Regionalism, Local Color, and Donna M. Campbell

Donna M. Campbell has some really interesting things to say about regionalism in Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885-1915 [Athens: Ohio UP, 1997].One enjoyable aspect of Campbell’s extremely informative book is its clear prose and lucid argument. I’m only a few chapters in, but I wanted to share some highlights so far:

“Realism was not all local color, of course, and yet a continual thread of feeling runs through the works of Norris and other naturalists: that ‘real life,’ the stuff of literature, was not the same as the realists teacup tragedies, and that the fit ones to write about real life were men (naturalists), not women (local color writers). It suggests that naturalism grew in part as a gender-based countertradition not only to realism but to female-dominated local color writing” (5).

“The displacement of local color fiction and those women who were its contributers ocurred as part of a broader shift from realism to naturalism, which in turn marked the passing of a nineteenth-century sensibility and the emergence of a twentieth-century one” (5).

“Emerging after the Civil War, a time when ‘[t]he country’s internal migration of younger men and women to new urban areas has left behind a ghost world of spinsters, widows, and bereft sea captains,’ local color fiction celebrates the preservation, through writing, of the lives of humble, ordinary people in an environment threatened by time, change, and external disruption. In part because of these factors, the fiction itself frequently denies or ignores the events immediately surrounding its creation, a strategy to ‘universalize’ the work that results from an unwillingness to dwell on the cause of the disruption and loss that the region had suffered. In celebrating not disruption but continuity, not timely events but timelessness, local color seeks to affirm what is usable about the past and the ordinary: its reluctance to deal with war stems not from a failure to understand war’s importance, but from an insistence on the primacy of the enduring world that exists both prior to and as a consequence of war’s disruption” (7-8).

“[Local color's] empahsis on ‘color’ on accurately representing the speech, habits, and other ‘homely details’ of the humbler classes of American life, helped to inform both the technique and method of naturalism. In much the same way, the local colorists’ preoccupation with the interdependence of character and region fit readily into naturalism’s scheme of determinism by race, epoch, and milieu. As its components became assimilated into other, newer movements, local color vanished as a distinct genre. So complete was this dismantling process that, by the century’s end, Frank Norris, one of the chief protesters against a too-feminine literature, felt free to construct the ‘Old Grannis-Miss Baker’ plot as a parable of local color’s virtues and limitations within his naturalistic novel McTeague (1899).”

Nastier than Norris is Ambrose Bierce, from the 18 December 1892 San Francisco Examiner, whom Campbell cites in an endnote as having discussed the local colorists as: “the pignoramous crew of malinguists, cacophonologist and apostrophographers who think they can get close to nature by depicting the sterile lives and limited emotions of the gowks and sodhoppers that speak only to tangle their own tongues, and move only to fall over their own feet” (189).

In the 1890s there’s a shift in what the local colorists are writing. They begin to produce historical romances.

“Noting that ‘historical romances, in fact, were the major best-sellers on the earliest published lists from 1895-1902,’ Amy Kaplan demonstrates convincingly that the performance of such fantasies of empire effects the revitalization of masculinity through a nostalgic ‘escape to a distant frontier . . . that . . . allows the American man to return home by becoming more fully himself.’ Nostalgia for a redemptive atavism and a regeneration through conquest thus replaces local color’s nostalgia for a harmonious, nonviolent golden age” (56).

“For both [Hamlin] Garland and Norris, the parallel between American expansionism in world affairs and the creation of a national literature proved irresistible. With the twin avatars of Theodore Roosevelt and (for Norris) Rudyard Kipling before them, Garland and Norris set forth to colonize the weak and unruly islands of local color fiction, suggesting that local fiction be allowed to exist under the aegis of, as well as for the benefit of, a truly national literature. Strengthened by the diversity and sheer number of these ‘colonies’ of regional fiction, a national literature might achieve a stature that at the very least would bring the United States to literary parity with other nations. In furthering his literary ‘jingoism,’ Garland, like [Edward] Eggleston and Norris, seeks to legitimize as well as to colonize the hitherto self-enclosed islands of local color fiction by uniting them under an all-encompassing banner of nationalism. By this credo of literary manifest destiny and his expansionist thinking, Garland thereby inflates, and ultimately obliterates, the movement’s original impetus, its lack of pretension and focus on preservation of the individual. Dislocated by the passage of time, by shifting tastes, and now by ideology from the local color movement they represented for so long, [Sarah Orne] Jewett and [Mary E Wilkins] Freeman may well have felt that they needed to retreat further into the past to salvage what they could from their original commitment to fiction” (59).

