists—were
frequently persecuted. The Peekskill incident, in which buses of
leftists returning from a Paul Robeson concert are ambushed and
attacked by rabid “patriots, ” is a microcosm of what happens in the
Isaacson case. Groups of people are endangered until the “patriots”
find a specific target on which to focus their hatred.

Furthermore, The Book of Daniel is about two generations of radicals,

the Old Left of the 1930s and the New Left of the 1960s. Artie
Sternlicht represents the ahistorical, opportunistic segment of the New
Left that tries to take advantage of the media, but ironically gives no
evidence of being more effective against the government than were
Old Leftists. Two other examples of ahistoricism are Linda Mindish,
who denies her past and remakes herself in California and Disneyland,
appropriately descried as a Baudrillard-like simulacrum substituting
for the real. The challenges for Daniel and for readers is to
acknowledge the burden of history without becoming immobilized by
it.

In the hopes of rescuing his mentally ill sister and silencing the
demons in his own head, Daniel begins a detective-like search to
discover the truth about his parents' guilt or innocence. But as the
novel progresses, Daniel moves from searching for the truth to
searching for an appropriate ritual or way to mourn, first suggested in
his participation in the March on the Pentagon and finally in the three
endings. He realizes he will never uncover the truth about his parents'
case, but he is nonetheless able to mourn them and to love his new
immediate family even as he accepts, in Barbara Eckstein's terms, his

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own and his society's complicity, “a network of personal, social,
political, even aesthetic conditions which perpetuate the stereotypes
and in turn rationalize the suffering” (32—33).

While The Book of Daniel is a densely written, challenging novel that

would suit a highly intellectual audience, Ragtime (1975), a novel
focusing on the years 1902 to 1919, also often characterized as
postmodern, is marked by a sense of play and easy accessibility. Its
style has been described as mock historical, imitating the simple facts
and characterizations of history books. Consider, for example, these
lines from the beginning of the book: “Everyone wore white in the
summer. Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical.
There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There were
no immigrants”(3—4).

These lines parody the dry, supposedly objective prose of

conventional history texts, what Bakhtin might call monolingual
discourse (60— 61). They do so playfully by including information
that would not be in history books, such as descriptions of tennis
racquets. However, the playful prose also underscores important
points, for in just a few paragraphs the narrator reports that there
apparently were Negroes and immigrants— and indeed the novel as a
whole bears this out. In some ways Ragtime is then a revisionist
history text including those who had been omitted from official
accounts. It is also a novel that toys with the preponderance of
illusions in human lives—Houdini's magic, the advent of filmmaking.
Both illusion and official history should be reconsidered. A key to the
novel's political insight might be summed up by the epigraph at the
beginning of the novel, “Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to
play Ragtime fast.” Indeed, this apparently light, entertaining novel is
filled with as much social criticism as Doctorow's more jeremiad-like
works, especially criticism of race and class inequities.

There are two governing clusters of images that structure Ragtime:

those of repetition suggested in Ford's assembly line, the Boy's
fascination with baseball; and the image of metamorphosis suggested
in the Boy's fascination with stories from Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Playfully, Ragtime teases out the relationship between these two

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images, questioning how the repetitious historical patterns of injustice
and discrimination affect the myth that in the United States people can
transform themselves.

As critics have noted, Ragtime is a romance. While an earlier

generation of American Studies scholars saw the romance as evading
direct engagement with sociopolitical issues, new Americanists find
the romance an essentially political document. According to Michael
Wilding, “The confrontation of the hopes of romance with the
actualities of realism runs throughout political fiction ... The formal
polarities arise from the situation, the politics, the character choices”
Romance dreams are suggested in figures such as Tateh; realism is
suggested in characters such as Emma Goldman, Mameh, and
Coalhouse Walker, Jr.

