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Objectivity and Low Seriousness in American Naturalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Louis J. Budd
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Extract

Resistance toward accepting realism and naturalism as major literary terms is lively and will undoubtedly stay so. Though nobody seriously denies that a naturalistic mind or intellectual system had matured by 1900, some insist that realism and naturalism, grounded in the literal and leaning toward the positivistic, are antithetical, to artistic creation or else irrelevant to its unique qualities. Such a view has helped to refine the debate over theory, which recently elicited the brilliant opening chapter of Edwin H. Cady's The Light of Common Day (1971). Of course, this debate is ultimately worthwhile so far as it helps us appreciate specific novels. Only the zealot needs to decide what is the most honorific mode of fiction or to deny that experience radiates inward and outward into both private and social realms—between which different readers and different sides of the same reader will make varying degrees of choice. The private realm may express itself best in symbols, impressionism, or fantasy, but the world that we fitfully share and that is partly the product, as well as a determinant, of our inwardness attracts some novelists toward mimesis. I unabashedly believe that mimesis serves humanistic ends in trying to cope with the outward world and bring it into perspective against the inward and that it fights through to becoming an invaluable mode of discourse.

Type
An American Tragedy: A 50th Anniversary
Information
Prospects , Volume 1 , October 1976 , pp. 41 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1976

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References

NOTES

1. Cady, Edwin, The Light of Common Day: Realism in American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1971).Google Scholar

2. In Georgia Review, 18 (1964)Google Scholar; reprinted in Young, T. D. and Fine, R. E., eds., American Literature: A Critical Survey (New York: American Book, 1968), II, 214–28.Google Scholar

3. Cady, , Common Day, pp. 19–20.Google Scholar

4. Curtin, William M., ed., The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews, 1893–1902 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1970), II, 607.Google Scholar

5. For a relevant analysis see Poirier, Richard, The Comic Sense of Henry James: A Study of the Early Novels (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960).Google Scholar

6. Introduction to Riverside Edition (Boston: Houghton, 1957), pp. v–vi. Howells was, however, sensitive to both the need for and the difficulty of achieving a perfectly honest, transparent tone; see, for example, section IV of “Editor's Study,” Harper's, 76 (02, 1888), 479–80Google Scholar, which ends by praising Tolstoy for his refusal “to caricature or dandify any feature of life.”

7. I refer to the version in Zabel, Morton D., ed., Literary Opinion in America, rev. ed. (New York: Harper, 1951)Google Scholar; see also Wright, Andrew, “Irony and Fiction,” first published in 1951 and reprinted as the final essay in Kumar, Shiv and McKean, Keith, eds., Critical Approaches to Fiction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968).Google Scholar

8. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 372.

9. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), p. 49.

10. Glicksberg, Charles I., The Ironic Vision in Modern Literature (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), p. 11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Booth, Wayne C., A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 44.Google Scholar

12. “A Modern Instance,” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910, No. 4 (Fall, 1968), 88.Google Scholar

13. Quoted from Marvin Mudrick by Wright, Andrew, “Irony and Fiction,” p. 385Google Scholar. For the point made with a more general thrust in a specific socio-political context see Walcutt, C. C., “Irony: Vision or Retreat?” Pacific Spectator, 10 (Autumn, 1956), 354–66.Google Scholar

14. Muecke, Douglas C., The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen, 1969), p. 220.Google Scholar

15. Beaver, Harold, “A Figure in the Carpet: Irony and the American Novel,” in Essays and Studies [London], 15 (1962), 104.Google Scholar

16. Gissing's ideas and his working-class novels published during the 1880s were far less stabilized than this quotation implies; for Gissing as well as his British contemporaries see Keating, P. J., The Working Class in Victorian Fiction (London: Routledge, 1971).Google Scholar

17. Muecke, , p. 14.Google Scholar

18. Ibid., p. 56.

19. Anatomy of Criticism, p. 49.Google Scholar

20. Introduction to McTeague, vol. VIIIGoogle Scholar in Collected Edition of Frank Norris (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1928).Google Scholar

21. From a review reprinted in Pizer, Donald, ed., The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1964), pp. 165–66.Google Scholar

22. “A Plea for Romantic Fiction” (1901)Google Scholar, reprinted in The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, p. 78.Google Scholar

23. P. 370.

24. After Bankshot Fraley got a cue ball “stuck in his mouth” at the Sport Center Billiard Hall in Raleigh, North Carolina, a columnist read the relevant passage in McTeague to its proprietor, who commented: “It happens every once in a while, doesn't it?”— Raleigh News and Observer, 03 17, 1969, p. 24.Google Scholar

25. Warren, Robert Penn, “Introduction,” Modern Library Edition of All the King's Men (New York: Random House, 1953), p. iv.Google Scholar

26. Johnson, George W., “The Frontier Behind Frank Norris's McTeague,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 26 (11, 1962), 91–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am bothered by Johnson's seeming to equate the frontiersman and the miner who worked for a company. Incidentally, he states well his sense of Norris' condescension toward McTeague.

27. Introduction to Rinehart Edition (New York: Holt, 1950), p. xiii. Gardner, Joseph H., “Dickens, Romance, and McTeague: A Study in Mutual Interpretation,” Essays in Literature, 1 (Spring, 1974), 72Google Scholar, comments on reaching beyond the “bourgeois condescension” of sympathy for McTeague though Gardner finally looks back to Dickens' example for Norris' breakthrough.

28. The Novels of Frank Norris (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1966), p. 76.Google Scholar

29. Keating, , The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction, p. 173.Google Scholar

30. P. J. Keating, in his introduction to Working-class Stories of the 1890s (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), p. xiGoogle Scholar, notes the “rejection of humor based on working-class ignorance or eccentricity”; yet even the stories he reprints lean often toward the kind of humor he decries.

31. “Mixed and Uniform Prose Styles in the Novel” (1960)Google Scholar, reprinted in Stevick, Philip, ed., The Theory of the Novel (New York:Free Press, 1967), p. 217.Google Scholar

32. “Frank Norris,” North American Review, 175 (12, 1902), 775.Google Scholar

33. American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1956), pp. 22–23.Google Scholar

34. Black Boy (1945; rpt. New York: Perennial Classic, 1966), p. 274Google Scholar. In an interview of 1941 Wright called Dreiser “the greatest writer this country had ever produced” and Jennie Gerhardt “the greatest novel”—quoted in Kinnamon, Keneth, The Emergence of Richard Wright (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1972), p. 44 n.Google Scholar

35. Writers at Work: Paris Review Interviews. Third Series (New York: Viking, 1967), p. 180Google Scholar. Bellow's short story “Leaving the Yellow House” (1957) very neutrally projects a hedonistic, goods-oriented woman crumbling toward death.