“Thus Garland, [James Lane] Allen, [Gertrude] Atherton, Norris, and the rest make the point repeatedly: for too long a predominantly female audience, or a coterie of cowed, timid editors, had created authors, particularly local colorists, in their own small, pale, tactful image, either restraining or refusing to sanction altogether fiction about real life by red-blooded male authors. Indeed, critics of the Feminine Principle often use the same image to describe the problem. Words denoting the presence of absence of ‘blood’ occur frequently in this debate over the new literature: Allen’s ‘bloodless’ and Atherton’s ‘anaemic’ are only two examples. In an unlikely metaphor, the editors and magazinists, the local colorists, and the female audience are cast as literary vampires, draining the life out of the corpus of American literature with their insatiable lust for propriety. For example, in a 1907 letter, Jack London lashed out at the timidity of McClure’s editor John S. Phillips: ‘In short, he wanted me to take the guts and backbone out of my stories; wanted me to make an eunuch of myself; wanted me to write petty, smug, complacent bourgeois stories; wanted me to enter the ranks of clever mediocrity and there to pander [to] the soft, fat, cowardly bourgois instincts.’ For these writers, women are not ‘red-blooded’; the only suggestion that they might be, or the closest approach to such an idea, is this comment by Norris: “[G]ive us men, strong, brutal men, with red-hot blood in ‘em, with unleashed passions rampant in ‘em, blood and bones and viscera in ‘em, and women, too, that move and have their being. This last vague phrase scarcely suggests parity with the ‘red-hot blood’ he allots to men” (63).

I’ll have more from Campbell soon.

Local-Color

I seem to be forever putting up teaser posts, these days. “Coming to a cabbage near you.” Here’s today’s: I will soon have a post on Donna M Campbell’s Resisting Regionalism. What is regionalism?

I’m also excited because anaj put me on to Alfred Doblin. I’m going to be reading his Berlin Alexaderplatz over my “lunch break” everyday. This gives me something to look forward to. There will be a post on it, naturally, when I’m finished. Of course if I limit myself to reading it over lunch, it may take awhile.
In other good news, Cerebral Jetsam has a new post–to which I’m headed now. Care to join me?

Alternate Histories

I’m finishing Bill Pelz’ history of the European left today. Then back to Donna M. Campbell.

Wanted to quick share this tidbit from 1917:

“The Bolshevik optimism was such Trotsky would later explain to a visiting U.S. businessman that Russia was the best country to invest in because, even after the American workers had expropriated his holdings at home, the soviet government would protect his investment in Russia.”

Would that it were so. Of course, it was commonly believed that a revolution in Germany was also immanent. How different the 20th century must have looked that November.

IWMA and the European Left

My friend and comrade from the Chicago Socialist Party, Bill Pelz, has not put out the edition of Venus im Pelz I’ve been encouraging for years. Rather, he’s written an excellent introduction to the European left from 1870 to 1921. I’ve only just begun, but so far, have read about the International Workingmen’s Association, of whom, Marx was perhaps the most famous member, and the Paris Commune. Although it’s written for a student audience, I find myself learning things. I’ve been asked to write a blurb for the back of the book, something I’ve not done before, so that is what I’m up to this morning.

Later today I hope to return to Donna M Campbell’s Resisting Regionalism, about which I’ll soon have a post.

Bodies and Machines

I want to let Mark Seltzer’s Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992) mostly speak for itself. Apt treatment, perhaps, for a disciple of Michel Foucault.

Of Frank Norris‘ The Octopus:

“Put simply, what unites these stories is the desire to project an alternative to biological reproduction, to displace the threat posed by the ‘women people’ (the reduction of men to ‘mere animalcules’ in the process of procreation) and to devise a counter-mode of reproduction (the naturalist machine)’” (32).