Although there are numerous historical figures such as J. P. Morgan,

Sigmund Freud, and Emma Goldman in the text, Ragtime's plot
centers on three families—a WASP one whose members are simply
named Mother, Father, Younger Brother, Grandfather, and the Boy
(whom many believe to be the clairvoyant narrator); Jewish-
immigrant Mameh, Tateh, and the girl; and African-American
Coalhouse Walker, his girlfriend Sarah, and their baby. In the spirit of
much proletarian fiction, the characters seem to be types representing
their ethnic and socioeconomic groups rather than individuals. The
novel depicts a period of rapid change in American society—new
inventions, changes in gender roles, the transition from a rural to an
urban society, the advent of the automobile and mass production.
Readers are given a quick, somewhat distanced panoramic view of the
era. Characters' potential to thrive in this society is marked first by
their ability to adapt to change and second, perhaps more importantly,
by their being allowed to change. Father, who cannot adapt to change,
conveniently sinks on the Luisitania, leaving the novel's landscape. In
contrast, Tateh and Mother evolve into happier human beings,
achieving what Mother might call a “life of genius, ” perhaps an
ultimate form of justice for Doctorow. Other, more controversial
characters such as Evelyn Nesbit, Emma Goldman, and Younger
Brother vanish from the novel: They either die or their lives are no
longer followed. Emma Goldman and Younger Brother do not strive

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for conventional success, but others do. The difference between who
is allowed to succeed and who is not is graphically illustrated in the
contrasting fates of Tateh and Coalhouse Walker. When Tateh stops
being an artist and a socialist activist, he hides his former life and his
Jewish identity, blends into the American mainstream, and prospers.
Coalhouse Walker, a proud, self-made man wants to achieve the
American Dream, but is thwarted by racism. He cannot hide being an
African-American. Unable to secure justice when his car is
vandalized, he becomes a terrorist, ironically reinforcing materialist
American values by conflating his identity with his car. Like Michael
Kohlhaas, the character in Kleist's short story on whom this subplot is
based, Coalhouse Walker's only choice is to die with dignity. That
Harry K. Thaw, Stanford White's murderer, marches in the Armistice
Day Parade long after Coalhouse Walker has been shot down
underscores the injustice in this society.

Doctorow played more freely with history in Ragtime than in any

other novel, and yet the fact that Coalhouse Walker is not a historical
character while Evelyn Nesbit is does not make the fates of the two
any less real. Each story is true to the “facts” of American history as
we understand race, class, and gender dynamics in the early 1900s.
Ragtime is, like The Book of Daniel, an effective piece of midfiction
because it does not merely accept the primacy of surface, but rather
engages it to bear witness. Like the history texts it mimics, the prose
initially seems to be a surface accounting of events. But this prose
actually prompts readers to recognize the social problems and
continuing injustice that mark an era when, on the surface,
technological progress is rapid and the quality of life seems to be
improving.

While his abandonment of his art and socialist goals is somewhat

problematic, Tateh's upward mobility is essentially benign; he does
not destroy others in his attempt to succeed. In Loon Lake (1980),
often described as a Depression-era inverted Horatio Alger story, the
main character moves from poverty to great wealth through his
ruthlessness, cunning, and luck. Doctorow's interest in the Depression,
his skepticism of the possibility of progress, and his interest in father-
son relationships as mirrors of political issues coalesce in this highly

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innovative adaptation of the proletarian novel. As a 1970s adaptation
of this genre, Loon Lake examines parallel lives of working-class
characters, focuses on union activity, and reconfigures a bourgeois
plot. The novel might disappoint some dogmatic radicals, however,
for it depicts assimilation rather than radicalization and deals with
issues such as complicity and betrayal.

While the 1930s proletarian novel often eschewed experimentation,

Loon Lake is highly innovative and challenging. Initially, it is difficult
to determine whether Joe or Penfield is narrating. Furthermore, the
plot line is interrupted with poems, computer printouts, and short
biographies, suggesting several interpretations of events. While in
World's Fair the presence of other voices enriched and complicated
Edgar's narrative, in Loon Lake the official biographies reduce the
complexities of characters' lives and again remind readers of the
drawbacks of official “factual” history. The dryness and lifelessness of
such documents are implicitly contrasted with the passion of Joe's love
for Clara, a passion which cannot endure in a world that Bennett
seemingly controls.

Loon Lake is a successful adaptation of the proletarian novel in part

because it is not formulaic; it includes many contingencies, one of the
most apparent ones being the parallels between Joe's and Penfield's
life, and to a lesser extent the parallels of Bennett with both men. All
men share the same birthdate. Joe and Penfield were both poor boys
alienated from their families; they both survived the dogs' attack, they
both fell in love with Clara, a working-class gun moll who nonetheless
becomes a Daisy-esque figure to these men. Such parallels undercut
bourgeois notions of individuality and stress how common
environments mold people.