“The sheer perversity of the Vanamee-Angele story provides an almost diagrammatic instance of what might be called the double discourse of the novel, a double writing by which (re)production is displaced or disavowed and rewritten in another register” (32).

“The contrast between mining and farming provides a final instance of the novel’s rewriting of production. The extraction of gold from the very entrails of the mother-earth is ultimately a species of obstetrics that can dispense with the women-people, and indeed with the body and its dreadful substance, altogether. Seen this way, gold-mining extracts value from what Marx called the ‘the womb of capital itself.’ And The Octopus, making capital of its instabilities and exigencies, provides a virtual map of the crises of production in the late nineteenth century, and of the representations invented to manage these crises” (35).

“What the naturalist aesthetic requires, then, is a principle of generation that incorporates rather than opposes the machine: in short, a mechanics that forms part of its very textuality. The discovery and operation of such a machine is the subject of Norris’s Vandover and the Brute, a novel written before The Octopus, but not published until 1914, and a novel centrally about processes of generation, and more particularly, degeneration” (36).

“Finally, and above all, the brute itself embodies not merely a counter-principle of generation, but a counter-aesthetic as well: an aesthetic of caricature, monstrosity, and deformity, an aesthetic of genesis as degeneration–that is, the aesthetic of the naturalist novel. Stated as simply as possible, the brute is the generative principle of naturalism” (38).

“From one point of view, Vandover and the Brute maps a process of degradation; from another, a process of generation. What links these apparently opposed processes is the agency of the brute” (38).

“These evolutionary accounts of generation help to clarify what I have called the double discourse of the brute in the naturalist novel, the manner in which apparently conflicting processes of generation and degradation operate within a more comprehensive technology of regulation. More generally, these accounts point to the late nineteenth-century double discourse by which the ‘contradictory’ registers of the body and the machine are ‘floated’ in relation to each other and coordinated within what looks like a general economy of power. I have elsewhere attempted to outline how such a ’system of flotation’ adn conversion functions in late nineteenth-century social and novelistic discourses and practices, and the manner in which a circuit of exchang is established between, on the basis of and by way of, conflicting and differentiated practices. What is gradually elaborated is a more or less efficient, more or less effective system of transformations and relays between ‘opposed’ and contradictory registers–between public and private spaces; between social norms and private values; between work and world on one side, and home and family on the other; between, more generally, ‘the economic’ and ‘the sexual.’ A flexible mechanism of adjustment is established, intrinsically promoting a coordination of conflicting practices, while strategically preserving the differences between these practices. Conflicts are, in principle, conscripted into a ‘circular functionality’ between, for instance, ‘the two registers of the production of goods and the production of producers (and consumers).’ Or, in terms of the naturalist logistics I have been considering, between the sieve-like registers of the machine and the body. These new, or rather, newly inflected, strategies of regulation advertise the differences between public and private, and between economic and sexual domains, even as they reinforce and extend lines of communication between them. But if each appears as the alternative to and sanctuary from the other, as the privileged site from which the other may be criticized and abjured, what these deployments of difference effectively obscure are precisely the links and relays progressively set in place ‘between’ these opposed domains’” (40).

“From this perspective, the utility and spreading of the thermodynamic model of force in the later nineteenth century becomes more intelligible. The scientifically sanctioned and flexibly generalizable model provided at once a system of transformation and exchange (a principle of conversion) and, in the relays, shifts, and contradictions that facilitate these exchanges, a system of crisis-management (a deployment of difference). The discourse of thermodynamics provided a working model of a new mechanics and biomechanics of power. Moreover, I have been indicating that the transformational system that manages, and capitalizes on, these differences and conflicts between the sexual and the economic, between the body and the machine, is that field of practices that Michel Foucault has called the ‘biopolitical.’ Taking as its field of analysis a politics of the body and of the social body, such an analytic identifies a network of practices located ‘between the empty gesture of the voluntary and the inscrutable efficiency of the involuntary,’ and reexamines ‘the endless cleavage between politics and psychology, by focusing on the constitution of the subject as the subject of power. What such an examination of the biopolitical dimension reveals is the subject’s disposition at the point of intersection of sexual and political practices and techniques; and what such a production of producers involves is not an ineradicable antinomy between ’system’ and ’subject,’ between political economy and individual psychology, between anonymous technologies of power and gender-differentiated sexual ‘identities,’ but rather a set of exchanges operating between and by way of these antinomies, ‘choices,’ and differences. The point, finally, is not to collapse these differences, but to examine their mobility and also their tactical mobilization” (41).

“One of the social practices that underwrites such an administration of power in duration is the nineteenth-century novel, and more particularly the realist novel. The subject of the realist novel, stated very generally, is the integral genesis and evolution of character in society. The realist novel, through techniques of narrative surveillance, organic continuity, and deterministic progress secures the intelligibility and supervision of individuals in an evolutionary and genetic narration. The linear continuities of the novel make for a ‘progress’ that proceeds as an unfolding and generation of character and action that are always, at least ideally, consistent with their determining antecedents. The naturalist novel involves a mutation in these techniques that consists also in a systematic and totalizing intensification of their effects. This mutation, again stated very generally, makes for functional shifts in emphasis–thematic and narrative shifts, for instance, from inheritance to heredity, from progress (as evolution) to recapitulation (as devolution), from histories of marriage and adultery to case histories of bodies, sexualities, and populations. Yet these differences themselves emphasize a significant continuity: if the realist novel resembles a time machine, the naturalist novel diagrammatically foregrounds, and maps in high relief, the evolutionary dynamics of this machinery” (43).

“In all, the naturalist novel manages late nineteenth-century ‘crises’ of production by the invention of a flexible and totalizing machine of power. Suspending contradictory practices in relation to each other, and intrinsically promoting a coordination and adjustment of these practices, the naturalist machine operates through a double discourse by which the apparently opposed registers of the body and the machine are coordinated within a single technology of regulation” (44).

“Hence neither the identificationof the feminine with the natural nor the identification of the feminine with the cultural but, instead, their uncertain mixture–the miscegenation of the natural and the cultural–is what incites, at once, panic and interest. Another way of saying this is that what is scandalous about the figure of the prostitute, in the realist novel, is that she embodies, with a violent explicitness, the mixed logic of physical capital: utterly artifactual and utterly physical at once, capital with a human face” (66).

“The connections between the everyday regressions of consumer society and these more dramatic versions of regression (that is, the connections between kitsch and the call of the wild) include also the regressions to romantic property, freedom of contract, and the romances of the market” (74).

“But it is, above all, the figure of the mother, or rather, the emphatic juxtaposition of the body of the mother and the social machine, that most powerfully condenses the relays we have been tracing: the relays between vision and embodiment and between social and natural ways of making persons” (96).

“It is this identification of writing and social physics as two versions of the same thing (each as une langue inconnue of the other) that in effect terminates the realist project: or, better, produces the terminator-version of the realist project sometimes called naturalism” (108).

“If turn-of-the-century American culture is alternatively described as naturalist, as machine culture, and as the culture of consumption, what binds together these apparently alternative descriptions is the notion that bodies and persons are things that can be made” (152).

“The commuting between these rival logics–between the logic of the market culture and possessive individualism, on the one side, and the logic of desire and discipline in the culture of consumption” (219).

“The first is a brief fantasy that appears in Henry Ford’s autobiographical My Life and Work (1923). The production of the Model T required 7882 distinct work operations, but, Ford noted, only 12% of these tasks–only 949 operations–required ’strong, able-bodied, and practically physically perfect men.’ Of the remainder–and this is clearly what he sees as the major achievement of his method of production–’we found that 670 could be filled by legless men, 2,637 by one-legged men, two by armless men, 715 by one-armed men and ten by blind men.’ If from one point of view, such a fantasy projects a violent dismemberment of the natural body and an emptying out of human agency, from another it projects a transcendence of the natural body and the extension of human agency through the forms of technology that represent it. This is precisely the double logic of prosthesis and it is also the double logic of a sheer culturalism that posits that the individual is something that can be made” (157).