In conversation Doctorow said that in part Loon Lake is about a man

who chooses the wrong father, and essentially, suffers the loss of his
soul.

Penfield does indeed see in Joe a surrogate son; he goes so far as to

tell the younger man “You are what I would want my son to be.” Yet

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Joe sees Penfield, a failed poet-in-residence kept at the lake as a
curiosity, as no more desirable than his own parents.

Essentially, Penfield as a poet suffers from a lack of community and a

lack of subject matter. Having rejected his father's admonition to write
about the workers' lives, he can find nothing inspirational at Bennett's
lake. The image of his body straining in the meditative poses of Zen
Buddhism suggests his emotional and intellectual desire to understand
and represent suffering, as well as a typically Buddhist desire to
escape repetitive cycles through death and rebirth into Nirvana. It is
fitting that someone who had always wanted to transcend suffering—
one proletarian artistic response—would die in an airplane with a
woman who wished she were without a body and would, like her, die
without an heir.

Warren Penfield, like Joe, disliked his own parents. Their common
disdain can be understood in part by reference to Richard Sennett and
Jonathan Cobb's The Hidden Injuries of Class in which the authors
argue that in a society where everyone supposedly can be middle
class, working-class youths often come to see their parents as failures
whom at all costs they should avoid imitating. The need to reject one's
parents contributes to the ruthlessness and anger that characterize Joe
and actually mold him to fit into the oppressor class.

Yet Joe tries to build a working-class life, and graphically describes

the rigors of factory work. His bold attempt to live with Clara as an
auto worker in a company town Bennett indeed controls might have
succeeded had the budding union not been infiltrated by Bennett's
spies. The effectiveness of Crapo Industrial Services represents how
difficult it is for solidarity to develop among workers. Ironically, the
shrewd Joe is duped by a seeming hillbilly. This act is but one of the
inversions in Loon Lake, one that again reflects Doctorow's interest in
the lines between appearances and reality. The carnival (evoking
Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque), in addition to representing an
escapist form of entertainment popular in the 1930s, is a mirror
society of Bennett's lake. People are commodified, disposed of when
no longer useful. Power is exerted by inflicting physical and sexual

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pain, most graphically illustrative in Joe's vengeful sex with Magda
Hearn.

cessfully married, indeed replicating his surrogate father's emotionally

empty life. In informing readers that Joe's last name is Korzeniowski,
the biography also complicates the doppelgänger theme and, like the
inclusion of Tateh in Ragtime, suggests the assimilation of immigrants
into the American Dream rather than their critique of it.

Despite the information it contains, this biography is a mock

biography as Ragtime is a mock history. It lists Joe's hobbies as petit
larceny, humorously legitimizing his crimes, embracing him as one of
the nation's wealthy industrialists who earned their fortunes at the
expense of others. Loon Lake thus does not suggest a “way out” of
what seems to be bourgeois determinism, but its experimental
techniques coupled with its proletarian themes suggest what Barbara
Eckstein calls complicities, not only among the characters, but likely
among any readers who wished to sever their roots for upward
mobility. Doctorow does not embrace the easy hope of radical change
still present in some leftists of the 1970s, but in Loon Lake vividly
represents the values that sustain the current regime and undermine
the possibility of such change.

While Loon Lake depicts a callous young man achieving wealth

through a chance inheritance, Doctorow's eighth novel, Billy Bathgate
(1989) represents a teen coming of age as a gangster. As in Loon
Lake, Doctorow in this novel uses inversions of the Horatio Alger
story and the proletarian bildungrsoman. The book is set in the 1930s,
but it actually suggests the danger of 1980s social and monetary
policies, policies that Doctorow frequently criticized. 17 In an
interview Doctorow stated that he, like many Americans, was
fascinated not by the actual gangsters, but by their mythic appeal. His
adaptation of an American myth in Billy Bathgate harkens back to
Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, and Ragtime
particularly. We might reflect on Barthes's notion that the world gives
myth a historical reality, and in turn gets back a natural image of it.
The public then is not in love with the actual, violent gangsters, but
with their naturalized renegade image. Billy Bathgate effectively

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engages readers at both levels: the actual in representing violent acts,
the mythic through Billy's adulation of Dutch Schultz.

Again, Doctorow adapts a popular genre, the crime novel, with a

tradition that has implications for Billy Bathgate. Unlike the detective
novel— which will soon be discussed—the crime novel does not
manifest an implicit faith in law and justice. Rather, it reflects a more
cynical society, and some theorists and practitioners might even argue
a more criminal society. As an urban figure living on the fringes of
society, and one who has personally experienced the failure of social
institutions, Billy has some affinities with Sloterdijk's criteria for a
modern-day cynic. Yet Billy does believe in the possibility and
satisfaction of upward mobility, a dream that distinguishes him from
the cynic and somewhat ironically marks him as an average American.

In Billy Bathgate a high-school aged boy, whose father has deserted

the family and whose apparently mentally-ill mother barely holds their
lives together, 18 dreams of a life beyond the poverty of his tough
Bronx neighborhood. Ultimately, he achieves this life through crime.
It has often been observed that in the United States historically there
have been two possible quick escapes from the ghetto: sports and
crime. Young Billy shows no athletic prowess and states that many of
the neighborhood figures were mobsters. Hence, Billy, an aspiring
criminal, manages to attract the attention of one of the crime bosses,
Dutch Schultz (who was an actual crime boss during this period) and
begin a sort of apprenticeship to the mob.

As a novel focusing on a boy trying to escape from the ghetto, Billy

Bathgate is a highly class-conscious novel. First, class is suggested in
the sheer number of times Billy says the word in references to “class
act” or “real class.” It is reinforced in Billy's simultaneous attraction
and intimidation in the presence of the upper-crust Drew, this novel's
equivalent of Loon Lake's Clara. Finally, the dream of class mobility
is represented in the image of Bathgate Avenue with its abundant
fruits evoking Schultz's references to wanting the fruits of his labor.
Although many may dream of upward mobility, Billy has specific
traits which will enable him to achieve it—primarily his tolerance for
violence and his ability to juggle. In this novel, even more than in

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Ragtime, America itself is a “big juggling act” which requires citizens
to effortlessly balance many diverse roles without showing signs of
strain. Juggling also signifies performance, acting itself, which, if we
look at Billy Bathgate as an allegory of the 1980s, brings to mind the
character of Ronald Reagan. Reagan's acting, like Billy's, other
characters' in this novel, and indeed many Doctorow characters in
general, is tied to his mutability. Billy has the ability to blend in with
the gang, even in the small town, Onandoga. His mentor, Dutch
Schultz, however, exemplifies mutability, moving from urban crime
boss to small-town good citizen, converting from Judaism to
Catholicism. When Schultz loses his chameleon-like traits—when he
loses his temper, impetuously killing—is when his survival is
threatened.

To Billy, Dutch Schultz is the father he never had. In this novel the
personal/political family dynamics that are crucial in much of
Doctorow's fiction are played out in the boy's identification with
Schultz. Some of the sentiments Schultz expresses about the need to
oppose a government that stood against him reflect not only a criminal
consciousness, but also an anti-government bias prevalent among
many on the extreme right. Dutch Schultz's being based upon, indeed
named after, a real character suggests that Doctorow is again playing
with the boundaries between fact and fiction.

In his death-bed monologue, Dutch Schultz significantly calls for this

mother. Billy's relationship with his mother is likewise crucial. Terry
Caesar argues that in many contemporary novels mothers are
disruptive voices, and that in a patriarchal society a mother's job is to
police her son: having a criminal son merely literalizes her work.
Caesar's otherwise provocative analysis ignores the class dimensions
of this father-son relationship. In many ghetto homes fathers are
missing and mothers are dependent on the agility and cunning of
youth for support, even if this support involves criminality.

Ultimately, Billy's mother (who is given no name) becomes functional

because of Billy's actions. Through his cunning and luck, Billy
uncovers the gang's fortune after Dutch Schultz is murdered. As heir
to Dutch Schultz, Billy is in many ways like Joe of Loon Lake: an

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inverted Horatio Alger protagonist. Moreover, he is an inversion of
the protagonist of the proletarian bildungsroman. The end of the novel
indicates that Billy has achieved respect by, in a typically cynical
fashion, going through the motions of getting an education. Yet it is
doubtful that Billy has escaped the gang life, even though as a youth
he may have thought he could do so. As Dutch Schultz told him, once
in the rackets, always in the rackets.