“The replacement of the natural body by the artificial body of the organization entails a transformation in production that is also a politics of reproduction. That is, the technologies for the making of men devised in naturalist discourse provide an anti-natural and anti-biological alternative to biological production and reproduction: the mother and the machine are, in the naturalist text, linked but rival principles of creation. These technologies of reproduction make up what I have described as ‘the naturalist machine’ . . . One form this competition between principles of production takes appears in the redefining of the category of production itself. Such a redefinition, in the naturalist discourse of force, displays in part a compensatory male response to a threatening female productivity: a compensation already implicit in such a counterposing of ‘male’ and ‘female’ power or principles. It displays also the ‘culturalist’ desire to devise an anti-natural and anti-biological countermode of making, a desire to ‘manage’ production and reproduction’ (157).

“It should by now be clear, however, that naturalist discourse registers such a transformation in production in terms of what I have called the double logic of prosthesis: in terms, at once, of panic and exhilaration. The discourse of naturalism is situated at the crux of this transformation: at the excruciated moment of confrontation between bodies and machines” (160).

“Put simply, to the extent that the anti-biological and anti-natural biases of naturalism involve, as we have seen, the transcendence of ‘the natural’ and ‘the female’ both, they involve the transcendence of a female/nature, identified with liquid interiors and flows. Such a channeling of natural floods into orderly movements thus forms part of the technologies for the making of men we have been tracing here” (164).

“It makes explicit here also the paradoxical economy of London’s call of the wild, what I have been describing as the unnaturalness of Nature in naturalism. That is, if “the Wild,” and its White Logic, are ‘the antithesis of life’ (the enemy of motion), this is to indicate the unnatural or ‘beyond the natural’ (WF 172) character of life (motion) itself. Such a turning away from the natural makes for what might be described as the compulsory unnaturalness or compulsory perversity of naturalist discourse. This perversity is revealed, on the one side, in the unnatural disciplines of the machine process and, on the other, in the unnatural disciplines of naturalist sexuality” (167).

“The mechanical process of producing men is thus a process of systematic management–the formation of the disciplinary individual. And the system of disciplinary individualism involves not merely the individualization and specialization of work and workers (the ‘division of labor’ and ’special knowledge’ that London takes up, for example, at the opening of The Sea Wolf). It involves also the Taylorization of bodies and interiors: what London calls the ‘achieve[ment of] an internal as well as external economy’ (CW 25). It involves, most fundamentally, the identification of the life process and the machine process, the ‘coordination’ of the body and the machine” (168).

“Not merely does the toil of trace and trail transform ’sullen brutes’ into ideal workers–’straining, eager, ambitious creatures’ (CW 33). ‘So he worked hard, learned discipline, and was obedient’ [WF 196].) Bodily processes are identified with efficient machine processes, internal and external economies all in order and precisely coordinated. For London, as for Seton, what this means, finally, is the bringing of individuals up to efficient standards through mastery of the laws of ‘time and space, the forces of Nature.’ London’s accounts of the wild often resemble time/motion studies, and ‘the sounding of the call’ appears as a ‘time-card’ . . . drawn on the limitless future’ (CW 73). This is the unnatural Nature that Veblen neatly condenses in his notion of “the instinct of workmanship’” (168).

“The ‘naturalization’ of the disciplinesof machine culture is, I have argued, inseparable from the redrawing of the uncertain line between the human and the animal, between ‘mankind’ and ‘brute creation.’ Along the same lines, London’s stories of men in furs make utterly explicit what I have been describing as the transcendence of the natural body in the naturalist project of making men” (170).

“It might be suggested that if photography is the realist from of representation par excellence, taxidermy is the form of representation proper to naturalism” (170).

New Kronos Quartet, Gorecki String Quartet

I know I should be writing about Mark Seltzer, but I have to mention the amazing new Kronos Quartet album, Henryk Gorecki’s “String Quartet No.3.”: “…songs are sung”.

Somewhere in the liner notes it describes the album as “restless.” To me it sounds anxious and beautiful, each minimal resolution the tincture of a growing malaise. Only to subside, as it will, in a dark forboding. Whose resolution–well, just listen to it.

I don’t know if there is another modern composer as important (to me) as Gorecki. His dissonant harmonics prove a shallow grave, sincere comfort to a world without end.