In Billy Bathgate Doctorow destroys or unpacks the myth that

gangsters are outsiders and constructs an image of them as grotesques.
Again, for Doctorow, as for Sherwood Anderson, a person becomes a
grotesque when he/she embraces a particular truth (such as economic
opportunity) too tightly or at the expense of all other truths. Hence, in
different ways “The Leather Man” and the Bad Man from Bodie are
grotesques of American individualism and unchecked greed.
Similarly, Donald Pease asserts, in a review of this novel, that
gangsters were “firm believers in the spirit of capitalism.” In their
world, “a different ordering of the relationship between needs and
wants prevailed, transforming the need for thrift into the wish to get
rich quick at the numbers” (458). This is the spirit that fueled
Reaganomics, some of the Wall Street scandals, and the Savings and
Loans debacles. Considering Eckstein's theory that good political
fiction makes readers recognize complicity, we might ponder the
extent to which this novel holds up an imperfect mirror to those who
lived through the 1980s. Partially that mirror would reflect a failure to
nurture.

It would further represent a lure of wealth so great that an essentially

good boy is drawn to ruthless crime figures. The text's ending suggests
the frightful possibility that crime might indeed pay. Billy Bathgate
does not, however, depict any possible way the course of events might
have been altered.

Doctorow's 1994 novel, The Waterworks, can be read as a provisional

resolution of many questions raised in Billy Bathgate, and indeed in
all his previous novels. Here Doctorow suggests that praxis is possible
and potentially effective against evil people and corrupt institutions. In
The Waterworks evil is represented as a collusion between science,

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wealth, and government. The depiction of a diabolical scientist,
Sartorius, whose hubris prompts him to violate what many would
consider human laws, has its roots in nineteenth-century American
writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. As in
Ragtime the romance genre is adapted, and it is again worthwhile to
consider new Americanist assessments of the romance. Polarities are
represented in Sartorius's destruction coupled with Martin's imperfect
recovery, for example.

The Waterworks also could be considered a detective novel, for it, like
The Book of Daniel, involves a search for the truth. As was previously
mentioned, the detective novel (a popular genre) typically manifests a
faith in reason, law, and justice; The Waterworks certainly exhibits
these themes. Hence, this novel is perhaps Doctorow's most effective
piece of midfiction, but one that slants in the direction of determinacy.
Its themes share much with a reconsideration of postmodernism
examined in Telling the Truth about History by Appleby et al. in
which the authors uphold, “the human capacity to discriminate
between false and faithful representations of past reality and beyond
that to articulate standards which helped both practitioners and readers
to make such discriminations” (261). 20 As did The Book of Daniel,
The Waterworks insists that although “truth” might be slippery, there
are some “truths” that are indeed verifiable and evident.

In addition to grappling with questions of praxis and verity, The

Waterworks insists upon the importance of community. This is first
suggested in the nineteenth-century newspaper's layout, somewhat
similar to the contemporary New York Times: “In those days we ran
stories straight down, side by side, a head, subheads, and story. If you
had a major story you ran it to the bottom of column one and took as
much of the next column as you needed” (114). In essence, the layout
visually represents interdependence. Furthermore, The Waterworks
actually represents community action by depicting McIlvaine, Donne,
Grimshaw, and Emily working together to find Martin Pemberton, and
ultimately bring Sartorius to justice. Simultaneously, the newspaper
suggests the failure of community, for McIlvaine iterates that there is
no need for papers in village societies in which residents spread news
among themselves, and keep track of all residents. Hence, there would

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be no undernourished paperboys or street urchins that populate this
novel and indeed populated nineteenth-century urban centers.

While the theme and plot of this novel are relatively determinate, and
indeed may harken back to more realistic fiction, the style is decidedly
postmodern and experimental. As he did in World's Fair, Doctorow
strives for an oral quality in The Waterworks. As did Conrad in Heart
of Darkness, Doctorow imagines a narration, one between the elder
McIlvaine and a stenographer taking down his remembered tale. The
same questions of reliability that marked Welcome to Hard Times are
implicit in The Waterworks, but philosophical speculations on the
reliability of his account do not trouble McIlvaine as they do Blue.
Rather, narrative gaps are visually suggested in the numerous ellipses,
left for readers to consider.