Guantanamo Banner

I’m going to have the long overdue Mark Seltzer post up, I hope, later this evening. In the meantime I want to thank anaj for creating the Guantanamo banner that I’ll be including at the end of every post until there is no longer a Guantanamo concentration camp.

10 Naturalist Novels Not to Miss

I hope to have a post on Mark Seltzer’s amazing Bodies and Machines before bed, but first, I realized that I talk about American literary naturalism as if it’s something that people know.

Let me briefly define American literary naturalism (with Eric Carl Link) as the thematic treatment of atavism, evolution, degeneration, and the development of force (a la Herbert Spencer), for starters. The debate about what naturalism is (a form of realism? a kind of romance-realism?) is fairly shopworn by this point, but ongoing.

Here are 10 novels that represent a fairly conservative estimation of the naturalist canon:

1.) Maggie: A Girl of the Streets — Stephen Crane

2.) The Red Badge of Courage — Stephen Crane

3.) McTeague — Frank Norris

4.) The Octopus — Frank Norris

5.) Vandover and the Brute — Frank Norris

6.) Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser

7.) An American Tragedy — Theodore Dreiser

8.) The House of Mirth — Edith Wharton

9.) The Jungle – Upton Sinclair

10.) The Call of the Wild – Jack London

Of course that’s just the beginning.

Pizer and Michaels

I finished Donald Pizer’s The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism: Selected Essays and Reviews (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993) this morning.

Amongst Pizer’s reviews, I was especially pleased with his take on Michaels’ Gold Standard, a text I’d been grappling with recently (see the several posts on Michaels).

Here is Pizer’s clear distillation of Michaels’ method in The Gold Standard:

“A typical essay in The Gold Standard will therefore initially locate in a fictional text an indirectly expressed allusion to a major economic (and thus also metaphysical and epistemological) issue of the age that also has profound pertinence for the text as a whole. In the title essay, for example, the gold theme in McTeague and Vandover’s dissipation of his inheritance in Vandover and the Brute are used to introduce the late nineteenth-century debate over gold and silver as standards of monetary value. This economic issue of the day is then discussed at great length in order to relate it to the larger philosophical question of a preference for the tangibly real as a principle of transaction over substitutions for or symbols of the tangibly real. Finally, the essay returns to the literary works in question and finds that their deep but largely unconscious participation in this debate reverses commonly held critical beliefs about the works–that in fact most turn-of-the-century naturalistic fiction endorses rather than rejects popular values of the time” (204).

“This methodology has a great deal of excitement and value,” Pizer explains. “The detailed substantiality of the naturalistic text is not merely accepted as a convention of naturalistic expression but becomes a finding place for the underlying beliefs and values that motivated this expression, and the age as a whole is revealed in far greater density of attitude and expression than is usually acknowledged” (205).

Pizer then takes a turn toward what seems to me to be the voice par excellance of the old-school advisor: “Yet The Gold Standard also has several troubling characteristics–troubling, that is, especially to someone like myself who experienced in graduate school some of the limitations of the old historicism” (205). Not surprisingly Pizer is concerned by the danger that the “absolutism” of Michaels’ “economic argument,”his “singleness of interpretive strategy… can produce distortions of the complexity of theme and motif in the literary work” (205). Not a lot of interest or room in Michaels’ logic for Pizer’s humanistic concern that naturalistic texts represent the frequently failed but necessarily ongoing search for meaning in what might in fact otherwise prove a meaningless world.

Perhaps there’s something to this, but I’m less sympathetic to Pizer’s concern that “Michael’s essays … recall the old historicism in their almost total neglect of the aesthetic nature and value of the literary texts under discussion” (205). Pizer’s concern that the texts be reduced to so many documents makes sense considering he has spent his career arguing that naturalist texts should not be considered so many botched pessimistic determinisms. Zola, only worse. A lack of aesthetic concern, from Pizer’s vantage, possibly resembles the risk of a return to an understanding of naturalism as a literature of limited document, rather than a literature of rich fictional complexity and worth.

I love the moment where Pizer takes Michaels aside (imagine in Pizer’s office, an older generation classically talking to a talented but reckless grad student): “I also have some other complaints about The Gold Standard. It is too clever by half–both in its occasionally excessive and obscure playing with ideas and language, in the manner of deconstructionist criticism . . . and in its relentlessly revisionist frame of mind, one that often produces interpretations that run counter to the felt response of several generations of readers to a specific novel” (206).

Anyone who knows Michaels, will have a difficult time imagining any sleep has been lost over these concerns. Still, I find Pizer’s “too clever by half”, choice. Not so much because Michaels method is “too clever,” but because I respect Pizer’s sincere concern for these texts. They are a serious matter, and not to be taken lightly–so too, the (useful) critical tradition that has developed in large part as a result of Pizer’s work in this area. Pizer concludes by supposing “that, as in most major movements in scholarship, there will eventually be a separating out of the chaff in the methodology of the New Historicism, with much profitable residue remaining behind” (206).

At risk of being too clever by half–chaff’s residue is wheat–which takes us back to Norris and is thus a perfect articulation of Pizer’s concern about whether New Historicism will leave a profitable residue behind, something that develops of its own inexorable force, like Norris’ wheat–a force capable of much damage prior to some benevolent equilibration (to borrow Spencer’s term) at a higher level of coherent organization.

So much for Pizer’s review of Michaels.

I want to conclude by posting some of Pizer’s thoughts about naturalism:

“I note at several points in this collection of essays Willard Thorp’s comment in 1960 that naturalism somehow refuses to die in America. Thorp was in part bemused by this insight because the long and seemingly indestructible life of American naturalism owed little to critical understanding or support. Yet, it seems, as long as American writers respond deeply to the disparity between the ideal and the actual in our national experience, naturalism will remain one of the major means for the registering of this shock of discovery” (10).

“Naturalism is thus closely related to the romance in its reliance on a sensationalistic symbolism and allegory. And if, as Richard Chase and others have argued, the romance–as in the fiction of Hawthorne and Melville–is the form most native to the distinctive American experience, then naturalism is a form that continues to fulfill this need in American life” (15).

“The naturalistic novel is therefore not so superficial or reductive as it implicitly appears to be in its conventional definition. 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 that Milton set his fallen angels to debating. 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’ that 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” (87).

“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)” (101).

“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 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” (109).

“Norris placed realism, romanticism, and naturalism in a dialectic, in which realism and romanticism were opposing forces, and naturalism was transcending synthesis” (120 “Frank Norris’s Definition of Naturalism”).

Next up: Mark Seltzer’s Bodies and Machines.

At Work

I’m at work with Pizer’s Theory. Just quickly I’d like to note how Pizer, at a moment when Walcutt’s Two Streams was the standard text in the field, dug in his heels, and said no, a naturalist’s naturalism is not a textual excrescence marring what might otherwise be good fiction.

Pizer demonstrate’s how Dreiser’s naturalism strengthens and is of a piece with his thematic content. Part of what I like about Pizer’s approach, in addition to generally agreeing with his close readings of Dreiser, is the sympathetic approach that he takes to a major movement in American literary history, when it was considered disreputable at best to be interested in a group of writers dismissed for their leftist commitments and “confused” philosophy. Prior to Pizer (though it still continues to this day) a critic would describe naturalism as a form of pessimistic determinism, of which Zola’s fiction is exemplary. The critic would then complain that the American naturalist’s fiction is confused in so far as it is not sufficiently deterministic, and thus he (typically) is represented as a bad naturalist, or that his fiction is overly deterministic and hence, limited. Pizer’s close readings demonstrate naturalists like Dreiser’s frequently complex treatment of consciousness.

Pizer shows that naturalism has three major periods.

1.) The 1890s (Crane, Norris, Dreiser)

2.) The 1930s (Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Farrell)

3.) The late ’40s, early ’50s (Bellow, Styron, Mailer)

And I would submit, a later group: (Proulx, DeLillo)

Naturalism for Pizer is decidedly a boys club, and a lot of recent work explodes this. I’ll be headed there in the near future. What is interesting in Pizer is his affirmation of the claim that naturalism never dies in America (by which he means the United States. I imagine there are some astonishing South American and Canadian naturalisms). The reason naturalism sticks with us is its peculiar interrogation of materialism and the ideal. A combination well suited to periods of crisis.

I’ll have more on Pizer soon.