McIlvaine is a lifelong, albeit ambivalent, urbanite who remained in

New York City rather than follow what was purportedly the great
story of the 1800s, the settlement of the West. In fact, the growth of
urban cities was the other, less commented upon, great story of the
era. The booming decade after the Civil War was the beginning of the
Gilded Age (the later part of which was depicted in Ragtime) when the
gap between the haves and the have nots widened. 21 In cities, which
swelled as a result of immigration, the divisions among a supposedly
classless society were especially apparent, for the rich and poor lived
in relatively close proximity to one another, and exploitation could be
easily observed.

The Waterworks suggests that determined and rational effort can

prevail against evil (if not against all the manifestations of social
injustice). The novel is, however, very skeptical about the possibility
of scientific achievement. As was previously discussed, Doctorow
came of age in the 1950s, in the aftermath of the Second World War,
and hence in many ways shares outlooks on science described by
Appleby et al. According to these authors, this post—World War II
generation had seen science produce and then been unable to control
the nuclear bomb; hence, it was far less optimistic than its
predecessors about science's potential to improve human life (172). As
important, Doctorow in conversations about possible influences on

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this novel referred to the Nazi experiments, an awareness of which
would undoubtedly make one wary of scientific experi ments on
vulnerable population groups and prompted him to reconsider the role
and limits of science, to examine the lines between genius and hubris,
a line Sartorius clearly crosses.

Like many Doctorow characters, Sartorius might be seen as a

grotesque: a mad scientist or rabid individualist, especially in view of
the fact that the has no professional affiliations. He is a symbol of the
excess that Doctorow, in the name of community values and social
justice, has repeatedly cautioned against through his fiction. Also, his
invention of his own name suggests a common American practice of
trying to better one's status by changing one's name. That he was able
to turn normally cynical men into “acolytes” illustrates the persistent
power of the con man who plays upon rubes' vulnerabilities, in this
case a desire for immortality.

It is ironic that Augustus Pemberton trusts Sartorius, for he has so few

ties with others. In fact, he is estranged from Martin who risks his life
to find his father. In The Waterworks the theme of failed nurturance is
manifested not only or even primarily in Martin's strained relationship,
but most graphically in the orphan children whom Sartorius exploits.
Martin Pemberton is similar to Joe in Loon Lake in that he is given
two surrogate father figures—Sartorius and McIlvaine—to choose
between. Unlike Joe, Martin ultimately transfers his affections to the
poorer, struggling man rather than the richer, corrupt one. This choice
not only signals Martin's redemption, but harkens back to Loon Lake,
suggesting, in Eva Goldbeck's terms, a “way out” of the impasse in
that novel: Joe's life might indeed have been different had he chosen
another father figure.

Although Martin is saved from Sartorius and restored sufficiently to

marry his fiancée, he is, like Marlow in Heart of Darkness, profoundly
altered by his experience, which is in keeping with Doctorow's view
of history's lasting power. In The Waterworks pernicious patterns of
scientific hubris and political corruption are broken, but they
nonetheless leave their mark. The narrator, McIlvaine, who struggles

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to recreate historical events and their meaning, does not doubt the hold
this history has upon him and his contemporaries.

McIlvaine's desire to understand and communicate history is best

exemplified in his desire to write something that would transcend
mere reporting, something along the lines of a novel or a memoir. By
accomplishing his desired task, McIlvaine would be breathing life into
history in a manner that historiographers have long argued historians
must do. That he decides not to publish what was undoubtedly the
greatest story of his career possibly reflects his anxiety about
accurately rendering this story, as well as a communal concern that if
“the horror” of Sartorius were to become widely known people would
be overwhelmed by the magnitude of his evil.

Ultimately then, the romance ending, with its dual wedding and
depiction of the peaceful winter city, apparently frozen in time, stands
in juxtaposition to McIlvaine's ruminations of the past. These elements
combined help to make The Waterworks a highly effective piece of
midfiction, a novel that combines postmodern indeterminacy and
stylistic experimentation with an implicit claim that there are some
definite truths one should try to discover and that there is possibility
for praxis and positive change. In accordance with postmodern
thinkers such as Foucault, Doctorow practices a version of
“micropolitics.” Action is local, situated in the community, in
individual deeds and work on the self rather than in mass movements
of which Doctorow has persistently remained skeptical. And yet
action is possible.

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